this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2024
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This thread has been a lesson in how many ways people can find to miss the joke. The cartoon isn't that subtle, surely?
I really thought the joke was obvious. Apparently not.
Maybe if you aren't familiar with US politics? Even then, the last panel should clue you in.
It's not hard to interpret it as "russia in 1917 was awesome, actually". The message wouldve come across far better just using an alt history US election or something imo. Like, it's extremely clear the comic is satirizing americans calling everything communist and saying communism is inherently evil, but doing that by applying these talking points to 1917 russia isn't helping in making it not seem like it comes from a tankie, on a platform that has a ton of those. Especially when you don't recognize everything as a democratic talking point because why the fuck would you when you're not american.
Okay, I'm genuinely trying to understand "the joke." Is it supposed to be "modern democrats do not resemble the bolshevic revolution?" Because it really doesn't read that way.
It is: Republicans keep calling Kamala Harris and the Democrats communists, or saying that what they propose is literally the definition of communism. And they say that communism is the most evil thing. Yet if we imagine a world where communism were just what the Democrats propose to do, the history of communist revolutions and the capitalist fear of communism would look absurd. Here is a humorous re-enactment of an imaginary Russian revolution where instead of Bolsheviks we had modern Democrats. From it we see how ridiculous the Republican fear-mongering around Democratic "communists" is, because the changes they propose are very trivial, and the panic of the capitalists is clearly over the top compared to the danger.
Ok. Then it's just poorly framed. The first frame should have been "America, 2025: a second communist revolution". As written, it reads like boilerplate "not real communism, and it wasn't that bad" revisionist history.
That would spoil the joke by spelling it out. Part of the humor is in discovering that what you're looking at isn't quite what you expected.