Today -100: May 25, 1924: Of Marxist corpses, death rays, true liberty, and colonies

Karl Marx’s grandson Jean Longuet rejects Soviet Russia’s request to transfer KM’s body from London to Moscow, saying Russia is totally misinterpreting his work.

Dr. T.F. Wall, lecturer in electrical research at Sheffield University, has also invented a death ray. We are entering a golden age of death rays. British newspapers have been demanding that Grindell Matthews not be allowed to hawk his own Diabolical Ray to a French company, so he has been called back for talks with the military. And Reinhold Wulle, the near-fascist German deputy, claims that there are no fewer than three German death ray patents.

Speaking of German inventions, the hot new thing in Berlin is mini-radios suitable for pockets, with headphones and an antenna in one’s hat.

Italy’s King Victor Emmanuel III, wearing a general’s uniform, opens the Parliament with a speech praising Fascism, Mussolini’s militia, and the crackdown on The Duck’s enemies: “The Italian people wish liberty, true liberty, to be left intact, but they have clearly shown that they repudiate every form of degeneration of liberty and every form of license, just as they repudiate all weakness or tolerance because they wish all special individual and class interests to be subordinated to the general interests of the community.”

Duke Adolf Friedrich of Mecklenburg, the former governor of Togoland, is head of a colonization company aiming to establish a feudal dukedom in Dutch New Guinea, in which the Dutch colonial government would have no say and all laws protecting the 200,000 natives in the 200,000 square mile concession would be abrogated. However, the plan seems to have been scuppered by... people finding out about it.

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