Che Shirts, Idi Buttons, Stalin Earrings
Dean
Some have suggested that perhaps I was over the top recently in my criticisms of people who wear Che Guevara merchandise. They roll their eyes and suggest that my concern with this has no relevance to the modern world.
Perhaps they are right. Indeed, perhaps we should expand our repertoir of merchandise into praising all brutal totalitarians who indiscriminately kill their political opponents.
As retired journalist Ronald Watts, who knew Idi Amin personally, notes:
I'm seeing a big merchandising opportunity here:"[Idi Amin] was a bit of a Jekyll and Hyde character. There were so many things that were charming about him. He played rugby, was a heavyweight boxing champion and he mixed well. He liked the Scots, particularly the kilts and the bagpipes.
"He was quite a popular character but obviously he had a shady side which came out when things went bad."
By 1974 his regime was murdering hundreds of thousands of its own people and Amin fed the heads of opponents to crocodiles and boasted of eating human flesh, keeping human heads in the freezer as his nation starved.
I mean, it makes at least as much sense as the Che shirts and posters, doesn't it?
Anyone know where I can get a good Stalin t-shirt?
(Image by The Colossus.)
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- Che Shirts, Idi Buttons, Stalin Earrings
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Do you realize that when I open the comment window, the advertisements at the top send you to sites selling Che Guevara crap? Ironically, when you go to one of the sites, the banner at the top has "No War" on it...because we all know how anti-war Guevara was.
Jason
Random irony of the universe, or clever totalitarian ploy? Inquiring minds want to know!
jan
That's why I've shunned Google ads on my sites.
I'm thinking about doing some Pinochet T-shirts and other anti-Communist dictators at the Ministry of Propaganda. Stay tuned...
Villains of the Left: Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, Martin Dies, Whittaker Chambers, Ayn Rand, E. Merrill Root, John Birch, J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, Frank S. Meyer, Klemens von Metternich....
I'm on the side of the villains. HAIL TO THE QUEEN OF ALL EVIL....!!!! AND HAIL TO THE KING....!!!!
To be even more Politically Incorrect: I love that sexy woman on your sidebar to the right. Up With Beauty! Down With Big Brother! AND MERRY CHRIST'S MASS!!!!
Ideally one of him and Hitler shaking hands.
I started folding the corners of pages with exposures of the true-nature of Guevara - totalitarian, anti-democrat, dilletante murderer...I'm going to have to stop, though, because soon the pages will be so puffed-out I literally won't be able to shut it.
I'll leave the Che ads just becuase I find the irony too delicious.
There are even "Mao temples" where you can burn incense and kneel at his altar. This is oddly reassuring in a way: the fanatic athiest Mao gets captured by ancient Chinese Daoist traditions and morphs into a godling, his original notions abandoned.
Bryan AWS wrote:
"Yeah, I read somewhere that Pol Pot was really a nice guy in person, too. Maybe he needs a t-shirt."
Hitler, too. I read that he was was quite a pleasant and scintillating conversationalist as long as you didn't mention Jews. And he was extremely popular. Women swooned over him. The young people went ape over him. He was more popular than the Beatles.
KGB - still watching you.
Its black with KGB in red, and the G made up of the Hammer and Sickle. Of course, I work in intelligence, so hanging a shirt like that makes sense . . .
...who were more popular than Jesus.
(Heehee. I couldn't resist!)
(better than Hitler, I mean. They looked pretty much like Jesus, come to think of it.)