Poland, a serious country, is looking hard at treating Leftist and Rightist extremism equally, mulling over a new draft law which would ban the production of fascist and totalitarian propaganda so that it includes clothing and anything else that could carry an image related to an authoritarian system.

So, farewell then, t-shirts glorifying cool dude Marxist killers?

My guess is that it will fizzle out and be largely unenforceable and/or unenforced if it does creep on to the statute books.

Plus Poland could become a Loony Left magnet in Europe attracting useful idiots from all over the place to march through Warsaw wearing Communist t-shirts just to show how really clever they are. Does anyone in Poland need the traffic held up for that rubbish?

What does totalitarian propaganda look like? Every Marxist-leaning tome in every University in Poland? Could be quite a tall bonfire.

That said, the underlying and correct motivation here is to confirm the core philosphical proposition that the Two Vampires of Nazism and Communism deserve to be looked at as twin equivalent evils, a point hotly contested by today’s Left-leaning intellectuals.

The Telegraph piece adds this:

… the Polish government hopes that tighter legislation will crack down on the trade in materials bearing Nazi emblems.

Markets in western Poland have profited from German neo-fascists buying Third-Reich memorabilia such as swastikas and pictures of Hitler that are prohibited under their own country’s stringent regulations.

It is pretty rare if not almost impossible to come across Nazi or Communist ‘memorabilia’ in British junk-shops and car-boot sales, although kitschy Soviet Communist iconography is found in the top-end shopping arcades around Piccadilly in London, selling for high prices. A measure of just how successful the Red Vampire has been in numbing modern sensibility to evil and making mass murderer badges an elite fashion accessory.

On the other hand, in Poland the flea-markets I visited all had small stalls selling rusty relics of WW2, Nazi and Soviet badges and rusty revolvers and scraps of uniforms alike.

Why? Because of the sheer volume of this material found lying around in fields and old attics as a result of Poland’s devastating WW2 and subsequent experience following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

So Poland has good reasons to insist that on the level of principle these two ideologies need to be equally reviled. The fact that in practice it is unlikely to happen is vexing but less significant.

Of course Tim Worstall applauds the general idea behind the Polish initiative but objects in principle to banning things. Maybe this is the best place to leave it?