Oh, that’s nice. Tolerance and inclusion? It’s like one of those “coexist” bumper stickers you see in the U.S. (usually right next to the sticker that says “My other car is a broom”):
You know, it’s this sort of magnanimous inclusivity that won the European Union the Nobel Peace Prize. As this poster clearly illustrates, people of all — Wait, what is that?
Seriously? The hammer and sickle symbol made infamous by the Soviet Union made its way onto a poster promoting inclusion and tolerance? We could go on about the irony of placing a symbol that’s as closely tied to communism as the swastika is to Nazism next to the symbols of Christianity, Judaism, and Hinduism, but Hannan says it best:
For three generations, the badge of the Soviet revolution meant poverty, slavery, torture and death. It adorned the caps of the chekas who came in the night. It opened and closed the propaganda films which hid the famines. It advertised the people’s courts where victims of purges and show-trials were condemned. It fluttered over the re-education camps and the gulags. For hundreds of millions of Europeans, it was a symbol of foreign occupation. Hungary, Lithuania and Moldova have banned its use, and various former communist countries want it to be treated in the same way as Nazi insignia.
Yet here it sits on a poster in the European Commission, advertising the moral deafness of its author (I hope that’s what it is, rather than lingering nostalgia). The Bolshevist sigil celebrates the ideology which, in strict numerical terms, must be reckoned the most murderous ever devised by our species. That it can be passed unremarked day after day in the corridors of Brussels is nauseating.
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(H/T: Reason). Front page photo courtesy Getty Images.