Politics in Media - The Good, the Bad, and the Preachy

I think there's something of a tendency to assume Left Wing authoritarians are more sincere than Right Wing when they're both explictly vile because authoritarians are just that way.

North Korea, current Chinese persecution of minorities, and so on.

Which cue, "But they're not REAL communists!"

Yes but that usually implies that the people were more collateral damage rather than the actual targets.

I'm afraid that's not the case, if the civilians are equated with the bourgeoisie then they will explicitly be targets.

I mean, both of those regimes are really bad examples because they pretty much abandoned communism.

North Korea's a fascistic heriditary dictatorship nominally ruled by a dead guy and the PRC has turned to state-capitalism and ethno-nationalism.

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Jul 22nd 2021 at 2:34:41 PM

A better example would be Cambodia under Pol Pot.

Is it, though?

Because if we're getting, "Have drifted from the ideology" we pretty much eliminate a lot of regimes that criticize any philosophy.

Technically you can't say any theocracy is REALLY like the religion they represent.

I think we might want to clarify here:

Are we arguing that we shouldn't say communists are just as bad as fascists, or are we saying we shouldn't have leftist villains at all? These are different things.

Personally, I'm mainly arguing that the reason we don't really have leftist villains right now is because the prevalence of the far-right would make people assume the creator had some seriously Skewed Priorities.

When there are literal fascists walking about and murdering people, a leftist villain is a bit of a hard sell (unless you're specifically selling to a far-right customer base).

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Jul 22nd 2021 at 2:44:10 PM

I'm with Nordmann, I don't have any inherent objection to leftist villains but given the current climate, I'd side-eye any modern work of fiction that chooses them over the people who are actually a clear and present danger.

Relatedly, I have the same view of eco-terrorists in fiction. Eco-terrorism is practically non-existent, but you know what's not? Big oil fucking over humanity by funding Climate denial, it just seems uncomfortable to focus on the former when the latter is what's actually hurting people.

Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Jul 22nd 2021 at 5:46:50 AM

If anything, being an environmental or indigenous rights activist makes you exceptionally likely to be targeted for murder.

Being mentally ill is more liable to make you a murder victim then a murderer, being an environmentalist too...

Makes me wonder how many more demographics or occupations that applies to.

We live in a time where Captain Planet villains have stopped being unrealistic, so maybe we need more of those.

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Jul 22nd 2021 at 2:57:22 PM

I dunno, I suppose the question of leftist villains is whether you are solely writing to an American audience.

Not just America - over here in Europe they wouldn't really work either, I'd reckon.

So unless you're specifically marketing to a region that has regular negative experiences with the far-left (like Latin America), there's probably not that much of a market.

To put it more simply: A lot of people just don't need a leftist villain right now.

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Jul 22nd 2021 at 3:08:27 PM

I wonder if the GOP lost its mind because after the USSR fell it no longer had an external enemy and turned inward to look for enemies. A leftist villain may have made more sense when the USSR existed, but now there is not much of a place for it.

Perhaps.

I think it actually underscores what we should seek in our own governments, though.

Also, the story more than the context should always determine its roots. THE AMERICANS was a good show because its heroes were Leftist Communists working for the Soviet Union in all its soul crushing Villain Protagonist glory but that helped contrast/compare to America as well as its values.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Jul 22nd 2021 at 6:21:28 AM

"Latin America" is a shot in the dark. Latin America encompasses a multitude of countries with complex histories of their own, and even in countries like Venezuela and Bolivia (the common boogeyman) the opinion of "leftists SUCK" is far from really being universal consensus. Do "latin-american markets" not include Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay, who have suffered much worse at the right-wing dictatorships of Operation Condor than anything even resembling the leftist boogeyman?

And as a general rule, there's an element of "To Those who wonder what we're fighting for: come to see what we're fighting against." in many of those stories of Latin-America. For example, Castro's Cuba deserves a lot of rightful criticism, but to contextualize it without the regime of Fulgencio Batista and the (continuous and very real) looming threat of US imperialism is to completely butcher the context. You can't really apply the same logic to most right-wing regimes, for example (are you going to argue that the Fascist leaders of the first half of the 20th century were correct in their assessment of paranoiac persecution at the hands of minorities?)

It's probably a factor that the right is blatantly operating in bad faith on both the economic and social axes, while on the left, there's only really been problems caused by economic motivations. I can't really even envision such a thing as too far left socially. Sure, every once in a while you get things like that university trying to remove names (I think one was Martin Luther King Jr.?) from buildings for claims they make against things that seem to amount to any slight flaw in character, but those always seem to turn out to have some other actual motive.

Edited by ShinyCottonCandy on Jul 22nd 2021 at 9:56:57 AM

maybe nordman is right and probably annoy me since I come from one of those places it were far left is genuiely an actual issue.

"I think there's something of a tendency to assume Left Wing authoritarians are more sincere than Right Wing when they're both explictly vile because authoritarians are just that way."

Probably because I feel people tend to take comuunism claim at face value and disregard any behavor as non beliver, which is an actituded that pretty much said " a bad comunism is not a comunism", ergo it presumed they must ether be sympathetic or no represent what they belive.

" but to contextualize it without the regime of Fulgencio Batista and the (continuous and very real) looming threat of US imperialism is to completely butcher the context."

I often found the oposite: that people very often focus in the context to the point that pass some very telling red flag on the regime in question, chavez did use the same exact point about past goverments and the idea of US imperalism to justify themselves and eventually it become not diferent that the "eternal enemy" rethoric use by facist and many other right wing to polarize the army, the state and eventually sociaty, all while being chummy to castrol himself.

In fact I will recomend "el hombre que amaba los perros"(the man who love dogs) a story about trosky from is exile to his death which very often deal with issue including their justification for violence, I found pretty compleing novel that examinate the fault of comunism as something it have rather than external motive without falling into right wing taking points.

I wasn't trying to paint a generalised picture of Latin America overall, just citing it as a region where you could actually find leftists as a credible threat in some places.

I know, I don't begrudge your point. I was just pointing it out.

That being said, I would argue that with the death of both Castros and the renewed opression of their successors, that context is rapidly losing relevance. Using the brutality of a regime that was overthrown 60 years ago in order to defend a current regime would hardly fly in other circumstances.

You chopped half the sentence there. I mentioned also the spectre of US imperialism, which hasn't (and likely never will for the foreseeable future) leave the door of Cuba even if Batista is long dead. The US can (and I have no doubt they'd like to) just find another Batista.

Regardless, the statement never was about absolving the regime of their sins. It's a observation that a lot of "leftist boogeymen" have a crucial context that if removed, renders them just into typical reactionary histrionics. I would risk saying all fascist regimes arose for terrible reasons, but the same is not the case the crushing majority of "leftist tyranny" regimes (or at least, most of the mainstream boogeymen ones) and skipping over that nuance is what can render the criticism into just ammo for the conservative war-machine. Like I said: "To those who wonder what we're fighting for, come see what we're fighting against" as the old saying goes. This ties into a point raised before in the thread about the importance of showing the nuances of the revolutionary movements. The story is never quite so simple as told.

Mind you, historically many tyrannies have used the specter of colonialism and imperialism to justify horrific crimes against humanity. Essentially, using them as substitutes for Fascist's minorities and scapegoating.

We torture and kill you so they don't.

Every authoritarian regime needs a boogeyman, left or right, because they only function with fear of the other.

Even strait afterwards it shouldn’t be used as a defence but as context to build understanding.

As for leftist and/or Tankie villains in fictions. I’m with the broad consensus, it jsut feel out of place in fiction written for/about people in the Global North rather than the Global South. Like you could probably make it work if you made a story about refugees from Venezuela, Syria or China fleeing to Europe/the US and then had a domestic Tankie in said country act as a supporter of the regime being fled and insisted that the refugees should be sent back because deserve ‘re-education’.

The entire thing with Tankies is that they’re not really independent villains so much as their idiotic lackies to villainous authoritarian regimes that style themselves as opposed to the US/Europe.

Tankies are and always have been a bunch of goddam hipsters who opposed Europe/the US because it’s ‘mainstream’ more than because they’ve look at the morality of specific countries in specific conflicts and have made a judgment call on who is acting in a more moral fashion.

The only non-leftist (maybe?) instance of the boogeymen being real being important context I can think of is probably Iran, where post-Revolution Iran isn’t left-wing but it’s very much a product of the US/U.K. imposed regime from before and the post-revolution threat from outside actors (which included the USSR).

Edited by Silasw on Jul 23rd 2021 at 8:28:05 PM