TOTALITARIAN CHIC

Nazi regalia may be unspeakable and Prince Harry was rightly hammered for dressing up in Nazi gear but communist emblems have never been trendier! Enter "hammer and sickle" into a shopping search engine, and up pop dozens of products lovinly adorned with the Marxist brand — T-shirts and ski caps, bracelet charms and keychains, posters of Lenin and "Soviet Kremlin Stainless Steel Flasks." The glamorisation of communist imagery is widespread.  So WHY the double standard? Jeff Jacoby asks the question here.. worth a read.

Comments

[Ogra]

Well, it does look cool, Stalin Mao et al were scumbags, but the Communist ideaology itself, is not hateful, there is nothing in Marxism which says that you must kill a particular race. Nazism, on the other hand, says that you must liquidate several peoples. I don't want anyone to slag of Che Guevara, he was not an evil communistic dictator,like u may think, he was actually a pretty cool guy

Ogra, did you ever hear of the time that Che Guevara walked into a bar in Kilkee, Co Clare?
(Not a joke)

[Ogra]

No i didnt what happened?

[scouseproud]

I suppose he was known in the pub as Shay Guevara?

[Cunningham]

Shay, good. Tho not too far off as his mother was a Lynch from Co Cork.
That was when he met Jim Fitzpatrick, the artist who later designed the print of Che that became an icon.

The story is in

http://www.jimfitzpatrick.ie/biography-3.html

[Henry94]

the Communist ideaology itself, is not hateful, there is nothing in Marxism which says that you must kill a particular race

Just particular classes.

I'm inclined to agree with Chech writer Milan Kundera who said the only thing worse than the failed and corrupt communism of the Eastren bloc would be actual real communism with all its conformity and failure of imagination.

[Adrian]

I suppose you'd have prefered Russia to remain under the Tsars?

Communism did one good think. If it wasn't for ideology, the USSR would have crumbled before Hitler as the Russians did in the First World War.

The evil that men do lives on after them, the good is oft interred with their bones. So let it be with the commies!!!

Pope John Paul II pointed out the fundamental flaw of Communism - they thought that to be human meant to be part of this giant superorganism, like bees in a hive. Totally contradicted by our experience.

[Henry94]

I suppose you'd have preferred Russia to remain under the Tsars?

The Tsar had already been overthrown by the time the Bolsheviks. What they overthrew was a provisional government which was trying to bring about reform.

[gg]

Che Cuevera was an evil murderer of children. Every time I see cretins wearing a t-shirt of him I ask them why they're wearing a picture of a child killer. He murdered plenty of adults as well.

[ch in texas]

Didn't he personally execute lots of political prisoners in Cuba? I know he's a sonofabitch, but I'll have to research.

[Adrian]

Thanks for spotting that Henry94!

I remember reading one ridiculous American history text book that was printed in the 1920s and kept calling the Bolsheviks traitors for ending the war with Germany and predicting that the Soviet Union wouldn't last more than a couple of years. And then I came across a second edition of the book written in the mid-1930s and was thoroughly amused to see the difference!!!

[Alkypone]

This is the way I see it: Nazism was an ideology built up around Hitler but Communism was not built up around any one man. Therefore, the Hitler's crimes are justly damned as the crimes of Nazism but the crimes of Stalin etc. were merely committed in the name of Communism.

You can't separate Hitler from Nazism but you can - and must - separate Stalin from communism.

[alison]

'Che Guevara - fooling middle class white kids since 1968'
&

'Che Guevara - he's dead. Get over it.'

You can buy both these t-shirts on line. Couldnt have put it better. I think i bought into the whole Che thing when i was about...hmm.. eleven. Interesting to see Ogra defend that ideology so quickly and all those deaths because the style of instigating them was ummm..quieter?

[willowfield]

Henry94

Communism per se does not advocate killing particular classes.

[Ogra]

'You can't separate Hitler from Nazism but you can - and must - separate Stalin from communism.' explains it must better than i could. Communism is not good bt the way.

The Provisional government in russia was a stop-gap measure put in place by the tsar so he could try and keep some power. Zerensky never got public support, the white army were routed, even though they got international support. there was always going to be Communism in Russia.

[Ogra]

He killed alot of children?, so did Bush and Churchill. Che Guevara, symbolzes the standing up of the South American people against oppression from the european elite, the idea of fighting authority, good libertarians like me and David!!!

The end result of this revolution was not good ie.scumbag Castro. But Che symbolizes the fight, and the idea that by challanging authority we can make things better.

[Henry94]

willowfield

Of course it does. For Communists the history of the worls is the history of class struggle. How did they propose the workers win such a struggle? Terror.

“We need the real, nation-wide terror which reinvigorates the country and through which the Great French Revolution achieved glory”

VI Lenin

"there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terrorism."

Marx

[mahons]

Good point. The Communists managed to equal if not exceed even the Nazis in the 20th Century. Their emblem as a fashion statement is disgusting, although expected in an often thought-free society. I sense a trend among the apologists for communism to blame Stalin only, as if Mao never existed. Che was a pro-Stalinist Marxist who put his energy into supporting the wrong side of history (not to mention morality). Adios Amigo.
Adrian -any chance after allegedly reading the history books from the 1920's and 1930's that you read any later accounts? The USSR did crumble before Hitler, it was the Germans mistake in employing savage tactics that led the Russian people to resist so strongly (not their love of Uncle Joe) combined with their brutual winter.

[Chris Gaskin]

Henry

I remember reading a great quote from a South American Bishop when looking up Liberation Theology.

"If I help the poor you all me a saint, If I ask why they are poor you call me a communist"

[Cunningham]

>>The USSR did crumble before Hitler, it was the Germans mistake in employing savage tactics that led the Russian people to resist so strongly... combined with their brutual winter.<<

Mahons, you're wrong here. The Germans were in Russia for 3 whole years, not only in the winters.
It was Stalin's grip of steel on Russian society, the economy, the army and the general war effort that brought the German armies to a standstill. Behind their lines, the situation for the Germans was not difficult, at least in the first 2 crucial years, and there was much more collaboration than resistance.

[Aileen]

I think that it is something to do with the NAZIs having such defined targets for killing, whicj is unrelated to any opinion that they may have, that chills the blood.

Personnally, I wish that we could reclaim the NAZI symbol for it's origional peaceful meaning. I don't like the NAZIs still having this control.

[Henry94]

Chris

That was the problem with LT. It failed to understand communism. JPII did because he had experienced it.

[mahons]

Cunningham:
I have to disagree. The collaboration you speak of was in fact quite real, when the people of the Soviet Republics thought that the Germans were getting rid of the Communists and "liberating them". Once the Germans started their brutual tactics, the collaboration diminshed and the resistance increased. Great book entitled Barbarosa that I would highly recommend that recounts the invasion.
Stalin's purges of the military before the war and during robbed the Soviets of some of their best officers and reduced most of the rest to Yes-men status. Forget the Germans, the Finns gave them Hell.
He played down the Commie propoganda and played up the Mother Russia propaganda to motivate the masses. I see the Soviet expulsion of the Nazis as a credit to them as a people, rather than the faulty system they suffered under.

[alison]

"He killed alot of children?, so did Bush and Churchill"

And noone picks up on what has to be the most pathetic comment ever. You can tell its a bank holiday.

[Richard Allen]

"He killed alot of children?, so did Bush and Churchill. Che Guevara, symbolzes the standing up of the South American people against oppression from the european elite, the idea of fighting authority, good libertarians like me and David!!!"

I won't respond to the first sentance as it doesn't deserve a response. As for the rest it's worth noting that the Bolivian people didn't care for his attempted revolution as much as his modern day supporters do.