Satire is dead and ineffective everyone here already knows this.
I think satire for any broader audience needs to clearly include and demonstrate the contradiction of what it's seeking to satirize: simply showing something that's absurd and awful and trusting people to realize it's mocking it is bad practice, especially when its mockery is only a little exaggerated from reality. Starship Troopers is bad satire because it doesn't refute the system it is satirizing, and it just comes across as generic corny military sci-fi with a similar fascistic tone to normal American slop if someone isn't already aware of its goals. All the nationalism and bloodlust in it is just a clearer statement of what most American theater-goers already expected from media.
To be effective it would have had to be more overt and actively spell out what it's implying: include a scene establishing the meteor was a natural phenomenon and the government knew it, hell establish that they decided against having asteroid-defense-systems because it would have meant raising taxes or diverting half a percent of military funding or something, and so clearly establish that the ridiculous casus belli is explicitly a lie; establish that the pointless invasion of the bug worlds is failing and the war is going poorly overall so that it doesn't look like they're just winning a hard fought victory against a monstrous foe; hell establish the bugs as individually smarter and more concerned with their own lives with something like a direct attack on a nest being met with a holding action from worker forms who fall back when actual soldier forms arrive and repel the attack; etc.
It basically needed to make it clear that the humans were in the wrong and the villain was the Fascist regime behind the war in the first place, and that they're losing because they're disorganized and launching a genocidal war against an entrenched foe over literally nothing but sheer stupid bloodlust.
Intellectual people LIKE media that trusts its audience to understand it is satire without the overt spelling out of it. Without the explanation. The intellectual audience that satire targets prefers not to have it so they can have they're "i'm clever for getting it" feeling.
This is the trap of satire. The trap of intellectual entertainment. It is masturbation and because it feels good it is so easy to make the mistake of helping the fascists while making the content feel as good as possible for its intended target audience. This isn't helped by the fact that doing so not only nets you more viewers from the intellectuals but also more viewers from the fash.
This is why all good communists in history just slam bullshit out of the air and mock anyone who disagrees with them relentlessly.
Just read any of the stuff Stalin, Mao, Lenin, Castro, etc. said when talking to heads of state. There's never any sarcasm or couching of ideas, only blatantly stating the consequences of the other person's ideological position and following up with clarity of their ideological position.
There were absolutely Soviet satirists, and the USSR produced satirical media alongside its other entertainment productions. While I argue constantly that satire shouldn't be subtle and should instead be a polemic utilizing satire, one really can't compare theorists and leaders making direct statements or writing on a topic with artists producing entertainment media.
Agreed, satire has its place, but it's not a revolutionary way to communicate. It's a way to filter out people who are in the "in" crowd. Stuff like Soviet satire wasn't convincing people to become communists, it was playing on the fact that they were already communist or had delt with the Soviet system at some point.
The heavy handed propagandist satire, like this was less to convince American's that America was bad, and more to entertain Soviet citizens who understood the context and message that the satire was presenting.
Basically, satire is fine, but you can't fight fascism with satire. You also can't lead a revolutionary movement with satire and satirical propaganda only works when the satirist is coming from the position of the dominant political ideology of the time and re-enforcing the "in group" mentality that satire re-enforces.
I think satire for any broader audience needs to clearly include and demonstrate the contradiction of what it's seeking to satirize: simply showing something that's absurd and awful and trusting people to realize it's mocking it is bad practice, especially when its mockery is only a little exaggerated from reality. Starship Troopers is bad satire because it doesn't refute the system it is satirizing, and it just comes across as generic corny military sci-fi with a similar fascistic tone to normal American slop if someone isn't already aware of its goals. All the nationalism and bloodlust in it is just a clearer statement of what most American theater-goers already expected from media.
To be effective it would have had to be more overt and actively spell out what it's implying: include a scene establishing the meteor was a natural phenomenon and the government knew it, hell establish that they decided against having asteroid-defense-systems because it would have meant raising taxes or diverting half a percent of military funding or something, and so clearly establish that the ridiculous casus belli is explicitly a lie; establish that the pointless invasion of the bug worlds is failing and the war is going poorly overall so that it doesn't look like they're just winning a hard fought victory against a monstrous foe; hell establish the bugs as individually smarter and more concerned with their own lives with something like a direct attack on a nest being met with a holding action from worker forms who fall back when actual soldier forms arrive and repel the attack; etc.
It basically needed to make it clear that the humans were in the wrong and the villain was the Fascist regime behind the war in the first place, and that they're losing because they're disorganized and launching a genocidal war against an entrenched foe over literally nothing but sheer stupid bloodlust.
The problem here is the intellectual trap.
Intellectual people LIKE media that trusts its audience to understand it is satire without the overt spelling out of it. Without the explanation. The intellectual audience that satire targets prefers not to have it so they can have they're "i'm clever for getting it" feeling.
This is the trap of satire. The trap of intellectual entertainment. It is masturbation and because it feels good it is so easy to make the mistake of helping the fascists while making the content feel as good as possible for its intended target audience. This isn't helped by the fact that doing so not only nets you more viewers from the intellectuals but also more viewers from the fash.
This is why all good communists in history just slam bullshit out of the air and mock anyone who disagrees with them relentlessly.
Just read any of the stuff Stalin, Mao, Lenin, Castro, etc. said when talking to heads of state. There's never any sarcasm or couching of ideas, only blatantly stating the consequences of the other person's ideological position and following up with clarity of their ideological position.
There were absolutely Soviet satirists, and the USSR produced satirical media alongside its other entertainment productions. While I argue constantly that satire shouldn't be subtle and should instead be a polemic utilizing satire, one really can't compare theorists and leaders making direct statements or writing on a topic with artists producing entertainment media.
Reminds me of how many people, then and now, got extremely mad at "a Modest Proposal" for... it's endorsement of cannibalism.
Agreed, satire has its place, but it's not a revolutionary way to communicate. It's a way to filter out people who are in the "in" crowd. Stuff like Soviet satire wasn't convincing people to become communists, it was playing on the fact that they were already communist or had delt with the Soviet system at some point.
The heavy handed propagandist satire, like this was less to convince American's that America was bad, and more to entertain Soviet citizens who understood the context and message that the satire was presenting.
Basically, satire is fine, but you can't fight fascism with satire. You also can't lead a revolutionary movement with satire and satirical propaganda only works when the satirist is coming from the position of the dominant political ideology of the time and re-enforcing the "in group" mentality that satire re-enforces.