When a joke is more than just a joke. · 7:51pm Jul 24th, 2020
Looks like it’s time to stir the pot! It's about time I said my piece on this matter. A lot of the drama going around is centered on a certain white-coated, blonde-maned, blue-eyed pony with a swastika cutie mark. She's become a center of controversy all around the fandom. A story about her got to the front page and promptly got buried in hundreds of comments. And the art pack that our brave free speech warriors are contributing to is filled with images of her. Her detractors hate her because she's a Nazi, but why are they so upset, it's all just a joke, right? The most common defense of Aryanne is that she's just a joke, that she exists to make fun of Nazis. Leftists might actually like her if it was really that simple. Her defenders say that posting art of Aryanne or writing a story about her clearly isn't some admission of a belief in Nazism, that it's all in good fun. At the same time, I see them beating around the bush to avoid admitting what Aryanne obviously is: A Nazi. She may have been originally intended as just a joke, and in many cases she is used this way, but it’s irrelevant to the reason I dislike her. Many people's issues with Aryanne, including me, have little do with the question of whether using her makes you a Nazi, because it doesn't.
River-Shy also has a good blog about offensive jokes, but I want to add my two cents and touch on another facet of this issue. Edgy, offensive jokes can become big problems because they attract the kind of people who come uncomfortably close to believing in the things the jokes imply. This ends up pushing away people who are impacted by the intolerant, bigoted attitudes that are held by many people who make them. Humor is not above criticism, making a edgy joke isn't automatically ok just because it's a joke. The "it's just a joke" defense falls flat when the jokes in question drive people away. Minstrel shows were meant to be funny as well, but we look back at them now and find them to be grotesquely racist all the same. You can have something be a joke while simultaneously being unacceptable.
Aryanne is another manifestation of a much broader issue: the use of edgy humor that helps normalize and disguise bigotry, and extreme right-wing thinking. This has exploded all over the internet for the past 6 years. Think about it, people use humor and irony all the time to flirt with ideas that they aren't comfortable committing to. I've seen people make "jokes" about dating people of the same gender, who later turned out to be gay or bisexual. Their jokes were more than just jokes, they were testing the waters, seeing if people were comfortable. If someone draws attention to the subject of your jokes, you can always say "It's just a joke" if they react badly. Similar things end up happening with political beliefs as well. This doesn't mean that anyone who posts fascist-adjacent shit or jokes about being a fascist actually is a fascist; but it’s difficult to tell the difference, and that’s the point. If a leftist tries to call them out, they can just fall back to the tried and true tactic of asserting that leftists want to accuse everyone they don’t like of being a Nazi. Open fascism is not acceptable almost anywhere, so they have to resort to using dog whistles.
Aryanne has become disturbingly popular. In fact, she’s the second-most popular OC in the fandom if you go by Derpibooru tags. Thanks, Fallout Equestria, for at least keeping her at number 2. We’re told Aryanne is meant to make fun of Nazis, but she’s most popular in the 4chan sections of the fandom, the very same ones that have the highest proportion of frothing at the mouth reactionaries. If Aryanne is just meant to make fun of people like them, why is she so popular there? Hell, she was practically a mascot for /mlpol/, which Cynewulf has talked about. One would have thought that event would be a wake-up call for the fandom, but mass pushback didn’t really start until recently.
I’ve already mentioned it, but not only does “humorous” reactionary content attract hateful people, but it also drives people away. It sure drove me away for a long time, long before it became as big of an issue as it is now, in a time when I didn’t care about Aryanne at all. Back then, people were largely content to pretend that anyone who didn’t like the growing number of reactionaries in the fandom were just evil SJW’s. When one has to deal with pseudo-ironic humor about fascism and purging degenerates, it makes a lot of people very nervous, uncomfortable, and unwelcome, especially if they belong to some minority group. Is that what we want? For a fandom based on a show about friendship, tolerance and acceptance to drive away those who are most vulnerable?
Let's look at a much more extreme example of this phenomenon, as a case study of a sort. There's a video online called Serbia Strong, also known as "Remove Kebab". Many of you will already know what this is already, but for those who don't know, it's a propaganda music video made during the Yugoslav Wars, with several Serbian soldiers singing a song about Radovan Karadžić leading the Serbs to victory. This video became a meme in the early 2010's and forward, with its hyper-nationalistic tone and odd musical style. Soon enough, there was also a copypasta that often is associated with the video about "removing kebab", or in other words, removing Muslims. Remove Kebab became very popular among far-right extremists and among people who just hated muslims. People joked and memed about "removing kebab" and quoted translated lyrics from the song or posting the song itself when Muslims were the topic of discussion. But of course they don't actually support the mass "removal" of Muslims, it's just a joke! It's just a meme!
Of course, "removing kebab" is just a euphemism for ethnic cleansing. The song has wonderful lyrics like "Karadžić, lead your Serbs, show them they are fearless". If you don't know, Radovan Karadžić was the president of the Republika Srpska. As president, he was responsible for many war crimes, crimes against humanity, and even genocide. These crimes mostly targeted the Bosniak muslim population. This song was always about hyper-nationalism that led to genocide, but somehow posting the song when talking about Muslims is okay because it's just a meme.
This did not stop even when the accordion player from the video was misidentified as Novislav Đajić, a known war criminal. The accordion player's true identity is still unknown, but the other member's identities are not. On the subject of the video, the keyboard player says:
War is the evil of us all and must NEVER happen again. Your enemy is not the one you are fighting against, but the one who sends you to war.
Ironically, this guy who helped make a propaganda song about ethnic nationalism seems to have learned his lesson better than those who made memes from it. I'm not saying that anyone who used the song or quoted from it was a fascist who wants to kill people, but it does mean we shouldn't let it slide because it's a meme, we should take a closer look at how these memes are used and who is using them.
It was of little surprise that when a terrorist massacred 51 muslims in New Zealand, it turned out he was deeply immersed with the online alt-right and their brand of humor. His manifesto was filled to the brim with edgy memes, jokes and 4chan-style humor, as was his livestream when he filmed himself committing the attacks. He shouted "Subscribe to Pewdiepie!" as he headed off to massacre innocents and even called himself a "kebab removalist". Are edgy memes responsible for attacks like this? Of course not, someone isn't going to be inspired to kill people just because of Remove Kebab or Aryanne. But at the same time, we'd be fools if we learned nothing. All those memes about “removing kebab” remind me of images of Aryanne gassing people and talking about extermination of degenerates. Edgy humor like Remove Kebab and Aryanne can be more than mere jokes. They give easy cover to rabid reactionaries under the guise of humor, and it lets them draw people into extreme right-wing ideology more easily. It starts with edgy jokes that become less and less humorous as time goes on. Contrapoints says it far better than I could.
In closing, I am sick of reactionaries and “ironic” fascists being given a free pass in this fandom. For too long, we let “love and tolerate” extend to groups of people who do not tolerate others. The more we put up with them, the more their corrupting influence can spread and pushes people away who actually believe in tolerance. Using Aryanne might not make someone a fascist, but she makes it far easier for extreme reactionaries to blend in, be accepted, spread their hate, and drive good people away. That is why I don't like her.
Great blog and Littlepip still doin' work, I love it.
All other matters aside, be careful posting pictures like that. A mod might get trigger happy over the swastika or the violence. Especially right now.
5321022
Hmm, yeah you're probably right. I'll change it.
I disagree with nearly all of this...
BUT
I appreciate the thought and care that went into this post. So have a follow
5376801
Thanks. I'm kinda tempted to ask what you disagree with... but I'll leave it be. This is a few months old after all.
You can have a follow in return.