Categories
folly ideological culture moral hazard

Mass Murderers Are Cool?

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.

PDF for printing

 


Categories
crime and punishment

Justice Delayed in Cambodia

It’s not a satisfying verdict. And no punishment can ever balance the scales for the many lives that the Khmer Rouge destroyed.

This August the two most senior surviving regime leaders, responsible for slaughtering an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians from 1975 to 1979 in the name of restructuring society along collectivist agrarian lines, were sentenced to life imprisonment. They are 88-​year-​old Nuon Chea and 83-​year-​old Khieu Samphan.

The pair are the first Khmer Rouge leaders convicted under proceedings sponsored by the Cambodian government and the United Nations. The only previous verdict was handed down in 2010 against a lower-​rung if still pretty vicious official, Kaing Guek Eav, then 67, sentenced to 19 years. As a prison commandant, he had overseen the torturing and killing of more than 14,000 people.

“I am not satisfied!” said 79-​year-​old Chum Mey back then. He had testified about being tortured by the regime. “We are victims two times, once in the Khmer Rouge time and now once again.” Others expressed similar dismay.

As for the notorious Pol Pot, he had died in 1998 after briefly suffering a house arrest as penalty for just one of his many murders.

One hopes that the proceedings, tainted by politics and other vitiating factors, will be improved even at this late date. But as near-​futile as the trials must seem to many survivors, I have to believe that even partial justice, however meager and belated, is better than no justice.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.