Reflections on Asia: When Bad Ideas Cross the Ocean

With the onset of globalization, bad ideas cross the world as well (or perhaps better) than good ideas. Here are 2 cases.

First, on my visit to Asia, I visited Malacca, Malaysia. While in Malacca, I went to the Cheng Ho Museum. Ho was the admiral who led the Chinese navy on seven expeditions in the early 15th century that explored the Indian Ocean basin, reaching as far as Africa. Malacca was a major stopping point for these expeditions. It was a major world trading post from the 14th century through World War II. It has since declined.

Unfortunately, now connected with Cheng Ho's history is the Gavin Menzies theory that his fleet discovered the entire world around 1421. Here's my review of this awful book. Essentially, it argues that in 1421, Cheng Ho sent his fleet around the world and they discovered every major land mass on Earth, including the Americans, Australia and New Zealand, Europe, and Antarctica. This is idiotic. The evidence simply does not exist, as I point out in my longer review.

The people behind promoting this idea have poured money into the museum. Honestly, the museum needs the money. Most of the exhibits can barely be called that while the 1421 exhibit is professionally done with interesting text and great graphics. The parts that don't make outlandish claims are actually quite good. Unfortunately, that's only about 1/2 of the exhibit.

What distrubs me is that people are actually going to believe this crap. While they have a couple of disclaimers referring to these claims as theories rather than established fact, the average person in there, whether Malaysian, European, or American, is likely to be persuaded, not by the evidence but by the graphics. These people know the power of the media and they use it effectively.

However, the claims are so ridiculuous that at least some people will see through them. 2 to highlight this. They claim that the ruins of some Chinese junks are high on a New Zealand cliff. Having no other way to explain this, Menzies asserts that a comet hit the ocean and the resulting tsunami threw the boats high on the cliff face. Right.

They also say that they have found the ruins to a large Chinese city in Nova Scotia. Yes, that's right. Nova Scotia. They provide no actual photographs of these ruins but Menzies says that without doubt this was the Chinese capital in North America. Uh, OK.

The second bad idea to cross the ocean is the movie Crash. My general feelings on the movie are here. I don't know if Malaysians have really watched this movie or not. But in these guesthouses I was staying in, they often show a movie at night. People can request what they want to see. At one guesthouse, someone actually chose Crash. I was infuriated and was literally ranting about this for the next 2 days. For Europeans, who along with the Australians probably made up the entire viewing audience of 15-20, this movie is likely to influence how they see American race relations. They can see how racist Americans are and talk about how fucked up America is. This, when they not only don't know what they're talking about, but their own nations have race relations that are at least as messed up as our own. No doubt the French Muslims feel pretty good about French tolerance these days. Really, this film should be banned for international audiences unless I or someone else who knows something about American race relations accompanies it with a lecture afterwards describing the 10 million ways that it is wrong.

What a terrible movie.