At my in-laws house this afternoon, I watched a documentary about Malaysia Airlines 17 on Chinas official TV network, CCTV. My jaw dropped. This documentary was akin to the worst sort of conspiracy theory nonsense. The gist of it was that this is Mean Obama vs. Reasonable Putin. At several points, both the English translation and the Chinese original made blatantly erroneous claims about the American governments position. For example, the US government claims that satellite photos show evidence that Russian artillery has fired into Ukraine during the past couple of weeks — but the CCTV show said that the US claimed that Russia shot down the plane. No one said that! The one authority whom the CCTV documentary repeatedly appealed-to — which suggests that he was probably the brains behind this mockumentary — was an expert in the Russian-Chinese Cooperation and Mutual Exchange Committee, or something to that effect. He demanded objectivity between realistic alternatives and crazy conspiracy theories. The best was one in which there were Ukrainian fighter escorts who somehow lured Separatist fighters — whom he had claimed a minute earlier could NOT have fired the missiles — to shoot the plane down. There were other logical fallacies aplenty, enough to fill a semester-long course. However, my relatives not being schooled in such philosophical detection, it seemed to have some purchase on my family. Why would CCTV air this particular thing? My guess is that this is their bone to Putin, who wants the Chinese to support his thugocracy.
Posted on: Sat, 02 Aug 2014 17:17:38 +0000
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