The Pollution of Democratic Socialism
Latin America is once again demonstrating the social poison of
“democratic socialism,” the ideology that won Bernie Sanders more than
thirteen million votes in the Democratic primaries, predominantly from
millennial generation voters. Socialism – democratic or otherwise – is
not only destructive of a nation’s economy, as history proved over and
over again during the twentieth century – and which is sadly on display
once again today in Venezuela, a country whose economy is imploding; 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 boats 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.”
