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M Gets (Ex)cited Over MH17
39 Plays3 years ago
Josh and M discuss a 2019 paper on MH17 conspiracy theories.
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
You can learn more about M’s academic work at: http://mrxdentith.com
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Transcript
Musical Intro and Its Appropriateness
00:00:00
Speaker
Back in episode 11, our first attempt at covering the conspiracy theories surrounding the fate of Malaysia Airlines flight 17, which came to an explosive end over Ukraine, the good doctor, now professor, Dentith, introduced the episode thusly.
00:00:21
Speaker
Planesoed with corpses and CIA agents. Theories by Henry, Lincoln and Bazian. Disinformation spread on the wings. These are a few of my favorite things.
00:00:38
Speaker
Twin towers falling and passports are burning Conspiracy theorists and theories are churning Government denials don't take out the sting These are a few of my favourite things When the government slights and the theorist sings When I'm feeling sad I simply remember my favourite things And I don't feel
00:01:06
Speaker
So bad.
00:01:12
Speaker
Tonight, we return to the story of MH17 and ask the big question, what the hell were you thinking? There we were discussing the serious loss of life of 298 people, and you thought starting the episode with a musical number was a good idea. Well, do you see? No, you see. You see. Are the victims of conspiracy just your playthings, Professor? Are they? Are they? Answer me. Yes.
00:01:39
Speaker
Sorry, what? Yes. Years and years of studying and looking into conspiracies and conspiracy theories has inured me, and now I feel nothing. Indeed, I can't even bring myself to sing anymore. The delight of the sound of music is gone. No more rocking to the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Even cabaret is just a taste of ash in my mouth.
00:02:00
Speaker
You see, I hate every conspiracy I see from theory A to theory Z. No, you'll never make a theorist out of me. Oh my god, I was wrong. I was a conspiracy theorist all along. You finally made a theorist. Come on.
00:02:24
Speaker
Fine, we finally made a theorist. Oh, you finally made a theorist out of me. I love you, Dr. Zayas. I feel used. The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. Indenter.
Hosts' Introduction and Background
00:02:55
Speaker
Oh, and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. I am Josh Edison there, doctor, now associate professor in Denton, in Auckland, separate again due to illness on my part, not any sort of nasty COVID illness, just sort of a cold, but I don't want to be around anyone else in my infectious state. It's true, I do not need you to destroy my vigors.
00:03:23
Speaker
No, all your humours. Gotta keep them pure. And viscous. Gotta keep my humours very viscous. I like my humours viscous and acidic at all times, and I cannot risk the alkaline nature of your illness state to make my vapours evaporate.
00:03:44
Speaker
Yeah, but neither humans nor vapors nor just pus, I guess, will be involved. Oh, no, you didn't mention pus. I mean, if you brought pus to the table, things might be very different.
00:03:56
Speaker
Well, my grandmother used to tell me about bringing pus to the table, but we don't need to get into that today. What we're talking about today is another paper that before we talk about a new paper, let's talk about the old paper.
Conspiracy Theories as Action Movies
00:04:08
Speaker
Well, yes, because one thing that I noted after we finished recording last week was that we didn't actually mention my favourite slash least favourite part of the paper. And in part, this is because, as we noted in the discussion of Juha's paper last week,
00:04:23
Speaker
The first section after the introduction basically reads as a recap or reiteration of the stuff you'd done in a paper earlier that year. So we'd kind of glossed over it going, well this is all old news, we want to move on to the new stuff. But there's one particular point towards the end of the first section proper after the introduction where Yuha writes,
00:04:48
Speaker
The explanation to social events provided by historians and social scientists tend to be relatively boring, as they refer to all kinds of accidents and unintentional side effects of actions, whereas conspiratorial explanations resemble action movies. Now, I think that seems both a bit of a stretch and a false dilemma to boot. What about you, Josh?
00:05:11
Speaker
Well, yeah, conspiratorial explanations resemble action movies. I mean, some of them do, certainly, but then some of the official theories are action movie-like enough by themselves. Yeah, 9-11 being a very good example. If you had pitched to me the plot of 9-11 back in 2000, I would assume you were doing a sequel to Executive
00:05:37
Speaker
Actually, it was an actual executive decision. The one where Steven Seagal falls out of an airplane. Yeah, very, very early on in the film. And I still am not entirely sure whether that was due to a literal fallout in production or whether he was just a glorified cameo. I mean, you could you could think that an executive decision is meant to rest upon the idea. You think Seagal was going to be the hero, but it turns out to be that pluckle pluckle plucky Kurt Russell.
00:06:05
Speaker
which doesn't really make much sense because Kurt Russell was kind of famous as having done action star stuff by that point anyway it wasn't an unexpected decision it was not an executive decision to make Kurt Russell the hero but I would have taken it to be a sequel to executive decision it does kind of sound like it I mean Watergate has all the trappings of sort of a spy thriller
00:06:27
Speaker
It's very three days of the contour, or there's a film called All the President's Men. I actually think you could do Watergate as a version of All the President's Men. Although actually Watergate, I mean, half the reason why it all came out was that it was so comically badly done.
MH17 and Academic References
00:06:45
Speaker
So it might actually be more of a bit of a farce, more of a bit of a parody of a thriller, but nevertheless cinematic.
00:06:51
Speaker
And of course, the invasion of Iraq, looking for those pesky weapons of mass destruction, really does read a lot like an episode of The Thick of It. Yes, which is why they then made the film, what was called In the Loop, which basically was a parody of the WMD justification for the War of Iraq with all the characters from The Thick of It. I do miss Malcolm Tucker.
00:07:14
Speaker
Hmm. That was, were they technically like different characters, but the same in the movie? It was. So Malcolm Tucker is the same character. The other actors who appear in the thick of it are playing different characters in the film. So Malcolm Tucker remains consistent. But the other actors who are in the TV show are playing different roles in the film adaptation of the TV show. It's a little bit messy, but it kind of works.
00:07:44
Speaker
Yes, good fun anyway, which is more than can be said of course for the case of flight MH17. No fun to be had there at all, but that's what we're going to be talking about this week because now how did this come out? You just got a ping that you'd been cited in a paper and that this paper involved MH17, one of the earlier things we looked at,
00:08:07
Speaker
So basically, like most academics, I'm signed up to a whole bunch of websites which act as repositories for papers. So I'm signed up to academia.edu, researchgate.net, fillpeople, which is actually an open access repository.
00:08:24
Speaker
which means that you get notifications when papers are posted to those sites which are in your research specialty, but you also occasionally get emails saying, oh you've been cited in PaperX. Sometimes it turns out the email they send you is when you've written a paper and you've mentioned an earlier paper of your own, so you go, yes I know I'm cited in that paper, I cited myself in that paper, but this paper
00:08:50
Speaker
I was cited in, and it wasn't written by me, but it is written on one of the two foundational texts of the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy, which are of course MH370, which does get a reference in this paper, and of course the other
European Projects and Research Anecdotes
00:09:07
Speaker
ill-fated Malaysian Airlines flight MH17. And I thought, oh, I'm cited in a paper about a topic we've talked about on the podcast before, not once, but twice. And keen listeners slash subscribers to the podcast will be very much aware of that because I have put those two old episodes back into the loop with fresh mixes. So they should sound better than they did back in the day.
00:09:36
Speaker
to kind of remind you that we've talked about this in the past and thus we might be able to link what we're going to talk about today with stuff that we talked about all the way back in 2014 and 2016. So I think that's enough introduction, how about you play one of them fancy stings and we'll get into the paper itself.
00:10:07
Speaker
Right, so the paper we're looking at today is called the impact of Russian anti-Western conspiracy theories on the status-related conflict in Ukraine, the case of Flight MH17. It was published in the Baltic Journal of European Studies, Tallinn University of Technology,
00:10:23
Speaker
And it's written by Dr Holger Milder of Tallinn University of Technology and Dr Vladimir Sazanov University of Tartu. These are both cities in Estonia, which I, in my ignorance, had to Google to find out Tallinn is the capital of Estonia and Tartu is its second largest city.
00:10:40
Speaker
uh now in the the biography at the end of this paper it points out that both Dr Milder and Dr Sazanov are members of cost action 15101 comparative analysis of conspiracy theories which is uh something you had experience with i believe i was also a member of cost action 15101 although we just called it compact okay because comparative analysis of conspiracy theories turns out to be compact because it turns out if you get
00:11:10
Speaker
European Union research funding, so an ERC grant, you not only have to come up with a long name, you have to come up with a pithy six-letter acronym of your project that then goes into the system, although I think they're actually running out of six-letter acronyms. Actually, no, it must be seven, because compact is not six, because I don't know anything about numbers, I'm really, really bad with them.
00:11:35
Speaker
But you have to come up with, you know, kind of exciting names. So Karen Douglas' new project is called Conspiracy Underscore FX, which I spent a little bit of time going, why that is? Oh, it's Conspiracy FX,
Russian Conspiracy Theories on MH17
00:11:48
Speaker
isn't it? It's not FX, it's FX, which of course, actually is what FX used to mean back in the day anyway. So frankly, I'm also a bit of an idiot who doesn't know how to use numbers.
00:11:58
Speaker
But you have been a member of Cost Action 15101, which means have you met these two doctors? Possibly. There were a lot of members and it is possible I have met them. It's possible I've even had conversations with them. It just turns out they don't immediately spring to mind when I think of people that I've corresponded with in the compact network.
00:12:23
Speaker
It's possible I've got drunk with these people, which also might explain why I don't remember them offhand. But anyway, the paper, it has an abstract, which is always nice, and so I'm going to read it. How very abstract of you.
00:12:39
Speaker
The Russian Federation has a wide arsenal of tools at its disposal for conducting information warfare to achieve its strategic objectives in the ongoing status conflict with the West. The act of exploitation of conspiracy theories has thrived since pro-criminal forces started armed conflicts against Ukraine in 2013 to 2014.
00:12:58
Speaker
This article focuses on the crash of Flight MH17, widely used by the Russian media to fabricate various conspiracy theories which make out that the West and Ukraine are responsible for the disaster. The study examines several Russian outlets and TV channels and concludes that the Russian media often used falsified stories and emotional rhetoric and narratives they spread about the crash of Flight MH17. The narratives used to create these conspiracy theories claim that the incident was a Western provocation aimed to generate hostility towards Russia.
00:13:26
Speaker
in disseminating these kinds of conspiracy theories, the pro-Cremlin media created distrust against the West and the Ukrainian government among a larger audience and produced discomfort and disorientation about Western and Ukrainian news. So yes, it's a bit of a, I don't know, there's a bit of a survey in there, basically. It's sort of going through a bunch of Russian media to bring up this case that they've been promoting conspiracy theories.
00:13:58
Speaker
I'm going to sneeze a little bit because I have a cold. Oh, that's lovely. Delightful. Now, there are six sections to this paper. Some of them I think we might skip over fairly quickly because it's a long paper to begin with and some of it's not specific to our area of interest. And also with a head cold, I'm kind of fighting to stay awake.
00:14:24
Speaker
But the first one is an introduction and it's always good to spend a bit of time looking at the introduction because that that lets you know what you're in for. And also mild spoilers is where the citation of a certain MRX dentist appears. So do you want to kick us off with the introduction?
00:14:48
Speaker
So because the theory for this line is since the evolution of communication networks, I actually kind of feel that I actually need to put a bit of an echo onto this because it does sound like the opening crawl of a film. So hold on.
00:15:04
Speaker
Since the evolution of communication networks over the last 25 to 30 years, of which the internet and social media soon became the most powerful influences of public opinion globally, more and more conspiracy theories have become available across various types of media outlets, influencing the everyday lives and mindsets of people around the world.
00:15:30
Speaker
The world entered into a post-truth environment where the boundaries between truth and lies, facts and beliefs became fuzzy and hardly recognisable.
00:15:45
Speaker
You're not a fan of the term post-truth, are you? Well I don't like the idea that post-truth is a new thing, because if you've done any study of the media over time, you'll be aware that people have been talking about us being in a post-truth movement for a very, very long time indeed.
00:16:06
Speaker
so going oh it's only it's only a recent thing it's in the last generation we've entered into the post-truth world okay so no people are saying that back in the 80s in the 70s in the 60s in the 50s in the 1850s in the 1840s people have been worried about how people attack or tackle with truth for a very long time now so as soon as anyone says post-truth I go
00:16:34
Speaker
So yeah, not a new thing. At any rate, the introduction continues. New information channels enormously multiplied the number of sources by which information could reach its potential customer and made fake news hardly distinguishable from real ones.
Communication Process of Conspiracy Theories
00:16:49
Speaker
Conspiracy theories can be spread very fast via social media with the help of the massive and coordinated fabrication of fake news, which is skillfully entwined with mainstream news streams.
00:16:59
Speaker
This new environment encouraged the rapid dissemination of politically motivated conspiracy theories in which personal beliefs successfully compete with objective facts. Interdisciplinary research on conspiracy theories includes various disciplines such as psychology, history, philosophy, semiotics, religious studies, media and communication, and political sciences. See Abba Lakina Papp, 1999, Burnett et al., 2005, Clark, 2002, Cody, 2003, 2006, Denteth, 2014, 2016,
00:17:33
Speaker
2016 and a partridge in a pear tree. So I'm assuming all of those people cited there were members of compact.
00:17:41
Speaker
Oh no, so you'll note by the date most of them are. So, Eblikina published in 1999. Compact only ran for five years. So basically between 2014 to 2019. So basically most of the material actually predates Compact by quite some time. This is simply a case of doing a literature review and going, oh, here are some names that
00:18:11
Speaker
I know. Jolly good. We have Steve Clark, David Cody, and you right alongside. So I think you're in good company there. I am indeed. It's nice that yes, a survey of the of the literature, you're one of the names that pops up. I think that is the extent to which you are cited in this paper.
00:18:31
Speaker
It is indeed. Basically, I appear in the introduction and then it's basically just Russia, Russia, Russia the entire time. They've got a really big hard on for Russia in this paper. Always going on about Russia. Imperial Russia, communist Russia, post-communist Russia. It's just Russia, Russia, Russia. Not enough time spent on me. Far too much time spent on the topic of the paper, which is Russia and its attitude towards stories around MH17.
00:19:00
Speaker
I am delighted absolutely delighted it continues Russia whose historical and cultural roots of conspiratorial tradition extend back to the long gone imperial period has been among the pioneers of contemporary information warfare and actively started to use different forms of information campaign to further its political goals um so yes you're right it is all about Russia and uh
00:19:27
Speaker
goes on a little bit longer and then finishes off. The current study focuses on a selected sample of the Russian media, eGTV channels, news agencies, publications, and digital media, and examines their connection with the conspiracy theories that emerged concerning the catastrophe of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, or MH17, which was shot down on the 14th of July, 2014, during the course of armed conflict between Ukraine and the pro-Criblin rebels in Donbass, which apparently is the southern region of Ukraine, where all this is going on.
00:19:56
Speaker
This article argues that the Russian media often turns to anti-Western conspiracy theories in order to support Russian information campaigns against Ukraine and to justify the accusation of responsibility of the West and Ukraine over the downing of Flight MH-17. So no mysteries about what it is they're going to be covering in this paper.
00:20:19
Speaker
No, and as we'll see in section 3, they're going to give a potted history of exactly how Russian information control works, and in section 4 they're going to state quite explicitly that they think that the downing of the MH17 really was just an accident, but that Russia has used that accident to launder particular conspiracy theories to kind of cement its control both of its internal population,
00:20:45
Speaker
and also to kind of cause issues for people overseas. But what we should do before we get on to the kind of nitty gritty is talk a little bit about Section 2 with respect to how they define the term conspiracy theory.
00:21:02
Speaker
Yes, section two is methods and data sample which is sort of part of the stuff that is not of so much interest to us, but it does start with a bit of definitions, which is what a good philosopher is always interested in. They start section two by saying
00:21:18
Speaker
The term conspiracy theory has been defined as a specific type of communication process, which gives a proposed explanation of some historical event or events in terms of the significant causal agency of a relatively small group of persons conspirators acting in secret.
00:21:34
Speaker
And where do they get this definition from? They get it from no other than one, Brian Alkely, and also the type of communication process is reference to
History of Russian Conspiracy Theories
00:21:47
Speaker
a Vencel. I don't know this person, but in 2016 they wrote a piece called Political Potentiality of Conspiracy Theories, where they've taken this part of the definition that a conspiracy theory is a specific type of communication process.
00:22:02
Speaker
Now, Lexia is, I believe, a journal in semiotics, and that particular special issue was edited by Massimo Leone, who is a friend of mine, who also turns out to not just be a disciple of the late Umberto Eco, but recently, as in the last few days, got engaged. So well done, Massimo, for
00:22:27
Speaker
posing for a photo with a person that you're planning to get married with and posting that on Facebook. He's very into posting things on social media because, as mentioned, he's into semiotics. Yes. Interesting to see that this initial definition is not pejorative at all. And also doesn't, as we've seen in other places, bring in the idea that a conspiracy theory is inherently opposed to an official story as well.
00:22:54
Speaker
No, and actually what makes this particular article interesting is it doesn't really need to go into that particular discussion because it is widely agreed that the Downing of Flight MH-17 really was a tragic accident. So it's very much focused on, okay, so given it was an accident,
00:23:17
Speaker
but there are some unwarranted conspiracy theories out there. What can we say about what Russia is doing with those theories? So they don't need to go into, we're going to have a laboured debate about whether conspiracy theories can be warranted or unwarranted. They're simply going, look, in this particular case, we are concerned about a very particular unwarranted conspiracy theory and how it's been used for political purpose.
00:23:46
Speaker
First, we have, though, move on to section three, Russia's Conspiratorial Legacy and the Status Conflict with the West, which is one, two, three, three and a bit pages of history that we can probably skip largely over, but basically it points out that Russia has a long history of promoting conspiracy theories, and it has a long history of being conspired against, and people promoting conspiracy theories against it.
00:24:14
Speaker
Yes, so I mean when you think about Russian conspiracy theories, you've got the Tsarist hoax of the protocols of the elders of Zion, which is pre-communist. You've then of course got the various great terror plots that went on during the communist era. One quote they've got here, during the Soviet era, the belief that Western countries were dreaming of the annihilation and humiliation of the Soviet Union was overwhelmingly disseminated in the society.
The MH17 Incident and Its Aftermath
00:24:43
Speaker
And of course, the Soviets weren't wrong. There were people in the West that were dreaming of the annihilation and I can't say humiliation. I can't even say that now. Humiliation. Humiliation. What an interesting word you people use. Humiliation. So they they weren't wrong. I mean, it may well have been a feel that it was a threat from an outside force, but it was a threat that did actually exist.
00:25:10
Speaker
I think the only thing, this section has a little bit of exceptionalism perhaps, they kind of make it sound like this is specifically a Russian issue, but governments all over the world conspire and are conspired against pretty much all the time.
00:25:28
Speaker
And this is very much a story about a country which has been under autocratic control for a very long time. And you might think that actually what we're seeing here isn't really specific to Russia. It's probably more generally something we see in autocratic societies, which is not
00:25:47
Speaker
Not to say you don't see it outside of autocratic societies, but it does seem to be a feature of autocracies, that you have this particular type of control, whether it be Russia, whether it be North Korea, or whether it be kind of one party states which are technically democracies, and yet only one party ever seems to be in control.
00:26:09
Speaker
So yes, not specific to Russia, but since Russia is what they're concentrating on in this paper, I guess it makes sense that they're the ones they're talking about. But skipping over the rest of that section, we get to section four, the MH17 story, which is basically a bit of a rundown of the whole history of the MH17 event and what took place around it.
00:26:32
Speaker
So it starts with a little summary. In July 2014, heated battles between the armed forces of Ukraine and pro-Russian rebels took place in Donbass. Ukrainian units tried to cut off rebel supply lines coming from Russia in the area of Shaktask. During the Battle of Shaktask, a Malaysian civilian aircraft carrying the designation of Flight MH-17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was most probably accidentally shot down in the area.
00:26:58
Speaker
Before the incident, several Ukrainian aircraft were shot down over rebel-controlled territory. Telephone calls made by the rebels and recorded by the Ukrainians led to the conclusion that Boeing 777200ER had been shot down by mistake, as it was thought to be the Ukrainian airplane AN26. And that's according to the Dutch Safety Board, who were the ones who did the major investigation into the fate of MH17.
00:27:24
Speaker
Yes, and we'll be getting to investigations by the Dutch a little bit later. That sounds a bit rude. Investigations by the Dutch? Ooh-uh. It does sound like yes. I think that might be my favourite euphemism now. I'll have to find more excuses to use it. Have you been investigated by the Dutch recently? Oh, constantly. And also, do you want to be? Just, yeah, you don't even have to ask. Look, Josh, I will always get consent to investigate you in a Dutch fashion.
00:27:52
Speaker
Fair enough. But yeah, so we can see straight away that this paper basically takes it as read that MH17 was accidentally shot down. But as we'll see, this accidental note was seized upon by Russia in a number of different ways. And of course, at this point, they do sort of name drop as well.
00:28:19
Speaker
the fact that MH17 wasn't the first tragedy to have befallen Malaysia Airlines. Because it was, I believe, as Queen Elizabeth II said, an anus horribilis for Malaysia Airlines that year. Not quite, but I take your meaning. The paper itself says a little bit later, nevertheless, Russia actively targeted this tragic event involving a scheduled international passenger flight to promote conspiracy theories, accusing Ukraine and the West of using civilian lives to fuel the war of Donbass.
00:28:48
Speaker
These conspiracy theories gain traction from the fact that the crash of flight MH17 was not the first incident of its type, with the Boeing 777 of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 mysteriously disappearing in March 2014 on its journey from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, allegedly over the Indian Ocean and far away from its route. No rational explanation has been found how the plane deviated from such a course nor any sign to confirm that the plane fell.
00:29:13
Speaker
Now we'll actually be returning back to the story of MH370 in our bonus episode this week, because mind we have some updates for you about that story. But let's leave 370 to one side and focus on 17, which according to my calculus comes before 370 and yet occurred afterwards. That seems a bit fishy.
00:29:37
Speaker
It does a little. Someone's been tinkering with the time stream perhaps. Indeed, Section 14 talks about the various ways that Russia sort of weaponized the story and produced a bunch of fake news. So Section 14. There aren't 14 sections in this paper. What paper have you been reading? I'm getting my fours and my 17s mixed up.
00:29:57
Speaker
really don't worry when I was actually doing the the prep for this episode I kept on calling the flight MH-11 because it turns out that our 11th episode was on flight MH-17 and so I kept on writing about MH-11 it was very confusing because then I was trying to do searches for information about flight MH-11 and it turns out there are there's very little information about flight MH-11 which is itself
00:30:23
Speaker
very mysterious. What is it they don't want us to know about flight MH11, which I'm assuming must have occurred somewhere between MH17 and MH370?
00:30:38
Speaker
You'd have to assume, but we don't have time to get into that now because we have a great variety of Russian fake news stories that were promoted in the wake of the MH17 disaster by the... Now, one win will continue here in Russia.
00:30:55
Speaker
much is one which I'm fairly sure we have mentioned in one of the early episodes, which is the UFO connection, the just asking questions. I'm not saying it really was a UFO, but which was a broadcast that occurred in Russia, I think around about 2016.
00:31:12
Speaker
where, because most of Russia's media is state-run, whether it's explicitly or implicitly known to be the case, they have a whole bunch of shows which seem to just launder in misinformation. One of the hosts was going, well, I don't know that it is a UFO that caused MH17 to disappear, but at the same time, people have suggested it might be the case, so we should probably take this seriously.
00:31:39
Speaker
which appears to just be a case of laundering disinformation in order to distract people from the awkward situation going on in the Ukraine at the time.
00:31:50
Speaker
And thank you for giving me cover for a large sneeze there. If I had a bit more warning on it, I probably could have muted, but no such luck. But yeah, they sort of go over a bunch of the things initially that these stories that came out that, yeah, theories that it was Western provocation that Flight MH-17 wasn't in the area at all. It was another plane that had been shot down, theories that the plane was there but hadn't been shot down. It had been exploded because a bomb was detonated inside.
00:32:20
Speaker
And then all sorts of other stuff getting down to was shot down by the CIA by the government by an Israeli missile I see we have here we have then even more paranormal causes like somebody mentioned the possibility of a hole in time.
00:32:36
Speaker
So there you go, there's your wacky numerological hijinks.
Major Theories by Russian Media on MH17
00:32:41
Speaker
Planes that, yes, three, three, MH370 somehow went through time and was in fact shot down over Ukraine. And the MH370 was MH17. Yes, the UFO. Other theories tried to convince the public that the crash had been organized by groups aiming to get the new world order, e.g. Illuminati, to trigger a third world war.
00:33:07
Speaker
But they go through all of this stuff and then in section five, four conspiracy theories disseminated by the Russian media, they basically go in a bit more detail about four sort of general conspiracy theories that were coming out of the Russian media regarding MH17 based on their sort of survey of the media of the time.
00:33:30
Speaker
So let's start with the first one, which is that the real culprits here were the people of the Ukraine. Yes, so they list out four conspiracy theories labeled CT1 to 4. CT1 is indeed, Ukraine is responsible for the catastrophe. So apparently, the largest proportion of articles portrayed Ukraine, e.g. state government Ukrainian army, as being responsible for the crash of Flight MH17 in eastern Ukraine.
00:33:59
Speaker
According to this narrative, Ukrainian armed forces were blamed for shooting down Flight MH-17 and Ukrainian soldiers, sometimes mentioned by name, were the guilty parties for this catastrophe. Now, we should point out that when Russians talk about Eastern Ukraine, Ukrainians don't talk about Eastern Ukraine. Ukrainians talk about the Ukraine. Russia talks about
00:34:24
Speaker
I should say they talk about just about Ukraine. Apparently they don't like the Ukraine because it makes it sound like a region more than a country or something. I can understand that. But yes, in Russia they talk about Western and Eastern Ukraine because of course Russia has its eyes on that Western bit of the Ukraine, which really would rather was it rather than Ukraine's.
00:34:50
Speaker
What was the deal with Macedonia? They had to change the name to North Macedonia or something because Greece complained. I never quite understood what went on there. Because Greece wants to take the legacy of Alexander the Great,
00:35:09
Speaker
who of course was Macedonian, but the Greeks have gone, well actually he was a Greek rather than a Macedonian. They don't really want anyone taking Macedonian culture away from Greece, so the people who live in modern-day Macedonia, which used to be a part of Croatia, are now living in northern Macedonia because it was the only way that the Hellenic states were going to allow northern Macedonia to kind of get into the EU.
00:35:38
Speaker
And yes, yeah, this is kind of irrelevant. But basically, like most people, my knowledge of European geography is largely informed by the Eurovision Song Contest. Which includes Australia, which makes it very confusing. And Israel, yes. Because it turns out that that's actually not the European Union song.
00:35:58
Speaker
contest. It's the if you belong to an organization called Eurovision which will include anyone who pays a licensing fee, you can be part of Eurovision. So technically Josh, we could via the podcast get enough money, require an awful lot of work, but it's technically possible to enroll Altera New Zealand
00:36:20
Speaker
into the Eurovision Song Contest, and then get Flight of the Conchords to appear in the Eurovision Song Contest, thus winning Eurovision for all time, in the name of the Southern Hemisphere.
00:36:35
Speaker
Although of course the rules of the Univerision song contest state merely that the song has to be written by the country, so indeed the Flight of the Conchords could appear singing for any country they chose as long as the song they were singing had been written by that country. I'm sure Jermaine and Brett would not do such a thing.
00:36:53
Speaker
probably not. We appear to have got off topic and I'm pretty sure I'm to blame so I'm going to pretend that's not true and just forge straight ahead to CT2, which is that the MH17 crash was a classic Western provocation against Russia. So
00:37:08
Speaker
The next branch of conspiracy theory is that basically the West, by which I assume they largely mean the US, although possibly the NATO Western European states, I suppose, collaborated with Ukraine
00:37:26
Speaker
in the downing of MH17. As they put it, in Komsomoskaya Pravda, Yevgeny Susanov described the case of MH17 as a classic Western provocation against Russia. He claimed that NATO and the United States were interested in sending their troops into Ukraine for, as he put it, a so-called peacekeeping mission, but Russia did not react to such provocation from the West, and thus the West apparently organized the shooting down of the civilian passenger flight.
00:37:53
Speaker
So I guess a false flag? Yes, and indeed actually what's interesting is that this particular Russian also linked 9-11 as a false flag to the event in Ukraine as well. So going well look, America did it in the past with respect to the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York,
00:38:16
Speaker
And here we've got another example of an action which is beneficial to the Americans coming in and doing a bit of peacekeeping in air quotes. So if we think that 9-11 was a false flag, we should think the downing of MH-17 is a false flag as well.
00:38:35
Speaker
Now, by the time you get to Conspiracy Series 3, where the US is acting on its own, Conspiracy Series 3 is that the United States or the CIA shot down MH17, or if not shot down, then caused the crashing of MH17, because as they put it,
00:38:54
Speaker
Several articles published by the Russian media claimed that Flight MH17 was destroyed due to the detonation of a bomb by claiming that the crash was an act of terrorism organized by the US Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA was also, however, directly accused of shooting down the airplane. So one way or another, they claimed that the US themselves directly caused the crash of MH17 either by shooting it down
00:39:19
Speaker
by their own means, or by put it planting a bomb on the plane and then claiming that it had been shot down after the fact. Now an interesting aspect of this particular conspiracy theory is the reference to the discovery of secret materials amongst the wreckage, which then went to show that something more than simply a plane crashing had occurred, which has ever so slight shades of the whole nano-thermite thing with respect to 9-11.
00:39:50
Speaker
And then they would sort of get extra conspiratorial because when, they'd question the US's investigation of what was going on because if the US was behind it, then the investigators were actually secretly investigating themselves. Which
Impact of Russian Narratives
00:40:05
Speaker
would be a bit of a problem if the US were in fact behind the event.
00:40:09
Speaker
And actually that brings us in quite nicely to conspiracy theory four, which portrays the Dutch as being the real villains of the space. Yes, you can talk about that one because I'm going to blow my nose noisily, but I'm going to mute myself first.
00:40:26
Speaker
Yes, you blow your noisily nose. So this one goes, although this narrative was mostly disseminated by fringe portals and outlets such as the information agency of the Russian public movement Renaissance, the Golden Era, it has still been widely used in Russian media and social media.
00:40:44
Speaker
This conspiracy theory relies on obvious facts such as how flight MH17 was flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, which makes the Netherlands and its government easy targets for conspiratorial accusations, together with the fact that the government of the Netherlands started an investigation into the crash of flight MH17.
00:41:06
Speaker
And in this case they're saying look MH17 was bombed rather than shot down. And where did that bomb originate? Amsterdam.
00:41:19
Speaker
Yes, if the flight had originated from the Netherlands, then that must have been when the bomb got put on the plane. And the suggestion is that the Netherlands themselves were behind it. Thank you for reading that out to us at home. You can assume that I was just noisily blowing my nose the entire time that N was speaking and are now completely devoid of mucus. That's not quite true, but it's a
00:41:42
Speaker
You'll never be completely devoid of mucus. Mucus is what keeps you together. It's true. Now actually what is interesting about this particular thing was that it had never really occurred to me to ask why did the Netherlands do the investigation into the fate of MH17.
00:42:00
Speaker
But of course they would do the investigation to the fate of a flight that left their region to go elsewhere. They are the port of origin. It makes sense that they would then do the investigation into what happened to the flight after it left their airspace.
00:42:19
Speaker
These theories apparently made a lot of claims that witnesses heard more than one explosion. So more than one gunshot? More than one gunshot, yes. That sounds very JFK-esque. Yes, like one of the shells that hit the plane had come from a grassy knoll of some sort.
00:42:39
Speaker
So the quote from the paper, this paper says, all witnesses say that they heard several explosions in the air. Some witnesses say they heard two explosions, others mentioned three. But the Russian system buck, which is the kind of anti-aircraft thing that supposedly shut down the plane, can make just one explosion. If it ever has to be proven the plane was blown up, the Netherlands will be fully responsible for the fact that the plane took off from the airport with the bomb on board.
00:43:06
Speaker
and that yeah I mean we hear similar claims like that all the time buildings bombed and people came I heard two explosions or two shots fired and so on but I mean certainly if in the case of a plane being shot down you can come up with reasons why there could have been more than one explosive noise anyway.
00:43:25
Speaker
Well, precisely, because you might expect there to be at least two explosive booms. The first boom would be the book hitting the plane and exploding, and then the second boom would be the plane exploding after the book has hit it. It seems like something which seems like a fairly plausible explanation as to, yeah,
00:43:45
Speaker
A missile hit the plane, it exploded, it caused the plane to explode, which meant there was a succession of explosions heard by air witnesses, and of course that's relying on the idea that A, people weren't hearing echoes, and B, the air witnesses were in fact reliable witnesses when it came to reporting what they thought they heard on the day.
00:44:08
Speaker
of course the other explosion you might hear is thing hits plane, plane explodes, plane hits ground, plane explodes again.
00:44:19
Speaker
But yes, I guess the salient point of this one, though, is that Russia, while casting around for people to blame this on, basically hit upon the fact that, OK, if we're already at the point where we're saying there was a bomb rather than a shell that caused the plane to explode in the first place, then we have another candidate for the guilty party in the Netherlands because they were the ones that allowed a plane to leave with a bomb on it.
00:44:47
Speaker
which would be very sloppy if the Dutch went oh yeah it's all right you've got to bomb on your plane but it'll be fine it'll be fine it'll be fine yes yes I mean at the very least if they're not claiming that the Netherlands the government of the Netherlands whatever for some reason decided to bomb this thing at the very least they would be rather culpable just because of their negligence but
00:45:14
Speaker
So those are the four main groups that this paper looked at of conspiracy theories that were promoted by Russia in the wake of MH17. And that just kind of leads into the conclusion, basically. This paper doesn't seem to sort of advance an argument as much as we might expect from, say, a paper in the philosophical disciplines. It's more of sort of a media survey. But it certainly seeks to prove a point.
00:45:43
Speaker
And it summarises all of this in section six, which is, of course, the conclusion. And the conclusion is short enough that we can probably read the whole thing out in one. Shall we do it a paragraph at a time? I think so. OK, you start. The conflict in Ukraine, which broke out in 2013 to 2014, immediately became part of an enhanced status-related conflict between the Russian Federation and the West.
00:46:07
Speaker
anti-Western feelings emerged and started to attract the political elite to the Russian Empire after the Crimean War of the mid-19th century, a time when many prominent representatives of the Russian elites felt themselves betrayed by the West. Since then, Russia has started to promote more forcefully the idea of Russia as a unique civilization suffering under constant attack from the West in their secret aim to govern the whole world.
00:46:35
Speaker
During the Soviet regime, conspiracy theories about the West reached their peak in official propaganda. But these misperceptions did not dissipate along with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, as Russia continued its civilizational battles. I'm surprised they didn't put scare quotes around the word secret in the West's secret aim to govern the whole world, because at any rate... I mean, arguably the West does have a secret aim to govern the whole world. I mean, it's not implausible to believe that.
00:47:03
Speaker
I was going to say it's not really much of a secret that they do. At any rate, the conclusion continues. The vast majority of conspiracy theories present in this content analysis blame Ukraine for the incident. The rest portray the West, the United States and more really the Netherlands as responsible for the catastrophe of flight MH17.
00:47:22
Speaker
Nevertheless, almost all the narratives disseminated by the Russian media concerning Flight MH17 firmly prove its link to the status conflict between Russia and the West, which is strategically promoted by the Russian Federation in its attempt to increase the impact it has on international relations. In this conflict, Ukraine has been portrayed as a puppet state which is heavily dependent on its Western hosts.
00:47:42
Speaker
Such articles often feature interviews with people who allegedly possess secret materials on the MH17 crash, which prove that Russia and pro-Russian rebels could not possibly have organized this crash and that it was done by Ukraine and the West.
00:47:55
Speaker
The Crash of Flight MH-17 represents just another case of a tragic event incurring real losses about which the Russian media has intentionally distributed fabricated news and stories in order to disorientate and confuse the audience, using it as a propagandistic tool against the Ukrainian government to portray it as weak and unreliable. I'll just make a note to myself there to not include sentences that long in my new book.
00:48:22
Speaker
A strong anti-Western component has been retained in the rhetoric of these fabricated narratives around the event. Samples from the Russian media have attempted to create a kind of illusion of Western provocation directed against the Russian Federation and pro-Russian rebels in Donbas, in which Ukraine was sided with the West in order to accuse them of this crime.
00:48:45
Speaker
So there you have it. A conclusion that I don't think would come as a massive surprise to anyone really, that the Russian government has disseminated a whole bunch of conspiracy theories around an issue to do with Ukraine. But an interesting journey to get there nonetheless. It's not the sort of paper I'm used to reading.
00:49:09
Speaker
um yes i must but i wanted something more substantive as a conclusion truth be told because it really does given the title of the paper is and let me just scroll all the way back up to it because i can't the impact of russian anti-western conspiracy theories on the status-rated conflict in ukraine the case of flight mh17 i kind of wanted there to be more discussion of the impact
00:49:33
Speaker
It's more a description of Russian anti-Western conspiracy theories on the status-related conflict. But it doesn't really say much about the impact of those theories. How persuasive were they? How commonly believed are they? Are they taken seriously within the Russian Federation?
00:49:54
Speaker
Are they useful in kind of stirring support for Russia in Western nations by people who are skeptical of their Western governments? I kind of wanted to look into that as to have these conspiracy theories which are, in the terms of the paper, unwarranted. Have they been successfully weaponized both in Russia and outside of it? And also, arguably, what have they done in the conflict in the Ukraine? Ooh.
00:50:23
Speaker
Yes, yes, I suppose for a paper that is all about the impact, it doesn't say a lot more around the impact other than it had one. So yes, a nice overview of an area of conspiracy theories, but maybe a bit light on actual conclusion, I suppose.
00:50:48
Speaker
Nevertheless, you were sighted, isn't it? And that's kind of interesting. Well, yeah. And, you know, this is probably going to happen more and more with time.
Episode Conclusion and Sign Off
00:50:57
Speaker
So I think we've come to the end of an episode. So before I once again revert to being a fountain of mucus and horrible sounds, I'm just going to go retreat into a box of tissues, leaving you merely with the thought that I say goodbye.
00:51:18
Speaker
And I will say, happy mucus time everyone! And remember, Soylent Green is meeples.