I felt a little weird commenting on my own blog post so instead I'm just going to edit my original blog and say what I think about the whole idea of communist being a joke. Personally I think communism started out as a very serious thing and at one point in time it was a very serious way in which to govern. At that time there were certain world powers (I'm not going to say any names, but russia and china.) who tried to spread communism, but since then Gorbachev successfully converted russia over to a more capitalist government. Now, since virtually all supporters of Communism have been converted or are dead, it seems as though the whole idea was a joke and makes it very hard to picture the fact that people actually thought that such a government would work. Its like an argument where there used to be equal sized teams but slowly one team switched to the other side, thus becoming a very one sided argument which is part of the reason why it is taken as a joke, because there is nobody to argue that it isn't a joke. All you can say is that it wasn't a joke, it didn't used to be a joke.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Communism, what a joke.
Just the other day, I saw a friend of mine and he was wearing a sweatshirt with a picture of the hammer and sickle. In fact many of my friends say that my friend, Ian, wears some sort of communist shirt almost every day. Ian doesn't wear these shirts to support communism, but instead because he thinks they are quite funny. The point of this blog post isn't to point out my friends strange obsession with communism, but more why communism has become this big joke. The point of this post also isn't to answer any questions but to pose one. Communism used to be something that was strongly believed in, and may still be today but on a much smaller scale. What happened? Why is communism not taken seriously, or is it taken seriously it just seems like it isn't because we are a part of one of the more anti-communist countries in the world?
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Communism probably is considered a joke b/c it is so radically different from Americacn beliefs. However, people don't need to worry about offending their peers or worry about being politcally correct b/c nobody in the U.S. is communist. Therefore we can get away with making communism into a joke.
ReplyDeleteCommunism is frowned upon partly because we are a capitalist society. We have been trained to think that how much work you do is correlated to what you get in return, and that some work is more important than other work. Communism levels everything out, and so people laugh at the fact that in a perfect socialist society, doctors and ditch diggers theoretically get the same amount of food/assistance.
ReplyDeleteAnd now to break from my usual tone on this blog: http://www.dailyhaha.com/_pics/communism_its_a_party.jpg
Another more modern reason for Communism being the butt of jokes is that it's currently very fashionable to be ironic. All of the Communism shirts, Care Bear shirts (worn by twenty-year-olds...), trucker hats, those shirts with quaint quippy little anti-"TheEstablishment" quotes- it's all for the sake of being sarcastically funny.
We find the stupidest stuff funny; Comedy really is the lowest form of entertainment.
good comments, but i was more asking as to wether comunism is a joke all around the world, like in europe. or is communism only considered a joke in america because our way of running things is so radically different from communism. I fully understand why it is a joke in america, i was just more curious as to if it is a joke in other places around the world, or if it is just us.
ReplyDeleteit is a bit odd how communism has turned into such a radical idea in our American society. However; our country has a history of hatred for communism...which makes sense considering the ground our country was built off of. in my opinion i believe communism can be somewhat beneficial to certain countries, especially countries with failed economies or growing poverty. Perhaps communism is an* (not the*) answer to a countries economical struggles. Nevertheless, if the United States became a communist nation, i would move.
ReplyDeleteCommunism is considered a joke because we won.
ReplyDeleteBut to be more analytic, communism is, as has been mentioned above, a drastically different system of government and way of life than our capitalistic one. The difference is apparent in my semi-educated, culturally influenced view of the two systems: on one and we have "Work to be the best, and you will see rewards", and on the other it's "Equality for all, and work for national pride".
While writing that, I just noticed the national pride thing and had the same response that would normally influence me to raise my hand in the middle of a lecture for a very tangential question/comment. Russia is a country with an ancient history and a specific culture and ethnicity, and so national pride is HUGE. On the other hand, America is a new country made almost entirely of immigrants from all corners of the globe (that makes no sense), and so lacks a central feeling of togetherness. While we are willing to root for national sports teams and the military, we aren't quite obsessed enough to let it govern our lives, in general.
deep.
Nobody has brought up socialism yet, which is interesting because socialism and communism are essentially the same thing. They are both good ideas, doing something for the good of all people. Many leaders were inspired by such philosophies. They aren't taken seriously, however, because of the bad wrap that Stalin, Castro, and Mao gave them. For those of you that have read Animal Farm, you know that Old Major played the role of a Marx type character, and inspired the farm to change into a communist society, free from the dangers of greed and capitalism. After his death, however, Snowball and Napoleon manipulate his original rules to their liking. There greed in turn causes the other animals to suffer. And in the end, the society collapses. Now, communism is seen as a joke because we have never seen a society work under communist rule. Greed just won't allow for it.
ReplyDeleteCommunism is just, to put it simply, as far away from American ideals as anything can possibly be. We can't possibly take it seriously, because our society doesn't understand how people could live in that kind of world. Because of this, we'd like to think of it as a joke, instead of something scarily different
ReplyDeleteCommunism is the flip side of Capitalism. Because America is a capitalist state, there is alot of bad blood between america and communism in general. It is all about the triumph of ideals. We consider our way to be the best way there is, and want our way of life to triumph over the communist way. In many ways this is similar to the multiple clashes of religion that are spread throughout history.
ReplyDeleteTo quote sam, yes, communism is a joke because we have won. It was anyting but in the McCarthy reign of terror.
Or is it just not taken seriously in our culture? Our government makes communism the bad guy to us.
ReplyDelete