The Rants of Issachar

I had an interesting experience at work on Thursday. I was wearing the "Absolute Powder" T-Shirt that my sister gave me a while back and it got noticed.


The man commenting on it was from an outside company doing some maintenance work and he was an immigrant from the the Slovakia side of the former Czechoslovakia. He'd assumed the shirt was a joke, (the fake cyrilic lettering and "Fernie" being obvious clues), but we got to talking about the Soviet Union, the communist governments in the former Soviet satellite states, Che Guevara and of course the incredibly bloody history of the communist revolutions.

I asked him if he'd been offended by the shirt and he said he hadn't, but I'm still a bit bothered by the whole thing. This man was very friendly, but I was wearing a shirt that makes light of the human suffering that he knew a lot more about than the average Canadian.


Why is it considered acceptable to wear a shirt like that that makes light of the bloody consequences of the socialist revolution? Why is it not considered unbelievably bad taste? I'm guessing that a shirt with a swastika and text reading "National Socialist Republic of Fernie, BC - Join the Revolution" would be considered pretty offensive. Of course it should be offensive. The nazi's killed 11 million people. (Six million Jews, 5 million others including Poles, Gypsies & homosexuals), but the estimates of murders by the Soviets under Stalin go as high as 60 million people. Oh, but that's communism, not nazism so it's hilarious right?

My "communist party" shirt from Threadless, (thanks Caleb, I still love it), raises the same questions. Replace Lenin & his fellow travelers with Hitler & his henchman and swap the hammer & cycle with a swastika and I wouldn't be getting the same compliments for having an "awesome" shirt.


It should go without saying that I'm not about to start wearing swastika t-shirts obviously, but this is the internet after all, so I'd best be clear.

But I do think that people should be more aware of the evils of communism and stop giving it and it's leaders a pass because we in the west seem to have a soft spot for socialism. These men were murderers, (Karl Marx excepted). We shouldn't ignore that just because their ideology sounded nice and some people wish that it had worked out.