From the ends of the earth
I have just received from the broadcaster TNT News the internet link to their podcast of my interview with their Johnny Vedmore show on 7 August, and I share this with you here:
I come on at 37 minutes into the program, though I can also recommend that you listen to the interview with Johnny’s first guest Lenka White, to hear a very interesting account of her experiences traveling around the United States.
Together with host Johnny Vedmore, I discuss what interconnections there are between the Russia-Ukraine war and the coming regional war between Israel and its neighbors in the Middle East, why the Israelis may be seriously tempted to use nuclear weapons should their conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon escalate further, whether the ruble is backed by gold and several other questions of topical interest.
However, I offer this interview for your consideration more for what it says about the current state of global news broadcasting than for the content of the interview itself.
TNT is an Australian based global broadcaster, and our interview was arranged by a staffer in the United States. I mistakenly assumed that Vedmore was speaking to me from Brisbane, when he was in fact in the United Kingdom. Given this configuration of participants, I am no longer surprised that their attempt to conduct an interview with me a week earlier failed due to technical glitches.
Having spent the greater part of the 1980’s working for the world’s largest industrial conglomerate at the time, ITT, which had telecommunications at its core, I never cease to be amazed by how far telecoms has come in recent years. The links which made possible the Johnny Vedmore show last week would have cost an incredible sum back in the 1980s if they could be established at all. And the global audience enabled by the internet is something mind-boggling for anyone with my life experience.
Indeed, the acronym of the Indian global English language broadcaster WION who invite me on air every week or two, standing for ‘the world is one,’ tells you the story in brief.
As for the Australians who run TNT, let me share the thought that your continent has long been on my mind. I have a college classmate from Sydney, with whom I occasionally still correspond when we can overlook differences in our positions on global politics, and I came very close to paying you a visit about a dozen years ago when I spent a winter vacation in what should have been summery New Zealand, but found myself shivering in the wind and rain of South Island, and thinking longingly of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef locales just across the water. Today I am surprised and pleased to have an audience and some subscribers to my websites in both countries.
Do the Aussies and Kiwis in my audience change in any way the focus of their governments on serving American global hegemony? Sadly, that is not the case. Nor is it the case with followers of mine and of other Opposition personalities in a hundred or more other countries named in my daily audience readout. But we fight on, nonetheless, for a fairer, more equitable world that will surely arrive before Kingdom Come.
©Gilbert Doctorow