2013-10-06
Explanation
This comic presents a "Funtime Activity" suggesting that you take motivational quotes from famous speeches and change the attributions to history''s villains. The first example shows a person giving a speech to a crowd, saying "Why is everyone looking at me like that?" while a quote card below reads: "The only limit to your impact is your imagination and commitment. --Joseph Stalin."
The joke is that many inspirational quotes are so generic and vague that they could just as easily have been said by a genocidal dictator as by an admired leader. The quote about "imagination and commitment" sounds perfectly wholesome when attributed to, say, a self-help author or a business leader, but becomes deeply unsettling when attributed to Stalin -- a man whose "impact" included the deaths of millions through forced collectivization, purges, and gulags. The humor forces the reader to confront how empty and context-dependent motivational platitudes really are.
The votey panel continues the gag with another example: "Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination. --Trofim Lysenko." This is an even more pointed joke for those who know the history. Lysenko was a Soviet agronomist who rejected Mendelian genetics in favor of pseudoscientific theories, and whose influence over Soviet agricultural policy (backed by Stalin) led to widespread crop failures and famine. Scientists who disagreed with him were persecuted, imprisoned, or executed. Attributing a quote about bold scientific imagination to a man who destroyed real science through ideological dogmatism is darkly ironic. The original quote is actually from John Dewey, the American philosopher and educator.