CCTV FOLLIES 2.23 Lei Feng lives on
Xi, nostalgic for his tortured childhood, whips up a Maoist style campaign.
-New Lei Feng spirit for New Era
-Dusting park benches
-Tractors on parade
-Russia pulls out of arms talks, flaunts big missile
-But it's all the fault of the US
"Chinese President Xi Jinping has stressed the importance of gaining a deep understanding of the Lei Feng spirit so that the spirit will shine more brightly in the new era!" says skilled sycophant and personality cult booster Cai Qi
As Xi says, "It has been proved that no matter how times change, the spirit of Lei Feng will always be relevant"
"Xi underlined the importance of earnestly grasping the contemporary connotations of the Lei Feng spirit, pointing to exemplary role of Party members and officials"
But enough of those timid party chiefs. Let's go to the Lei Feng museum to examine the realistic artifacts of a fabricated life.
You need a big building to accommodate all the realistic-looking fake certificates, fake photos, fake diaries, and more.
There's even a Lei Feng telephone booth in which you can converse with his ghost by listening to his made-up sayings and then repeating them back.
After hearing about Lei Feng, new-found admirers in the New Era are typically turbo-charged.
Here they rush outside to engage in selfless labor, picking weeds and lovingly wiping the dust off park benches.
How wonderful it must be to sacrifice one's life for the party!
Why, just mention the word "Lei Feng" and it's enough to get octogenarians dancing with obedient glee.
Contemporaries of the fictitious Lei Feng, they remember all too well the "good old days"
Lei Feng! Such a heroic man!
Would be even marginally more impressive if it wasn't all a lie.
But telling the historic truth has never been the party's strong card. So stop thinking and just enjoy a Xi-inspired journey into Maoist nonsense.
The dumbing-down spirit is also evident in the wooden way of approaching the news. Heavy on slogans, full of catchwords, fully in accordance with Xi's whims and mostly full of hot air.
But I like the work of CCTV's crack camera crews...
An ode to tractors...
-frontal view
-rear view
-ground view
-sky view
But it's not all about nostalgia for the mud and muck of Xi's childhood generation.
There's Huawei, and surveillance and 5G!
World news might as well be called Russian news...
...and Russian news might as well be called Putin's murderous military struttin' their stuff.
It's been a year since Putin invaded Ukraine
(not yet acknowledged by CCTV)
And the editorial line has been pro-Russia every day of the way.
Russia has a right to defend itself!
Putin makes vague threatening noises about terrifying new weapons and escalation, but CCTV continues to portray him as a man of peace with honorable intentions.
Dubbed the "Satan 2" by the West, Putin unrolls the massive RS-28 Sarmat missile to show just how serious and sincere he is about peace.
(non-CCTV reports say a Satan 2 was fired around time Biden was in Kiev, but the launch failed.)
Not enough news with a Russian tilt? Just wait, there's more. Courtesy of TASS news service, we learn that Russia didn't want to pull out of the arms treaty, but the US was so provocative it made them do it.
(Same logic applied to invasion of Ukraine)
Sadly, Russia had no choice but to reluctantly withdraw from the nuclear arms treaty because the US is so intolerable.
The US is so unfair!
CCTV graphics department illustrates the quitting of the nuclear arms treaty.
Russia's face to the world, Ambassador Vasily Alekseyevich Nebenzya, would prefer to change the topic.
He likes talking Nord Stream.
CCTV locates two photogenic international personages who want "peace and dialogue" unlike the hegemonic US which supplies weapons and profits off the backs of suffering Ukrainians.
note: any resemblance to Xi Jinping's upcoming call for "peace and dialogue" is coincidental
Meanwhile, back in mother Russia, Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov is not at all amused.
"Why doesn't the West want to talk Nord Stream?"
"I think they're scheming to make it go away so nothing comes of it."
Clare Daly has tweeted about this important matter, which is more than you can say for the entirety of US mainstream media.
Israel doing its thing in Palestine
Palestine fights back
And the news concludes, as per practice, with a pictorial update on life in the United States.
Zai jian!
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