Posted on 08/14/2021 10:30:56 PM PDT by RandFan
“No great movement designed to change the world can bear sarcasm or mockery, because they are a rust that corrodes everything it touches.” So wrote the Czech writer Milan Kundera in his novel The Joke.
Humour has long been a magic ingredient in unlocking political change. In the medieval court, jesters had an almost unique privilege in being able to tell the monarch what he didn’t want to hear, and were often tasked with presenting bad news. In totalitarian regimes humour was a daily act of undermining the regime, to the extent that on Stalin’s death 200,000 of the Gulag’s 2.5m population were there for telling jokes.
In recent years, unpalatable political ideas have often been presented under the cover of humour. Nigel Farage, Britain’s most successful politician of the early 21st century, has always employed a particularly English jocularity to sell what was a controversial platform, laughing us out of the EU eventually. But he’s not alone – in Italy and the Ukraine, comedians have risen to very highest office, and France may be next.
Saul Alinsky wrote in Rules for Radicals that “through humour much is accepted that would have been rejected if presented seriously”. Or as comedian Andrew Doyle put it: “You’re far more likely to remember a joke than an argument.” But perhaps because we live in such a serious and pious climate, the authorities have never been more scared of jokes.
Earlier this year an EU report warned that online memes were a menace to society, potentially dangerous to social peace. These memes, it said, are being used “to rebrand extremist positions in an ironic guise, blurring the lines between mischief and potentially radicalising messaging.....
(Excerpt) Read more at unherd.com ...
Some of the best I've seen have been right here...
What are your favorites?
Ping
Travis is prolific when it comes to conservative memes and musicman has some good ones too...
Excellent post, thank you. For the majority of us that cannot read everything pertinent concerning our zeitgeist, sites like this fill the void—if we have time to read them.
Although the left make good mimes.
They can be the guy trapped in an imaginary box or fighting against an imaginary wind storm.
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bkmk
Paul Joseph Watson did a recent segment on this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OTPQ_Lzn9s
His insightful point is, you can’t be subversive or edgy if you are the establishment....and the Left is clearly the Establishment. That’s why Leftists hate memes so much and are constantly seeking to ban/censor them.
Solzhenitsyn was sent to a labor camp for making a joke about Stalin’s mustache.
Both provocative and informative. Good post, RandFan.
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