Communist Theme Park Tours Want You to "Feel the Power" of an AK 47

Turning a catastrophe into profit is the hallmark of a civilisation that is increasingly insensitive to the claims of those killed in them. Before me I have a pamphlet advertising Communist Tours in Krakow by so-called "Crazy Guides". Communism there is now nothing but a joke.

This group are not to be confused with Crazy Tours, another bunch of rapacious money grubbing dolts who believe that treating Communism as "crazy","wacky" or "zany" is one way of laughing away this grim era of austerity and repression by getting foreigners to chuckle at it.

The Pamphlet states their Communist Tours are supported by Lonely Planet, Trip Advisor, The Guardian, Reuters. Michelin, Newsweek, The New York Times, TVN, the Financial Times and RMF FM.

In short, by corporate media outlets who, by their own supposed standards and fact they are very much a product of capitalism, really ought to know better when the nature of the tour is revealed and there is no historical context is provided about Nowa Huta in Krakow.

Nor does the Communist Tour mention the era when the Armii Krajowe who had been crushed by both the Nazi's whilst Stalin's Red Army watched over the Wisla and in Krakow AK members rounded up and tortured in the Montelupich Prison.

Now that no longer matters.

Only late "Commie" kitsch is valued for its voyeuristic ability to bring in cash. Any educated individual can learn about the inhumanity, torture and show trials that led to the set up of the Communist system in Poland. Get on Tram 4 and it takes any person there.

Reading a history book like that of Norman Davies will provide the overall picture of the enormity of what was done to Poland in general under Communism and Jan T Malecki's History of Krakow For Everyone tells the story of it imposition in Krakow in particular.

Anne Applebaum, despite he misjudgements about contemporary Russia and Putin's regime as a "Neo-Soviet threat" or as part of a "New Cold War" ( Lucas ), makes the appropriate moral position clear when in her introduction to Gulag: A History she asks

"the lesson could not be clearer:while one symbol of mass murder fills us with horror ( i.e Nazism ),the symbol of another mass murder makes us laugh"

Applebaum perceived this double standard whilst walking across the Karlov Most in Prague where all manner of Soviet paraphenalia was on sale-caps, badges, belt buckles and little pins, the tin Lenin and Brezhnev images that Soviet schoolchildren once pinned to their uniforms.

The explanation for these double standards were well explained.

By the end of Communism the system was seen as a joke and, of course, some dark humour about Brezhnev being "dead from the neck up" after numerous strokes but still put on parade to show "business as usual" seemed to represent a system falling crummily to bits.

The era of James Bond films like For Your Eyes Only ( 1981 ) where the Soviets and Bond's rivalry had become more jovial.But, as Applebaum, suggests, "the passage of time" from the immediate Stalinist period of repression meant few cared or were scared of Brezhnev or General Jaruzelski.

Despite the fact comfortable consumers contrived to ignore events in Poland, they now go to have a jolly jape in a Trabant and chauffered to Nowa Huta to voyeuristically look around a residential area where Solidarity activists in the 1980s were dispersed by ZOMO's batons, tanks and beaten up ( sometimes to death ) in police cells.

Nothing that the Communist Tour repackaging of the so-called "Communist experience" does could not be done by knowing that Poles eat pickled cucumbers ( ogorek ), drink vodka and that some places can be found that look like "authentic" communist flats.

However beyond that patronising sell out, surely the crassest part of the Communist Tours "Other Stuff" that you can do for "fun" is go on a Kalashnikov Shooting outing which is advertised thus-

"The Famous AK47 is the most popular assault rifle, used by all the Soviet storm troopers to Afghan shepherds-and now it's your turn to feel the power".

Now anybody with a decent memory will know that the Cold War saw the mass export, often without money being received by the USSR and Communist China, of AK-47s to pro-communist countries and guerilla groups such as the Viet Cong.

The AK design was spread to over 55 national armies and dozens of paramilitary groups, many of which would not hesitate to shoot decadent Westerners dead with their AK 47s, whilst on Communist Tours, thus getting them to feel " the power" of this weapon.

The AK is a symbol included in the flag of Mozambique and its coat of arms, a reminder that the country's leaders gained power in large part through the effective use of their AK-47s and retain power through state sanctioned terror and violence.

It is also found in the coat of arms of Zimbabwe, where the mass murdering Mugabe is in control, the flag of Hezbollah, and the logo of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. It was an iconic emblem for the RAF terrorists in West Germany in the 1970s too.

Perhaps those idiots who want to "feel the power" of a Kalashnikov can go on an "authentic" tour of Afghanistan just like drugged up and terrified Soviet conscripts had to in that graveyard of Empires called Afghanistan.

They might then get a real adrenalin rush when they "feel the power" of being fired at by an AK 47.