Propaganda: Sarcasm and Irony

Propaganda: Sarcasm and Irony


One of the interesting subtleties of human language is the existence of irony and humour, and I am assuming it is true of all languages and cultures.

Like language itself, humour and irony are both based on cultural stereotypes and commonly held understandings. But if there is a lot of propaganda, it will create confusing effects with not only the words of our language, but with perceived humour, irony, and sarcasm. That is because with a nationwide audience, you will get some people who have the opposite stereotypes and commonly held understandings from the others.

For example, Fox News calling itself "Fair and Balanced" is either a simple declaration of truth, if you believe it to be true, or it is an ironic statement if you believe it to be false. However if somebody else, say Michael Moore called Fox News "Fair and Balanced" it would be sarcastic, as Fox News is always attacking him.

Sarcasm is a person saying something as though it was true, but really they believe is a lie, and that the audience also believes is a lie.
Irony is a person saying something that they believe to be true, but the audience believes is a lie.

Now I have an interesting story about the religious Republicans vs. Democrats either religious or not.

A fundamentalist Christian church, during the 2008 American election, mounted a prayer campaign against the Democrats. Apparently Obama was going to make his acceptance speech during the convention at an outdoor stadium. Since the Republicans were doing their own convention indoors, they obviously didn't have to worry about rain. I'm sure that the prayer leaders had cleverly taken this little fact into account, stacking the odds against the Democrats. So the fundamentalists decided to pray for "biblical" proportions of rain to come down on Obama's acceptance speech.

So far, so good. What's the worst that could happen, I guess simply that it doesn't rain on Obama.

But then it got strange, since Obama's speech went off without any interruption from God, but a few weeks later as the Republican convention began, they had to shut it down due to an "act of God", a Hurricane approaching the Gulf Coast. Even though the convention itself was a thousand miles away, and indoors God apparently knew how to hit the Republicans where it counted. Though the Democrats (as far as I know) never prayed for it.

Now the telling of this tale, as funny as it might be, is understood by different people in different ways. If you are a southern Baptist who believes that Obama is the Anti-Christ, you will simply take it that people didn't pray hard enough, and that you should never give up praying until God finally smites the Anti-Christ down. And maybe sharpens up his timing and aim. Besides, military types are all used to the idea of friendly fire, I guess it happens in prayer, too. But have faith in God, He will eventually get it right.

But if you are say, an alien from another planet taking all this in, you might observe that God had given a very clear message to these deluded Christian followers of Bush, and it said clearly "Wake thyselves up, for I, who art thy God, am with Obama! Did thy forgettest Jesus was a man of Peace, not war." You would think, how much clearer does He have to be?

The lesson here is that you cannot defeat propaganda and brainwashing with arguments, for arguments require the use of words, and the meaning of the words is controlled by the propaganda.