Karl Marx’s grave in Highgate Cemetery, London, has been defaced with anti-Communist graffiti, branding the dead thinker an “architect of genocide”.
Marx intellectual is memorialised with a huge stone plinth in the cemetery, crowned by a huge bust of his head.
An unidentified individual or individuals defaced the plinth with red spraypaint, reading “Memorial to Bolshevik Holocaust”, “66,000,000 DEAD”, “Architect of Genocide, terror + oppression, Mass Murder”, “Ideology of Starving”, and “Doctrine of HATE”.
The German Jewish intellectual played no direct role in the notoriously bloodstained communist revolutions and one-party regimes of the 20th century, dying in England in 1883 — but his writings are regarded by many as having given licence to the methods employed by his later acolytes.
For example, he wrote in 1849 that “there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror”, warning his opponents: “We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror.”
These words were taken very much to heart by Soviet leaders Vladimir Ulyanov (Vladimir Lenin), Lev Bronstein (Leon Trotsky), and Joseph Jugashvili (Joseph Stalin) when they implemented Marx’s plan for a “dictatorship of the proletariat” under a Communist “vanguard” in the former Russian Empire.
The defacing is the second act of vandalism against Marx’s gravesite in a month, with Friends of Highgate Cemetery Trust chief executive Ian Dungavell, having described the first attack on his monument, in which a plaque was damaged with a hammer, as “very upsetting”.
Highgate Cemetery branded the latest incident “Senseless. Stupid. Ignorant.” on social media.
“Whatever you think about Marx’s legacy, this is not the way to make the point,” they added, having denounced the earlier hammer on the foreign Communist’s monument as “no way to treat our heritage”.
Despite his legacy, the controversial thinker remains popular with many Western politicians of the political left and so-called “centre”, including President of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker.