We Can Be Heroes

If world-upside-down broadsheets [ed note: the precursor to the modern meme] were either innocuous or soporific, we would not expect to find them figuring so prominently in actual rebellions and in the imagery and actions of the insurgents themselves.  In the Reformation and in the subsequent Peasants’ War, the prints play and undeniably major role in disseminating the spirit of revolution. As the conflict became more open and violent, the imagery became more direct: a…cartoon showed a peasant defecating into the papal tiara. The prints associated with the peasant revolutionaries under Thomas Munzer pictured “peasants disputing with learned theologians, ramming the scriptures down the throat of priests, and pulling down the tyrant’s castle.”

When a captured peasant was asked (rhetorically) what kind of beast he was, he replied, “A beast that usually feeds on roots and wild herbs [ed note: goyim] but, when driven by hunger, sometimes consumes priests, bishops and fat citizens.” Not only did such radical–an end to status distinctions , the abolition of differences in wealth, popular justice, and popular religion, revenge on exploiting priest, nobles, and wealthy townsmen–play a rhetorical role in the Peasants’ War, but there are instances in which the rebels turned the images of inversion into tableaux vivants. One peasant leader thus dressed a countess up like a beggar and sent her off in a dung cart; knights, now in rags, were obliged to serve their vassals at the table while peasants dressed up in knightly garb and mocked their noble rituals. This once, briefly, peasants had the opportunity to live their fantasies and dreams of revenge, and those fantasies might have been read from the world-upside-down prints.

-excerpted from Domination and the Arts of Resistance by James C. Scott