If you have a lick of sense, you wouldn’t emblazon images of Ché Guevara on your chest or your wall — and yet Ché t‑shirts and posters have been a pop culture hit for decades now.
He is cool, we are told, because he was ¡Viva la Revolución! and all that.
But it could get worse. You could be emblazoning a hammer and sickle.
Walmart’s website is there to help. Under “men’s sleeveless,” for example, we see an artistic rendering of the old Communist symbol, frankly identified as a “Soviet Hammer and Sickle,” white on black for $14.97.* Walmart files it under “Pop culture.”
Aren’t men’s sleeveless shirts called “wife beaters”? Should we now call them Kulak Killers?
It’s hip to murder millions!
No wonder Lithuania and several other Baltic countries — who suffered greatly under Soviet rule — object. Indeed, many of these countries go too far in actually banning the symbols. Now, they have contacted Walmart requesting a cessation in hawking the offensive merchandise. “You wouldn’t buy Nazi-themed clothing, would you?” Lithuania’s foreign minister Linas Linkevicius tweeted. Or sell such items.
But a few people might. Certainly, a lot of people do buy stuff that others regard as “Nazi.” Sometimes to be “cool”; other times to make a controversial political point.
At the Uhuru Store, Gavin McInnes’s “ProudBoys Official” sells a “Pinochet Did Nothing Wrong” t‑shirt for twice the price of Walmart’s Hammer and Sickle shirt — and that surely has annoyed leftists who have seen it.
I’m waiting for the death of cool.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* The shirts also come in Navy, Royal and Gray. I guess to get a red commie shirt you have to go for the sleeves.
1 reply on “Mass Murderers Are Cool?”
Walmart will supply anything that sells, even a tee shirt representing a philosophy which, if adopted, would result is its own demise and the probable execution of most of its executives.
On the other hand, it appears that Walmart is more interested in supplying the demands and preferences of its market, without judgment, than are Google or Facebook so if I have to choose I would prefer the Walmart model.
As an aside, Walmart has identified a need, that the youth need to have the availability to something to wear to the high schools and universities other than all of that American flag patriotic stuff which does not conform to the current lesson plan and, at this point, I do not think Walmart is trying to influence any election (beyond that of seeking to cause one by their potential customers to elect to purchase their offerings which in this case is a tee celebrating a failed and murderous social system, probably produced in China to complete the irony).
God bless America and what it at one time stood for!