Black Lives Matter has taken the long dead communist Karl Marx as its mascot.

But do the members really know who he was? The magazine National Review and columnist Robert Knight who contributes to Townhall recently had reports on the ethnic but not religious German Jew, Marx, who lived from May 5, 1818, to March 14, 1883.

Wikipedia describes him as a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist and socialist revolutionary.

Karl’s father, Heinrich, was a man of the Enlightenment, interested in the ideas of the philosophers Immanuel Kant and Voltaire. A classical liberal, he took part in agitation for a constitution and reforms in Prussia, at that time being an absolute monarchy.

His wife, Henriette Pressburg, was a Dutch Jewish woman from a prosperous business family that later founded the company Philips Electronics.

Knight quotes a new book by historian Paul Kengor that sheds considerable light on Marx and by implication the madness and mob violence that has descended on the United States this year.

In his book, “The Devil and Karl Marx,” Professor Kengor explores not only the communist icon’s religious views but how they corrupted so many others over nearly two centuries.

His Own Family Feared Him

Citing numerous biographies and Marx’s own writings, Kengor reveals a man whose own family and friends were frightened by his demonic fits of rage and dark babblings about violence.

His own father said he was “governed by a demon.” A key biographer, Robert Payne, described Marx as having “the devil’s view of the world and the devil‘s malignity.”

In 1849, Marx wrote, “When our turn comes, we shall make no excuses for the terror. There is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.”

The riots in America’s cities today would indicate the rioters (at least their leaders) are familiar with Marx.

Communist revolutions, beginning in Russia in 1917, have taken at least 140 million lives, enslaved literally billions of people and spread unspeakable horror everywhere Marxism has taken root, Kengor notes.

When Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors boasted in 2015 that “myself” and BLM co-founder Alicia Garza “are trained Marxists,” was she aware of the poisonous pedigree of her stated worldview? Perhaps it didn’t matter, Knight wrote.

He pointed out that BLM is using the LGBTQ movement as a blunt instrument:

“We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure … foster a queer-affirming network. When we gather, we do so with the intention of freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking,” one leader writes.

Communism Opposes Families

Strong families have been the hallmark of a successful America.

Families produce independent-minded people, which is why socialists promote sexual anarchy. Marx and his co-author Friedrich Engels denounced families, saying the state should seize and raise children. Knight continued:

“The rapidity with which virtually every sizable institution in America has bent its knee to BLM is stunning. To be fair, most probably think it’s just about racial remonstrance and reforming police procedure, and even love of neighbor and equality before God.

“But the call for getting on one’s knees to this movement and parroting their Marxist slogans is anything but sacred. How do Christians, in particular, justify kneeling to anything other than God Almighty and His Son Jesus Christ?”

Knight wonders “if he (Marx) had had a glimpse into the murderous misery his philosophy would unleash, would he have shelved his books and spared the world?

Hardly likely. Kengor shared a line from the heroine in one of Marx’s poems:

“Thus Heaven I’ve forfeited, I know it full well. My soul, once true to God, is chosen for Hell.”

A National Review article written byKevin D. Williamson called Marx a Jew-hating bigot. It asks the question:

What would Marx have done if he had any political power? He asks, then answers the question this way: “We do not know because he never had any.”

Marx renounced his Prussian citizenship in 1845, unsuccessfully tried to get it back in 1848 and was shortly expelled from Prussia and then France before landing at age 31 in the United Kingdom.

He lived the rest of his life in exile having only a marginal influence on mainstream European affairs. Marx directed his bigotry on other races as well as Jews, calling Mexicans lazy and responding to Engels, who chastised him for his obsessive Jew hatred, by denouncing “Der judische N***** Ferdinand Lassalle,” including spiteful references to the man’s ancestry.

Marx’s theories have long been disproven but a new set of proponents has arisen in the United States.

Our personal action to help defuse the new bigotry will be to vote for President Trump’s re-election on Nov. 3. The “other side” seems enthralled by BLM activists’ demands.