1.1A Senate resolution
1.2expressing the sense of the Minnesota Senate denouncing the horrors of socialism.
1.3WHEREAS, socialist ideology necessitates a concentration of power that has time and time
1.4again collapsed into Communist regimes, totalitarian rule, and brutal dictatorships; and
1.5WHEREAS, socialism has repeatedly led to famine and mass murders, and the killing of
1.6over 100,000,000 people worldwide; and
1.7WHEREAS, many of the greatest crimes in history were committed by socialist ideologues,
1.8including Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, Pol Pot, Kim Jong Il, Kim
1.9Jong Un, Daniel Ortega, Hugo Chavez, and Nicolas Maduro; and
1.10WHEREAS, tens of millions died in the Bolshevik Revolution, at least 10,000,000 people
1.11were sent to the gulags in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), and millions more
1.12starved in the Terror-Famine (Holodomor) in Ukraine; and
1.13WHEREAS, between 15,000,000 and 55,000,000 people starved to death in the wake of
1.14famine and devastation caused by the Great Leap Forward in China; and
1.15WHEREAS, the socialist experiment in Cambodia led to the killing fields in which over a
1.16million people were gruesomely murdered; and
1.17WHEREAS, up to 3,500,000 people have starved in North Korea, dividing a land of freedom
1.18from a land of destitution; and
1.19WHEREAS, the Castro regime in Cuba expropriated the land of Cuban farmers and the
1.20businesses of Cuban entrepreneurs, stealing their possessions and their livelihoods, and exiling
1.21millions with nothing but the clothes on their backs; and
1.22WHEREAS, the implementation of socialism in Venezuela has turned a once-prosperous
1.23nation into a failed State with the world's highest rate of inflation; and
2.1WHEREAS, the author of the Declaration of Independence, President Thomas Jefferson,
2.2wrote, "To take from one, because it is thought that his own industry and that of his fathers has
2.3acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal
2.4industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to every
2.5one of a free exercise of his industry, and the fruits acquired by it."; and
2.6WHEREAS, the "Father of the Constitution," President James Madison, wrote that it "is not
2.7a just government, nor is property secure under it, where the property which a man has in his
2.8personal safety and personal liberty, is violated by arbitrary seizures of one class of citizens for the
2.9service of the rest"; and
2.10WHEREAS, the United States of America was founded on the belief in the sanctity of the
2.11individual, to which the collectivistic system of socialism in all of its forms is fundamentally and
2.12necessarily opposed; NOW, THEREFORE,
2.13BE IT RESOLVED by the Senate of the State of Minnesota that it denounces socialism in
2.14all its forms, and opposes the implementation of socialist policies in Minnesota and the United
2.15States of America.