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Red Rosa, the communist eagle
Lenin described Rosa Luxemburg as a communist eagle after her murder a hundred years ago this week. PETER FROST finds no reason to disagree

ONE hundred years ago, as the last days of 1918 became the early days of 1919, the newly founded German Communist Party (KPD), with 50,000 members, held a crucial congress. 

Inspired by the success of Lenin and his 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, they voted to oppose both the councils and the Constituent Assembly that were ruling a defeated, demoralised and almost destroyed country and organise an armed uprising to take power and establish a truly socialist Germany. 

Communist Party founder and Spartacus League leader and theoretician Rosa Luxemburg was far from convinced that such a move could be successful, but she decided reluctantly to join the fight. This German revolution, with inadequate forces, fizzled out rather as Luxemburg had so sadly predicted. 

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