This piece on political symbols raises a good question: Why is wearing the hammer-and-sickle considered to be nothing more than post-Communist chic, while wearing the swastika is (quite correctly) deemed unacceptable? It can't be just a matter of numbers: The Nazis killed about 6 million; the Communists murdered 20 million.

Fascism and all its permutations are repugnant. But so is Communism. Could the gentler treatment of the latter have any relation to the fact that so many well-known "intellectuals" and others were Communist sympathizers, once upon a time?