[pjc50]

The bar at King's College Cambridge used to have a hammer-and-sicle on the wall for years. If the authorities removed it the students would repaint it. All good clean fun.

It eventually got taken down for good after increasing numbers of students from eastern Europe came to the college and pointed out that, to them, it was just as oppressive a symbol as the swastika.

Really this all should have got sorted out around the time of the Spanish Civil War; actual capital-C Communism is too tied up in Stalinism to be trusted any more.

Of course, plenty of people are happy to label their enemies as "communist" for supporting basic reasonable non-Stalinist things like universal healthcare. So the fact that someone is labelled a communist by their enemies, especially in America, means almost nothing.