To the editor:

Che Guevara and “hammer and sickle” T-shirts appear all over town, apparently for giggles – though some may be serious. All ought to read Ray Chao’s account in Monday’s Journal-World of the cruel wickedness of Che’s hero, Mao Zedong.

As Eileen Roddy reported, the Chao family was brutally beaten and driven from its home in China simply because Ray’s parents were educated people. Che and Mao used the same rhetoric and proclaimed the same paradise, all the while using murder, torture and exile as tools to control people and hold on to their own power.

No, a T-shirt with Hitler’s picture or a swastika doesn’t make me giggle. This “clothing celebration” of communist liars and murderers doesn’t either.

David Upchurch,

Lawrence