Hey Greens, You Sure You Want to Deface This Particular Statue?

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While finding photos to illustrate a post about inventor Siegfried Marcus, I found this photo on Flickr of one of the memorials to Marcus in Vienna. The photographer had tagged it with the caption, “Siegfried is made an example of”. I think it’s safe to assume from the green peace symbol that the vandals who defaced the monument to Marcus were environmentalists eager to show their hatred for Marcus and the automobile. You see, at the base of the plinth is “Inventor of Gasoline Automobiles 1864″. Siegfried Marcus was the first person on record to power a vehicle with a gasoline engine. I suppose I could snark about the hypocrisy inherent in the vandals using ozone depleting or carbon dioxide increasing propellents in their can of green spray paint but there’s really a more curious coincidence involved in this graffiti that’s impossible to ignore, Godwin be damned.

Siegfried Marcus’ monument was defaced by self-righteous people convinced that the only way to save the world is to make people act the way they want them too. They’re adept at focusing their hate on identifiable targets, for example, like inventors and industrialists who make products the activists disapprove of strongly.

The curious coincidence is that this wasn’t the first time Marcus’ monument has been defaced. As mentioned in the previous post about Marcus, in 1938, after Austria was unified with Germany under the Third Reich, the Nazis tore down this very statue and every other memorial in Vienna that honored Marcus as the inventor of the automobile. That time Marcus’ monument was also defaced by self-righteous people convinced that the only way to save the world was to make people act the way they wanted them too. They were adept at focusing their hate on identifiable targets, for example, like Jews and Gypsies.

Of course I’m not saying that radical environmentalists are akin to Nazis. Nowadays, too many people have no perspective and throw around the word “Nazi” or compare people to Nazis without a clue about how wicked and evil and cruel the Nazis really were. So obviously I’m loathe to say that the greens in Vienna acted like Nazis when they defaced Marcus’ statue, but the simple facts are that they vandalized the same monument that Nazis vandalized in 1938.

I have no doubt that some hardcore environmentalist earth firsters can be as totalitarian as human beings are capable of being. Clearly some radical environmentalists put their own values above the value of some human life. Still, like I said, I’m not going to call greens Nazis. I will say, though, you’d think the environmentalists would have thought twice before acting like Nazis.