Celebrating Karl Marx’s Birthday?

By: Daniel Nardini

Lawndale News Chicago's Bilingual Newspaper - HealthCan anyone in Germany imagine a statue of Adolf Hitler ever being put up anywhere in that country? Of course not! Any mention of Hitler in a positive light or any glorification of Nazism and the Third Reich are completely illegal under German law, and denying the Holocaust will earn a person up to two years in prison. An 89-year old lady who did deny the Holocaust found that out the hard way—Ursula Haverbeck denied that six million Jews were killed and so was sentenced to two years in prison. Apparently being 89 years old and not in the best mental health is still considered no excuse. Yes, even the display of the swastika and the old Nazi flag is equally a crime in Germany. Only a few years ago did the German government even permit Adolf Hitler’s book Mein Kampf to be published in Germany itself.

Given all this, it is disconcerting that the German government would allow not only an 18-foot statue but also all of the written works of Karl Marx to be published in Marx’s native birthplace of Trier, Germany. Marx, along with his colleague Frederick Engels, was the founder of modern Communism. As we all know, Communism is the ideology that has helped create the most brutal, the most savage, and the most evil and vial regimes in history. Without Marx there would have been no sadistic Communist rulers like Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Kim Il-sung, Fidel Castro, Haile Mengistu Miriam, ad nauseum. In total, the Communist regimes have killed 100 million people, destroyed or diminished the lives of hundreds of millions more, and affected negatively the lives of over one billion people in the course of less than 100 years.

The Chinese government gave Trier an 18-foot statue of Karl Marx—Trier’s native son. Born on May 5, 1818, Karl Marx lived in Trier until he was 17 years old. His writings would create for a fundamental ideological philosophy that would call for vicious class struggle, world revolution, and the creation of regimes that would kill tens of millions of people in the most horrifying ways possible. In too many ways if it had not been for Karl Marx, opposite ideologies like Fascism and National Socialism (Nazism) would never have arisen. Ironically, many residents of Trier celebrated the birth of their native son. Extravaganzas, special sales of Marx’s books as well as all kinds of kitschy statues and other items of Marx are being sold to mark the 200th anniversary of his birth. For so many Germans who were born and raised in the former Communist East Germany, this is a slap in the face. The very Communist ideology that Marx had spawned created their inhuman misery. It is estimated that as many as 70,000 East Germans had been killed by the East German government of the time, and Lord knows how many families were affected by that regime. Yet it does not seem to matter to many of the residents of Trier that this all happened, and the fact that Marx is the architect of this red holocaust. There are no German laws against socialism, no prohibitions against talking about Karl Marx or about how “great” socialism is, and certainly no problem glorifying Karl Marx. I guess that the lesson of condemning one tyrant only to praise another has been lost on too many Germans (and Americans too for that matter. These days socialism has become highly popular among American millennials).

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