Vladimir Putin, a former career USSR KGB agent, is engaging in a brutal assault on the civilian infrastructure of Ukraine, particularly energy and water. It is not a new tactic for Moscow or for socialist regimes across the planet. Starvation has been a key result of left-wing governments for a century, in Europe, Asia, and Latin America.
Ukraine has been victimized before, as it is now. Stalin decided to collectivize agriculture. Communist Party officials stole land from their owners. This 1932-1933 holocaust was known as the “Holodomor.” At least 3.9 million died as a result. An additional million died in Kazakhstan and in parts of Russia that rebelled against forced socialization.
Following the Second World War and the Soviet domination of Eastern European nations, collectivization was to varying degrees imposed on the captive nations. Predictably, production diminished sharply.
That was barely a warm-up for what occurred when Mao Zedong and his Communist Party took over China. “Mao’s ‘Great Leap Forward’ in agriculture, beginning in 1958, led to the deaths of an astounding 45 million human beings. The brutal intent behind his implementation of socialist economics was made clear by a truly disturbing fact, noted by the Dispropaganda site: “Mao Zedong aimed to rapidly transform the China from an agrarian economy into a Communist modern society through rapid industrialization and collectivization, and he meant to do it at all costs, and regardless of human suffering. Much like Stalin, Mao used famine a weapon to murder, terrorize and subdue the population of rural China, and bring them into the fold of the Chinese Communist party.”
The terrible record was continued in Cambodia after Communists took over that nation. From 1975 to 1979, 500,000 to 1.5 million people, representing up tp 20% of that nation’s whole population, died of starvation and disease as a result of socialist policies.
The record doesn’t end there. Venezuela is a nation that should be awash in wealth, sitting as it does atop a sea of oil. Instead, its population is enduring terrible food shortages. According to the Borgen Project, “Across the country, poor and middle-class Venezuelans are unable to afford food and often must wait in long lines known as “colas” to find basic food like flour and rice. The government subsidizing of food in the country is limited, but the only affordable option. Malnutrition has increased. In the poorest segments of the population, especially in slums and areas of Caracas, malnutrition has increased greatly… Often, families cannot afford two or three meals a day and those meals consist of just bread or banana.”
In the Caribbean, Cuba is facing its worst food shortages in decades. Apologists for the Communist regime seek to blame an American embargo, but, similar to all other socialist regimes, the assault on private property rights is the true culprit. In a scene familiar to totalitarian socialist regimes, long lines for meager rations of food. A third of the entire nation’s land mass is suitable for farming, with highly fertile land.
Over the past century, these consistent food shortages in socialist regimes have been falsely blamed on weather conditions, citizens protecting their property rights, or other extraneous factors.
The problem is likely to get worse as advocates of extreme environmental policies, which tend to be trojan horses for socialist economics with little relevance to global temperatures, gain ground. The latest tirade is against agribusinesses and their production of $175 billion worth of chemical fertilizers. They recently won a major victory in Sri Lanka, where the substances were banned. As a result, food production collapsed. Despite the disastrous result, advocates are working diligently to enforce the concept throughout the world.
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