More than ninety years after her brutal extra judiciary 1919 execution by German officials, the corpse of communist activist Rosa Luxemberg has been identified. Her legacy to humanity must also be recognized despite the right wing political elite's 90 year attempt to torture and dump it in the German river.
What does a corpse from nearly 100 years passed have to do with the present? I wrote a brief note in the wake of the terrible Air France crash over the Atlantic. In it I noted that the flight path was a trade route for colonial slave ships bringing their human captives to work new world plantation. These slavers often threw bodies overboard and Africans themselves often threw themselves overboard. Should their remains be found - several hundred years passed - that would be quite a funeral reckoning for the West.
"Those who do not move do not notice their chains."
So Rosa is but a yesterday, within the lifetimes of some of my own surviving family members. Her work was devoted to the working class revolution that was to replace capitalist exploitation and militarism, which she warned about. She wanted the working class to be the grave digger for the capitalist corpse.
Among her famous contributions was the Spartacus League, which became the German Communist Party, the Red Flag newspaper, leadership in the German revolution not only to get rid of the German emperor, grandson of Queen Victoria, but also to institute a social democracy.
The political elite that control the press and textbooks might have you forget this woman or say that she failed. They will not say they had her captured, tortured with the end of a rifle, shot, and dumped in the river.
A forensic crime scientist could read a lot into the manner of her murder, about what it says about the state of mind of the murderer[s]. Take note: they are our our rulers, and this is the same Social Democrat Party of Angela Merkel, German president.
Like the late communist poet, Audre Lorde, Luxemberg saw through the suggestions of reform. Unfortunately, like Che, she learned that with a revolution, one either wins or dies. Luxemberg was literally an instructor to up and coming social democrats, but when she was seen to take her ideas seriously, and they themselves turned to reformism, her pupils sent death squads to capture her and later slaughter thousands of her activist comrades who agitated for a communist revolution in Germany. Russia had just preceded them and rather than opt for reformism, the revolutionary government remained true to its word and took Russia out of war.
The German left is organizing an official burial ceremony in its "cemetery of Socialists."
"The working classes in every country only learn to fight in the course of their struggles ... Social democracy ... is only the advance guard of the proletariat, a small piece of the total working masses; blood from their blood, and flesh from their flesh. Social democracy seeks and finds the ways, and particular slogans, of the workers' struggle only in the course of the development of this struggle, and gains directions for the way forward through this struggle alone."
For more info: BBC report on discovery of Luxemburg * GARA (Basque) report * Granma (Cuba) Spanish translation of GARA article
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