Saddam Hussein’s Hiding Place And The Last Laugh Of The Conspiracy Shitposter

Almost anyone can get an image boost (or their reputation trashed) through the power of memery. All it takes is the right image or slip of the tongue to go down in the archives of internet history for life. Sometimes, their likeness can inspire a format so blissfully strange that its origins can seem perplexing. Such was the case for Saddam Hussein’s Hiding Place, which has led to the former Iraqi president experiencing a renaissance on the internet 15 years after his death.

The format is based on a diagram from an old BBC News article, which documents his capture and the hideaway in which he was found. A peculiarly detailed illustration, it almost invites the viewer on the military mission themselves. At least, that seems to be the takeaway made by many intrepid memers, who were quick to remix the blank red human outline and his underground lair into a wide array of memes. On the face of it, it was simply a drawing with plenty of exploitable capabilities. However, underneath the bricks and rubble is a more complicated picture of meme culture’s desire for subversion and reimagining.

It helps that the meme touches upon a beloved pillar of absurdist internet content: the September 11th terrorist attacks and its associated fallout. One of the most seismic and emotive events to happen on American soil in the 21st century, the retrospective memes that followed were also powerful, but deliberately far removed from its popular tragic perception.

The joint forces of Jet Fuel Can’t Melt Steel Beams and Bush Did 9/11 began as a straightforward satire of converts to the Truth Movement, but as they steeped longer in the online hivemind, they took on a life of their own as a versatile punchline with a darkly ludicrous undertone.

Saddam Hussein’s Hiding place is influenced by the legacy of the big 9/11 memes, transplanting their irreverent attitude into a related subject but removing the finger-pointing. Its main difference is that it riffs on a display of fact as opposed to what most would accept as fiction.

The way in which the meme harnesses the delegitimizing and depoliticizing power further reflects how shitposting has developed through memes over the past half a decade or more. The semi-ironic adoption of 9/11 as a meme reflected an attitude that has come to define more popular countercultural memes of recent times, taking the randomcore of a generation previous and reflecting it through a prism of wry self-awareness. This gave it a more material grounding, as it touched on the realities of life and society instead of working on zaniness alone. At the same time, it kept enough distance to keep the crowd-pleasing humor intact.

Saddam Hussein’s Hiding Place has some connections to headlines from around the time of its repurposing as a meme including the death of former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan. At the same time though, it challenges any serious analysis of this through its unapologetic underlining of the out-of-context strangeness with which it presents itself.

This approach has encouraged a great affection for using and abusing conspiracy theories more generally. The bogus science of Flat Earthers, chemtrails and the distrust of political elites found in Pizzagate have given ample opportunity to indulge in absurdity.

Out of all the popular theories, the most natural successor for 9/11 memes pre-Saddam Hussein was Epstein Didn’t Kill Himself, a blanket catchphrase regarding the circumstances of the late sex offender's death that operated in a similarly dogmatic and revealing way to something like Bush Did 9/11.

Although Saddam Hussein’s Hiding Place does not address an issue directly as these do, it remains provocative. It channels the determined energy of the conspiracy meme tradition but marries it with an added level of weird, taking away the level of meaning found in these phrases and implying a light-heartedness that switches the tone of its predecessors.

Memes are a communicative device through which we process the world around us. By this token, ones that deal with things in a more abstract way involve escapism and a means of protesting the complexity that is often a part of being alive. The memeification of the Saddam Hussein diagram is as much about embracing the inherent ridiculousness of how seriously we take ourselves as it is making light the heavy context from which it came. It’s not quite the memetic embodiment of writing something off as too complicated to understand, but it does underline an attitude that believes the ultimate method of subversion is nonsense.

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