Idealism and Betrayal
After studying towns of similar type, geographic features, and industry, a delegation from Duluth, Minnesota adopted the Russian of Petrozavodsk as their sister city. In the late 1980s, a Duluth delegation wished to travel there but was impeded several times since the Soviet Communist Party still controlled Russia, at the time known officially as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).
After finally getting authorization, and flying to St. Petersburg, they took a train and rolled into the Petrozavodsk train station. They were absolutely astonished and surprised to discover a large delegation of people waving American Flags to greet them. Another even greater bewilderment that struck the visitors as they disembarked the train, was finding that the gathering, for the most part, spoke fluent English.
These people, it was then discovered were once Finnish Americans or decedents of Finnish Americans, who had left the states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota several decades previous. They had been lured to the USSR by propagandist messaging asking people, especially zealous-union workers to come help rebuild the Soviet Union and participate in a collectivist, shared, and idyllic existence.
Having immigrated to the Soviet Union they quickly learned that the communications from the USSR were not as professed and the men were essentially enslaved with horrendous work conditions and hours and their families were relegated to substandard, shoddy, and bitterly cold housing. Petrozavodsk is located at 61.5 degrees of latitude, 430 miles north of Moscow.
I write this from memory, having read a 1992 book called, “They Took My Father: A Story of Idealism and Betrayal” by Mayme Sevander, who, as a child, was one of those Finnish Americans who immigrated to the USSR. Like so many, the Stalinists eventually came to her parent’s home, led her father away, and murdered him. He was one of many entombed in mass graves ordered by the Soviet regime.
I write this as a prelude to an article on the City of Duluth, the location for the story from the Science X Network entitled, “Frigid US city becomes haven in climate change era”. The article claims that people from California are escaping to Duluth to avoid climate change which causes the forest fires so prevalent in the “Golden State”.
As I have written about several times and specifically in my article, The Anatomy of Wildfires, “In their reports on state wildfires, Calfire, a division of California’s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection articulated that climate change is not a participant. Excess fuels are constantly being created because of anti-logging legislation, a deficiency of prescribed burns, elimination of fire breaks and berms, and no forest floor clearing or cleaning.”
In other words, California fires, often started by arsonists, and substandard electrical infrastructure, are simply fodder for climate change alarmism. The State of California is actually hemorrhaging and people leave in droves because of high-income taxes, elevated sales taxes, inflated corporate taxes, high utility expenses, housing costs, the heavy crime rate, the homelessness and drug crisis, draconian environmental policies, and several other detrimental factors.
I spend the lazier days of summer in Southwest Idaho. Migrants from California have grown almost as fast as Idaho’s famous potatoes, yet the writer of the Science X Network isolates Duluth as a Californian refuge. The people of California are growing sick of the corruption disguised as moral authority purveyed on them by their elitist leaders. Texas, Arizona, and Montana are also large attractors of people sick of the growing political pillage in the once glamorous Golden State.
An accompanying picture to the linked article states, The Minnesota city of Duluth, on the coast of Lake Superior, has a notoriously chilly climate, with temperatures often in the negative.” I’ve been to Duluth and Duluth’s sister city Superior, Wisconsin on a number of occasions and while the winters can be cold, does the following graph evidence, “temperatures often in the negative.”
Like so many woke articles of today, this entire story has a heavy stench of climate change fear-mongering with no actual evidence, validity, or legitimacy.
