Oh no, don’t meme me!
Leader of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping, is terrified of memes. Specifically, Winnie-the-Pooh.
Since July 2017, the harmless bear has been disappeared from China’s version of the internet. The cartoon character memes mocked the overly serious, distinctly rotund communist dictator and are thought to originate from a photo of the then-US President Barack Obama walking beside Xi Jinping ‘like Tigger and Winnie-the-Pooh’. The late Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was painted as Eeyore, sitting around the edge looking dejected at the tour’s events and reluctantly shaking hands with his Chinese counterpart.
Mocking Xi Jinping on social media is not allowed, so political dissidents latched onto Winnie-the-Pooh as a way to criticise their untouchable leader without mentioning his name.
‘The University of Georgia’s Han explained that it’s not Pooh that’s objectionable to Xi and the authoritarian regime, but the fact that critics are using the bear as a stand-in to denounce the government’s policies. That’s why, he says, “the censorship machine” is constantly looking for perceived criticism, which often takes the form of seemingly benign images, coded plays on words, or no words at all.’
Australians used to laugh at the so-called ‘all-powerful’ dictator for life cowering beneath the English honey-loving bear. How ridiculous, we thought, for an adult leader to tremble at the sight of satirical online memes!
But that’s the thing about laughter – it can topple empires and chip away at authority.
Comics terrify terrorists.
That’s why the feeble-minded Islamic terrorists went after Charlie Hebdo. If the world starts laughing at the ‘prophet’ they might also begin picking fault with his divinity. They might even stop believing… If they stop believing, what happens to political power in an Islamic theocracy?
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is continuing the tradition of ridiculous, small-minded tyrants by expressing frustration at people memeing him. By doing so, he unlocked the gates to the hordes of barbarian keyboard warriors – god love them – who set to work flooding Twitter with Albo memes.
‘I noticed today, for example, on the way up here [to the press conference], they’ve removed various sites that were up containing fake images of myself superimposed on other people. That’s just the sort of thing that’s going on on social media. Social media has a responsibility to do the right thing here.’
Albanese may as well have fallen to his knees and begged, ‘Oh please don’t meme me!’
As if itching to get in on the action, Twitter’s automatic caption generator tends to translate ‘Albo’ as ‘Elbow’, which makes the ‘serious’ commentary on his censorial madness all the more entertaining.
One Nation’s cartoon series was happy to oblige with the ‘memeing’.
Despite this new fear of memes, I feel it necessary to point out that Labor used to be comfortable with memes, including superimposing Albo’s head on images, when it thought it was ‘winning’ in the polls. Here is a cringe-inducing meme put out in 2022 on Labor’s official Twitter account.
For someone who doesn’t want to be laughed at, this is pretty hilarious stuff.
The Prime Minister is wrong, in any case. Social media is the public forum. It has no ‘responsibility’ to anyone or anything. It offers and demands no burden of truth, nor does it intend or pretend to be a haven of ‘facts’. The public forum is a space, previously physical and now digital, where members of civilisation can talk to each other. For lack of a better description, Twitter is the pub and no one wants or needs a bureaucrat elbowing their way onto the table to nitpick the conversation.
The noise of humanity is rarely truthful, mostly nonsense, but fundamentally free. Sometimes it mulls over the news, sometimes it laughs at cat memes. Politicians have no interest in the purpose of a public forum in maintaining a healthy society – all they see are millions of eyeballs and the chance to control politically sensitive information in a way that gets them elected.
Politicians selfishly view social media as their sandpit for re-election.
They are cowards who, having failed to convince the public of their political ideas, seek to stop people from criticising them. Albanese would rather have silence. A room without laughter. A land without voices. So long as the nihilism remains under his control.
His love of censorship shows that his ‘Voice to Parliament’ referendum was nothing more than a PR exercise designed to award a wealthy racial bureaucracy power over democracy in exchange for Labor popularity among inner-city voters.
Besides, everyone knows that the real reason Labor wants to kill off memes is because of the long-held internet truth: ‘The Left can’t meme.’
The more authoritarian a government becomes, the more ‘serious’ it presents itself as being.
Labor tries to meme.
Here’s one of their attempts to meme Scott Morrison.
And another.
And another.
And another.
Indeed, Albanese’s Labor Party is quite comfortable using memes (however untalented) against their political opposition, they just don’t want the public poking fun at their cardboard leader in case he topples over.
Popular governments and happy civilisations do not employ censors. Their existence is a sign of weakness and how fitting it is that both Labor and Liberal support the draconian e-Safety Commissioner. The uni-party of failure has lost faith with the people of Australia. They would both, Liberal and Labor alike, rather do deals with the dying mainstream media than suffer the indignity of being dragged through the public forum toward defeat.
The best thing we can do is laugh and then vote them out of power.
