Born in communist Czechoslovakia, Dalibor Rohac is unsettled by the continued displays of the symbols of communism by people on the political left. In view of the millions of victims of communist regimes, he finds it difficult to understand the surviving taste for the hammer and sickle, Che Guevara t-shirts and the like. Rohac mentions some possible explanations for this: that few people grasp the magnitude of the crimes of communism; that, whereas totalitarian fascism was always a poisonous idea, communism may be seen as a good idea that went wrong - one with clear links to principles of universal justice.
But despite these suggestions of his, he is right to be unsettled. A good idea gone wrong as may be, communism didn't just go wrong in some minor or insignificant detail, but on a vast scale, and the manner in which it went wrong wasn't only the manner of what one calls a 'mistake'; it became mired in the worst kinds of moral corruption and criminality. No one with a genuine attachment to humane ideals should want to be associated with, much less bear upon their person, the iconography in question. It should have been completely discredited.
At the same time, for my part I do not find it so difficult to understand why this hasn't happened. It hasn't happened, because the left is far from having rid itself of those tendencies towards apologia for dictatorship and disregard for human rights that prevailed in the mid-20th century, or distanced itself from that constituency within which such stuff is still par for the course. What was said yesterday about Stalinism, Maoism, Pol Pot, etc is reheated and dished up again, be it in relation to contemporary tyrannies like Iran or to movements that engage in murdering civilians at random and other horrors. There are always voices on the left ready to justify or excuse these regimes and movements. Moreover, we are not talking here, as is sometimes alleged, of only a small fraction of the left - the far left: unreconstructed Stalinists, the SWP and its penumbra, and so forth. They form, to be sure, a core region of the anti-democratic indulgence I mean. But it also has a large hinterland among well-meaning 'liberals' (in the loose and relativist sense), and among the considerable numbers on the left who regard such apologists as entirely reasonable interlocutors, when their cavalier disregard for democratic principles ought to be a sign that these are dubious allies if allies at all.The regrettable fact of the matter is that too much of the left still gives anti-capitalism and/or equality priority over the norms of democracy, liberty and human rights; and this is why the iconography tainted by the deaths of millions of innocent people is still seen as being cool where it no longer should be.