It is therefore evident that the black-and-white filter applied to the heavily-trimmed and -edited clip shown in the documentary was intended as a means of legitimizing the incident and creating a supposedly true narrative around it. Freeze-frames and a distinctly gamified palette categorically demarcate it from a live-action film sequence-even one recorded with 1980s equipment-while the drastically hyperbolic explosions indicate that even realistic simulators often indulge in sensationalized visual embellishment. It is radically different from the clip shown in the documentary, mostly because it's quite clearly a game. The video above-which was captured by a viewer and posted after ITV removed the documentary from its digital player-proceeds to display the original fan edit of the Arma footage. I am not arguing against those two irrefutable facts-instead, I argue that it is actively harmful to fabricate footage and pass it off as admissible historical evidence. It's important to note that the IRA was a terrorist organization, and a helicopter was shot down in 1988. Misremembering what happened indirectly enables the media to get away with passing video game clips off as real footage-obviously, that is a major problem. And so, a documentary using falsified footage is not just a potential counterargument for viewers-it is the entire narrative with which they become acquainted, and sparse, frivolous coverage of the event's gravity ensures that it is not sufficiently well-documented as to be remembered as fake. It's not even on England's curriculum, where history syllabuses attempt to hide the country's imperialistic past. This is taught to primary school children from about the age of 10 in Ireland. Irish/English tensions have always existed across history, with Ireland having spent centuries under an oppressive England's thumb. Misremembering what happened indirectly enables the media to get away with passing video game clips off as real footage.įor Irish people, however, this presented-and still presents-a major problem. The country it attempted to demonize was outside of its planned circulation, and was therefore left by the wayside as the offense faded into obscurity. This was a British documentary intended for a British audience, and its significance was trivialized in reports because it was not deemed sufficiently dangerous for rigorous investigation. A significant amount of coverage focused more on the absurdity of the situation than on its gravity on a wider scale, and even less-if any at all-considered the phenomenon from an Irish perspective. However, it was not the same helicopter as the one constructed with programmed code in the Arma II footage.Īlthough ITV's use of video game footage in a documentary became a news story of its own in 2011, most of those stories didn't address the underlying problem: that a TV station had mistaken a game for history (or worse, used it on purpose). It's important to note that a Lynx helicopter really was shot down by the IRA in South Armagh-part of Northern Ireland-in 1988. "With Gaddafi's heavy machine guns, it was possible to shoot down a helicopter, as the terrorist's own footage of 1988 shows," explains the narrator. If you skip to 00:36 in the above video, you'll see a sequence in which anti-aircraft heavy artillery is used to take down a helicopter.
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