DON'T BOTHER, THEY'RE ALREADY HERE

Orrin Judd writes that Berlin is considering resurrecting their 60 foot high statue of Lenin.

Ironically, there’s already a statue on Lenin in the US. A 30-foot high representation of Vladimir Ilyich is displayed prominently on a street in Fremont, a suburb of Seattle.

No really–Seattle has a statue devoted to one of the most evil, destructive men in history–and they’re proud of it! When we were there during Memorial Day weekend, we stopped by the Guitar Center that was near our hotel, both so I could explore, and to kill time. I bought a few CD-ROMs of Acid Loops, and the clerk, a bearded, but otherwise surprisingly clean-cut fellow in his mid-30s or so noticed my out-of-state credit card and asked what we were planning to see that day. My wife mentioned she’d like to see the canals and locks in Fremont (just across the bridge from our hotel), and the clerk said, “yeah, they have a state of Karl Marx there. It’s really cool!”

He didn’t notice the death ray I was projecting. I had to bite my tongue to not say, “nahh, I’d like to check out the Saddam Hussein and Adolf Hitler statues first. Then I’ll check out Marx.” Instead I just took my purchase and waited to get in the car before blowing a gasket.

It’s actually not Marx, it’s Lenin, which I discovered after a little Googling. But either way, it’s been frequently noted that a huge mistake on our part was not holding Nuremberg-like trials for the apparatchiks and party members of the Soviet Union after the Cold War ended. It might have caused more people to think before erecting statues to mass murderers–especially in the US.