The Literal Poison of Democratic Socialism

Latin America is once again demonstrating the social poison of “democratic socialism,” the ideology that won Bernie Sanders more than 13 million votes in the Democratic primaries.  Socialism – democratic or otherwise – is not only destructive of a nation’s economy, as history proved over and over again during the twentieth century; it is also ecological poison.  After the worldwide collapse of socialism in the late 1980s/early 1990s, we got a first look at what a country’s environment under a socialist system that banned private profit-making for decades looked like.  In a word, it was a catastrophe, as described in books with titles like “Ecocide in the U.S.S. R.”

The world learned that the socialist countries dumped untreated sewage into their rivers, streams, and lakes for decades; the Volga River in Russia was so polluted that boat were equipped with signs warning against throwing cigarettes in the water for fear the chemical-laden water would catch fire; factories had no pollution controls whatsoever; massive fish kills were routine; and the Polish Academy of Sciences reported that by the early 1990s one-third of the Polish people lived in areas of “ecological disaster.”

• Vast islands of sewage sludge are seen at low tide, dumped there by residential high-rise apartment buildings.

• Many rivers are “tar black” from pollution.

Such ecological nightmares have become common in other Latin American “showcases” of “democratic” socialism.  Venezuela suffers from massive deforestation and its Lake Maracaibo is heavily polluted with 10,000 gallons of sewage per second dumped into it from the two million residences that surround the lake.  More than 800 companies, mostly related to the government’s nationalized oil industry, are permitted to dump industrial waste into the lake.  Massive Lake Valencia is also said to be “massively polluted,” and the government-run oil company, PDVSA, has reportedly filled more than 15,000 oil pits with contaminated sludge from oil wells that will inevitably seep into the ground water.

One lesson that all the Bernie Sanders-following millennials need to learn is that “democratic” socialism can not only destroy their economic future; it can also inflict irreparable harm on their natural environment.  Socialism is always and everywhere an economic and environmental disaster.

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