The primary is that Ukraine, in February 2022, was largely unknown to the common Western viewer. Most couldn’t have named its president. Most didn’t understand it was a raucous democracy with elections, a free press, and a thriving stand-up comedy scene. The memes launched that Ukraine to the world, filling an info vacuum. As Olga Tokariuk, a researcher and journalist, argued in a Reuters Institute paper, Ukrainian humor labored as a “gateway to a deeper understanding of Ukraine’s historical past and tradition.”
The second purpose is extra essential: the Ukrainian memes had been per the underlying actuality. The witty, defiant, democratic Ukraine of the embassy accounts was the identical Ukraine that journalists and diplomats and refugees and weapons inspectors all discovered on the bottom. The propaganda didn’t have to beat the reality; it solely needed to floor it.
Iran has neither benefit. The Islamic Republic is just not obscure; it’s among the many most-covered, most-analyzed, most-sanctioned regimes on earth, and the general public document of its 47 years in energy is thick and damning. The mass executions of political prisoners in 1988 are nicely documented—together with the truth that some younger girls amongst them had been first raped by their guards, on the theologically doubtful premise that virgins couldn’t be executed.
