I know two similar cases: Alexander Daniloff’s Born in the USSR tarot and the Sacred Sites Tarot by Lo Scarabeo.
Born in the USSR has a very similar approach, it shows artwork that is inspired by Soviet propaganda posters. It is a reflection on the Soviet dreams of a bright communist future. Daniloff made his intentions quite clear in two brief statements:
Represents the human enthusiasm for the construction of a better future, a future so far away not to leave anything for the present, that turns into a nightmare.
"Born in the USSR" is a look at the past of my country many years later. The past quite sticky, still following us continuing to offer the splendor of the future for to rob us the present. I do not exclude that the cards can be used to do divination, but I warn you - all illusions and false belief.
The reactions to his deck have been all positive.
The Sacred Sites has one card in particular that always troubled me, the 10 of swords showing the Wewelsburg in Germany, a place where Heinrich Himmler and other top SS people practiced their personal Nazi style mysticism. It also shows a black sun (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sun_(occult_symbol) ). Nazis and a neo fascist paganism symbol as a “sacred” site? What?? I found it weird that I never found any discussion about this card.
But when I pulled out the deck today and looked at the LWB I learned that the deck offers a reflection on all kinds of familiar and odd spirituality, negative and positive. It doesn’t offer spirituality on itself though. Consequently there are no indications whatsoever about how to read with this deck. So I finally came to peace with the deck.
Applying the same standards to the Cultural Revolution Tarot would have allowed me to see this as another reflection on a mindset that had great power at the time but ended as a nightmare as we know today, had it been for the first half of James Battersby’s statement (linked by Debra) only:
There are a lot of cute cards in the deck, with children playing with pandas or flying in rocket ships and all kinds of funny scenarios. Then there is the harsher side to the deck with the five of pentacles showing more than just spiritual starvation, but the very real true life event of the famine which killed millions during the cultural revolution.
So far this sounds like a perfectly valid explanation. The last bit of course makes the whole thing sound more like a flippant and naïve glorification of the whole period:
Some of the images might seem Anti-American, in particular, Strength, The Devil and the Ten of Swords, but i can assure that both my partner and i are not Anti-American. Instead we are keeping with the theme of the Cultural Revolution and this was really about the Chinese trying to remove Imperialism (which also included Britain and Japan).
Some clarification by the artists would be needed here before I would feel able to make a final judgement.