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If the person with the t-shirt is both sympathetic to communism or the Che, and RMS, I can see how it can not be a provocation.

RMS was probably right not to sign it though. I also believe producing a t-shirt with RMS depicted as the Che is not quite right.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005081587056.html

rvnx 991 days ago

There is some soft irony that the t-shirt depicting Stallman supporting "revolution" is made in China and coming from Aliexpress.

https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/1999/04/msg00623.html

DonHopkins 991 days ago

Wow, to add insult to injury, that t-shirt calls RMS an "OS Liberator" as in "Open Source Liberator", not "FS Liberator" as "Free Software Liberator". That would really piss RMS off: he HATES it when you refer to Free Software as Open Source!

On the other (left) hand, I'd definitely buy an ironic t-shirt of ESR as Che labeled "Free Software Liberator" and ask ESR to sign it, just to piss him off and provoke him to threaten to shoot me, like he did to Bruce Perens.

The irony of Eric S Raymond threatening someone else for behaving "like that kind of disruptive asshole in public" is rich -- very rich.

ESR's Death Threat Email to Bruce Perens:

Bruce Perens Dead:

https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/cat/bruce-perens/page/10

Terrorismistic:

https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/archive/terrorismistic

dralley 991 days ago

I assume "OS" in this context actually refers to "operating system"

DonHopkins 991 days ago

Some people call Emacs an Operating System. And "FS" stands for "File System"?

drt5b7j 991 days ago

Of course the person with T-shirt is sympathetic to communism and RMS, but their sympathy to RMS is very superficial. Otherwise they would know that RMS wouldn't approve. So it's option 2 I guess.

Intent matters. It's only a provocation if it's meant to be a provocation.

Otherwise it's mere faux-pas, at worst.

What's more, you don't necessarily know everything about a person. I would not know anything about RMS's political opinions if I had not read his website a bit, I would only know him for his stance on free software.

Biganon 991 days ago

Well first of all I was 15 or 16 at the time, so I guess I didn't give it as much though as you currently do, and besides, Che Guevara is (to me at least) not a symbol of communism first and foremost, but a symbol of a man fighting for his ideas (not saying that's my opinion of him especially nowadays, I'm talking about the symbolic power, especially of the famous photograph we all know).

So... no.

Besides, it was in Europe. Us Europeans do not have the same epidermic reaction to communism that Americans have.

The parts of Europe that lived under communism (so from East Germany eastward) have a much more negative view of communism than Americans for whom it was a theoretical, faraway geopolitical issue, which they never experienced.

Still, around 20 years ago when I was a teen, some edgy kids did wear Che and Marx t-shirts and it was considered cool in some circles. I'd say it is an imitation of the West. As paradoxical as it sounds, since communism is seen as edgy and cool in Western Europe, the kids in Eastern Europe who want to seem in-the-know and up-to-date had to copy it. But it was indirect in this way, it didn't grow out of the Eastern European experience.

orwin 991 days ago

I do not think it's true. It's wishful thinking at best, but sadly (or not, depending on your views), Eastern Europe is going through an identity crisis right now, and at least in Romania/Ukraine/Russia pré invasion (don't know about other countries), you could see a lot of misery and a lot of people yearning for the 'good old days', even people who weren't alive back then. I'd say it's half 50+, half young people, mostly poor people.

I'm Hungarian BTW. And you seem to misunderstand me. I'm not saying that teens yearn for Kádár or much less Rákosi. I'm saying that the Che t shirt and the rest of the "Western teen rebel starter pack" are parts of a cool identity, it's not associated in their minds with historical Hungarian communism that actually happened.

It is a continuation of a historic West-imitation that's as old as taking on Roman Catholicism or adopting the Renaissance in Matthias Corvinus' court.

Hungarians in the 80s didn't long for some different philosophical organization of society. They wanted the cool Western things, good home appliances, higher salaries, vacations abroad, jeans, shoes, porn magazines, Western pop rock punk music, Coca Cola, McDonald's etc.

So shortly after the change of system in 1989 edgier kids also started to adopt the teen rebel fashion including Che. Just like there were a few goths and emo kids in every class later on. And today it's kpop and whatever is trending on tiktok.

Western Kids larp communism so eastern kids larp the larp. Its not unlike importing Buddhism and mindfulness from California. People adopt it because it is cool in the West and adopt the western interpretation of it.

Imagine if a hip Indian tech worker in Bangalore adopts Californian Buddhism. It would not be because of the local history of Buddhism, but the coolness factor put on it by Silicon Valley. It's like when pizza was backimported to all of Italy, after it got popular in America, even though it was a much more local thing in a small part of Italy before.

orwin 991 days ago

Ouch, yeah in Hungary I can understand pro-communist people should be rare. That said, communist occupation depending on the local party, could be just that, an occupation. My mother hosted multiple georgian/Kazakh asylum seekers over the years, and Georgian in particular were rather sad of the status quo change for obvious reasons. Also, I've met unironical pro-Stalin Russians/Romanian (Ceaușescu rather than Stalin, but you know...). It's like seeing pro-hitler guys, weird and fascinating. Each ex-ussr country had its own communist government, quota and laws, and sentiment about it varies. In Hungary, Ukraine and Poland, I guess rural area should be very anti-communist. In rural areas with less agriculture, it seems to me it's the opposite (places I hike through in the Caucasus kept the image, and sometimes titles and names).

Not saying it was good or anything, it was a terribly autocratic regime without self-determination and liberty, and i'm sure 99% are better without it, whatever their feelings are. I'm just saying that the sentiments about it are more complex than you seem to say. Anecdata is only worth that much, and in topics so close to personal feelings, it's worth even less. And you seems to essentialize your opponents too much.

tekla 991 days ago

I had grandparents who lived under Communism.

They would had GLADLY spit on the graves of every Communist they came across. Killed so many members of my family.

kortilla 991 days ago

Hitler was a man fighting for his ideas as well. If you ignore the ideas it’s pretty dumb to get behind someone just because they’re enthusiastic.

You are surprising me. Where do you live? Many Europeans have lived under communism for decades, and repulse it as nothing else.

touisteur 991 days ago

The Communist Party had 2-digits percentage of votes in France until the 90s. We had coalition governments with communist (and green) ministers last time in 2002 I think? And one of the main newspapers, when people still read them, was l'Humanité, clearly further left than the mainstream left (parti socialiste, then).

Hate of communism was just never as rabid 'round here. In 1993 we had one of the mainstream pop songwriters write a love song to it (Rouge) and it had the Red Army Choir singing there and sold a million discs on this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rouge_(Fredericks_Goldman_Jo....

We still have 'revolutionary' communist (troskists, and other variations) like Lutte Ouvrière, la Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire at each presidential election, gathering between 3 and 6% of votes...

Europe is diverse...

It is true that some did not oppose communism, but they were fortunately always a minority. They had a very naive and romantic view, which is easier when you don't get to suffer the oppression personally.

squarefoot 991 days ago

Sentiment about communism changes a lot. We, as western Europeans, haven't been brainwashed with decades of anti-communist propaganda, at least not to the level reached in the US, neither we lived under a communist regime, so we didn't develop extreme views until recent years. A couple decades ago one could find here a good number of right militants among immigrants from the former communist countries. As much as I'm left leaning and heavily hostile to any form of right wing ideology, I honestly can't blame who suffered for example the Ceausescu dictatorship for leaning the other way; it's pretty normal to me. Nowadays however the right wing nationalist ideology is developing support also among citizens of countries who never saw communism in all their existence, but that is the result of a subtle propaganda which I would date back in the early to mid 90s.

On one hand, you have "propaganda" (your words). On the other hand, you have those that lived under it. If the views of those align, there may be more truth to the anti-communist sentiment than plain "propaganda".

MisterBastahrd 991 days ago

I bet if you broke down what they were specifically repulsed by, you'd get a response that aligned more with "we were affected by western sanctions and embargos that crippled our economies and made trade impossible" than "we didn't like communism." The US specifically hated communism because it's harder to extract resources from communists than it is to get it from oligarchs and kleptocrats. Hell, we spent a good part of the 20th century overthrowing democratically elected governments to put those people in charge while our leaders proclaimed how much they loved "freedom" back home.

drt5b7j 991 days ago

> Besides, it was in Europe. Us Europeans do not have the same epidermic reaction to communism that Americans have.

You're just making it worse and worse. I'm also European. I'm guessing you're Western European though? I'm also guessing your country wasn't under soviet occupation for 50 years? Eastern Europeans very much do have a bad allergic reaction to communism, just like Americans, and just like everyone else who came in contact with it. Che was at best a useful idiot.

rvnx 991 days ago

It's true that in Western Europe it's fine to show the communist symbols.

To Westerner, they never saw communism in action, only propaganda.

Which means that kids can proudly wear their capitalistic-made Che Guevara t-shirt at school.

However, in Eastern Europe it's an absolute no, wearing such shirts is worse than the nazi symbols

because it shows support to extreme atrocities in front of people who were victim of them.

Communism refers to at least two separate things, though (in Western Europe).

- a theoretical economic model that is opposed to capitalism

- the atrocious regimes of the 20th century calling themselves communism you are referring to that have vanishingly few things to do with the first.

Vanishingly few people in Western Europe support these atrocious regimes. And therefore, communism the way you are using it. What's more, there's not much propaganda for communism here (I believe there was propaganda in the past, though). The confusion is usually here and people mostly don't see communism with a good eye because of the confusion (or because they are knowledgeable and oppose the theory - which is a better reason to be against it). Now, it's true that we have weaker feelings about it than in the US (and, I guess, the parts of the words that suffered from the atrocious regimes).

(The usual response to this is that theoretical communism invariably leads to these atrocious regimes, but I believe we don't know this - invariably, it seems they've been set up by possibly sadist assholes with huge egos and thirsts for power, we haven't tried without - as well as we don't know if it would work. I don't have any further useful point to make in this discussion so I probably won't engage in it.)

zajio1am 991 days ago

These eastern european regimes implemented alternative economic model opposed to capitalism. Even if we look away from the atrocities / human rights violations and just consider economic reality of communist countries, then the economic model of communist countries caused lower GDP growth rate, falling behind comparable western countries. E.g. in Czechia, after 40 years of communism, we ended with about half of GDP/capita than neighboring Austria, which has comparable GDP/capita before.

I don't think GDP growth is an end in itself. A means, at best. Well-being would be.

Though they failed in that regard too I think.

sdfghswe 991 days ago

Communism refers to at least two separate things: the theory and the reality. That's basically what you just said, right?

No. This is a very bad summary of what I carefully tried to make, that completely misses the point.

I'm sorry I was not clear enough, but I'm afraid I won't be able to express myself better so I'll just leave it at that.

You are free to make this point if you want, just don't make it look like it comes from me because it doesn't.

It is fine in certain circles only. We are many that think it is completely insane, but we acknowledge that we live in a democracy with freedom of opinion.

> However, in Eastern Europe it's an absolute no, wearing such shirts is worse than the nazi symbols

As a Hungarian, this is just not true. The Western view of communism has been imported and the more time goes on, the more the younger generations base their views on what's cool in the West vs what their old and uncool grandparents blabber on about.

With the Internet and media and travel options and exchange semesters etc. the Western European attitude is diffusing into the east as well. It was already cool to wear Che t shirts 20 years ago in Budapest. Though of course Budapest has always been a West oriented cosmopolitan liberal city, so copying the west in this is not so surprising.

orthoxerox 991 days ago

Che shirts - yes, "1956: best year of my life" shirts - not so much.

Sure, because 1956 is quite Hungary-specific. The more our media globalizes (eg TikTok trends in sync all over the world, not even a week delay in the newest fad), the less people relate these things to their local history. People use international cultural references and only see the Hungary-specific local view in school where they are bored anyway.

1956 is also interesting as it became relevant politically again with the war in Ukraine. And it is my impression that many people in Hungary look at this not as something happening in a bordering country but as if trying to see it through Western European/North American eyes. A bit like vampire Transylvania, which might as well be a totally different entity than Erdély. So is "Ukraine whose flag the celebs put on their profile pics" a separate entity from Ukraine, east from Nyíregyháza and Mátészalka, where the cheap cigarettes come from etc. A very different set of connotations.

Similarly, the communism that's cool is mentally compartmentalized away from historic reality like 1956, Rákosi, Kádár etc.

boffinAudio 991 days ago

Che Guevara was responsible for the murder of an awful lot of innocent human beings. That fact is lost on the edge lords who want to worship him as a saviour of mankind. He was far, far from that.

Shekelphile 991 days ago

Gonna go out on a limb here and say that Che almost certainly did not kill anywhere near the same number of 'innocent people' as the overtly fascist south american heads of state from the 1950s-1990s did, namely Bautista, Barrientos, Pinochet, Videla, Stroessner.

boffinAudio 988 days ago

14,000 people executed without trial makes Che a mass murderer, whether you like it or not.

Worship of this mass murderer is repugnant:

“We don’t need proof to execute a man. We only need proof that it’s necessary to execute him.”

“We executed many people by firing squad without knowing if they were fully guilty. At times, the Revolution cannot stop to conduct much investigation.”

“My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood…I’d like to confess, Papa, at that moment I discovered that I really like killing.”

“We must eliminate all newspapers; we cannot make a revolution with free press.”

“We send to Guanahacabibes [i.e., Cuban labor camp] people who have committed crimes against revolutionary morals…it is hard labor…the working conditions are harsh…”

flir 991 days ago

It's funny, I read those Che t-shirts completely differently to the way you do.

What could be more capitalist than remixing a photo of a communist revolutionary and selling it for profit? I see them as ironic, not endorsing, especially in their remixed state.

I guess this just underlines the fact RMS shouldn't have signed the t-shirt - it's just a graphic, so you could make out it means anything.

Shekelphile 991 days ago

How can this be viewed as a provocation, unless your views align with the regimes who people like Che faught against?

Regardless of your views on 'communism' (and I say that as someone who will quickly detest any of those governments at that time in history), they faught against overtly fascist regimes that trampled on all personal freedoms and routinely rounded up dissidents to be summarily executed. RMS 'not endorsing' fighting for personal freedom is an endorsement of the status quo of that era, where governments like Pinochets would literally kidnap dissidents, sedate them, throw them into the cargo holds of 747s and dump them out over the ocean from tens of thousands of feet in the air.