Marx is dead.

The other day, I was making my way through campus, when I saw some of those hopeless, self-styled Trotzkyists passing out leaflets to everyone who could not run away fast enough.
Of course, I got one as well, but this once, I stopped and checked out the other leaflets and books they had lying around on their stand. As was to be expected, everything was about Marx, Lenin, Trotzky, Rosa Luxemburg and all those other people who have been dead for half a century or -sometimes much- more. As dead as Communism should be.
I really felt like arguing with those people, especially because their claims actually insulted my intelligence, but alas, I was already late for class. Specifically, they were claiming that the United States of America are responsible for the recent war between Russia and Georgia, and that it is only the latest coup in American imperialism
Seriously, I'm certainly not an advocate of W's foreign policy, but there' already so much shit you can attribute to it that you don't need to make up shit like that. Some of the arguments these would-be revolutionaries made are so ludicrous that I really can't find any words for them: For example, they justified Russia's invasion of South Ossetia and Georgia by claiming that these territories had been under Russian control for centuries.

Let that sink in for a moment.

What they are, quite literally, saying is that Russian imperialism is OK, American imperialism isn't. A territory having been under foreign control for centuries, its political opposition deported to prison camps in Siberia, its resources exploited with no revenue and its cultural life quite simply killed is OK if the foreign power is Russian and therefore any Communist's darling, but if a nation so much as attempts to ally itself with the democratic and free powers of the west, it's not OK because... it's just so fucking popular to be anti-American?

You would think that Germans, of all people, and Berliners, of all Germans, would know the difference between Democracy and Communism, which is essentially the difference between freedom and slavery.
I don't want to claim that what Marx thought up is what Communism eventually turned out to be. That would be injustice towards one of the world's greatest and most important philosophers. But history proved that Marx, like all good things, should be consumed in little doses. A little bit of Socialism is an enrichment for any democratic society. But whenever anybody tried to install Communism as a form of government, it failed bitterly, becoming an oppressive, inhumane dictature. I probably wouldn't even attribute it to the system and its ideology if it only happened once or twice- but it happened every single fucking time somebody tried it, essentially proving that it does not work.
It certainly was worth a shot, but now that we have seen how dramatically it failed, let's try something else, or let's just stick with what we have. Seriously, democracy isn't all that bad if it allows me to waste my Sundays writing my worthless ideas on an even more worthless online blog...