Why is it, then, that one of the biggest retro jersey trends is wearing sweats or hockey jerseys or t-shirts or whatever else festooned with the old Soviet-era "CCCP"? I'm not much interested in coming to a conclusion as to which regime was worse, the Nazis or the Soviets. And I find that students tend to be more interested in being cool than making political statements -- I doubt highly that the preponderace of Red Army hockey jerseys is a sign of latent leftist tendencies as opposed to simply thinking the jerseys give them style cache. Still, I find it disquieting that one of the two apodictically evil regimes in the twentieth century world gets such a free pass by people who would be rightfully appalled if someone wore a swastika or enjoyed showing off their Klan memorabilia. Plus, with the winter Olympics coming up, I cannot help but get a little bit nostalgic over the time when Americans could rally around our Olympians as they did proxy battle with the baddies on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
4 comments:
They are wearing this stuff because they have no idea how evil communism is. We have to do a better job of teaching that.
greg --
I think a better and less sloppy way to put it is that we need to let them know just what the Soviet Union stood for. Most all communist regimes have bended up being evil, but the example I always use is that the governing coalition of South Africa includes the SACP and folks like Chris Hani and Joe Slovo were both Communists and the good guys during the anti-Apartheid struggle. The Soviet Union was evil, but even that should come across in our classes from what the Soviets did and stood for and not by simply asserting its evil.
dcat
You callin' me sloppy?
Well, yeah, but only because Tootle told me that "Sloppy" used to be your nickname in grad school.
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