I’m not sure if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her cronies and their audacious Green New Deal were inspired by Stalin’s grand scheme to transform nature – or if it was just a predictable coincidence. But since contemporary progressive ideology has so much with common with soviet-style totalitarianism, it was inevitable that their grandiose proposals would be so similar.
70 years ago, at the end of World War II, the Soviet Union was essentially a devastated land; 70,000 villages, 40,000 miles of railway and half of all urban housing lay in complete ruin. (Source: “A Brief History of Russia,” Michael Kort)
Stalin apparently decided his government could restore the country to its former glory in part, through an ambitious environmental recovery program; the Great Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Nature ~
On October 20, 1948, the Soviet government announced the world’s first state-centered program to reverse human-induced climate change, a grandiose plan to construct 5.7 million hectares of forest in the Russian south. However, the plan collapsed upon Stalin’s death in 1953 because of a fundamental contradiction at the plan’s heart.
At first, the Stalin Plan advanced a basically conservative vision of restoring the steppes to an imagined prehistoric state, but soon a group of radical scientists advancing untested silvicultural theories managed to take control. The resulting struggle between the old approach and the new brought about the plan’s collapse.
Reality always wins in the end.
Today’s neo-totalitarians (aka-Democrat Socialists) share several common beliefs with the communists of the Soviet era. First, most are agnostic, if not outright atheist. This is key, because once God is out of the way, man is free to remake the world in his own image.
Second, they are the ones uniquely qualified to do the re-making. In totalitarian societies there is a tiny ruling class of elites – and there are the teeming masses. The common rabble is simply not capable of self-government.
The elites of course, with their godlike abilities, believe they are fully capable of re-engineering society, controlling every aspect of their subjects’ lives, even altering the climate.
But, my final point – they refuse to accept that human nature is essentially immutable. This wrong-headed belief is also arises out of their atheism. They reject the fact that we were created in God’s image, each a unique, special and worthwhile individual. They can’t stand that our innate affections and loyalties are attached first to our nuclear family, then our “tribe” – rather than the collective. Nor that we humans naturally yearn for freedom and independence.
Further, progressive socialists don’t seem to realize that were are all inherently flawed – and thus can never be molded into some utopian model of the perfect comrade.
This warped way of looking at the world is what led to Stalin’s annihilation of some 20 million souls. When you are a god, you create your own reality; destroying anything that gets in the way. And then you can perfect whatever’s left; society, individuals, the economy – even the climate. Why quibble over the human cost?
Another one of the ill-fated projects under the Great Plan was Stalin’s attempt to conquer the Arctic via his deadly railway to nowhere. It ended as tragically as all his other crazy schemes ~
The system was supposed to link the eastern and western parts of Siberia with a 1,000-mile (1,609km) railway stretching from the city of Inta, in Komi Autonomous Republic, through Salekhard to Igarka, on the Yenisei River […]
The labour force was almost entirely made up of “enemies of the people” – prisoners convicted of “political” offences […]
Other prisoners had already endured German prisoner-of-war camps. When they eventually returned home to the Soviet Union, the authorities branded them traitors and sent them to the Arctic […]
According to some estimates 300,000 prisoners were enslaved on the project and nearly a third of them perished in the process […]
By the time Stalin died in 1953, over 370 miles (600km) had been built but it was never completed. Cold War Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev transferred responsibility for the construction from the Interior Ministry to the Ministry of Transport, which lacked money and workers to continue the project.
The tracks sank back into the tundra. The railway to nowhere, with its huge cost in human lives, became known as the Dead Road.
This is exactly where the Green New Deal will take America, should we ever be unfortunate enough to fall prey to AOC and the neo-totalitarians. An arrogant, futile attempt to alter reality.
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