At this point, using that symbol without knowing the meaning is rather benign and driven by social proof and the artistic qualities of the image. It's similar to people wearing Gandhi T-shirts. I once saw a mural of Che alongside Gandhi, Cesar Chavez, and Mother Teresa (once of these things is not like the others).

The fault lies with the members of the leftist* intelligentsia who knew what Che did, but who continued to promote him as a positive symbol of revolution and liberation. It is disturbing, and yes, potentially minorly risky that they are trendsetters. Yet the risk is pretty low, because they are mainly followed out of ignorance. It is a particular sort of leftist consequentialism** promoted by some leftist leaders, intellectuals, and activists that's the real risk.

*Only some people on the left actually support Che as an icon while knowing what he actually did. This sort of attitude is hardly confined to the left.

**Leftists aren't all consequentialists, nor are all consequentialists leftists. It's a particular brand of leftism that I am criticizing.

I know people downvote mind-killers. But is it really a mind-killer to say that Stalin and the Soviet system under him was not clearly better than Hitler?

• Aggression against other Sovereign states in the hopes of territorial gain (sometimes with revanchist justification)
• Confinement relocation and extermination of inconvenient ethnic and ideological groups

Frack considering Stalin was only beat by death from organizing a Pogrom on a massive scale because of his paranoia, and that Atheist Jews no longer where a powerful faction in the Soviet Union circa 1930 to 1950 and that Jews tended to be a bit better off than was appropriate in the age of forced egalitarianism (and disdain for the bourgeois and hunts for kulaks), its not that clear that if say Communists had beaten the Nazis in the struggle for power in Weimar Germany there wouldn't have been a Shoah anyway.

Communism overall has been historically a pretty terrible system.

Pol Pot became leader of Cambodia in mid-1975. During his time in power, Pol Pot imposed a version of agrarian socialism, forcing urban dwellers to relocate to the countryside to work in collective farms and forced labor projects, toward a goal of "restarting civilization" in a "Year Zero". The combined effects of forced labour, malnutrition, poor medical care and executions resulted in the deaths of approximately 21% of the Cambodian population.[5]

Mao's China and North Korea are also data points. The only time Communism was a sort of ok system to live in (NEP period of the Soviet Union, China after Deng, Tito's Yugoslavia) is when it didn't really follow its ideology and allowed some economic freedom. And even then it was clearly totalitarian when it came to intellectual liberty (see the use of psychiatric institutions and sluggish schizophrenia as a diagnosis of dissidents or the constant witch hunt for wreckers and contra-revolutionaries).

If one considers National Socialism to be a kind of Fascism (which I don't think it is, I think its distinct ideologically) then one could also add at this point that its arguable that mellow watered down Fascist regimes actually come out looking better than mellow watered down Communist regimes of the same era (1945-1990).

I give people who claim that those people that their brand of Communism would never turn out like that a fair hearing if they don't seem kooky or clearly irrational, but the same would be true if I ever met a NeoNazi who fit the criteria claiming the same of his political brand. .

I treat the Che guevara T-shirt on a college freshman the same I would treat a child who scribbles swastika graffiti but has no idea what the symbol stands for today. I wouldn't consider it a crime or even blame them for it, but I would try and convey that the he is normalizing symbolism that carries a message he may not endorse.

Do you think a child scribbling a swastika graffiti without knowing why (or even what the symbol is associated with) increases the risk of massively destructive political choices?

I've seen two main groups, socialists who'll have something like that "pyramid of workers holding up the aristocracy" poster because they like the message and don't care about the source*, and people in stereotypically first-against-the-wall jobs who'll have a poster about killing bankers for kitsch value. People who like the style tend to go in for Polish movie posters.

*like, I imagine quite a few less wrongers would have no problem hanging this one on their wall: http://img402.imageshack.us/i/leten.jpg/