Today is Earth Day. For those of you counting along at home, the Earth is now 5,000,002,005 or something in that range.
Today is also the day that Nikita Khruschev established as Lenin Day -- the celebration of the birthday of Vladimir Lenin. (Spartacus Schoolnet, a good online resource, says he was born April 10, 1870; Khruschev's declaration and general acceptance is April 22, 1870). Think there's a connection? According to Lowell Ponte (see link in title), there is:
One of the self-identified "founders" of Earth Day, Bay Area activist John McConnell, has written that in 1969 he proposed to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors a new holiday to be called Earth Day on the first day of spring, the Equinox, around March 21. But, he writes, in 1970 local anti-Vietnam War and Environmental Teach-in activists "who were planning a one-time event for April 22, also decided to call their event Earth Day."
And what was this unnamed "one-time event" in 1970? It was the 100th birthday celebration for Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, known to history as Lenin, a pen name he might have coined from Siberia’s Lena River. He was the patron saint of the North Vietnamese Communists such as Ho Chi Minh that America was fighting.
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