On my own time, I read and finished Anne Applebaum's [i]Gulag[/i]. [i]Gulag[/i] won a Pulitzer, and for good reason. It is a shocking and insightful piece of literature. At the start of the book, Applebaum brought up one point that really stuck with me. During one of her many visits to the post-collapse USSR, she noticed an odd phenomena. Small Soviet symbols, trinkets, flags, etc., were popular souvenirs. It wasn't strange that people owned these things. It was strange that they [i]displayed[/i] them. Contrast this with the collapse of the Third Reich. We know that people took souvenirs. There are countless photographs of smiling American soldiers holding their captured German trophies. However, these symbols became social taboo. They're [i]still[/i] taboo. Not many things will damage your public image more than casually, non-ironically displaying a swastika. These symbols are taboo for a reason. It's difficult to deny the heinous crimes of the Reich. Very few people want to be associated with the kind of dehumanization that the symbols represent. Why are Soviet symbols tolerated, then? I won't deny that the Soviet flag carries some shock value. The press spent some time covering the Trump protest that was marked by a single protester carrying a Soviet flag. However, USSR symbols are still more acceptable than their German counterparts. Why is that? The atrocities of the USSR are comparable (I argue even worse) to the crimes of the Reich. High estimates put the blood of about 12 million people on the hands of the National Socialist regime. Looking at the USSR, the numbers are more grim. Up to 62 million "unnatural deaths" recorded over the totality of the regime. Up to 34 million of those came from Stalin's rule alone. The Gulag was just as savage as any German death camp. Applebaum describes it well. How did the Soviets beat out the National Socialists in the culture war? Granted, both forces eventually crumbled. However, the Soviet legacy is more enduring. Mussolini's fascism is almost universally reviled. Why, then, does Marxism get a free pass in Western nations? Academia takes it seriously - more and more every year, in fact. Despite deaths from starvation reaching into the millions (under [i]multiple[/i] leaders) during the march to Marxism, it's somehow still viewed as more than a historical disgrace. [b]TL;DR[/b] - Soviet symbols carry shock value, but they aren't taboo. Given the amount of people that Marxism has killed, I'm unsure why this is the case. Pulitzer-prize winner Anne Applebaum observes this in her novel [i]Gulag[/i], and I think her observation is intriguing. Why isn't Marxism globally recognized as a disgrace? As always, I encourage anyone interested in topics like this to join the group Liberty Hub. No admin approval is required.