"Maybe a certain naïveté is not always bad if it prevents over-interpretation, so you don’t always dissect things in detail and suspect everything."

Said Wolfram Leibe, the mayor of Trier, Germany, where Karl Marx was born. He's talking about the town's acceptance of a gift, a 18-...

Said Wolfram Leibe, the mayor of Trier, Germany, where Karl Marx was born. He's talking about the town's acceptance of a gift, a 18-foot-tall statue of Karl Marx, to be erected in a public square, on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of Marx's birth. Leibe asserts that “It was a gesture of friendship and has nothing to do with ideology,” and yet he recounts the statement of the sculptor, Wei Weishan, on seeing the square: "This square is too small and cramped. Karl Marx was a great man and we can’t put him in a small square." 

The NYT reports, noting that "[m]illions* died in Communist political campaigns after the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, and in a famine precipitated by an effort to collectivize agriculture in the late 1950s," but "Marx is officially revered in China."

The article also quotes Chang Ping, "a Chinese journalist who has lived in exile in Germany since 2011":

“This is not just a question of commemorating a historical figure. It’s also a question of how to deal with the Chinese government’s ambition to shine on the world stage. I think that I can see better than ordinary Germans the hideous grin behind the statue that is to be erected in Trier, and the threat it represents to the civilized political cultures of the world.”

And Geremie Barmé, "a founder of the Wairarapa Academy for New Sinology in New Zealand, the sculpture is an expression of party power":

“The Germans’ suggestion was for an early, humane, humanist Marx, a source for change in China — not the heroic, sclerotic, formalized Marx used for party purposes that Wu offered. Since we’re the only one that’s been successful and adapted Marxism to state leadership, we’ll tell you what it’s about.”

Meanwhile, in America, we're not putting up statues of heroes — revered or rejected — we're taking them down.

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* "Millions" is not an adequate way to express what is something more like 45 or 65 million.