Fake News Ain't New News

 I recall staying up late to watch the first man on the moon .....

The First Moon Landings Were A Great Achievement ....

..... So I have always had great difficulty with the conspiracists who have tried to claim it was faked, claims that are easily debunked.

In fact I always assume that they are either nutters, or have a motivation to believe this nonsense. These motivations can vary. Some people are frankly just crackpots who like to see conspiracies at every turn ... the QAnon followers are examples of this type. The US deniers often also don’t trust a big government, they don’t trust their political leaders, and never trust the authorities and government agencies.

They often think that the most outlandish of claims have a grain of truth e.g. that a secret organisation of Satanic, cannibalistic paedophiles, have been running a global child sex trafficking ring, and that they conspired against former President Donald Trump during his term in office. 

Conspiracy Has Entered The Mainstream

So if you are of this mindset, even if not a QAnon follower, doubting the moon landings, or the twin towers 9/11 explanation is easy for someone of this type.

Another type of doubter is the anti-American ideologue ... these just want to think only bad about Americans, and consider that the US is constantly running false flag operations. So also for them the US attacked the twin towers themselves, or faked the moon landings. These ideologues came in various flavours. The political such as the Soviet Communists, or the religious such as fundamentalist Muslims.

Now, as Islamic fundamentalism is a comparatively new phenomena (in its late 20th century form), they tend to concentrate their conspiracy theories on the twin tower attacks, or the Palestinian issues, but even so many Muslims, even those ostensibly sensible and western educated, will express belief that the US faked the moon landings .... I had this very conversation with a colleague at work. This scepticism is undoubtedly driven partly by a feeling of cultural inferiority, as Islam has not produced much of note in many centuries, and it goes against the religious grain that non Muslims can continue to do so. They like to live with the cars, TV's, smart-phones etc etc that non-Muslims churn out, but can at least get some comfort denying the moon landings.

But the political ideologues belief that the landings were faked seems odd these days. I actually assumed that as the Russians, and now the Chinese are space faring themselves, they would not hold this view in any greater numbers than the nutters in the West do. After all, they are fully aware that they could land there themselves, and that indeed plans are afoot for both nations to land on the moon within the next decade. The Chinese expect to land men on the moon sometime in the early 2030's, while Russia's Luna-Glob 25 is expected to be launched in May 2021 and will end in a manned mission with a crewed orbiter mission on a spacecraft called Orel. Russia is also planning to begin building a lunar base in the 2030's.

NASA themselves are planning to land astronauts on the Moon again on the Artemis III mission in the next 4 or 5 years. So why would anyone doubt that the original landings were faked simply because they don't like US politics or policies? If you have access to an appropriate laser and telescope system apparently you can bounce laser beams off any of the three retroreflector arrays left on the Moon by Apollo 11. 

Also there is actually plenty of third party independent evidence that the landings happened if you really needed it. So when it came out that when questioned in 2020 by the Russia Public Opinion Research Centre (RPORC), almost half of all Russians still believe that the 1969 Moon Landings were faked, I was genuinely surprised.

But you have to put yourself back into the soviet mindset of the old cold war, and then into the recent relationship between the USA and Putin's Russia. Under both the old Soviet and Putin there has been a constant propaganda that implies that Russia is under constant attack by the US and their interests. The Soviets barely acknowledged the moon landing in 1969, and in broadcasts to Latin America, Africa and Asia, Radio Moscow said that Apollo 11 was “the fanatical squandering of wealth looted from the oppressed peoples of the developing world.”

The RPORC findings in 2020 show that scepticism in Russia over the moon landings has actually fallen by 8 percent from a survey in 2018, but more interestingly younger Russians are more inclined to believe that it was genuine and not faked. When asked, 57 per cent of Russians aged between 18 and 24 believe that the moon landings were genuine. Which suggests that a lot of the disbelief is from the generations brought up under the Soviet era, and that as they die off, the percentage of those believing that the landings were faked drops as well. 

This not only illustrates both the power and limitations of propaganda, or false news as we call it now .... but also that fake news isn't new.