Moonbase Alpha Male wrote:I think the thing that people get triggered by, in the heat of the emotion, is some kind of erroneous assumption that by talking about the neutrality of the representative object, somehow we are implying both sides of the underlying issue are necessarily equivalent. Or that somehow, we're saying silly toys are more important than world events. Neither of those would be a fair statement. But "the map is not the territory." Another way to look at it is this. If someone posted somewhere, "Here is a source of photographs that would be useful to anyone writing an article about the Russia Ukraine situation," I doubt John Byng or anyone could take issue with that. We need words, pictures, songs and little plastic heads in order to be able to talk about anything. The content of that talking is up to the speaker and it's somewhere else than here.
I think this is all very true, and very well put. The real world issues are very real and very divisive. Recent events and the horrors of war have made it relatively easy to adopt a black-and-white view of the situation, even if, without being a specialist, I know enough of the region's history to know that things are not entirely clear cut when it comes to the underlying motivations and justifications -- just as is the case with the aftermath of the division of any supra-national empire, be it in South Asia, Africa, the Near East, Central Europe, the Balkans, or most recently the Soviet Union. But, again, these aspects neither change current realities nor belong within the scope of
this space. At the risk of appearing to be suggesting politically charged courses of action, this little piece of molded plastic, while it is an inanimate object,
might become propaganda (of one kind or another) depending on who possesses it and what he or she does with it; but whether one puts it up in a shrine or melts it in a fire, is beyond our purview (and might not belong on this forum ether way). It might also be a valuable addition to one's collection of real-world or historical leaders, good or/and bad, and censoring it might have a negative impact on a collector's ability to enjoy this hobby.