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this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2024
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Political Memes
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Today, Venezuela had its elections, almost certainly rigged by the autocratic Maduro regime. No one here cares.
Today, Malaysia applied to join the BRICS economic block. No one here cares. I'm not even sure most of the people here know what BRICS is.
Just for fun, sort this community by new and see how long it takes to find a post about the politics of literally any other country. You'll be there for a while. Nearly everything is about the election they're gonna have in four months.
The truth is that in a world dominated by American culture, any forum for discussion on the English Internet not explicitly about non-American topics is doomed to be instantly dominated by American discourse. If you want any amount of discussion on other countries, you have to label it as such. Because America is the first world power and to Americans, it is the default.
What I'm saying here is that whenever you see a community that labels itself something like "Political Memes", you have to mentally prepend that name with "American". Because this place certainly isn't "Worldwide Political Memes". Even the "Memes" part is pushing it, looking at what gets to the top here. It's mostly just American liberal political opinions shared without a hint of humor or irony.
World news has quite a few threads about rigged Venezuelan elections.
For better or worse, this site has a heavy American presence, and politically minded people are very focused on the election right now. That's going to translate to a lot of American political memes. If you want to post global political memes, no one's stopping you, and I'd be quite interested in seeing them
The whole tenure of the Venezuela election discussion has American news media bias slathered all over it. Nobody seems to want to discuss how Maduro's biggest contender for the Presidency was running the same hyper-Christian, anti-government, private-the-oil-industry shit that is wildly unpopular in the country outside of the bigger cities. Basically the same campaign Anez ran in Bolivia and Bolsanaro ran in Brazil. A Trumpian candidate that the majority simply couldn't stomach.
Venezuela doesn't have anything resembling a centrist liberal faction. Its either another term with Maduro or a full-blown reactionary counter-revolution. And there are plenty of people alive in Venezuela today who still remember right-wing military junta that ran the country back in the '50s. Plenty more familiar with the brutal treatment of Haitians, El Salvadorians, and Guyanans. Or, hell, the very ham-fisted Operation Gideon sponsored by the US at the tail end of the Trump administration.
Very hard to get a pro-Western government to win popular support under these conditions.
Yeah I have no disagreement with what you're saying. This was also true with Russia, where Navalny was hardly left wing. I think it's moreso the idea of a democratic system versus dictatorship.
Even the so-called Communist Party of Russia is a vestigial remnant. That is as much a result of the socio-economic rewiring of the nation after Yeltsin's coup as any functional dictatorship. People are saturated in Putin-friendly right-wing media in Russia not unlike how Americans have been surrounded by ultra-orthodox conservative news media.
What's the difference between a democracy and a dictatorship in a nation where mass media and big business are all beholden to a handful of oligarchs?
I am going on a limp here but I recon Lemmy is 80% made up of EU+Anglosphere. And frankly, and forgive my language, barely anyone gives a shit about a rigged vote in Venecuela ("what a surprise, it happened again - for the past 25 years") and Malaysia ("where's that even?") joining BRICS (" do they even get to do anything, they basically hate each other?")
So yeah, while there's 90% US politics here, you're free to post memes for other topics, it's not like its forbidden.