It serves as entertainment for the people who already agree with the message of the satire. It achieves nothing with the people who take media at face value. And worse yet it becomes completely unironic media that the subjects of the satire use to promote themselves and be aspirational about.
If we score this, nothing is gained for group 1, nothing is gained for group 2 (and sometimes they like it which is really bad), something is gained for group 3. The fascists gain something from it.
It is far better for us to produce completely unambiguous good guys and bad guys content, rather than satire of the fascists as the ""good guys"". While the latter is very entertaining for us it is a mistake and a trap.
Can’t deny how crowded warhammer 40k has become with fascists though, so I’ve seen it in action.
(The lore of 40k has been retconned so that there is literal “tiers” of humanity with each tier being smarter, fitter, and taller than the last. And it’s unironically embraced.)
Satire is one of my favorite forms of media, but it eventually gets hollowed out with an unironic form over time.
Can’t deny how crowded warhammer 40k has become with fascists though, so I’ve seen it in action.
Exactly, you see the problem here right?
It either achieves nothing, or it actively converts the media illiterate into seeing the fascists as "cool". And any further iterations on a successful piece of satire may or may not be satire or completely unironic lionisation of fascism written by people who totally didn't get the message originally.
Satire is hugely entertaining because it's clever and it aligns with our politics. The problem however is that we have a mountain of evidence to show that it is not particularly beneficial. Entertainment is fun, but at the expense of helping the fascists we should be pushing against it. We would be better off if satire died entirely.
I haven't seen any solid defence of satire so far. At best it is neutral by not harming but not really helping us. At worst it actively harms us.
You're steering in to "i live in a tank and am the only true communist" territory. It's okay for entertainment to be entertaining. One sci fi movie that no one got isn't going to make things worse. The reason no one got it is bc the society was already so saturated with fascism to begin with.
Being joyless monks who never have anything to laugh at because humor supports fascism is not good for morale.
A defense of satire? Sneaking satire in to mass media is a dogwhistle for leftists and proto-leftists that says "you're not insane. Other people see it too. You're not alone. This isn't normal or acceptable and you are correct to oppose it."
Not everything can or should be come and see. The people who are already fascists in their hearts and wake up because they saw some movie and have 0 media literacy aren't a net loss. They were never ours to begin with and seeing your neighbors miss the point entirely and cheer for Dougie Howser, SS is wonderfully clarifying about the nature of the society you live in.
This movie was released in to a society that was already packed with fascists even if it didn't technically meet all the requirements to be called fascist in it's totality. Bush didn't launch the homicidal war in Iraq and the nightmarish global war on terror bc idiots thought Johnny Rico was aspirational, and nothing would be different if the movie hadn't been made except that leftists wouldn't have it as an example of the incoherence and stupidity of fascists.
America didn't need Mel Brooks or Verhoeven or Lucas or Tarentino or Chaplin to make them sympathetic to fascism. They already had John Wayne and Patton and untold other extremely famous and influential fascists to do that. Satire might not being a great weapon in the war on fascism, but it's not making things worse, either, and it provides rare moments of joy in the otherwise bleak nightmare we live in.
Humans like telling stories and having entertainment that entertains is good for morale. Regardless of what the fash are doing (which we have no control over) we do need to laugh at them, because the alternative is viewing them as inevitable and unstoppable, and just giving in to despair.
There's more to entertainment than satire and you don't need satire to shit on fascists. Satire is completely impotent because the people being satirized just need to say, "This but unironically." In many ways, satire is the ultimate lib genre, a completely impotent genre that has absolutely no persuasive power. When was the last time you say someone on the fence get convinced by a satire because almost every single fence-sitter I've encountered always characterize that satire as "too preachy and smug." It's a genre for people who already buy into the belief/argument/ideology circlejerking about how smart they are for getting the satire and how their opponents are too stoopid for not getting the satire while their "stoopid" opponents use the aesthetics and selected parts of the satire to further push their agenda unironically. Who's the stupid one, the ones who don't get the satire or the ones who think not getting the satire actually matter?
Satire has been so idealistically defended as some great and important thing that should be above criticism in this very thread that I'm... tired. Just tired of it.
Is having clever insider bits that hogs gobble up and oink about, saying "based" and blissful in their unintentional feeding, really that important a contribution to the arts? :debord-tired:
Satire is so powerful, which is why brilliant satire Full Metal Jacket gets shown at Marines boot camp. When Asian women get annoyed by lone men shouting "me so horny me love you long time" at them, you see, it's actually Asian women who are stoopid for not getting that the men are just referencing a brilliant satire and totally not sexually harassing them.
Satire is so powerful, which is why brilliant satire Full Metal Jacket gets shown at Marines boot camp.
And Army, too. :agony-minion:
Satire defenders in this thread are on the "entertainment has no effect on people" kick and it's impossible to prove (or disprove) a negative so that defense can go in circles forever and consist of imaginary worlds where people totally do what they do entirely because of their bank balance and what they had for breakfast, completely unaffected by their entertainment because "I didn't go out and act like a Terminator today after watching Terminator so no one is influenced by their entertainment, ever ever ever." :very-intelligent:
It's not a criticism of entertainment though, it's a criticism of satire that masquerades as doing something useful when it is in fact achieving the opposite.
One sci fi movie that no one got isn’t going to make things worse.
It objectively has though, because it functions to normalise the ultra nationalism depicted as somehow laudable and heroic. Because it creates fascist larpers out of people who have no idea they're larping fascism, and some of whom who do go on to discover this end up unironically becoming fascists.
A defense of satire? Sneaking satire in to mass media is a dogwhistle for leftists and proto-leftists that says “you’re not insane. Other people see it too. You’re not alone. This isn’t normal or acceptable and you are correct to oppose it.”
Why do you think satire is required to do this?
They were never ours to begin with and seeing your neighbors miss the point entirely and cheer for Dougie Howser, SS is wonderfully clarifying about the nature of the society you live in.
I completely disagree. This is just how propaganda functions, and you would never dismiss any other form of propaganda as "oh they were never ours to begin with therefore the propaganda affecting them doesn't matter".
it provides rare moments of joy in the otherwise bleak nightmare we live in.
The only thing here I agree with.
Humans like telling stories and having entertainment that entertains is good for morale. Regardless of what the fash are doing (which we have no control over) we do need to laugh at them, because the alternative is viewing them as inevitable and unstoppable, and just giving in to despair.
We can laugh at them without producing masturbatory satire that unintentionally functions as recruitment material.
GW has the problem with a lot of long-term media that the kids who grew up not getting the references ended up writing the story. I had some teenager jawing on about how the Imperium is socialism, totally talking over my attempts to explain that it's a parody of the Nazis, UK politics, the brainworms version of the Soviets, American fundies, etc.
Partially because it's not any more. The people writing genuinely think the space marines are cool good guys instead os psychopathic genocidal fanatics. Which sucks bc unhinged cranked up to 11 old school 40k was a lot of fun with it's vision of 20th century ideologies stretched out to their full illogical conclusions.
Also, they named Gazkul Mag Uruk Thracka after Thatcher and that will never not amuse me.
(The lore of 40k has been retconned so that there is literal “tiers” of humanity with each tier being smarter, fitter, and taller than the last. And it’s unironically embraced.)
No way, in the past everyone was a baseline human?? What the fuck... When did the ubermenschen retcon happen it's been like this for at least 20 years now. Legit erasure of history lol
There used to be an Imperial Guardsman who fought, and died, right alongside the Emperor during the final battle with Horus, but the Great Man Theory deterministic douchebags of Games Workshop continually retconned that Guardsman into further and further irrelevance because surely the only way to be brave or make a difference is to be an epic destiny supersoldier from birth plus modifications later.
This feels like "dirty ushanka" territory. Is there really no value in galvanizing support among the left by creating art depicting fascist ideologies, in giving people without lived experiences with fascism an emotional understanding of what it is and why is must be fought? Is there no value in creating a shared cultural language of antifascist symbols? Would the masses be willing to seek out and consume endless dry, polemic works? Would leftists even be allowed to create and disseminate unambiguous morality plays which cast their capitalist patrons as the enemies of humanity?
I think this dialog falls foul of a common fault in analysis on the left, where we ignore the sheer scale of our opposition's power and nitpick our own, convincing ourselves that if we just create the perfect work we'd sweep aside generations of propaganda and that anything less than perfect may as well be a tool of our enemies in the way that everything created under capitalism reenforces it. You could write "Fuck Fascism" on a piece of paper and a lib would say "oh yes, I too hate Stalin".
Do we as leftists give up on creating art that speaks to leftists on anything other than a surface level because a fascist might see it and be convinced we support them instead, when they are primed by a lifetime of propaganda to see that in every shadow?
If the treats are recruiting tools for fascists, the treats are bad. We can make treats that depict fascist ideologies without those treats also functioning in a positive way for them. That's the point.
No, and I resent the aggressive reductionism. If you aren't interested in engaging with my argument, don't.
There is no emotionally honest depiction of fascism which will not appeal to a fascist - that is what makes them a fascist. They like the things we hate.
The benefits being presented are "it makes leftists feel good".
The negatives being presented are "when this content is successful it clearly functions to grow fascist numbers".
There is no emotionally honest depiction of fascism which will not appeal to a fascist - that is what makes them a fascist. They like the things we hate.
Satire like Warhammer 40k and Starship Troopers is NOT an emotionally honest depiction of fascism. It presents the enemy as monsters. It justifies the foundational root of fascism being that there are monsters that must be destroyed.
An emotionally honest depiction of fascism would have the enemies fascism seeks to destroy be actually marginalised people that are the weakest in society being actively destroyed and brutalised. This of course would not be very fun to watch or play though would it? And thus would be less successful, both with leftists and with the wider audience, it would in fact stop being satirical altogether if you did this. Satire inherently has emotional dishonesty embedded in it for the sake of making it fun entertainment and audience reach.
The benefits go beyond making leftists feel good, it makes them feel like part of a larger group within society that can and should effect change. It gives them a structure around which to understand what they oppose and why. It literally grows the number of active leftists in exactly the same way as it grows the number of fascists - by giving them a nucleus around which to form a coherent ideology distinct from the background radiation of disaffected liberalism. The difference is that the fascist gets this anyway, from the news, from every blockbuster film, from every war game.
I would also argue that there is emotional honesty there, because fascism sees itself as fighting monsters, part of inoculating against fascism is understanding that no perceived enemy justifies it's existence. However I do agree that it is a serious weakness of both 40k and Starship Troopers that this idea, that fascism creates it's monsters, is never explored. If it was I think it would be harder, but still not impossible, to co-opt them. I'm not arguing that these pieces of media cannot be criticized though, I am arguing that satire should not be declared tainted and abandoned to the right. It's is a tool in the belt of leftist artists and is no more vulnerable to co-opting than any other media dealing with the subject of fascism.
Fascists are also quite capable of taking media that explicitly shows them attacking humanized, marginalized, non-threatening people and understanding it as aspirational.
I am arguing that satire should not be declared tainted and abandoned to the right
I can't think of any popular right wing satire of the left. The closest thing I can come up with is Monty Python's occasional jab leftwards with extremely accurate criticisms that leftists would make themselves. That's not to say that right wing comedy doesn't exist. But that's not the same as satire is it?
Satire is by nature less compatible with the right, but off the top of my head I'd say South Park and Team America are popular right wing satire. Idiocracy too. I'd even say modern WH40K lore contains explicitly right wing satire, the Tau for example. Satire is extremely popular with liberals as well, and liberals can certainly be considered "right-wing".
Monty Python are leftists criticizing the left. That's why their criticisms are spot-on. The whole "People's Front of Judea" vs. "Judean People's Front" was formed from their experiences in orgs in the 60s and 70s.
This feels like “dirty ushanka” territory. Is there really no value in galvanizing support among the left by creating art depicting fascist ideologies, in giving people without lived experiences with fascism an emotional understanding of what it is and why is must be fought? Is there no value in creating a shared cultural language of antifascist symbols? Would the masses be willing to seek out and consume endless dry, polemic works? Would leftists even be allowed to create and disseminate unambiguous morality plays which cast their capitalist patrons as the enemies of humanity?
Awoo's point is that it doesn't have to be through satire. What's wrong with something like Wolfenstein 3d? Fascists are scum and the universal truth of fascists being the scum of society holding humanity back is expressed through the mechanics and lore of the FPS. What's wrong with something like Come and See, where fascist scum is portrayed as they really are, a bunch of drunk, incompetent, genocidal monsters who gets got at the end. And before you wave your "not every movie needs to be as heavy as Come and See" objection, even the Indiana Jones series treated Nazis better than virtually all useless satirical depictions of fascists. In the films involving Nazis, they are either depicted as incompetent or completely creepy and unhinged, nameless mooks that gets owned by the protagonists. The climax of the first film is basically Yahweh smiting a bunch of Nazis for being Nazis.
But all that Starship Trooper/WH40k "uh ignore how we made the fascists look cool it's acktually satire stoopid" satire is complete bullshit.
In my opinion yes, it's pointless.
It serves as entertainment for the people who already agree with the message of the satire. It achieves nothing with the people who take media at face value. And worse yet it becomes completely unironic media that the subjects of the satire use to promote themselves and be aspirational about.
If we score this, nothing is gained for group 1, nothing is gained for group 2 (and sometimes they like it which is really bad), something is gained for group 3. The fascists gain something from it.
It is far better for us to produce completely unambiguous good guys and bad guys content, rather than satire of the fascists as the ""good guys"". While the latter is very entertaining for us it is a mistake and a trap.
That’s fucking bleak.
Can’t deny how crowded warhammer 40k has become with fascists though, so I’ve seen it in action.
(The lore of 40k has been retconned so that there is literal “tiers” of humanity with each tier being smarter, fitter, and taller than the last. And it’s unironically embraced.)
Satire is one of my favorite forms of media, but it eventually gets hollowed out with an unironic form over time.
Exactly, you see the problem here right?
It either achieves nothing, or it actively converts the media illiterate into seeing the fascists as "cool". And any further iterations on a successful piece of satire may or may not be satire or completely unironic lionisation of fascism written by people who totally didn't get the message originally.
Satire is hugely entertaining because it's clever and it aligns with our politics. The problem however is that we have a mountain of evidence to show that it is not particularly beneficial. Entertainment is fun, but at the expense of helping the fascists we should be pushing against it. We would be better off if satire died entirely.
I haven't seen any solid defence of satire so far. At best it is neutral by not harming but not really helping us. At worst it actively harms us.
Has The Onion really been a net negative for the world? :powercry-1:
They did offer a public apology for making Biden seem like a harmless but well meaning old man.
You're steering in to "i live in a tank and am the only true communist" territory. It's okay for entertainment to be entertaining. One sci fi movie that no one got isn't going to make things worse. The reason no one got it is bc the society was already so saturated with fascism to begin with.
Being joyless monks who never have anything to laugh at because humor supports fascism is not good for morale.
A defense of satire? Sneaking satire in to mass media is a dogwhistle for leftists and proto-leftists that says "you're not insane. Other people see it too. You're not alone. This isn't normal or acceptable and you are correct to oppose it."
Not everything can or should be come and see. The people who are already fascists in their hearts and wake up because they saw some movie and have 0 media literacy aren't a net loss. They were never ours to begin with and seeing your neighbors miss the point entirely and cheer for Dougie Howser, SS is wonderfully clarifying about the nature of the society you live in.
This movie was released in to a society that was already packed with fascists even if it didn't technically meet all the requirements to be called fascist in it's totality. Bush didn't launch the homicidal war in Iraq and the nightmarish global war on terror bc idiots thought Johnny Rico was aspirational, and nothing would be different if the movie hadn't been made except that leftists wouldn't have it as an example of the incoherence and stupidity of fascists.
America didn't need Mel Brooks or Verhoeven or Lucas or Tarentino or Chaplin to make them sympathetic to fascism. They already had John Wayne and Patton and untold other extremely famous and influential fascists to do that. Satire might not being a great weapon in the war on fascism, but it's not making things worse, either, and it provides rare moments of joy in the otherwise bleak nightmare we live in.
Humans like telling stories and having entertainment that entertains is good for morale. Regardless of what the fash are doing (which we have no control over) we do need to laugh at them, because the alternative is viewing them as inevitable and unstoppable, and just giving in to despair.
There's more to entertainment than satire and you don't need satire to shit on fascists. Satire is completely impotent because the people being satirized just need to say, "This but unironically." In many ways, satire is the ultimate lib genre, a completely impotent genre that has absolutely no persuasive power. When was the last time you say someone on the fence get convinced by a satire because almost every single fence-sitter I've encountered always characterize that satire as "too preachy and smug." It's a genre for people who already buy into the belief/argument/ideology circlejerking about how smart they are for getting the satire and how their opponents are too stoopid for not getting the satire while their "stoopid" opponents use the aesthetics and selected parts of the satire to further push their agenda unironically. Who's the stupid one, the ones who don't get the satire or the ones who think not getting the satire actually matter?
Satire has been so idealistically defended as some great and important thing that should be above criticism in this very thread that I'm... tired. Just tired of it.
Is having clever insider bits that hogs gobble up and oink about, saying "based" and blissful in their unintentional feeding, really that important a contribution to the arts? :debord-tired:
Satire is so powerful, which is why brilliant satire Full Metal Jacket gets shown at Marines boot camp. When Asian women get annoyed by lone men shouting "me so horny me love you long time" at them, you see, it's actually Asian women who are stoopid for not getting that the men are just referencing a brilliant satire and totally not sexually harassing them.
And Army, too. :agony-minion:
Satire defenders in this thread are on the "entertainment has no effect on people" kick and it's impossible to prove (or disprove) a negative so that defense can go in circles forever and consist of imaginary worlds where people totally do what they do entirely because of their bank balance and what they had for breakfast, completely unaffected by their entertainment because "I didn't go out and act like a Terminator today after watching Terminator so no one is influenced by their entertainment, ever ever ever." :very-intelligent:
It's not a criticism of entertainment though, it's a criticism of satire that masquerades as doing something useful when it is in fact achieving the opposite.
It objectively has though, because it functions to normalise the ultra nationalism depicted as somehow laudable and heroic. Because it creates fascist larpers out of people who have no idea they're larping fascism, and some of whom who do go on to discover this end up unironically becoming fascists.
Why do you think satire is required to do this?
I completely disagree. This is just how propaganda functions, and you would never dismiss any other form of propaganda as "oh they were never ours to begin with therefore the propaganda affecting them doesn't matter".
The only thing here I agree with.
We can laugh at them without producing masturbatory satire that unintentionally functions as recruitment material.
GW has the problem with a lot of long-term media that the kids who grew up not getting the references ended up writing the story. I had some teenager jawing on about how the Imperium is socialism, totally talking over my attempts to explain that it's a parody of the Nazis, UK politics, the brainworms version of the Soviets, American fundies, etc.
Partially because it's not any more. The people writing genuinely think the space marines are cool good guys instead os psychopathic genocidal fanatics. Which sucks bc unhinged cranked up to 11 old school 40k was a lot of fun with it's vision of 20th century ideologies stretched out to their full illogical conclusions.
Also, they named Gazkul Mag Uruk Thracka after Thatcher and that will never not amuse me.
There's an internet term for when people who get the joke are gradually replaced with true believers who don't get the joke.
deleted by creator
R u referring to the primaries marines?
Humans > Space Marines > Custodes > Primarchs > Emperor
Back in the day all these “tiers” were just humans, with no weird biological supremacy stuff going on.
Like, Primarchs were just basic (if famous) human generals back in the original lore.
No way, in the past everyone was a baseline human?? What the fuck... When did the ubermenschen retcon happen it's been like this for at least 20 years now. Legit erasure of history lol
There used to be an Imperial Guardsman who fought, and died, right alongside the Emperor during the final battle with Horus, but the Great Man Theory deterministic douchebags of Games Workshop continually retconned that Guardsman into further and further irrelevance because surely the only way to be brave or make a difference is to be an epic destiny supersoldier from birth plus modifications later.
This feels like "dirty ushanka" territory. Is there really no value in galvanizing support among the left by creating art depicting fascist ideologies, in giving people without lived experiences with fascism an emotional understanding of what it is and why is must be fought? Is there no value in creating a shared cultural language of antifascist symbols? Would the masses be willing to seek out and consume endless dry, polemic works? Would leftists even be allowed to create and disseminate unambiguous morality plays which cast their capitalist patrons as the enemies of humanity?
I think this dialog falls foul of a common fault in analysis on the left, where we ignore the sheer scale of our opposition's power and nitpick our own, convincing ourselves that if we just create the perfect work we'd sweep aside generations of propaganda and that anything less than perfect may as well be a tool of our enemies in the way that everything created under capitalism reenforces it. You could write "Fuck Fascism" on a piece of paper and a lib would say "oh yes, I too hate Stalin".
Do we as leftists give up on creating art that speaks to leftists on anything other than a surface level because a fascist might see it and be convinced we support them instead, when they are primed by a lifetime of propaganda to see that in every shadow?
Is this not a "my treeeeeats" argument?
If the treats are recruiting tools for fascists, the treats are bad. We can make treats that depict fascist ideologies without those treats also functioning in a positive way for them. That's the point.
No, and I resent the aggressive reductionism. If you aren't interested in engaging with my argument, don't.
There is no emotionally honest depiction of fascism which will not appeal to a fascist - that is what makes them a fascist. They like the things we hate.
The benefits being presented are "it makes leftists feel good".
The negatives being presented are "when this content is successful it clearly functions to grow fascist numbers".
Satire like Warhammer 40k and Starship Troopers is NOT an emotionally honest depiction of fascism. It presents the enemy as monsters. It justifies the foundational root of fascism being that there are monsters that must be destroyed.
An emotionally honest depiction of fascism would have the enemies fascism seeks to destroy be actually marginalised people that are the weakest in society being actively destroyed and brutalised. This of course would not be very fun to watch or play though would it? And thus would be less successful, both with leftists and with the wider audience, it would in fact stop being satirical altogether if you did this. Satire inherently has emotional dishonesty embedded in it for the sake of making it fun entertainment and audience reach.
The benefits go beyond making leftists feel good, it makes them feel like part of a larger group within society that can and should effect change. It gives them a structure around which to understand what they oppose and why. It literally grows the number of active leftists in exactly the same way as it grows the number of fascists - by giving them a nucleus around which to form a coherent ideology distinct from the background radiation of disaffected liberalism. The difference is that the fascist gets this anyway, from the news, from every blockbuster film, from every war game.
I would also argue that there is emotional honesty there, because fascism sees itself as fighting monsters, part of inoculating against fascism is understanding that no perceived enemy justifies it's existence. However I do agree that it is a serious weakness of both 40k and Starship Troopers that this idea, that fascism creates it's monsters, is never explored. If it was I think it would be harder, but still not impossible, to co-opt them. I'm not arguing that these pieces of media cannot be criticized though, I am arguing that satire should not be declared tainted and abandoned to the right. It's is a tool in the belt of leftist artists and is no more vulnerable to co-opting than any other media dealing with the subject of fascism.
Fascists are also quite capable of taking media that explicitly shows them attacking humanized, marginalized, non-threatening people and understanding it as aspirational.
I can't think of any popular right wing satire of the left. The closest thing I can come up with is Monty Python's occasional jab leftwards with extremely accurate criticisms that leftists would make themselves. That's not to say that right wing comedy doesn't exist. But that's not the same as satire is it?
Satire is by nature less compatible with the right, but off the top of my head I'd say South Park and Team America are popular right wing satire. Idiocracy too. I'd even say modern WH40K lore contains explicitly right wing satire, the Tau for example. Satire is extremely popular with liberals as well, and liberals can certainly be considered "right-wing".
Monty Python are leftists criticizing the left. That's why their criticisms are spot-on. The whole "People's Front of Judea" vs. "Judean People's Front" was formed from their experiences in orgs in the 60s and 70s.
I hate to say it but only Graham Chapman had credentials as a potential leftist "armchair socialist" some of the other members called him. The rest of them were hardcore liberals. Cleese was a Liberal Democrat member and did many ads for them at their peak.
Awoo's point is that it doesn't have to be through satire. What's wrong with something like Wolfenstein 3d? Fascists are scum and the universal truth of fascists being the scum of society holding humanity back is expressed through the mechanics and lore of the FPS. What's wrong with something like Come and See, where fascist scum is portrayed as they really are, a bunch of drunk, incompetent, genocidal monsters who gets got at the end. And before you wave your "not every movie needs to be as heavy as Come and See" objection, even the Indiana Jones series treated Nazis better than virtually all useless satirical depictions of fascists. In the films involving Nazis, they are either depicted as incompetent or completely creepy and unhinged, nameless mooks that gets owned by the protagonists. The climax of the first film is basically Yahweh smiting a bunch of Nazis for being Nazis.
But all that Starship Trooper/WH40k "uh ignore how we made the fascists look cool it's acktually satire stoopid" satire is complete bullshit.