 Property is theft. Then, over New Year's in Chicago, my friend Saulius was wearing a black shirt with a hammer and sickle in red upon it. Afterwards, I was asked about my opinion regarding his shirt. I was put in a position to be like the man who hassled me at LT Days. I was to say something like, yes, it's totally tasteless for Saulius to wear that shirt, considering what "those people" did to "my people." I, of course, didn't. But I didn't like the reasons I gave. It's not that they were weak, but they didn't properly engage in the actual horrors of Stalinism. I maintain, as I did, that much of what we take for granted today was won by people fighting and organizing under the red star, but that's still evading the terror, etc., of Stalin's regime. But there's something else that's also important, coming out of the shirt, which is the rehabilitation of the USSR brand coupled with its abstraction to the level of taboo—such that the hammer and sickle begins to take a place interchangeably with the swastika, as diametric symbols of totalitarianism, opposing poles of evil and extremism. The problem is, though, that that tabooing is not only wrong and misguided, it's an invitation to political danger. In asserting that Saulius's walking around a bunch of diaspora Lithuanians with a shirt featuring a hammer and sickle is equivalent to, say, dressing as Hitler and going to a synagogue, the asserter is engaging in a fascist project of recuperation, in which communists are slandered at the cost of covertly supporting a new fascism. Below, I flesh this out with the help of an article by Žižek.
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Lietuvos Rytas 
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