Publius: 'Today is Lenin's Birthday (a.k.a. Earth Day)'

Today is Vladimir Ilyich Lenin's birthday (a.k.a. Earth Day).

It's no coincidence that the date chosen for the first Earth Day in 1970 coincided with the 100th anniversary of the birth of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, founder of the Soviet Union, who was born on April 22, 1870.

The continued celebration of Lenin’s birthday speaks volumes about the hidden left-wing political agenda that dominates environmental groups such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, The Sierra Club, The World Wildlife Fund and countless other "Green" organizations.

For many on the political left, environmentalism is simply a means by which private property, individual freedoms and free markets can be increasingly regulated to a point of absolute government control. Ideology trumps ecology for these "watermelon" environmentalists (green on the outside and red on the inside), who routinely condemn all things capitalistic and advocate Soviet-style collectivism as the one true way to protect the earth’s environment.

Ironically, industrial development at any cost, not environmental stewardship, was the doctrine of Lenin’s Soviet Union. His failed system’s environmental legacy includes the following [1]:

-The despoiling of the Aral Sea;
-The open-storage of billions of tons of contaminated solid and liquid industrial wastes at thousands of locations, many containing high concentrations of heavy metals;
-Decommissioned nuclear submarines dumped in the Barents Sea;
-Nuclear disasters at Chelyabinsk and Chernobyl;
-Liquid nuclear wastes dumped in the Kara Sea and the Sea of Japan;
-Severe water pollution and extensive dam-building on the Volga and Dnieper rivers;
-Widespread radioactive contamination of the Yenisey River;
-Chemical weapons dumped at hundreds of locations in the Baltic, Black, Barents, Japan, Kara, Okhotsk and White Seas; and
-Millions of cubic meters of radioactive wastes injected into the ground at Krasnoyarsk.

Sincere environmentalists are horrified by the long-term ecological devastation and untold human suffering brought about by Lenin’s ruinous Soviet system. It's reprehensible that so-called "Progressive" and "Green" organizations surreptitiously honor the founder of an oppressive political system that routinely violated basic human rights, murdered millions of its citizens and exploited Russia’s natural resources with utter disregard for the environment.

Regrettably, students won't learn any of this in the public schools where a Soviet-style propaganda apparatus compels them to celebrate Lenin's birthday (a.k.a. Earth Day) today.

[1] L. A. Fedorov, Undeclared Chemical War in Russia: Politics against Ecology, 1995