Go read Radley Balko’s letter to The CEO of Target about its merchandising of clothing that seems to glorify “Soviet chic”.

I think Balko’s analogy to Nazism is apt. It’s not about left vs. right, it’s about totalitarian collectivism vs. individual liberty.

And, like Balko, I’m not talking about censorship. I’m talking about declining to support the obscuring of crucially important historical lessons. Communism wasn’t a noble experiment that went slightly wrong for obscure technical reasons. It was a horrible effort to crush individual wills (and lives) to support the whims of those who spoke for the collective. It was never noble.

And, I’m not opposed to joking about anything. If the Soviet chic clothing is a joke, I think it fails to convey the nature of the joke and merely helps to promote ignorance.

Anybody who thinks that the Soviet Union was a joke should visit Bryan Caplan’s Museum of Communism.

UPDATE: Apparently, Target will no longer stock the stuff because it isn’t selling. Cool.