World War III will start with Pentagon bombing of RT – Kusturica
Award-winning Serbian director and musician Emir Kusturica believes that when Washington eventually starts World War III, RT will become one of its first and primary targets, being an extremely powerful weapon challenging US state propaganda.
In an article published by the Serbian daily Politika, Kusturica has aligned RT with Russia’s most powerful weapons, specifically the SS-18, an intercontinental ballistic missile which NATO is calling“Satan”: “The devil never comes alone! At the same time with this rocket and numerous other innovations, the TV Channel RT has also appeared among the Russian arsenal.”
The RT network, Kusturica says, is destroying the “Hollywood-CNN stereotype of the good and bad guys, where blacks, Hispanics, Russians, Serbs are the villains, and white Americans, wherever you look, are OK!”
“[US Secretary of State] Kerry and the congressmen are bothered by the fact that RT sends signals that the world is not determined by the inevitability of liberal capitalism, that the US is leading the world into chaos, that Monsanto is not producing healthy food, that Coca-Cola is ideal for cleaning automobile alloys and [is] not for the human stomach, that in Serbia the percentage of people who die from cancer has risen sharply due to the 1999 NATO bombings ... that the fingerprints of the CIA are on the Ukrainian crisis, and that Blackwater fired at the Ukrainian police, and not Maidan activists,” the filmmaker wrote.
Most of what Kusturica mentions in the article, indeed, are topics RT covers extensively... except maybe Coca-Cola’s cleaning properties.
RT is a real threat to US state propaganda as it reaches Americans “in their own homes, in perfect English, better than they use on CNN.” And that is why, according to the director, Washington could get fed up and seek to silence RT by force – much like NATO did to Serbian state TV in April 1999.
In turn, Kusturica predicts, Moscow would destroy CNN, which he considers the flag-bearer of pro-American propaganda: “CNN in direct transmissions assures that since the 1990s America has been leading humanitarian actions, and not wars, and that its military planes rain angels, not bombs!”
Until the Pentagon resorts to force, Kusturica believes, “RT will ever more demystify the American Dream and in primetime will reveal the truth hidden for decades from the eyes and hearts of average Americans.”
Born in what is today Bosnia-Herzegovina, Emir Kusturica is a 60-year-old Serbian filmmaker, actor and musician. He has won numerous international awards for his films, and was appointed Serbia’s ambassador to UNICEF in 2007.
The EU has drafted a plan to counter what it sees as “Russian disinformation activities” calling for the promotion of EU policies in the post-Soviet space and the implementation of measures against Russian media, including RT.
The nine-page paper drafted by the EU Foreign Service and obtained by EUobserver was prepared ahead of the June 25-26 summit and is set to be voted on by EU leaders on Thursday.
The plan is aimed at tackling Russia’s “use and misuse of communication tools” and the “promotion of EU policies” in former Soviet states as well as support for “independent media” and “increased public awareness of disinformation activities by external actors,” the report says.
It specifically mentions RT, which according to the report broadcasts “fabrications and hate speech from their bureaus in EU cities.”
“The EU … will work to improve co-operation between national regulators, including through meetings of the European Regulators Group”, it adds.
The European Commission also plans to “table a new legislative proposal to improve the regulatory environment and take account of current challenges,” according to the draft.
The plan says that the EU Foreign Service will create a special cell to spearhead the activities called East StratComTeam by September. It will distribute information in Russian and in local languages in the EU’s eastern neighborhood, in countries such as Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine.
The Russian Foreign Ministry lashed out at the EU over the report, saying that the proposed plan is violating the right to freedom of expression and creating conditions of total discrimination against Russian media.
The draft plan presented on Tuesday is “clearly aimed at pushing out Russia’s presence in the international media field,” the ministry said in a statement on Wednesday. “Following the introduction of restrictive measures against Russian journalists the EU is trying to create conditions for the total discrimination of Russian media.”
While the Western media is speaking in one voice, the EU is trying to push out one of the few alternative sources of information, said RT’s editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan.
“The EU is actively trying to shut out RT, to stifle a rare alternative voice in international news media,” she said.
“It’s not enough that there are hundreds of Western newspapers, TV channels, websites and radio stations, all beaming the same take on what is going on in the world. The UK has created a 1,500-strong army unit to, among other things, fight Russia in the social media space. NATO has a special taskforce dedicated to countering Russia’s influence. Deutsche Welle just launched a 24-hour English-language news channel that’s supposed to compete directly with RT – despite the global presence of Euronews, BBC World News and CNN International.”
“If despite all these efforts the EU is still concerned with “losing the information war” to Russia, perhaps the time has come for it to realize that people around the world simply no longer believe their same tired, one-sided narratives of current events,” said Simonyan.
The EU project was previously discussed in March, however no details were revealed at the time. The EU announced its plans following US Secretary of State John Kerry’s plea to lawmakers for more money to tackle the so-called Russian propaganda in February.
Speaking before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on February 26, he urged for the setting up of “democracy promotion” programs around the world.
“Russia Today (sic) can be heard in English, do we have an equivalent that can be heard in Russian? It’s a pretty expensive proposition. They are spending huge amounts of money,” Kerry said apparently forgetting that Voice of America has been broadcasting in Russian since 1947.
Though the US government media receives $721 million a year, in the budget proposal submitted by Kerry, the Department of State asked for “$639 million to help our friends in Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova as they seek to strengthen their democracies, withstand pressure from Russia, and to integrate more closely into Europe.”
By contrast RT’s budget for 2015 is about $225 million. The BBC World Service, which complained about RT “winning the information war” in January, is funded to the tune of $375 million a year.