Daniel Mitchell: Why Is the EU Celebrating Karl Marx's Birthday?

Celebrating the 200th birthday of Karl Marx is a slap in the face of millions of people killed by communism. The evil ideology known as communism left a track record of unimaginable horror. Experts estimate that 100 million people were killed by Marxist regimes. Some were murdered. Other starved to death because of the pervasive economic failure of communism.

Yet there are dupes and apologists who overlook all this death and misery. One of them is Jean-Claude Juncker, the President of the European Commission. A few days from now, this über-bureaucrat will help celebrate the 200th birthday of Karl Marx.

The European Commission President will travel to Trier, Germany, where he will give a speech to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Marx’s birth. …The Commission President will give a speech at the opening ceremony of the Karl Marx exhibition in the city. …The chief eurocrat’s trip has received critics, who have suggested the 63-year-old forgetting how Marx’s “warped ideology” led to millions of deaths across the world. Ukip MEP and the party’s former leader Paul Nuttall said: “It is appalling that Jean-Claude Juncker feels it necessary to commemorate a man whose ideology—Marxism/Communism—led to more than 100 million deaths. …Conservative MP Daniel Kawczynski…, who as a seven-year-old boy fled to Britain with his family from the Communist regime in Poland, said Mr. Juncker should reject any invitations to commemorate the event. He said: “I think it’s in very poor taste we have to remember that Marxism was all about ripping power and individual means away from people and giving to State. “Marxism led to the killing of millions around the world as it allowed a small band of fanatics to suppress the people we must learn the lessons from this and share with our children.”

How disgusting.

And let’s not forget that communism is still claiming victims in places such as  Cuba and North Korea.

Here’s the part of the story that caused my jaw to drop.

A commission spokeswoman defending Mr. Juncker’s visit… She said: …“I think that nobody can deny that Karl Marx is a figure who shaped history in one way or the other."

In that case, why not celebrate Hitler’s birthday as well?

Writing for the Atlas Society, Alan Charles Kors expresses dismay that communism does not receive the same treatment as its sister ideology of National Socialism.

No cause, ever, in the history of all mankind, has produced more cold-blooded tyrants, more slaughtered innocents, and more orphans than socialism with power. It surpassed, exponentially, all other systems of production in turning out the dead. The bodies are all around us. And here is the problem: No one talks about them. No one honors them. No one does penance for them. No one has committed suicide for having been an apologist for those who did this to them… 

The West accepts an epochal, monstrous, unforgivable double standard. We rehearse the crimes of Nazism almost daily, we teach them to our children as ultimate historical and moral lessons, and we bear witness to every victim. We are, with so few exceptions, almost silent on the crimes of Communism. So the bodies lie among us, unnoticed, everywhere. We insisted upon “de-Nazification,” and we excoriate those who tempered it in the name of new or emerging political realities. 

There never has been and never will be a similar “de-Communization,” although the slaughter of innocents was exponentially greater, and although those who signed the orders and ran the camps remain. In the case of Nazism, we hunt down ninety-year-old men because “the bones cry out” for justice. In the case of Communism, we insisted on “no witch hunts”… 

The Communist holocaust should have brought forth a flowering of Western art, and witness, and sympathy. It should have called forth an overflowing ocean of tears. Instead, it has called forth a glacier of indifference. Kids who in the 1960s had portraits of Mao and Che on their college walls — the moral equivalent of having hung portraits of Hitler, Goebbels, or Horst Wessel in one’s dorm — now teach our children about the moral superiority of their political generation. Every historical textbook lingers on the crimes of Nazism, seeks their root causes, and announces a lesson that should be learned. Everyone knows the number “six million.” By contrast, it is always “the mistakes” of Communism or of Stalinism (repeated, by mistake, again, and again, and again). Ask college freshmen how many died under Stalin’s regime, and they will answer, even now, “Thousands? Tens of thousands?”

Of course, some of these kids are probably wearing t-shirts celebrating Che Guevara, so it goes without saying that they are ignorant.

Or, if they actually know Che’s track record, the kids are immoral punks.

In any event, Jean-Claude Juncker should know better. Sounds like he wants his name to be added to the biggest-clown-in-Brussels contest.

P.S. I’m embarrassed to admit that some economists were apologists for communism.

P.P.S. There’s a very small silver lining to the dark cloud of communism. You can click here, here, here, and here to enjoy some clever anti-communism humor.

This article was originally published on FEE.org and reprinted from International Liberty HERE. 

Daniel J. Mitchell is a Washington-based economist who specializes in fiscal policy, particularly tax reform, international tax competition, and the economic burden of government spending.