Why Not the Hammer and Sickle?

There has been widespread, and justified, outrage over Prince Harry’s recent decision to attend a “Native and Colonial” party wearing a Nazi Afrika Corps uniform. The photograph of the oblivious Prince calmly holding a drink while sporting a blood-red, swastika-embellished armband has now become an icon of royal idiocy and cluelessness.

However, outrage at Nazism, while justified and warranted, is not exactly breaking news or intellectually compelling discussion; Nazism has been so thoroughly debunked that it is no longer an ideology to be taken seriously. What would have happened, though, if Harry had not sported the swastika but opted for the hammer and the sickle instead? Would the public outcry have been as vocal and immediate, and as monolithically damning, if Harry had worn a Soviet instead of Nazi uniform? No, it most certainly would not have been. In our society communist paraphernalia is considered to be humorous or ironic; it is almost never viewed with the outright revulsion we reserve for the Nazis.

Judging from the content of popular culture, one can safely say that if Harry had chosen to sport the hammer and the sickle of Stalin, Beria and Dzerzhinsky instead of the swastika of Hitler, Göring and Goebbels he would have attracted little notice. The widespread popularity of Che, Castro, Lenin, CCCP or Marx t-shirts, and the frequent usage of the Soviet five-pointed star or the crossed hammer and sickle, are only the most obvious examples of the curious double standard between our views on Nazism and Soviet Communism. Harvard’s own beloved “Mathergrad,” in addition to the appearance of the Soviet flag and the playing of the Soviet national anthem at last year’s Primal Scream, is merely the nearest example of the “humorous” usage of Soviet-style artwork.

To the tens of millions of victims of Soviet tyranny, including many thousands who fled to the United States, the Hammer and the Sickle are anything but a laughing matter; they are the symbols of a tyranny that carried out acts as depraved, bloodthirsty and merciless as anything propagated by Hitler’s Third Reich. The lack of outrage over the continued usage of Soviet images is disturbing, because it suggests a shocking lack of historical perspective. While few are prepared to say it, the Russia that Lenin and Stalin forged in the blood of millions of nameless peasants was as evil a system as humans have yet constructed: it would behoove us to remember what happened in Soviet Russia as assuredly as we remember what happened in Nazi Germany.

True, there are some differences between the two pinnacles of totalitarianism; but the similarities, especially in terms of human suffering and misery, are overwhelming enough for them to be judged in the same vein. We would never consider putting mock-Nazi propaganda on a House Committee t-shirt; nor would we ever think of making a swastika out of a beer-bong and a keg tap. We probably wouldn’t wear a t-shirt saying “give me some lebenstraum,” and we would never think of sporting a t-shirt with Hitler’s face on it. This is because we have smugly assured ourselves that the Soviets were somehow very different than their Nazi contemporaries. They were not. And we should remember that when dealing with the inevitable urge to jokingly use Soviet imagery; it is not a laughing matter.

Mark A. Adomanis ’07, a Crimson editorial editor, is a government concentrator in Eliot House.