Don't go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao.
Or wearing T-shirts of Ché Guevara.
Or listening to poetry at the KGB Bar.
Or marching for illegal immigrant rights on May Day.
As Jeff Jacoby writes, those are symbols soaked in the blood of communism's many victims.
So why all the pop culture love for communism's button-men, which coincides with distaste — and appropriately so — for swastikas and other symbols identified with Nazi bloodlust.
Jacoby has a theory:
(P)erhaps the strongest explanation is the simplest: visibility. Ever since the end of World War II, when photographers entered the death camps and recorded what they found, the world has had indelible images of the Nazi crimes. But no army ever liberated the Soviet Gulag or halted the Maoist massacres. If there are photos or films of those atrocities, few of us have ever seen them. The victims of communism have tended to be invisible -- and suffering that isn't seen is suffering most people don't think about.
''Communist chic?" The blood of 100 million victims cries out from the ground. To wear the symbols of their killers is no fashion statement, but the ultimate in bad taste.
Read Jacoby's entire column here.
(H/T to Andrew Sullivan.)
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