So the always in-your-face Daniel Hannan, a Member of the European Parliament for South East England, deconstructs the latest in “Can’t we all get along” siss-boom-bahery. Namely, this:

Note the symbol at the peak. Yes, the old hammer and sickle, which we spontaneously associate with diversity, liberty, and freedom of thought, speech, and religion.

For three generations, the badge of the Soviet revolution meant poverty, slavery, torture and death. It adorned the caps of the chekas who came in the night. It opened and closed the propaganda films which hid the famines. It advertised the people’s courts where victims of purges and show-trials were condemned. It fluttered over the re-education camps and the gulags. For hundreds of millions of Europeans, it was a symbol of foreign occupation. Hungary, Lithuania and Moldova have banned its use, and various  former communist countries want it to be treated in the same way as Nazi insignia.

Yet here it sits on a poster in the European Commission, advertising the moral deafness of its author (I hope that’s what it is, rather than lingering nostalgia). The Bolshevist sigil celebrates the ideology which, in strict numerical terms, must be reckoned the most murderous ever devised by our species. That it can be passed unremarked day after day in the corridors of Brussels is nauseating.

Come on, Dan — stop pulling your punches. Tell us how you really feel.

Guaranteed, if the hammer and sickle should find sufficient converts again, for whom the twentieth century is one gaping memory hole, Europe will no longer be 4all, but merely 4lorn, 4saken, and then 4gotten.

Oh, and in case you need a reminder of what Hannan is capable of when it comes to speaking truth to power, here’s a video of his giving it to Gordon Brown, his then prime minister. “The truth, prime minister, is that you have run out of our money.”