Venice has the Piazza San Marco, Paris has the Eiffel Tower, and now Prague has the Charles Bridge: wide and pedestrianized, blackened with age—and suffused with the spirit of capitalism. There are buskers and hustlers along the bridge, and, every fifteen feet or so, someone is selling very much what one would expect to find for sale in such a postcard-perfect spot. Paintings of appropriately pretty streets are on display, along with bargain jewelry, and “Prague” key chains. Soviet military paraphernalia is for sale, too: caps, badges, belt buckles, and little pins, tin Lenin and Brezhnev images of the sort which Soviet school children and Soviet veterans once wore on their respective uniforms.
It is a familiar sight now, but still an odd one. After all, most of the people buying these things are Americans and West Europeans, people who would be sickened by the thought of wearing a swastika. They see nothing wrong, on the other hand, with sporting the hammer and sickle on a T-shirt or a hat. It is a minor observation—but sometimes it is through just such minor observations that a cultural mood is best observed. Here, the lesson could not be more clear: while the symbol of one mass murder fills us with horror, the symbol of another mass murder makes us laugh.
There are other ways, both minor and less so, in which the same phenomenon can be observed. Look, for example, at the use of the term “collaborator” in
