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Top 15 Shipwreck Survival Tips
This is a list of the most important things to remember if you are shipwrecked. The list comes from Yan Martel’s prize-winning novel, Life of Pi.
1. Always read instructions carefully
2. Do not drink urine. Or sea water. Or bird blood
3. Do not eat jellyfish. Or fish that have spikes. Or fish that have parrot like beaks. Or that puff up like balloons.
4. Pressing the eyes of fish will paralyse them
5. The body can be heroic in battle; if a castaway is injured, beware of well-meaning, but ill-founded, medical treatment. Ignorance is the worst doctor, while rest and sleep are the best nurses.
6. Put your feet up at least 5 minutes every hour
7. Unnecessary exertion should be avoided. But an idle mind tends to sing, so the mind should be kept occupied with whatever light distraction may suggest itself. Playing card games, twenty questions and I spy are excellent distractions.
8. Green water is shallower than blue water
9. Beware of far-off clouds that look like mountains. Look for green. Ultimately, a foot is the only good judge of land.
10. Do not go swimming. It wastes energy. Besides, a survival craft may drift faster than you can swim. Not to mention the danger of sea life. If you are hot, wet your clothes instead.
12. Shelter yourself. Exposure can kill faster than thirst or hunger.
13. As long as no excessive water is lost through perspiration, the body can survive up to 14 days without water. If you are thirsty, suck a button.
14. Turtles are an easy catch and make for excellent meals. Their blood is a good, nutritious, salt-free drink; their flesh is tasty and filling; their fat has many uses; and the castaway will find turtle eggs a real treat. Mind the beak and the claws.
15. Don’t let your morale flag. Be daunted but not defeated. Remember: the spirit, above all else, counts. If you have the will to live, you will. Good luck
http://listverse.com/2007/07/01/top-15-shipwreck-survival-tips/
1. Always read instructions carefully
2. Do not drink urine. Or sea water. Or bird blood
3. Do not eat jellyfish. Or fish that have spikes. Or fish that have parrot like beaks. Or that puff up like balloons.
4. Pressing the eyes of fish will paralyse them
Read the bestselling book Life of Pi at Amazon.com!
5. The body can be heroic in battle; if a castaway is injured, beware of well-meaning, but ill-founded, medical treatment. Ignorance is the worst doctor, while rest and sleep are the best nurses.
6. Put your feet up at least 5 minutes every hour
7. Unnecessary exertion should be avoided. But an idle mind tends to sing, so the mind should be kept occupied with whatever light distraction may suggest itself. Playing card games, twenty questions and I spy are excellent distractions.
8. Green water is shallower than blue water
9. Beware of far-off clouds that look like mountains. Look for green. Ultimately, a foot is the only good judge of land.
10. Do not go swimming. It wastes energy. Besides, a survival craft may drift faster than you can swim. Not to mention the danger of sea life. If you are hot, wet your clothes instead.
Can’t get your survival fix? Try The Ultimate Survival Manual – 333 Skills That Will Get You Out Alive at Amazon.com!
11. Do not urinate in your clothes. The momentary warmth is not worth the nappy rash.12. Shelter yourself. Exposure can kill faster than thirst or hunger.
13. As long as no excessive water is lost through perspiration, the body can survive up to 14 days without water. If you are thirsty, suck a button.
14. Turtles are an easy catch and make for excellent meals. Their blood is a good, nutritious, salt-free drink; their flesh is tasty and filling; their fat has many uses; and the castaway will find turtle eggs a real treat. Mind the beak and the claws.
15. Don’t let your morale flag. Be daunted but not defeated. Remember: the spirit, above all else, counts. If you have the will to live, you will. Good luck
http://listverse.com/2007/07/01/top-15-shipwreck-survival-tips/
8 Expensive Art Works Found Accidentally
This is a list of 8 great works of art (well – maybe one is only
nominally so) that were found in unusual places. It makes you wonder
how many great works of art are lost to the world simply because no one
is looking in the right place!
1. In a farmer’s field
In 1820, a Greek peasant named Yorgos was digging in his field on the island of Milos when he unearthed several carved blocks of stone. He burrowed deeper and found four statues – three figures of Hermes and one of Aphrodite, the goddess of love. Three weeks later, the Choiseul archeological expedition arrived by ship, purchased the Aphrodite, and took it to France. Louis XVIII gave it the name Venus de Milo and presented it to the Louvre where it became one of the most famous works of art in history.
2. Beneath a street
On February 21, 1978, electrical workers were putting down lines on a busy street corner in Mexico city when they discovered a 20 ton stone bas-relief of the Aztec night goddess, Coyolxauqui. It is believed to have been sculpted in the early fifteenth century and buried prior to the destruction o the Aztec civilisation by the Spanish conquistadors in 1521. The stone was moved 200 yards from the site to the Museum of the Great Temple.
3. In a hole in the ground
In 1978 more than 500 movies dating from 1903 to 1929 were dug out of a hole in the ground of Dawson City, Yukon. Under normal circumstances, the 35mm nitrate films would have perished, but the permafrost preserved them perfectly.
4. Under a bed
Joanne Perez, the widow of vaudeville performer Pepito the Spanish Clown, cleaned out the area underneath her bed and discovered the only existing copy of the pilot for the TV series I Love Lucy. Pepito had coached Lucille Ball and had guest-starred in the pilot. Ball and her husband, Desi Arnaz, had given it to Pepito as a gift in 1951 and it had remained under the bed for thirty years.
5. On a wall
A middle-aged couple in a suburb of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, asked an art prospector to appraise a painting in their home. While he was there, he examined another painting that the couple had thought was a reproduction of a work by Van Gogh. It turned out to be an 1886 original. On March 10, 1991, the painting Still Life with Flowers sold at auction for $1.4m (US).
6. In a trunk in an attic
In 1961 Barbara Testa, a Hollywood librarian, inherited six steamer trunks that had belonged to her grandfather, James Fraser Gluck, a Buffalo, New York, lawyer who died in 1895. Over the next three decades she gradually sifted through the contents of the trunks, until one day in Autumn of 1990 she came upon 665 pages that turned out to be the original handwritten manuscript of the first half of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. The two halves of the great American novel were finally reunited at the Buffalo and Eerie County Public Library.
7. At a flea market
A Philadelphia financial analyst was browsing at a flea market in Adamstown, Pennsylvania, when he was attracted by a wooden picture frame. He paid $4 for it. Back at his home he removed the old torn painting in the frame and found a folded document between the canvas and the wood backing. It turned out to be a 1776 copy of the Declaration of Independence – one of 24 known to remain. On June 13, 1991, it was sold at auction for $2.4m (US)
8. Masquerading as a bicycle rack
For years, employees of the God’s House Tower Archaeology Museum in Southampton, England, propped their bikes against a 27 inch black rock in the basement. In 2000, two Egyptologists investigating the Museums holdings identified the bike rack as a 7th century BC Egyptian statue portraying King Taharqa a Kushite monarch from the region that is modern Sudan. Karen Wordley, the Southampton city council’s curator of archaeological collections, said it was a “mystery” how the sculpture ended up in the Museum basement.
http://listverse.com/2007/06/30/8-expensive-art-works-found-accidentally/
1. In a farmer’s field
In 1820, a Greek peasant named Yorgos was digging in his field on the island of Milos when he unearthed several carved blocks of stone. He burrowed deeper and found four statues – three figures of Hermes and one of Aphrodite, the goddess of love. Three weeks later, the Choiseul archeological expedition arrived by ship, purchased the Aphrodite, and took it to France. Louis XVIII gave it the name Venus de Milo and presented it to the Louvre where it became one of the most famous works of art in history.
On February 21, 1978, electrical workers were putting down lines on a busy street corner in Mexico city when they discovered a 20 ton stone bas-relief of the Aztec night goddess, Coyolxauqui. It is believed to have been sculpted in the early fifteenth century and buried prior to the destruction o the Aztec civilisation by the Spanish conquistadors in 1521. The stone was moved 200 yards from the site to the Museum of the Great Temple.
3. In a hole in the ground
In 1978 more than 500 movies dating from 1903 to 1929 were dug out of a hole in the ground of Dawson City, Yukon. Under normal circumstances, the 35mm nitrate films would have perished, but the permafrost preserved them perfectly.
4. Under a bed
Joanne Perez, the widow of vaudeville performer Pepito the Spanish Clown, cleaned out the area underneath her bed and discovered the only existing copy of the pilot for the TV series I Love Lucy. Pepito had coached Lucille Ball and had guest-starred in the pilot. Ball and her husband, Desi Arnaz, had given it to Pepito as a gift in 1951 and it had remained under the bed for thirty years.
A middle-aged couple in a suburb of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, asked an art prospector to appraise a painting in their home. While he was there, he examined another painting that the couple had thought was a reproduction of a work by Van Gogh. It turned out to be an 1886 original. On March 10, 1991, the painting Still Life with Flowers sold at auction for $1.4m (US).
6. In a trunk in an attic
In 1961 Barbara Testa, a Hollywood librarian, inherited six steamer trunks that had belonged to her grandfather, James Fraser Gluck, a Buffalo, New York, lawyer who died in 1895. Over the next three decades she gradually sifted through the contents of the trunks, until one day in Autumn of 1990 she came upon 665 pages that turned out to be the original handwritten manuscript of the first half of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. The two halves of the great American novel were finally reunited at the Buffalo and Eerie County Public Library.
7. At a flea market
A Philadelphia financial analyst was browsing at a flea market in Adamstown, Pennsylvania, when he was attracted by a wooden picture frame. He paid $4 for it. Back at his home he removed the old torn painting in the frame and found a folded document between the canvas and the wood backing. It turned out to be a 1776 copy of the Declaration of Independence – one of 24 known to remain. On June 13, 1991, it was sold at auction for $2.4m (US)
8. Masquerading as a bicycle rack
For years, employees of the God’s House Tower Archaeology Museum in Southampton, England, propped their bikes against a 27 inch black rock in the basement. In 2000, two Egyptologists investigating the Museums holdings identified the bike rack as a 7th century BC Egyptian statue portraying King Taharqa a Kushite monarch from the region that is modern Sudan. Karen Wordley, the Southampton city council’s curator of archaeological collections, said it was a “mystery” how the sculpture ended up in the Museum basement.
http://listverse.com/2007/06/30/8-expensive-art-works-found-accidentally/
10 Works Of Prose And Poetry By Brutal Dictators
Adolf Hitler was famous as a failed artist, but it has been more
common for dictators and authoritarian leaders to turn their hand toward
the written word. This may be a psychological persuasion, a desire to
back up their cruel leadership with the pure justification and emotional
sway of writing. Here are 10 examples of poetry and prose written by
history’s most tyrannical figures.
In reality, the book was just a bizarre mix of Niyazov’s morality, a lot of self-congratulation, a contrived revisionist history of Turkmenistan, and fairy tales. Niyazov’s decision to use a book to establish his regime was explained by a scholar quoted in the New Yorker: “Niyazov was somewhat illiterate. He couldn’t read or write Turkmen or Russian properly. People who have disabilities, for example illiteracy, want to be seen as geniuses. This was probably what got him started.”
Art and literature are important activities which are indispensable to a fully human life. Food, clothing, and housing are the essential material conditions for human existence, but man is not satisfied with these alone. The freer man is from the fetters of nature and society and from worries over food, clothing and housing, the greater his need for art and literature. Life without art and literature is unimaginable.
Much of the problem with Kim’s advice regarding cinema is how obvious it is. Perhaps the idea is of profundity within simplicity, but we suspect it has more to do with fact that he didn’t have many original things to say. Here is his opinion on repeated viewings:
Seeing a production once is different from seeing it twice. One wants to see some productions again, but not others. A certain production awakens fresh interest each time one sees it and excites greater passion and warmth. This sort of production is called sincere art.
As for music:
Sound and music are heard wherever nature works and man lives. [ . . . ] However excellent the music, it is useless for the cinema if it is not appropriate to each scene.”
The turgidity and rigidity of the text is probably one of the best arguments that the text was indeed written by Kim himself. However, he did gain some interest abroad. Australian documentarian Anna Broinowski was intrigued by Kim’s directing advice and decided to produce a propaganda movie following the Dear Leader’s instructions in order to protest a gas company drilling in a park near her home. When she asked directing advice from North Korean filmmakers, she found herself given unprecedented access to the entire North Korean film industry, including interviews with North Korean directors and actors. Broinowski was even given the opportunity to appear in a North Korean film herself, playing an evil American, though she apparently flubbed her lines.
Following that, a book by a more sympathetic author was published in 1981, called Islam and the Revolution. It established Khomeini’s credentials as a righteous-minded revolutionary while insisting that his ideology was derived from classical Islam, shariah law, and the Sufi tradition.
Less well-known in the West was the revolutionary imam’s flair for mystical poetry, compiled in a collection called The Wine of Love. To Western eyes, the poetry seems strangely heretical but apparently is part of a long tradition of poetry written as part of a deeply personal communion with God. One example is a translation of one of the ayatollah’s poems, published in an Iranian newspaper in 1989:
Open the door of the tavern and let us go there day and night,
For I am sick and tired of the mosque and seminary.
I have torn off the garb of asceticism and hypocrisy,
Putting on the cloak of the tavern-haunting shaykh and becoming aware.
The city preacher has so tormented me with his advice
That I have sought aid from the breath of the wine-drenched profligate.
Leave me alone to remember the idol-temple,
I who have been awakened by the hand of the tavern’s idol.
Both the bitter history of our country in the past and the reality of the ‘world’ that they advertise have convinced us that it is by no means a ‘civilized world,’ but a world in which the bigger and stronger oppress and flay the smaller and the weaker, in which money and corruption make the law, and injustice, perfidy and backstabbing triumph.
One of his most famous works was With Stalin, written in 1979 in memory of Hoxha’s hero, Joseph Stalin. The book is divided into six sections—an introduction and five collections of reminiscences of the Albanian leader’s encounters with the Soviet strongman. It is a shockingly boring hagiography meant to celebrate the extinct Stalin personality cult while reinforcing Hoxha’s own. Hoxha wrote lovingly of Stalin, reporting dreaming night and day of his eventual meeting with Stalin and of the viewing of a Soviet musical entitled Tractor Drivers. Much of the book is also devoted to lambasting his real and perceived enemies, both Western “imperialists” and his many, many foes within the communist world itself.
Regardless of Hoxha’s prolific output, the collapse of communism in Albania relegated his work to history books. In 1991, pro-democracy protesters burned the late dictator’s works in a crater near a toppled Hoxha statue. By the mid-1990s, pages from Hoxha’s works were being used to wrap roasted peanuts and sausages. Today, Hoxha’s books are still sold, but now, they’re alongside the works of liberal poet and novelist Ismail Kadare, as well as Western authors like Danielle Steele and L. Ron Hubbard.
In 2009, however, he secured his first international book release for his masterpiece Akhaltekke: Our Pride and Glory, published in Ukrainian. The book was a loving ode to the Akhal-Teke horse breed and the history of horse breeding in Turkmenistan. The cover featured an image of a smiling Berdymukhamedov standing with a proud Akhal-Teke steed. It would later be published in French, English, Russian, and German, though its success abroad has so far been lackluster. It did, however, allegedly receive some accolades within the Community of Independent States (CIS), winning the CIS member states’ international contest called “Art of Book” in the “My Country” nomination.
The second volume of the book was on economic theory, titled “The Solution of the Economic Problem.” Here, many of the contents were a mess of capitalist and socialist ideology which has been compared with the thoughts of Rousseau, Mao, and Marx, as well as Islamic philosophy. Property ownership was given much importance, with Gadhafi insisting, “There is no freedom for a man who lives in another’s house, whether he pays rent or not.”
During the 1980s, Gadhafi attempted to institute many of these policies in Libyan society, creating a government-run supermarket system and forcing families to own only one home. The main result of the policies were the decimation of the traditional Libyan merchant class.
He also had some choice information about the difference between the sexes:
Women, like men, are human beings. This is an incontestable truth . . . Women are different from men in form because they are females, just as all females in the kingdom of plants and animals differ from the male of their species . . . According to gynecologists women, unlike men, menstruate each month . . . Since men cannot be impregnated they do not experience the ailments that women do. She breastfeeds for nearly two years.
Gadhafi was inspired as much by the earlier writing of Egyptian nationalist Gamal Abdel Nasser as he was by the traditional Bedouin lifestyle. A Tripoli think tank known as the The World Center for the Study and Research of the Green Book attempted to popularize the dictator’s writing overseas. They translated the work into 30 languages, underwrote international conferences, and released nearly 140 studies and scholarly papers on Gadhafi’s theories. The work never really caught on, though, and the think tank was eventually destroyed by NATO air strikes in 2011.
Many of the pieces highlight Gadhafi’s preference for village life and the way of the Bedouin rather than the alienating existence of the city:
This is the city: a mill that grinds down its inhabitants, a nightmare to its builders. It forces you to change your appearance and replace your values; you take on an urban personality, which has no colour or taste to it . . . The city forces you to hear the sounds of others whom you are not addressing. You are forced to inhale their very breaths . . . Children are worse off than adults. They move from darkness to darkness . . . Houses are not homes—they are holes and caves . . .
Another bizarrely compelling piece was “Suicide of The Astronaut,” telling the story of a space explorer who returns to Earth and is unable to find suitable employment. He tries and fails to find work in carpentry, lathing, blacksmithing, building, plumbing, and white-washing before fleeing the city into the countryside. There, he tries and fails to explain his plight to an uncomprehending farmer, who ultimately feels sympathy for the erstwhile astronaut but declines to take him on as a farm hand, leading the space man to commit suicide out of earthly ennui.
The short stories of Gadhafi are often entertaining for their vitriol, focused on both the West and Islamic fundamentalist thinkers. He enjoyed making frequent references to classical Islamic thought, though his own religious views were highly idiosyncratic and heterodox. Though they were published in English, there wasn’t a great deal of praise in the West for Gadhafi’s stories. Daniel Kalder would write in the Guardian: “What we find is a mind that cannot follow a coherent thought for very long, is filled with crude dichotomies and nonsense, and rambles along at random, collapsing in on itself before exploding outward again in a burst of surreal gibberish.”
While the book is available online in Spanish, there is little available information on the text in English. What little exists is often linked to lurid conspiracy websites. One compelling piece of text illustrates Franco’s conspiratorial mindset linked Freemasonry, communism, and Judaism:
Another focal point of this Soviet infiltration which Freemasonry presents us is that of the State of Israel, where, under the pretext of creating a Jewish religious state, there has taken place a concentration of atheist elements from Central Europe and the international bas fonds (lower strata), who eventually regard as Pharisaic and backward the ministers and representatives of the Mosaic faith. What was to have been a Jewish state, built on the old models of international Jewry, has thus become a focal point of faithless and rootless people, receptive to foreign slogans and influences.
Russia takes advantage once again of the state of affairs which Freemasonry offers to her to serve its own interests. Russia was aware of the great influence of Judaism in American politics, and the presence in many governments in Europe and in America of leading members of the Masonic sects; the oath they took when going through the XV and XVI degrees of ‘Knights of the Orient or of the Sword’ and ‘Princes of Jerusalem;’ regarding ‘turning over to the Hebrew people all that which was taken away from them by force,’ and while it helped and supported Stern Gang’s terrorist attacks in the Middle East, it worked in international meetings to foster Zionist principles, which would take their struggle to the field of their enemies, since for Russia, before the war, during the war and after the war, the nations which will not submit will always be its enemy.
[ . . . ]
The creation of Israel was of Soviet work. Here, as in the case of Lie, President Ben Gurion also presents himself with the complexity of his dual nationality, for he was active in the Communist ranks under a different name. Let us not lose sight of the diminutive State which, small as it may be, is ambitious in its aspirations, which reach to the limits of the Euphrates, and, however farfetched it may seem to us, there are those who feed the fire which one day may become a devouring wild fire, behind which the tanks of the modern barbarians will surge forward.
Opinions on Mao’s poetry vary depending on the source. According to the Chinese, it “exhibits a spirit of boldness and power, weaving together history, reality and commitment, and going beyond the limitations of time and space. [ . . . ] Mao Zedong advocated a method of literary composition that combines revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism, and his poetry was a synthesis of his theory and practice.” Belgian sinologist Pierre Ryckmans was less impressed, saying, “Well, if poetry were painting, I would say that Mao was better than Hitler . . . but not as good as Churchill.” Mao, for his part, modestly called them “scribbles.”
Mao did seem to have a literary flair, with an appreciation for natural themes like flowers, snow, horses, geese, sky, rivers, mountains, and the Moon. But his poems also occasionally reflect the vanity of the human will, as in his work “To Guo Moruo”:
On our small planet
a few houseflies bang on the walls.
They buzz, moan, moon,
and ants climb the locust tree
and brag about
their vast dominion.
Much of Karadzic’s poetry often had warlike themes, with titles like “A Morning Hand Grenade,” “Assassins,” and “A Man Made of Ashes and War Boots.” But they also betrayed the dictator’s flair for self-pity:
I surmise the sun is wounding me
With its sharp malignant rays
I surmise the stars are healing me
I am the deity of dark cosmic space
A horned cow reveals a faithless goddess
Everything’s turned against me the one true god
I created the world to tear my head off
Judges torture me for insignificant acts
I am disgusted by the souls who radiate nothing
Like a small nasty puppy puny death
Is approaching from afar
I don’t know what to make of all these things
But I can’t stand the sight of you you file of scum
You file of snails
Well hurry up in your slime
After Karadzic’s capture in 2009, the Slovakian PEN Centre, part of PEN International, ethically criticized Slovakian magazine Dotyky for publishing his poetry without editorial comment. The editor defended the decision, saying simply that the poems were high-quality, but it set off a debate about free speech in publishing the works of a man known for inciting ethnic hatred. Andrew Rubin described the work as “a psychic landscape of eerie and illogical violence,” while Jay Surdukowski asserted that Karadzic saw himself as a poet-warrior. Surdukowski also argued in 2005 that the poetry itself could be admissible as evidence in a war crimes tribunal.
http://listverse.com/2015/09/07/10-works-of-prose-and-poetry-by-brutal-dictators/
10 Ruhnama
Photo credit: Martijn Munneke
Saparmurat Niyazov, the late president-for-life of Turkmenistan, wrote a book known as the Ruhnama, meaning “Book of the Soul,” published in 2001. According to the dictator, it was meant to improve the spiritual life
of the Turkmen people. Niyazov even claimed that God had assured him
that readers of the book would surely get into Heaven. His book was
mandatory reading in schools and universities and displayed next to the
Quran in mosques, and there was even a test on the Ruhnama
included in the process of getting a driver’s license. Elaborate
ceremonies saw hundreds of Turkmen engaged in choreographed songs and
dances while holding the book. In the capital of Ashgabat, a giant statue of the book was built, which would open and play an audio and video recording of a passage from the text.In reality, the book was just a bizarre mix of Niyazov’s morality, a lot of self-congratulation, a contrived revisionist history of Turkmenistan, and fairy tales. Niyazov’s decision to use a book to establish his regime was explained by a scholar quoted in the New Yorker: “Niyazov was somewhat illiterate. He couldn’t read or write Turkmen or Russian properly. People who have disabilities, for example illiteracy, want to be seen as geniuses. This was probably what got him started.”
9 On the Art Of Cinema
Photo credit: Foreign Languages Publishing House
Kim Jong Il was a big movie buff and considered himself somewhat of an expert. In 1973, he published On The Art of Cinema, following it up in 1987 with The Cinema and Directing. For Kim, building a good film industry was a socialist project: Art and literature are important activities which are indispensable to a fully human life. Food, clothing, and housing are the essential material conditions for human existence, but man is not satisfied with these alone. The freer man is from the fetters of nature and society and from worries over food, clothing and housing, the greater his need for art and literature. Life without art and literature is unimaginable.
Much of the problem with Kim’s advice regarding cinema is how obvious it is. Perhaps the idea is of profundity within simplicity, but we suspect it has more to do with fact that he didn’t have many original things to say. Here is his opinion on repeated viewings:
Seeing a production once is different from seeing it twice. One wants to see some productions again, but not others. A certain production awakens fresh interest each time one sees it and excites greater passion and warmth. This sort of production is called sincere art.
As for music:
Sound and music are heard wherever nature works and man lives. [ . . . ] However excellent the music, it is useless for the cinema if it is not appropriate to each scene.”
The turgidity and rigidity of the text is probably one of the best arguments that the text was indeed written by Kim himself. However, he did gain some interest abroad. Australian documentarian Anna Broinowski was intrigued by Kim’s directing advice and decided to produce a propaganda movie following the Dear Leader’s instructions in order to protest a gas company drilling in a park near her home. When she asked directing advice from North Korean filmmakers, she found herself given unprecedented access to the entire North Korean film industry, including interviews with North Korean directors and actors. Broinowski was even given the opportunity to appear in a North Korean film herself, playing an evil American, though she apparently flubbed her lines.
8 The Wine Of Love
Photo via Wikimedia
Ayatollah Khomeini was a surprisingly prolific writer, penning
commentaries on the Quran and the Hadith, as well as works on Islamic
law, philosophy, gnosticism, poetry, literature, and politics. Unlike
the literature of most other authoritarian leaders, the works of the
ayatollah were rarely translated. After the Islamic Revolution, a
hastily assembled paperback was published called The Little Green Book: Sayings of the Ayatollah Khomeini.
However, after being translated from Iranian to French to English, it
somehow went from over 1,000 pages to only 125, with a suspiciously
repeated theme of aphorisms about semen, sweat, and the anus, adding
weird color to the reactionary thoughts of the ayatollah.Following that, a book by a more sympathetic author was published in 1981, called Islam and the Revolution. It established Khomeini’s credentials as a righteous-minded revolutionary while insisting that his ideology was derived from classical Islam, shariah law, and the Sufi tradition.
Less well-known in the West was the revolutionary imam’s flair for mystical poetry, compiled in a collection called The Wine of Love. To Western eyes, the poetry seems strangely heretical but apparently is part of a long tradition of poetry written as part of a deeply personal communion with God. One example is a translation of one of the ayatollah’s poems, published in an Iranian newspaper in 1989:
Open the door of the tavern and let us go there day and night,
For I am sick and tired of the mosque and seminary.
I have torn off the garb of asceticism and hypocrisy,
Putting on the cloak of the tavern-haunting shaykh and becoming aware.
The city preacher has so tormented me with his advice
That I have sought aid from the breath of the wine-drenched profligate.
Leave me alone to remember the idol-temple,
I who have been awakened by the hand of the tavern’s idol.
7 Enver Hoxha’s Books
Photo credit: Forrasjeloles Hasonlo
Paranoid even by communist standards, Albania became increasingly
isolated after its leader, Enver Hoxha, fell out with Soviet leader
Khruschev over the end of Stalinism. He also fell out with China,
Albania’s one remaining ally. In hermetic isolation, Albania became
subject to the crimes against literature committed by Hoxha, who would
eventually churn out 40 volumes of speeches and memoirs. His writings
reflected his mindset and deep distrust of the outside world and foreign
imperialists: Both the bitter history of our country in the past and the reality of the ‘world’ that they advertise have convinced us that it is by no means a ‘civilized world,’ but a world in which the bigger and stronger oppress and flay the smaller and the weaker, in which money and corruption make the law, and injustice, perfidy and backstabbing triumph.
One of his most famous works was With Stalin, written in 1979 in memory of Hoxha’s hero, Joseph Stalin. The book is divided into six sections—an introduction and five collections of reminiscences of the Albanian leader’s encounters with the Soviet strongman. It is a shockingly boring hagiography meant to celebrate the extinct Stalin personality cult while reinforcing Hoxha’s own. Hoxha wrote lovingly of Stalin, reporting dreaming night and day of his eventual meeting with Stalin and of the viewing of a Soviet musical entitled Tractor Drivers. Much of the book is also devoted to lambasting his real and perceived enemies, both Western “imperialists” and his many, many foes within the communist world itself.
Regardless of Hoxha’s prolific output, the collapse of communism in Albania relegated his work to history books. In 1991, pro-democracy protesters burned the late dictator’s works in a crater near a toppled Hoxha statue. By the mid-1990s, pages from Hoxha’s works were being used to wrap roasted peanuts and sausages. Today, Hoxha’s books are still sold, but now, they’re alongside the works of liberal poet and novelist Ismail Kadare, as well as Western authors like Danielle Steele and L. Ron Hubbard.
6 Akhaltekke: Our Pride And Glory
Photo via Wikimedia
Saparmurat Niyazov’s successor to the rule of Turkmenistan,
Gurbanguli Berdymukhamedov, was not about to let the rich tradition of
Turkmen dictator literature die with the passing of the old leader. His
first book, published soon after assuming power in 2007, was a tad too
prosaic—Scientific Fundamentals of the Development of Public Health in Turkmenistan. This was followed up by an exciting collection of political speeches called To
New Heights of Progress: Selected Works—or Speech of the President of
Turkmenistan Gurbanguli Berdymukhamedov at the Extended Sitting of the
Cabinet of Ministers. Needless to say, these were largely for a domestic audience only.In 2009, however, he secured his first international book release for his masterpiece Akhaltekke: Our Pride and Glory, published in Ukrainian. The book was a loving ode to the Akhal-Teke horse breed and the history of horse breeding in Turkmenistan. The cover featured an image of a smiling Berdymukhamedov standing with a proud Akhal-Teke steed. It would later be published in French, English, Russian, and German, though its success abroad has so far been lackluster. It did, however, allegedly receive some accolades within the Community of Independent States (CIS), winning the CIS member states’ international contest called “Art of Book” in the “My Country” nomination.
5 Green Book
Photo credit: Viktor Kornienko
Muammar Gadhafi’s Green Book, a 1975 work of political and
social philosophy, was once a nearly omnipresent feature of Libya’s
literary universe. The work described Gadhafi’s Islamic socialist vision
of Jamahiriya, a democratic system without parties governed directly by
the people. The first volume of the Green Book, titled “The
Solution of the Problem of Democracy,” criticized both communism and
Western democracy, decrying elections, political parties, and popular
representation as fraudulent. True democracy was achievable only through
the people coming together in people’s committees, popular congresses,
and professional associations. In reality, this was little more than a
guise for a personal military dictatorship with Gadhafi at the helm.The second volume of the book was on economic theory, titled “The Solution of the Economic Problem.” Here, many of the contents were a mess of capitalist and socialist ideology which has been compared with the thoughts of Rousseau, Mao, and Marx, as well as Islamic philosophy. Property ownership was given much importance, with Gadhafi insisting, “There is no freedom for a man who lives in another’s house, whether he pays rent or not.”
During the 1980s, Gadhafi attempted to institute many of these policies in Libyan society, creating a government-run supermarket system and forcing families to own only one home. The main result of the policies were the decimation of the traditional Libyan merchant class.
He also had some choice information about the difference between the sexes:
Women, like men, are human beings. This is an incontestable truth . . . Women are different from men in form because they are females, just as all females in the kingdom of plants and animals differ from the male of their species . . . According to gynecologists women, unlike men, menstruate each month . . . Since men cannot be impregnated they do not experience the ailments that women do. She breastfeeds for nearly two years.
Gadhafi was inspired as much by the earlier writing of Egyptian nationalist Gamal Abdel Nasser as he was by the traditional Bedouin lifestyle. A Tripoli think tank known as the The World Center for the Study and Research of the Green Book attempted to popularize the dictator’s writing overseas. They translated the work into 30 languages, underwrote international conferences, and released nearly 140 studies and scholarly papers on Gadhafi’s theories. The work never really caught on, though, and the think tank was eventually destroyed by NATO air strikes in 2011.
4 Escape To Hell
Photo via Amazon.com
Gadhafi wasn’t just content churning out political literature, he
also tried his hand at short stories, releasing two collections, Escape to Hell (1993) and Illegal Publications
(1995). The main problem with Gadhafi’s short stories is that he
doesn’t really understand the art of prose. There are no characters and
little narrative but rather bizarre stream of consciousness rants.Many of the pieces highlight Gadhafi’s preference for village life and the way of the Bedouin rather than the alienating existence of the city:
This is the city: a mill that grinds down its inhabitants, a nightmare to its builders. It forces you to change your appearance and replace your values; you take on an urban personality, which has no colour or taste to it . . . The city forces you to hear the sounds of others whom you are not addressing. You are forced to inhale their very breaths . . . Children are worse off than adults. They move from darkness to darkness . . . Houses are not homes—they are holes and caves . . .
Another bizarrely compelling piece was “Suicide of The Astronaut,” telling the story of a space explorer who returns to Earth and is unable to find suitable employment. He tries and fails to find work in carpentry, lathing, blacksmithing, building, plumbing, and white-washing before fleeing the city into the countryside. There, he tries and fails to explain his plight to an uncomprehending farmer, who ultimately feels sympathy for the erstwhile astronaut but declines to take him on as a farm hand, leading the space man to commit suicide out of earthly ennui.
The short stories of Gadhafi are often entertaining for their vitriol, focused on both the West and Islamic fundamentalist thinkers. He enjoyed making frequent references to classical Islamic thought, though his own religious views were highly idiosyncratic and heterodox. Though they were published in English, there wasn’t a great deal of praise in the West for Gadhafi’s stories. Daniel Kalder would write in the Guardian: “What we find is a mind that cannot follow a coherent thought for very long, is filled with crude dichotomies and nonsense, and rambles along at random, collapsing in on itself before exploding outward again in a burst of surreal gibberish.”
3 Masoneria
Photo via Wikimedia
Spanish dictator Francisco Franco had a lifelong suspicion of the Freemasons,
whom he perceived as a conspiracy to undermine Catholic Spain and
banned along with communism in 1940. Between late 1947 and early 1951,
Franco wrote a series of anti-Mason articles in the Falange journal Arriba, after which they were collected in a text called Masoneria
under his pseudonym, J. Boor. Franco allegedly suspected the book was
being bought up by the Freemasons themselves to prevent it from being
written and tried to encourage an English-language version, though it
never came to fruition.While the book is available online in Spanish, there is little available information on the text in English. What little exists is often linked to lurid conspiracy websites. One compelling piece of text illustrates Franco’s conspiratorial mindset linked Freemasonry, communism, and Judaism:
Another focal point of this Soviet infiltration which Freemasonry presents us is that of the State of Israel, where, under the pretext of creating a Jewish religious state, there has taken place a concentration of atheist elements from Central Europe and the international bas fonds (lower strata), who eventually regard as Pharisaic and backward the ministers and representatives of the Mosaic faith. What was to have been a Jewish state, built on the old models of international Jewry, has thus become a focal point of faithless and rootless people, receptive to foreign slogans and influences.
Russia takes advantage once again of the state of affairs which Freemasonry offers to her to serve its own interests. Russia was aware of the great influence of Judaism in American politics, and the presence in many governments in Europe and in America of leading members of the Masonic sects; the oath they took when going through the XV and XVI degrees of ‘Knights of the Orient or of the Sword’ and ‘Princes of Jerusalem;’ regarding ‘turning over to the Hebrew people all that which was taken away from them by force,’ and while it helped and supported Stern Gang’s terrorist attacks in the Middle East, it worked in international meetings to foster Zionist principles, which would take their struggle to the field of their enemies, since for Russia, before the war, during the war and after the war, the nations which will not submit will always be its enemy.
[ . . . ]
The creation of Israel was of Soviet work. Here, as in the case of Lie, President Ben Gurion also presents himself with the complexity of his dual nationality, for he was active in the Communist ranks under a different name. Let us not lose sight of the diminutive State which, small as it may be, is ambitious in its aspirations, which reach to the limits of the Euphrates, and, however farfetched it may seem to us, there are those who feed the fire which one day may become a devouring wild fire, behind which the tanks of the modern barbarians will surge forward.
2 Mao’s Poetry
Photo credit: Poco a poco
Chinese revolutionary leader Mao Tse-tung wrote a number of books, most famously his political treatise The Little Red Book.
However, what is less well-known is that his education was steeped in
classical Chinese culture, and he grew up with a love of calligraphy and
traditional forms of poetry. Over four decades, spanning the pre- and
post-revolutionary periods, Mao produced scores of poetic works
that were then translated into English, with titles like “Yellow Crane
Tower” (1927), “The Long March” (1935), “The People’s Liberation Army
Captures Nanking” (1949), “Farewell To the God Of Plague” (1958), and
“The Fairy Cave: Inscription on a Photograph taken by Comrade Li Chin”
(1961). Many of his poems were inspired by the literary traditions of
the Tang and Sung dynasties.Opinions on Mao’s poetry vary depending on the source. According to the Chinese, it “exhibits a spirit of boldness and power, weaving together history, reality and commitment, and going beyond the limitations of time and space. [ . . . ] Mao Zedong advocated a method of literary composition that combines revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism, and his poetry was a synthesis of his theory and practice.” Belgian sinologist Pierre Ryckmans was less impressed, saying, “Well, if poetry were painting, I would say that Mao was better than Hitler . . . but not as good as Churchill.” Mao, for his part, modestly called them “scribbles.”
Mao did seem to have a literary flair, with an appreciation for natural themes like flowers, snow, horses, geese, sky, rivers, mountains, and the Moon. But his poems also occasionally reflect the vanity of the human will, as in his work “To Guo Moruo”:
On our small planet
a few houseflies bang on the walls.
They buzz, moan, moon,
and ants climb the locust tree
and brag about
their vast dominion.
1 Under The Left Breast Of The Century
Photo credit: Mikhail Evstafiev
Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic was a Columbia
University–trained psychiatrist who led the violent siege and ethnic
cleansing of Sarajevo in an attempt to wipe out the populations of Jews,
Muslims, and Croats and create an ethnically pure Serbia. He was also a
poet and author, whose work Under the Left Breast of the Century was published in 2005 in spite of Karadzic being a wanted war criminal with a $5 million bounty on his head. Much of Karadzic’s poetry often had warlike themes, with titles like “A Morning Hand Grenade,” “Assassins,” and “A Man Made of Ashes and War Boots.” But they also betrayed the dictator’s flair for self-pity:
I surmise the sun is wounding me
With its sharp malignant rays
I surmise the stars are healing me
I am the deity of dark cosmic space
A horned cow reveals a faithless goddess
Everything’s turned against me the one true god
I created the world to tear my head off
Judges torture me for insignificant acts
I am disgusted by the souls who radiate nothing
Like a small nasty puppy puny death
Is approaching from afar
I don’t know what to make of all these things
But I can’t stand the sight of you you file of scum
You file of snails
Well hurry up in your slime
After Karadzic’s capture in 2009, the Slovakian PEN Centre, part of PEN International, ethically criticized Slovakian magazine Dotyky for publishing his poetry without editorial comment. The editor defended the decision, saying simply that the poems were high-quality, but it set off a debate about free speech in publishing the works of a man known for inciting ethnic hatred. Andrew Rubin described the work as “a psychic landscape of eerie and illogical violence,” while Jay Surdukowski asserted that Karadzic saw himself as a poet-warrior. Surdukowski also argued in 2005 that the poetry itself could be admissible as evidence in a war crimes tribunal.
http://listverse.com/2015/09/07/10-works-of-prose-and-poetry-by-brutal-dictators/
10 Outrageous Ways Russian Media Covered The Crash Of MH17
On July 17, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 crashed close to the
city of Torez in Eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board.
Within hours, the world had a rough explanation of what had happened to
the fateful flight: Separatist forces shot the Boeing down with a Russian-supplied BUK anti-aircraft system, likely mistaking it for a Ukrainian An-26 transport plane.
In the months that followed, news media and citizen journalists have pieced together a thorough picture of the events. They’ve zeroed in on the exact launch location, the BUK’s exact journey into and out of Ukraine, and even the likely culprits behind the tragic misfire—Russian soldiers of the 53rd Air Defense Brigade from Kursk. On October 13, the Dutch Safety Board intends to publish a final report on the crash after more than a year of meticulous investigation. (There’s also a parallel criminal investigation that will take longer.) The report is expected to confirm and expand upon the above understanding of the incident.
Meanwhile, in Russia, media coverage of the MH17 tragedy has been somewhat . . . different. Rather than settling on a single story, Russian news outlets have released a flurry of often self-contradictory claims. They’ve ranged from at least hypothetically plausible explanations to completely absurd conspiracy theories. Here are some of the most glaring examples of how Russian media has (mis)treated the story.
Shortly after MH17 crashed, an anchor for Russia’s LifeNews channel appeared on TV to announce that the separatists had successfully downed yet another Ukrainian An-26. (One was shot down just three days prior, on July 14.) She described the incident in detail, including the fact that the plane was hit by a missile and that it crashed near Torez, which was under separatist control. Her report was accompanied by video footage of black smoke rising from the site of the crash. Of course, it wasn’t long before the sad truth became clear. There was no An-26; the plane that fell near Torez was none other than MH17. Once that news got out, a curious thing happened: The same anchor, wearing the same blue outfit and what must have been the best poker face in the industry, came back on to say that MH17 could not have possibly been downed by separatists because they didn’t have the right weapons for the job—the same separatists that minutes earlier took credit for downing the nonexistent An-26. We got to see the Orwellian “Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia” switcheroo happen in real time.
As for the phantom An-26 that was allegedly hit by a separatist missile? There was no further mention of it. Yet, bizarrely, you can still read the original An-26 story on the LifeNews website and the site of the TASS news agency.
One of the more popular Russian claims is that a Ukrainian Su-25 jet brought down MH17. The main problem with that claim—aside from the lack of any evidence—is that it’s a physical impossibility. The Su-25 is not designed to intercept other planes, but to provide close air support to ground troops. More importantly, its service ceiling is only 7,000 meters (23,000 ft), while the MH17 was downed at an altitude of over 10,000 meters (33,000 ft). The Su-25’s chief designer, Russian Vladimir Babak, has even gone on record to explicitly state, “The Su-25 could attack a Boeing at a height of three or four thousand meters, but it can’t shoot down a plane flying at an altitude of 10,500 meters. I believe that all allegations of the Su-25 involvement in the tragedy are an attempt to cover tracks. I can’t explain it in any other way.” We’ve already talked about how someone in the Russian government tried to manipulate the Su-25’s Wikipedia entry to suit the false narrative. But even that fades in comparison to how Russia’s Channel One covered the jet fighter theory in an episode of a show called “Odnako.” On November 14, 2014, the show’s host, Mikhail Leontyev, revealed a “sensational” satellite image of a Ukrainian jet fighter (which Leontyev suggested was a MiG-29) caught firing a missile at MH17. He hinted smugly at how this image would shatter the BUK theory and give Putin a clear trump card at the G20 summit in Australia. The photograph was apparently sent to the Russian Union of Engineers (RUE) by one George Bilt. In an ironic foreshadowing, Leontyev wrapped up his show with this statement: “To fake something like this, you’d have to be an even bigger professional than to have access to this kind of information.”
Almost instantly, Russian bloggers exposed the “satellite photograph” as a laughably crude fake. The scale of the two airplanes was way off. The map of the area, including a uniquely shaped cloud, was taken directly from a Google Earth photo . . . from August 28, 2012. Perhaps most ridiculous was the image of the Boeing itself, which appeared to simply be the first Google search result for “Boeing view from above,” showing just how lazy this Photoshop job really was. The Internet proceeded to mock the image mercilessly, pasting Nazi UFOs in place of the Ukrainian jet and grabbing video game screenshots as “undeniable proof.”
BuzzFeed managed to interview George Bilt, the man who forwarded the image to the RUE. Bilt confirmed that he’d found the photo in an online forum but was shocked to see it used on live TV. “Those guys are either desperate or totally unprofessional,” he said. When confronted about the ludicrous “Odnako” episode, Leontyev called his critics “brutes” and then quickly backtracked, “I never claimed that this proved anything. We don’t prove, we tell the story. Experts are the ones who should prove.” As for those experts, the comment from RUE’s leader Vladimir Saulyanov should tell you everything you need to know about their level of professionalism: “How could we check it? It came to us from the Internet.”
This theory incorrectly assumes that regional governor Kolomoyskyi somehow had access to Putin’s routing plans and the authority to command Ukrainian military forces. The names of Petrenko and Yakatsuts do not appear on any official sites or in any sources other than the ones quoting the story. Unsurprisingly, it gained little traction outside of Russian media and fringe conspiracy sites. The story tends to only receive passing mention when other Russian conspiracy theories about MH17 are discussed.
The day after the crash, Russia 24 (formerly Vesti) asserted that Ukrainian air traffic controllers forced MH17 off its normal path for unspecified nefarious purposes and that the whole world was now expecting answers from Kiev. The news outlet also claimed that it was normal practice for governments to fully shut down all air traffic over war zones.
The same day, Malaysia’s transport minister Liow Tiong Lai unequivocally stated that MH17 was on an approved flight path used by multiple other airlines and received “no last-minute instructions” to change course. Instead, there was indication that the pilots of MH17 may have requested a route adjustment to avoid a brewing thunderstorm. Finally, Russia 24’s claim that air traffic is always closed over war zones is inaccurate. Unless aviation authorities issue a special “notice to airmen” (NOTAM), commercial air travel often continues as usual over war-torn areas. In the case of Ukraine, the most recent NOTAM raised the minimum allowed altitude over the country to 9,800 meters (32,000 ft). MH17 was flying above that minimum.
To be sure, the MH17 tragedy does call for a serious look at whether a more stringent NOTAM was needed and whether Ukraine should have fully closed its airspace based on the information that it had on hand. We can expect the report from the Dutch Safety Board to do exactly that and to offer recommendations for how similar situations should be handled in the future. Turning flight controllers into evil masterminds is probably going a few steps too far, though.
A certain “Carlos,” who claimed to be a Spanish air traffic controller based in Kiev, offered a chilling first-person account of what had happened. According to him, not one but two Ukrainian jets were chasing MH17. Carlos, who apparently lives in a fast-paced action movie, watched the chase unfold while soldiers were simultaneously raiding his air control tower. He chose to share his sensational story in a series of sporadic tweets. His claim was quickly picked up and published by TASS.
As you may have guessed, air controller Carlos is a fictional character. Matthew Bennett of The Spain Report reached out to the Spanish embassy in Kiev. An embassy spokesman confirmed that Carlos wasn’t known within the rather small Spanish community there and that his Twitter account had previously made unsupported and exaggerated claims. Moreover, citizen journalists have pointed out that, according to Ukrainian law, all traffic controllers employed by the country must be Ukrainian citizens. That was the last we’ve heard from Carlos. TV station RT (formerly Russia Today), which originally also published the “Carlos” story, has since updated the article to state that his Twitter account was considered fake and has been removed.
On July 29, 2015, LifeNews published an explosive interview with Sergei Sokolov, an alleged expert from a Russian federal information center called Analytics and Security. Sokolov claimed that MH17 was blown up from within as part of a special operation. His proof was an audio tape that he’d purchased in 2014 from someone in the Ukrainian Security Service for $250,000.
The tape is said to be a conversation between a Ukrainian Su-27 pilot and a flight dispatcher. The Su-27 observes an explosion aboard MH17 and calls dispatch to stipulate that the Boeing was destroyed from the inside. LifeNews assures us that the tape is authentic, as established by a team of unnamed experts.
How was this plot carried out? What was its purpose? Why did the Ukrainian Security Service sell incriminating tapes to a random, self-proclaimed expert in Russia? Such questions are not addressed. Instead, LifeNews says that the West has failed to present a common version of the events. This is patently untrue: The Russian BUK has always been and remains the primary explanation.
The article goes on to say that Dutch experts have been sloppy in investigating the crash site and that Europeans are more interested in establishing a tribunal for MH17 than “correcting their own mistakes.” It’s hard to say which of those claims is more insulting to the memories of MH17 victims. And yet, this story gets even more far-fetched.
At first glance, the report looks impressive. It’s full of photos and diagrams and littered with enough numbers to overwhelm a casual reader. But once you study the report, you quickly see how brusquely it dismisses the painstakingly detailed BUK hypothesis and how it relies on the already debunked Su-25 story line.
RT correctly points out that the report is “yet another one among many other unofficial versions” about MH17. What it fails to mention is that the lion’s share of those unofficial versions has been spawned by Russia’s relentless media machine.
Russian media wasn’t quite done with the “bomb aboard the plane” theory. Weeks after the original LifeNews publication, the theory mutated into a convoluted CIA plot. It went something like this: CIA agents planted an explosive device in the cockpit of MH17. Their intention was to blow up the plane in a false-flag operation and blame the pro-Russian separatists for the disaster. But the bomb was actually just a backup plan. The real plan was to deliver a BUK to the Ukrainians, who would then target MH17. When the BUK misfired, the onboard bomb was detonated using a satellite signal. To support this claim, Komsomolskaya Pravda released a YouTube audio of two CIA agents discussing their master plan in a string of phone calls. The recording is so ludicrous that simply describing it doesn’t quite do it justice. One of the “agents” is confused about his identity, switching his accent from British to American. The dialogue itself is stilted and sounds less like a natural conversation and more like two voice actors reading a script. The story that these phone calls tell is worthy of a spy novel. Naturally, commenters didn’t hesitate to ridicule the audio, giving it “three out of five spy stars,” and calling it “the dumbest thing” they’ve heard.
The main proof point of this theory is that the aircraft registration numbers look nearly identical: MH370’s registration number was 9M-MRO, while MH17’s was 9M-MRD. MH370 was allegedly repainted to mask this fact, which is allegedly proven by photos of the wreckage. Even though it really shouldn’t be necessary, people have actually spent time to carefully debunk the false claims.
Russia isn’t alone here. Variations of this version can be found on many conspiracy sites worldwide. However, it does appear that the story first originated on another Russian LiveJournal and was picked up by other Russian-language sites. Appallingly, this theory goes as far as to dismiss the real families of the MH17 victims, insisting that the media never showed us any specific relatives. (A simple Google search should be more than enough to refute that.)
“But wait a moment,” you may say, “how does this theory account for the people aboard MH17?” Well, that brings us to perhaps the most cynical claim of them all . . .
Russian Spring—a pro-separatist site with the ironic tagline “Only verified information”—published an interview with the then-commander of separatist forces, Russian citizen and presumed GRU (Russian military intelligence) officer Igor Girkin. In that interview, Girkin said that the bodies at the crash site were not “fresh,” according to some of his sources. He also pointed out wild claims that some bodies had been drained of blood. As sickening as his claims were, they soon found a home on many dubious sites and served as a building block for the MH370 conspiracy theory.
It is noteworthy that Girkin himself was one of the first to celebrate the downing of what separatists first believed to be a Ukrainian An-26. Girkin announced the An-26 crash on his Vkontakte (Russian version of Facebook) page and stated, “We have warned them—not to fly in our sky!” His post was deleted soon after the plane turned out to be MH17, closely mimicking the LifeNews anchor’s sudden amnesia about the same event. The rest, as we have shown, is sad media circus history.
The presentation heavily implied that the BUK belonged to the Ukrainian military. This claim relied on a number of assumptions. First, a BUK launch from Snizhne would be inconsistent with the type of damage sustained by MH17. Second, Zaroshchenske was controlled by Ukraine rather than the separatists. Third, there was a Ukrainian BUK in Zaroschenske. Fourth, the exact type of BUK missile used—9M38M1—was out of production since 1999 and could therefore not have come from Russia.
Russian media, including the English-language Sputnik website, widely circulated this presentation. This version also got a more thorough treatment outside of Russia, since it broadly coincided with the main BUK theory. Upon closer scrutiny, multiple journalists have debunked the “Ukrainian BUK” theory on all counts.
An open-source investigation by Bellingcat journalists showed that Zaroshchenske was not controlled by Ukraine and that no Ukrainian BUK was present at the site identified by Almaz-Antey. The same report also concluded that it was “highly unlikely” that a missile was launched from Zaroshchenske in the first place. A separate article from the same team took apart the claim that 9M38M1 missiles were not in use by Russia. In addition, the team has traced this specific type of missile to a Russian convoy seen in June 2014 close to the Ukrainian border.
In parallel, Pavel Kanygin, a journalist from Novaya Gazeta (one of Russia’s few remaining independent news sites), traveled to both Zaroschenske and Snizhne to conduct a series of personal interviews with the locals. Their accounts corroborated the fact that Zaroschenske was under separatist control and that no BUK was ever seen there.
Perhaps most damningly, Almaz-Antey’s presentation relied on satellite imagery originally provided by Russia’s Ministry of Defense (MoD). This imagery was later proven to be falsified and became part of a larger collection of MoD manipulations in an article called “Russia’s Colin Powell Moment.”
http://listverse.com/2015/09/07/10-outrageous-ways-russian-media-covered-the-crash-of-mh17/
In the months that followed, news media and citizen journalists have pieced together a thorough picture of the events. They’ve zeroed in on the exact launch location, the BUK’s exact journey into and out of Ukraine, and even the likely culprits behind the tragic misfire—Russian soldiers of the 53rd Air Defense Brigade from Kursk. On October 13, the Dutch Safety Board intends to publish a final report on the crash after more than a year of meticulous investigation. (There’s also a parallel criminal investigation that will take longer.) The report is expected to confirm and expand upon the above understanding of the incident.
Meanwhile, in Russia, media coverage of the MH17 tragedy has been somewhat . . . different. Rather than settling on a single story, Russian news outlets have released a flurry of often self-contradictory claims. They’ve ranged from at least hypothetically plausible explanations to completely absurd conspiracy theories. Here are some of the most glaring examples of how Russian media has (mis)treated the story.
Featured image credit: russavia
10 LifeNews Anchor Contradicts Herself Within Minutes
Shortly after MH17 crashed, an anchor for Russia’s LifeNews channel appeared on TV to announce that the separatists had successfully downed yet another Ukrainian An-26. (One was shot down just three days prior, on July 14.) She described the incident in detail, including the fact that the plane was hit by a missile and that it crashed near Torez, which was under separatist control. Her report was accompanied by video footage of black smoke rising from the site of the crash. Of course, it wasn’t long before the sad truth became clear. There was no An-26; the plane that fell near Torez was none other than MH17. Once that news got out, a curious thing happened: The same anchor, wearing the same blue outfit and what must have been the best poker face in the industry, came back on to say that MH17 could not have possibly been downed by separatists because they didn’t have the right weapons for the job—the same separatists that minutes earlier took credit for downing the nonexistent An-26. We got to see the Orwellian “Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia” switcheroo happen in real time.
As for the phantom An-26 that was allegedly hit by a separatist missile? There was no further mention of it. Yet, bizarrely, you can still read the original An-26 story on the LifeNews website and the site of the TASS news agency.
9 Channel One Shows A Crude Photoshop Image Of A Fighter Jet Firing At MH17
One of the more popular Russian claims is that a Ukrainian Su-25 jet brought down MH17. The main problem with that claim—aside from the lack of any evidence—is that it’s a physical impossibility. The Su-25 is not designed to intercept other planes, but to provide close air support to ground troops. More importantly, its service ceiling is only 7,000 meters (23,000 ft), while the MH17 was downed at an altitude of over 10,000 meters (33,000 ft). The Su-25’s chief designer, Russian Vladimir Babak, has even gone on record to explicitly state, “The Su-25 could attack a Boeing at a height of three or four thousand meters, but it can’t shoot down a plane flying at an altitude of 10,500 meters. I believe that all allegations of the Su-25 involvement in the tragedy are an attempt to cover tracks. I can’t explain it in any other way.” We’ve already talked about how someone in the Russian government tried to manipulate the Su-25’s Wikipedia entry to suit the false narrative. But even that fades in comparison to how Russia’s Channel One covered the jet fighter theory in an episode of a show called “Odnako.” On November 14, 2014, the show’s host, Mikhail Leontyev, revealed a “sensational” satellite image of a Ukrainian jet fighter (which Leontyev suggested was a MiG-29) caught firing a missile at MH17. He hinted smugly at how this image would shatter the BUK theory and give Putin a clear trump card at the G20 summit in Australia. The photograph was apparently sent to the Russian Union of Engineers (RUE) by one George Bilt. In an ironic foreshadowing, Leontyev wrapped up his show with this statement: “To fake something like this, you’d have to be an even bigger professional than to have access to this kind of information.”
Almost instantly, Russian bloggers exposed the “satellite photograph” as a laughably crude fake. The scale of the two airplanes was way off. The map of the area, including a uniquely shaped cloud, was taken directly from a Google Earth photo . . . from August 28, 2012. Perhaps most ridiculous was the image of the Boeing itself, which appeared to simply be the first Google search result for “Boeing view from above,” showing just how lazy this Photoshop job really was. The Internet proceeded to mock the image mercilessly, pasting Nazi UFOs in place of the Ukrainian jet and grabbing video game screenshots as “undeniable proof.”
BuzzFeed managed to interview George Bilt, the man who forwarded the image to the RUE. Bilt confirmed that he’d found the photo in an online forum but was shocked to see it used on live TV. “Those guys are either desperate or totally unprofessional,” he said. When confronted about the ludicrous “Odnako” episode, Leontyev called his critics “brutes” and then quickly backtracked, “I never claimed that this proved anything. We don’t prove, we tell the story. Experts are the ones who should prove.” As for those experts, the comment from RUE’s leader Vladimir Saulyanov should tell you everything you need to know about their level of professionalism: “How could we check it? It came to us from the Internet.”
8 Komsomolskaya Pravda Claims It Was An Attempt To Assassinate Putin
Photo credit: Russian Presidential Press and Information Office
Yet another wild conspiracy theory that featured an Su-25 was published by Komsomolskaya Pravda,
a Russian tabloid. According to this explanation, then-governor of the
Dnepropetrovsk region Ihor Kolomoyskyi got word that Putin’s Plane
Number One would be flying over Ukraine on its way from Latin America.
Kolomoyskyi then ordered an Su-25 pilot, Dmitro Yakatsuts, to bring the
plane down, assassinating Putin in the air. The inept pilot managed to mistake MH17 for Plane Number One
because of their similar silhouette and coloring. After the plane was
shot down, Yakatsuts disappeared to Dubai, along with
Dnepropetrovsk-based air traffic controller Anna Petrenko, who was
responsible for MH17’s flight path.This theory incorrectly assumes that regional governor Kolomoyskyi somehow had access to Putin’s routing plans and the authority to command Ukrainian military forces. The names of Petrenko and Yakatsuts do not appear on any official sites or in any sources other than the ones quoting the story. Unsurprisingly, it gained little traction outside of Russian media and fringe conspiracy sites. The story tends to only receive passing mention when other Russian conspiracy theories about MH17 are discussed.
7 Russia 24 Accuses Ukrainian Air Controllers Of Deliberately Diverting MH17
The day after the crash, Russia 24 (formerly Vesti) asserted that Ukrainian air traffic controllers forced MH17 off its normal path for unspecified nefarious purposes and that the whole world was now expecting answers from Kiev. The news outlet also claimed that it was normal practice for governments to fully shut down all air traffic over war zones.
The same day, Malaysia’s transport minister Liow Tiong Lai unequivocally stated that MH17 was on an approved flight path used by multiple other airlines and received “no last-minute instructions” to change course. Instead, there was indication that the pilots of MH17 may have requested a route adjustment to avoid a brewing thunderstorm. Finally, Russia 24’s claim that air traffic is always closed over war zones is inaccurate. Unless aviation authorities issue a special “notice to airmen” (NOTAM), commercial air travel often continues as usual over war-torn areas. In the case of Ukraine, the most recent NOTAM raised the minimum allowed altitude over the country to 9,800 meters (32,000 ft). MH17 was flying above that minimum.
To be sure, the MH17 tragedy does call for a serious look at whether a more stringent NOTAM was needed and whether Ukraine should have fully closed its airspace based on the information that it had on hand. We can expect the report from the Dutch Safety Board to do exactly that and to offer recommendations for how similar situations should be handled in the future. Turning flight controllers into evil masterminds is probably going a few steps too far, though.
6 The Tale Of Carlos, The Mystery Air Controller
A certain “Carlos,” who claimed to be a Spanish air traffic controller based in Kiev, offered a chilling first-person account of what had happened. According to him, not one but two Ukrainian jets were chasing MH17. Carlos, who apparently lives in a fast-paced action movie, watched the chase unfold while soldiers were simultaneously raiding his air control tower. He chose to share his sensational story in a series of sporadic tweets. His claim was quickly picked up and published by TASS.
As you may have guessed, air controller Carlos is a fictional character. Matthew Bennett of The Spain Report reached out to the Spanish embassy in Kiev. An embassy spokesman confirmed that Carlos wasn’t known within the rather small Spanish community there and that his Twitter account had previously made unsupported and exaggerated claims. Moreover, citizen journalists have pointed out that, according to Ukrainian law, all traffic controllers employed by the country must be Ukrainian citizens. That was the last we’ve heard from Carlos. TV station RT (formerly Russia Today), which originally also published the “Carlos” story, has since updated the article to state that his Twitter account was considered fake and has been removed.
5 LifeNews Reports A Bomb Explosion Aboard MH17
On July 29, 2015, LifeNews published an explosive interview with Sergei Sokolov, an alleged expert from a Russian federal information center called Analytics and Security. Sokolov claimed that MH17 was blown up from within as part of a special operation. His proof was an audio tape that he’d purchased in 2014 from someone in the Ukrainian Security Service for $250,000.
The tape is said to be a conversation between a Ukrainian Su-27 pilot and a flight dispatcher. The Su-27 observes an explosion aboard MH17 and calls dispatch to stipulate that the Boeing was destroyed from the inside. LifeNews assures us that the tape is authentic, as established by a team of unnamed experts.
How was this plot carried out? What was its purpose? Why did the Ukrainian Security Service sell incriminating tapes to a random, self-proclaimed expert in Russia? Such questions are not addressed. Instead, LifeNews says that the West has failed to present a common version of the events. This is patently untrue: The Russian BUK has always been and remains the primary explanation.
The article goes on to say that Dutch experts have been sloppy in investigating the crash site and that Europeans are more interested in establishing a tribunal for MH17 than “correcting their own mistakes.” It’s hard to say which of those claims is more insulting to the memories of MH17 victims. And yet, this story gets even more far-fetched.
4 RT Suggests MH17 Was Downed By An Israeli Python Missile
Photo credit: KGyST
Forget about the bomb for a moment. Let’s return to the persistent
Su-25 theory. In mid-July 2015, RT published a report from another
unspecified “group of old-hand aviation security experts.”
This report was supposedly “leaked” via someone’s private LiveJournal
(a blogging platform popular in Russia). According to these “old-hand
experts,” MH17 was hit by an Israeli Python missile fired from a
Ukrainian Su-25, which was specifically refurbished to carry such
missiles, since they are visually similar to Su-25’s native R-60
air-to-air missiles. Are you with us so far?At first glance, the report looks impressive. It’s full of photos and diagrams and littered with enough numbers to overwhelm a casual reader. But once you study the report, you quickly see how brusquely it dismisses the painstakingly detailed BUK hypothesis and how it relies on the already debunked Su-25 story line.
RT correctly points out that the report is “yet another one among many other unofficial versions” about MH17. What it fails to mention is that the lion’s share of those unofficial versions has been spawned by Russia’s relentless media machine.
3 Komsomolskaya Pravda Publishes Fake CIA Phone Calls
Russian media wasn’t quite done with the “bomb aboard the plane” theory. Weeks after the original LifeNews publication, the theory mutated into a convoluted CIA plot. It went something like this: CIA agents planted an explosive device in the cockpit of MH17. Their intention was to blow up the plane in a false-flag operation and blame the pro-Russian separatists for the disaster. But the bomb was actually just a backup plan. The real plan was to deliver a BUK to the Ukrainians, who would then target MH17. When the BUK misfired, the onboard bomb was detonated using a satellite signal. To support this claim, Komsomolskaya Pravda released a YouTube audio of two CIA agents discussing their master plan in a string of phone calls. The recording is so ludicrous that simply describing it doesn’t quite do it justice. One of the “agents” is confused about his identity, switching his accent from British to American. The dialogue itself is stilted and sounds less like a natural conversation and more like two voice actors reading a script. The story that these phone calls tell is worthy of a spy novel. Naturally, commenters didn’t hesitate to ridicule the audio, giving it “three out of five spy stars,” and calling it “the dumbest thing” they’ve heard.
2 Speculation That MH17 Was Actually The Missing MH370
Photo credit: Laurent Errera
Russian fringe site News2 published a bizarre conspiracy claim that there was never any MH17
to begin with. Instead, the plane that crashed over Ukraine was MH370,
another Malaysian Boeing that disappeared over the Indian Ocean on March
8, 2014. According to this theory, MH370 was actually hijacked and
taken to a US military base. Later, the plane was relocated to the
Netherlands, where it took off with pilots who then jumped out wearing
parachutes. Autopilot directed the plane all the way to Ukraine. There,
the CIA blew it up in an attempt to frame Russia and start a major
conventional war.The main proof point of this theory is that the aircraft registration numbers look nearly identical: MH370’s registration number was 9M-MRO, while MH17’s was 9M-MRD. MH370 was allegedly repainted to mask this fact, which is allegedly proven by photos of the wreckage. Even though it really shouldn’t be necessary, people have actually spent time to carefully debunk the false claims.
Russia isn’t alone here. Variations of this version can be found on many conspiracy sites worldwide. However, it does appear that the story first originated on another Russian LiveJournal and was picked up by other Russian-language sites. Appallingly, this theory goes as far as to dismiss the real families of the MH17 victims, insisting that the media never showed us any specific relatives. (A simple Google search should be more than enough to refute that.)
“But wait a moment,” you may say, “how does this theory account for the people aboard MH17?” Well, that brings us to perhaps the most cynical claim of them all . . .
1 The Infuriating Claim That MH17 Was Filled With Corpses
Russian Spring—a pro-separatist site with the ironic tagline “Only verified information”—published an interview with the then-commander of separatist forces, Russian citizen and presumed GRU (Russian military intelligence) officer Igor Girkin. In that interview, Girkin said that the bodies at the crash site were not “fresh,” according to some of his sources. He also pointed out wild claims that some bodies had been drained of blood. As sickening as his claims were, they soon found a home on many dubious sites and served as a building block for the MH370 conspiracy theory.
It is noteworthy that Girkin himself was one of the first to celebrate the downing of what separatists first believed to be a Ukrainian An-26. Girkin announced the An-26 crash on his Vkontakte (Russian version of Facebook) page and stated, “We have warned them—not to fly in our sky!” His post was deleted soon after the plane turned out to be MH17, closely mimicking the LifeNews anchor’s sudden amnesia about the same event. The rest, as we have shown, is sad media circus history.
+ The ‘Ukrainian BUK’ Theory Deserves A Mention (Though Debunked)
Photo credit: Ajvol
For the sake of fairness, we should touch upon the more sensible
version voiced by Russian defense firm Almaz-Antey. In their June 2015
presentation, the company conceded that the MH17 was most likely downed
by a BUK. However, Almaz-Antey insisted that the launch site was to the
south of a tiny settlement of Zaroshchenske, rather than in Snizhne
(where the primary BUK theory places it).The presentation heavily implied that the BUK belonged to the Ukrainian military. This claim relied on a number of assumptions. First, a BUK launch from Snizhne would be inconsistent with the type of damage sustained by MH17. Second, Zaroshchenske was controlled by Ukraine rather than the separatists. Third, there was a Ukrainian BUK in Zaroschenske. Fourth, the exact type of BUK missile used—9M38M1—was out of production since 1999 and could therefore not have come from Russia.
Russian media, including the English-language Sputnik website, widely circulated this presentation. This version also got a more thorough treatment outside of Russia, since it broadly coincided with the main BUK theory. Upon closer scrutiny, multiple journalists have debunked the “Ukrainian BUK” theory on all counts.
An open-source investigation by Bellingcat journalists showed that Zaroshchenske was not controlled by Ukraine and that no Ukrainian BUK was present at the site identified by Almaz-Antey. The same report also concluded that it was “highly unlikely” that a missile was launched from Zaroshchenske in the first place. A separate article from the same team took apart the claim that 9M38M1 missiles were not in use by Russia. In addition, the team has traced this specific type of missile to a Russian convoy seen in June 2014 close to the Ukrainian border.
In parallel, Pavel Kanygin, a journalist from Novaya Gazeta (one of Russia’s few remaining independent news sites), traveled to both Zaroschenske and Snizhne to conduct a series of personal interviews with the locals. Their accounts corroborated the fact that Zaroschenske was under separatist control and that no BUK was ever seen there.
Perhaps most damningly, Almaz-Antey’s presentation relied on satellite imagery originally provided by Russia’s Ministry of Defense (MoD). This imagery was later proven to be falsified and became part of a larger collection of MoD manipulations in an article called “Russia’s Colin Powell Moment.”
http://listverse.com/2015/09/07/10-outrageous-ways-russian-media-covered-the-crash-of-mh17/
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