When I lived in Waterbury, Vermont, in the late 1980s I attended
a bluegrass concert in the park one summer evening. The band (its
name escapes me) had recently returned from a Vermont Arts
Council/ State Department-type cultural exchange trip to the then
Soviet Union. During a break in the music, a couple of the
musicians told the assembled crowd of Boomer hippies about the
trip; the bass player showing off a souvenir, which was a lapel
pin fastened to his shirt pocket. It was small, gold-colored, and
bore the likeness of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, known to history by
the notorious nom de guerre of “Lenin.” The bass player
told the crowd, “Lenin was their original leader. He was the
Russian George Washington.”
I’m always reminded of this when yet another Earth Day approaches
(always on April 22). Most people, especially school kids,
participating in the annual green fetish don’t know that it only
dates to 1970, the first one held on the centenary of Lenin’s
birth (April 22, 1870). The Earth Day back-story is that the
Lenin anniversary was purely coincidental, at least according to
the occasion’s two founders, the late Senator Gaylord Nelson
(D-Wisc.) and environmental activist Denis Hayes. Fine, it’s a
coincidence.
But if indeed there is even a subtle connection, I wonder how
many of the millions worldwide participating in Earth Day
festivities actually know who Lenin was? Do the ones who do have
an inkling know that he was one of history’s great monsters, a
cold-blooded nihilist whose minions and successors were
responsible for the deaths of scores of millions, and the
sufferings of many more? But Earth Day as a
holy-day-of-obligation of the Left (like May Day) has its ironies
even if you put aside lethal political expediencies.
The Soviet Union under the green thumb of Joseph Stalin in the
1920s and '30s collectivized agriculture, thus starving millions
of Russian and Ukrainian peasants who up until then had solid
reputations as, well, organic farmers. With his infamous “Five
Year Plans” Stalin also forced the rapid industrialization of
Russia that left it with a legacy of belching smokestacks, dirty
skies, fouled rivers, and — in a Soviet version of “smart
growth” — thousands of those dreary gray apartment buildings
known for poor plumbing and lousy electrical service.
Following Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev gave his tyrant-numbed people
the infamous “Virgin Lands Campaign” (1954-1962), when he
“relocated” 300,000 Russians and Ukrainians to Soviet Central
Asia (mostly present Kazakhstan) to plow the vast steppe and grow
wheat. After one good harvest, drought and Soviet agricultural
policy combined to produce windblown erosion on a grand scale,
turning the region into a Dust Bowl. By the early 1960s the
Soviets were importing grain, mostly from Canada.
In China, Chairman Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” (his own second
“Five Year Plan”: 1958-1963) aped the Stalinist model and starved
tens of millions of those pesky peasants, as industrialization
accelerated. Maybe “A Hundred Flowers” bloomed, but not much
else. Mao remedied these excesses with the discipline of the
subsequent Cultural Revolution, when he sent academics,
intellectuals, and Communist Party higher-ups into the
countryside as farm laborers. I’ve always liked this aspect of
the Cultural Revolution. Imagine Ivy League professors spending
their summers in Iowa shucking corn at gunpoint. Mao was on to
something. But sadly, part of the Great Helmsman’s monstrous
legacy is that much of China today suffers hideous pollution
problems, so much so that it famously shut down factories weeks
before last year’s Olympic Games to clear the skies, and athletes
wearing surgical masks commonly appeared in the media. Lately —
and to the chagrin of international greenies — the Chinese have
completed the infamous Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River,
where they removed 1.25 million people elsewhere, and flooded
archaeological sites and 13,000 farms to do it.
In Cambodia in 1975, those admirers of Maoist agricultural
methods, the Khmer Rouge, sent much of the population of Phnom
Penh and elsewhere hoe-in-hand to the boonies, and in the end 1.5
million didn’t come back, notably university-educated
French-speakers who wore glasses.
All of the above should tell us that you don’t have to be the
late Milton Friedman to know that free market capitalist
economies have cleaner environments. Private property rights
encourage it. If you own a backyard, there is a built-in
incentive to keep it clean because it’s yours.
So, Happy Earth Day, Vladimir Ilyich. Maybe President Obama and
the Democrat Congress will get around to proclaiming your Earth
Day Birthday a national holiday sometime. It’s an ersatz one
anyway.
