It’s well known to the friends of this blog that I’m anti-totalitarian, loathing both sides of statism socialism, the National/Fascist Socialists and the International/Communist Socialists and their watered down (but still tyrannical) versions of the SDP, Democrats, Greens and even faux conservatives (corporate welfare advocates/crony capitalism) etc..
I would like nothing better than to see Communist regalia disappear from public view, but it has to be through individual decisions, not by state legislation. It’s hard work, but the truth of the matter is, still in this day and age, Communist symbols do not elicit the same reactions as Nazi symbols, even though both are a branch from the same socialist totalitarian impulse.
It takes both time and effort to inform people that both of these ideologies (Communism and National Socialism) have a common link in Karl Marx’s (miserable) economic, political and social theories. Banning the trappings of their ideology does nothing to expose them for what they are, and what they have done to humanity over the past 100 years, enslavement, brutality and dehumanization have been their enduring legacy (just think N.Korea), and that should be the focus, not a uniform or memorabilia. KGS
NOTE: I was in Berlin over a year ago, and was just as shocked at seeing the symbols of the communist era on display for sale by by vendors all over the city. Truly disgusting but on the flip side, fun to see capitalism at work.
H/T: Fjordman
Historian wants ban on communist uniforms
A prominent historian of communist East Germany and its Stasi secret police has called for a ban on the public display of communist era uniforms or insignia. “This is not only tasteless, but violates the dignity of the victims of this dictatorship,” Hubertus Knabe, the director of the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial, where the Stasi ran a huge prison, told the BZ newspaper this week. “For years, we’ve been experiencing an increasingly careless way of dealing with the relics of the communist dictatorship in Germany,” he added.
Communist-era insignia has become increasingly chic in western Europe, where young people sometimes wear t-shirts or military caps with the infamous hammer and sickle. In parts of Berlin, surplus East German military supplies are sold on the streets and street hawkers pose in old army uniforms for pictures with tourists.
But Knabe says the commercialization of the communist era is wrong and should be compared to idealizing the Nazis. In Germany, it is illegal to publicly display insignia like the swastika that are commonly associated with the Nazis. Knabe told the BZ that there is no other country where “you can freely walk around on the street in the uniform of a fallen dictatorship.”
