Sometimes you just have to learn to live with a deplorable double standard.

Show up at a costume party wearing a swastika armband, as Prince Harry did a few years ago, and you will find yourself issuing a public apology the next day. It’s neither funny nor cute to trivialize the symbols of one of the most monstrous tyrannies in history, especially one whose victims died within living memory.

Unless of course the tyranny flew a red flag. Then the sense of revulsion mysteriously disappears.

The craft brewery nearest to my home, for example, sports a yellow hammer and sickle logo on a red background. The hammer and sickle are depicted as wheat, hops and yeast, but the image is unmistakable. It’s the Comrade Brewing Co., after all. And one of its beers is named “Enhanced Interrogation.”

What a hoot, right?

Don’t get me wrong. I like the place, as well as the young owner, a pleasant fellow who chose the brewery’s name, he told me, as a playful expression of camaraderie. His coffee milk stout is especially good, and I wish him every success.

But try to imagine a brewery with wheat, hops and yeast outlining a swastika.

Or a coffee shop with a Gestapo blend for sale, similar to the KGB blend that is sold at a chain of coffee shops around town.

Not quite the same thigh-slappers, are they? The notion of either is inconceivable. And yet the Bolsheviks’ roll call of victims, through terror, massacre, deliberate famine, forced collectivization, and brutal labor camps may rival the Nazi total, even if we assign the bulk of the deaths in Europe in World War II to the Nazi ledger.

Throw in the millions of lives stomped into the dust by Mao Zedong, Pol Pot and others, and it’s not even a close contest.

Yet remember the Mao restaurant in Cherry Creek North a decade ago? We joke at the memory of some monsters while recoiling at the recollection of others.

Maybe the difference has to do with the fact that this country fought a war to end Nazism and helped to liberate its concentration camps. Or maybe it’s because so many Western intellectuals once sympathized with communism — some long after its evils had been exposed — raising uncomfortable questions about their blindness.

Whatever the reasons for the double standard, it’s existed for decades, immune to revelations of Stalinist and Maoist horrors.

This year is the 25th anniversary of the collapse of communism in the Eastern Bloc, triggered by Hungary’s decision to let East German refugees who’d fled to its territory leave for West Germany, followed in November by the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Not long after, the Soviet Union itself began to totter and crumble, in one of the great watersheds of recent history.

In reflecting on this event a few years ago, Ilya Somin of George Mason law school reminded us that “millions of victims of communism are still alive today. They include former Gulag inmates, forced laborers, dissidents subjected to political repression, ethnic minorities such as the Crimean Tatars who were forcibly deported, and many others. With a few exceptions (principally in Eastern Europe), little has been done to recognize the suffering of these victims.”

What Somin wrote remains true today. Moreover, little has been done to bring justice to those who perpetrated the crimes.

Still, you don’t want to make too much of a hammer and sickle on a beer glass. In the broader world, they remain a symbol of oppression, but in this case, maybe the glass is little more than a harmless piece of kitsch.

In any event, rather than merely being annoyed, I took advantage of the double standard and bought one.

E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com. Follow him on Twitter @vcarrollDP