November 24, 2008
The Communists Say James Bond Is Anti-Communist
The hell you say.
Say the Russian communists:
The attack is obviously anti-American propaganda.
Standard stuff: Assertion fallacy, misleading qualifier "special," elevated importance by using "operation," personalizing it, etc. None of his points are accurate-- they're not supposed to be, they're supposed to create a sentiment. The move is to use a many words of different meanings as possible, thereby immunizing the other words, to that even if one is detected to be false, the reader can think, "well, that's just one small mistake."
They don't even get the movie right: Bond isn't American, Kurylenko's character "Camille Rivera Montes" isn't Russian but Bolivian (ok, half-Russian), she doesn't sleep with him...
But it's neither directed at Kurylenko nor even Bond viewers. It's directed at Russians, it's an appeal to return to the Communist Party. The West is against you, look how we fight for the honor of our people.
II.
Or maybe not.
This group isn't the actual communist party in Russia, it is a communist group in Russia. It's best described as a-- fan club. By my estimation, it has 44 members. You know why I think that? Because that's how many people visited their site today.
And over the past month...
This story hit Russia and the niche James Bond sites on Oct 27, and the American/British media November 1.
If your communist party can't get more than 14000 hits even with every news outlet on the planet carrying your story, it's time to try porn.
So perhaps this isn't propaganda for the communist ideology, but rather a press release for themselves, for their specific club. The press equivalent of trolling for website hits.
III.
But as it took me no effort at all to look up this fake group (started 2003) and their inaccurate postings, why didn't any other news media do this?
It makes sense that the studio people love this kind of publicity. If anything, this makes James Bond films look better, suddenly they have some indirect, but real, effect in winning the Cold War. And I won't even disagree with that sentence.
But why would the news media carry this? I'm assuming they don't think of themselves as tools of communism or of Hollywood, so why would they repeat, dozens of times, this story? Not just contentless, but misleadingly contentless. For example, you might conclude that communists are actually upset, or idiots. Or that this Bond movie is just like the others. Etc.
Don't make the mistake and think this is fluff, like the story about the Madonna divorce. That story is fluff, but fact. This is none of those things: it is musak, its purpose is to convey mood. You leave with no actual information, your own empty prejudices are reinforced (in any direction-- it's your choice how to interpret it) and you're left, again, thinking you know something when in fact you know less than nothing.
The group appealed to [female lead] Kurylenko, who was born in the former USSR: "The Soviet Union educated you, cared for you and brought you up for free but no one suspected that you would commit this act of intellectual and moral betrayal... [the movie wanted] to show that a Ukrainian girl sleeps with an American. It's a part of information and psychological war."Previously, they hated Indiana Jones And The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and specifically Cate Blanchett (though for the wrong reasons.) (Oddly, no complaint about Kurylenko with an American agent in Hitman.)
The attack is obviously anti-American propaganda.
The party's leader, Sergei Malinkovich, said: "Everyone knows that the CIA and MI6 finance James Bond films as a special operation of psychological warfare against us. This Ukrainian girl sleeps with Bond and that means that Ukraine is sleeping with the West." (emphasis mine.)
Standard stuff: Assertion fallacy, misleading qualifier "special," elevated importance by using "operation," personalizing it, etc. None of his points are accurate-- they're not supposed to be, they're supposed to create a sentiment. The move is to use a many words of different meanings as possible, thereby immunizing the other words, to that even if one is detected to be false, the reader can think, "well, that's just one small mistake."
They don't even get the movie right: Bond isn't American, Kurylenko's character "Camille Rivera Montes" isn't Russian but Bolivian (ok, half-Russian), she doesn't sleep with him...
But it's neither directed at Kurylenko nor even Bond viewers. It's directed at Russians, it's an appeal to return to the Communist Party. The West is against you, look how we fight for the honor of our people.
II.
Or maybe not.
This group isn't the actual communist party in Russia, it is a communist group in Russia. It's best described as a-- fan club. By my estimation, it has 44 members. You know why I think that? Because that's how many people visited their site today.
And over the past month...
This story hit Russia and the niche James Bond sites on Oct 27, and the American/British media November 1.
If your communist party can't get more than 14000 hits even with every news outlet on the planet carrying your story, it's time to try porn.
So perhaps this isn't propaganda for the communist ideology, but rather a press release for themselves, for their specific club. The press equivalent of trolling for website hits.
III.
But as it took me no effort at all to look up this fake group (started 2003) and their inaccurate postings, why didn't any other news media do this?
It makes sense that the studio people love this kind of publicity. If anything, this makes James Bond films look better, suddenly they have some indirect, but real, effect in winning the Cold War. And I won't even disagree with that sentence.
But why would the news media carry this? I'm assuming they don't think of themselves as tools of communism or of Hollywood, so why would they repeat, dozens of times, this story? Not just contentless, but misleadingly contentless. For example, you might conclude that communists are actually upset, or idiots. Or that this Bond movie is just like the others. Etc.
Don't make the mistake and think this is fluff, like the story about the Madonna divorce. That story is fluff, but fact. This is none of those things: it is musak, its purpose is to convey mood. You leave with no actual information, your own empty prejudices are reinforced (in any direction-- it's your choice how to interpret it) and you're left, again, thinking you know something when in fact you know less than nothing.
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