FUCK COMMUNISM! Kurt Vonnegut on the significance of this classic poster from The Realist: …in 1963 [Paul Krassner] created a miracle of compressed intelligence nearly as admirable for potent simplicity, in my opinion, as Einstein’s e=mc2. With the Vietnam War going on, and with its critics discounted and scorned by the government and the mass media, Krassner put on sale a red, white and blue poster that said FUCK COMMUNISM. At the beginning of the 1960s, FUCK was believed to be so full of bad magic as to be unprintable. In the most humanely influential American novel of this half century, “The Catcher in the Rye,” Holden Caulfield, it will be remembered, was shocked to see that word on a subway-station wall. He wondered what seeing it might do to the mind of a little kid. COMMUNISM was to millions the name of the most loathsome evil imaginable. To call an American a communist was like calling somebody a Jew in Nazi Germany. By having FUCK and COMMUNISM fight it out in a single sentence, Krassner wasn’t merely being funny as heck. He was demonstrating how preposterous it was for so many people to be responding to both words with such cockamamie Pavlovian fear and alarm.
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FUCK COMMUNISM!

Kurt Vonnegut on the significance of this classic poster from The Realist:

…in 1963 [Paul Krassner] created a miracle of compressed intelligence nearly as admirable for potent simplicity, in my opinion, as Einstein’s e=mc2. With the Vietnam War going on, and with its critics discounted and scorned by the government and the mass media, Krassner put on sale a red, white and blue poster that said FUCK COMMUNISM.

At the beginning of the 1960s, FUCK was believed to be so full of bad magic as to be unprintable. In the most humanely influential American novel of this half century, “The Catcher in the Rye,” Holden Caulfield, it will be remembered, was shocked to see that word on a subway-station wall. He wondered what seeing it might do to the mind of a little kid. COMMUNISM was to millions the name of the most loathsome evil imaginable. To call an American a communist was like calling somebody a Jew in Nazi Germany. By having FUCK and COMMUNISM fight it out in a single sentence, Krassner wasn’t merely being funny as heck. He was demonstrating how preposterous it was for so many people to be responding to both words with such cockamamie Pavlovian fear and alarm.

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  1. fuck-skippy reblogged this from babylonfalling and added:
    I own this t shirt. Thanks Breanna!
  2. ennui-elan reblogged this from babylonfalling and added:
    //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Krassner
  3. joshuaspace reblogged this from criminalwisdom
  4. liberals-are-so-strange reblogged this from meinschatten
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  8. continentalop reblogged this from criminalwisdom and added:
    Language, as always, is fascinating. Except just here. Not fascinating just here.
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  11. ecgrap2081 reblogged this from criminalwisdom and added:
    Vonnegut is a sick c*nt — and * is a drawing of an asshole…. Brrrappp….
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