Week 1: A Final Overview Before the Fun Starts

Happy time of day to you all! Welcome to my blog and have a lovely read 🙂  

As mentioned in my description, my project will involve writing satirical articles on political leaders and key situations from the 20th century till today. Hopefully, with the knowledge of past political successes and failures, individuals will be more equipped to parse through all the sensationalist news rife in contemporary media. Because, as much as you’re tired of hearing your grandparents regale you stories from ‘back in the day’, they did wonderful or regrettable stuff in the 1950s just so you could make more informed political decisions in the modern day. 

The Comedy Bit 

After a long day, whether that’s from working 12 hours or scrolling through instagram on your part time job, people like to decompress with some light entertainment. So, to grasp what little energy people have to spend on academic topics, I’ll be imbuing as much humour in my writing as possible. A lot of inspiration for my project came from reading immense amounts of Onion articles from their 2001 omnibus “Dispatches From the Tenth Circle”. In it, there’s a funny article where Clinton approves of a new tiered citizenship scheme (much like airplane seats); It’s amusing, but does provide legitimate commentary on the “second class” treatment some citizens are given because of their socioeconomic status, race etc.  

I haven’t  decided what exact tone my project will take (E.G. Horatian, Juvenalian) but my aim is to explore as many types as possible in the next few months and find what gels with me the most. My next post will list more comedians/satirical works that I find acceptably amusing. 

The Historical Bit 

My two main aims for the historical research part of my project are to: 1) be as international as possible and 2) reduce my bias as much as possible. So far, I have used YouTube and Wikipedia as initial sources of intrigue. I don’t just want to stick to the eurocentric dictators I have already learned about, and it’s much easier to find info on relatively unknown political leaders on those sites rather than in libraries. YouTube and Wikipedia are obviously not the most reliable sources, so once I have a name/event I turn to places like JSTOR for all my future research. 

Some overarching concepts I’ll explore include: 

• How autocracies came to be
• How dictators use media and/or violence to perpetuate their power
• How different nations have overthrown their leaders.  

It’s hard to be completely bias-free, but for all the people/events I research, I will only write about them if I find documentation from multiple sources and the context surrounding it. For example, just last week, I was researching the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and its core leader, Jose Maria Sison. I started drafting a piece that satirized the CPP for killing many of its own members, because they feared spies, but neglected to note that the CPP was not in power at the time. The Philippines was governed then by a military dictator, Ferdinand Marcos, who was brutal, and caused a lot of trouble for the CPP- likely making the CPP more fearful than usual. The setting where someone acts means a lot, and I will try my best to discover that in my research.

Closing Thoughts

If you just had a long, busy day at work and want to de-stress by reading some dense historical literature, then I highly recommend these (all taken from the research I conducted last week):

*Informational Autocrats (Sergei Guriev & Daniel Treisman)*

*Regime Change Without Military Force: Lessons from Overthrowing Milosevic (Gregory Schulte)*

*The Military and The Fragile Democracy of the Philippines (Viberto Selochan)*

*Trump’s Speech at CPAC 2024*

Have a lovely day everyone 😎