It’s become an early 21st-century commonplace that the Right has won the economic argument, the liberal Left the cultural one. And, I would add, the revolutionary Left has, almost posthumously, won the argument over T-shirts, to the extent that their favourite hard men have entered mainstream iconography.

Last weekend, at my local farmers’ market, I saw a T-shirt for sale bearing the faces of Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Castro. (Strange for a farmers’ market, admittedly. You can buy the usual humorously overpriced tomatoes and bottles of olive oil, too.) Paint the Town Red said the legend. And under the faces, in smaller text, Tough Dictator Finish. A bargain at £25.

But why, I thought, mentally totting up the misery these men have caused, stop at just the image? Why not feature a precis of each dictator’s personal death toll? Or maybe you could print an individual rollcall of repression and mass murder on the back of the shirt, as bands do with their tour dates? Obviously, it’d have to be a very large T-shirt.

Stalin: caused the Ukrainian famine, forcibly displaced entire peoples, including the Chechens, conducted the Great Purge, sent hundreds of thousands to the Gulag camps, ordered the Katyn massacre, signed an alliance with Hitler, weakened the Red Army by killing its officer corps, had thousands of returning Soviet PoWs executed for treason, antiSemitic, laughed at son’s suicide attempt, had most of own family murdered.

Mao: brought in killing quotas during land reform in the early Fifties, one landlord shot per village, starved millions during the so-called Great Leap Forward, unleashed the Red Guards to torture city-dwellers, spectacle-wearers etc during the Cultural Revolution, said “China is such a populous nation it is not as if we cannot do without a few people”.

Lenin: set up the Cheka, instigated the Red Terror, and thus the deaths of perhaps a quarter of a million opponents, signed off mass executions of former tsarist ministers and officials, issued the infamous hanging order for the exemplary execution of kulaks during the civil war, possibly syphilitic, no sense of humour, ghastly prose style.

Castro: political executions since the revolution running at somewhere between 5,000 and 12,000, not counting the thousands drowned trying to flee, including children swept into the sea with powerhoses by the Cuban Navy, country held down by the normal paraphernalia of a police state, rigged elections, lies, torture, toe-curling personality cult (Fidel, El Comandante etc).

If someone wore a T-shirt celebrating Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and, say, Somoza, or Pinochet, they would, one hopes and trusts, before long receive a firm instruction to desist or face the consequences. I can see no reason why anyone parading this equally gruesome quartet should be treated any less robustly, and at least with all that detail on the shirt, they might realise why.

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