Rioters in Washington defaced a monument on Monday dedicated to those who have been murdered by communist regimes.
Rioters defaced historic monuments throughout the city during protests against death of George Floyd, a black man who died after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for several minutes, according to footage of the incident.
The rioters also defaced the Victims of Communism Memorial, a memorial created to commemorate those who have suffered under communist regimes, by spray painting messages on the memorial.
“Given that Antifa groups openly espouse Marxist ideology and have vandalized our memorial before, it’s not surprising that the group would deface it and dishonor the memory of more than 100 million dead again,” Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation Executive Director Marion Smith said in a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“We call on the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department to protect public spaces and memorials like ours from further vandalism and destruction,” Smith added.
The statue is modeled after a statue of the “Goddess of Democracy” which was erected by Chinese students protesting in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square who were gunned down by the Chinese military.
“To the more than one hundred million victims of communism and to those who love liberty,” the memorial says on the front pedestal, while the back pedestal reads, “To the freedom and independence of all captive nations and peoples.”
“You do not advance justice by defacing our country’s memorial dedicated to one of the largest victim groups in human history—those killed by communist parties in power,” Smith wrote on Twitter Monday.
“The culprits are not yet known,” Smith said, before noting that “the site has been targeted by socialist extremist and Antifa groups in the past.”
Photographs from the National Parks Service show that rioters defaced at least three monuments to historical figures in Washington, including the World War II memorial and the Lincoln Memorial. Messages on the memorials say “Ya’ll not tired yet?” and “Do black vets count?”
