Bernie Sanders Did Support Communism: Does It Still Matter?

there were a lot of reasons to regard
the candidacy of Bernie Sanders without them ISM a lot of reasons a lot of reasons to be excited about the concept to the United States of America would finally catch up with Scotland Taiwan and Canada in providing cost-free health care to the poor having cheaper tuition all kinds of opportunities for the poorest 20% of my budget all kinds of reason to be optimistic about that you wouldn't want that optimism to blind you to the important fact that this is somebody who made excuses for communist dictatorships around the world from at least 1982 to 1989 would you you wouldn't want to be the kind of person who says oh no it's not politically convenient for me to think about that it's not politically convenient for me to do that so I'm just gonna pretend it isn't true you wouldn't want to live a lie because it's politically it's yourself you just to do so no that would make you just like all the people you disagree with the despise in politics I mean what if it's really important to have the maturity and the detachment to appreciate you know what's promising about Bernie Sanders in his current campaign or what things he's right about and to also have a kind of balanced down-to-earth view about you know what what might be wrong with Bernie Sanders past president future um does it matter does it matter at 2019 that Bernie Sanders used to make positive statements about economies and theater ships around the world does it matter that in 1988 he chose to go for his honeymoon vacation with his newly wedded wife to the Soviet Union and to say positive things about Soviet it matters he tells you something about Bernie Sanders claims he cares about the poor uplifting the poor in that decade the decade of the 1980s what were the most successful countries in the world and lifting the poor out of poverty Japan South Korea those countries were totally devastated totally devastated in World War two right some areas bombed to being just a parking lot and they rose up out of that devastation and created educational opportunities to the people and economic opportunities there people is the arrow who was normally called the economic miracle and Japan and South Korea both this kind of language is someone with Bernie Sanders his political agenda might have developed a fascination with and an appreciation for what had happened in Japan in the decade of the nineteen eighties and he didn't could have been Singapore could have been South Korea could have been Denmark Sweden or Norway but it wasn't the political and economic examples that interested Bernie Sanders were cuba nicaragua and the Soviet Union aka Russia that was what he was interested in emulating learning from and praising and none of those countries none of them were successfully helping to alleviate the poor were lifting the port authority down them none of them had a record remotely as impressive as Japan during the same period of time you know Japan had its own political problems but Japan did very fundamentally have freedom of the press democracy their democracy was a direct imitation of the American system of democracy in that period their constitution was written by members of the American military it's a really funny story that's how things wrapped up at your ban after World War two hey you know what it could have been West Germany in the same period also alright and if that were the case we'd be sitting around saying boy you know Bernie Sanders he's a weird guy he really spent the 1980s traveling back and forth to Japan and studying like maybe the automotive industry Japan and say hey look the automotive industry of Japan is booming at the same time it's collapsed United States and looking at how the Japanese provide their people with care and you know how maybe he would have learned some things from that and we have a very different perspective on the autobiographical portion of this book today in dealing if we are to believe the convenient myth that he made excuses for communism in cuba nicaragua and the soviet union only only during the decade of the 1980s and he certainly had changed his tune by 1991 a book like this would be a really good opportunity for him to do some soul-searching and to say how wrong he was in his youth and how different his perspective his thing and you guys know he wasn't exactly young in the 1980s I was I remember my perspective and might debates with my parents about a lot of it those issues you know from that period I was a kid instead the only invention the only admission of the extent to which he was involved with justifying supporting and and visiting these these timers counters here you get just a couple sentences saying that he established you know a sister city program linking the the town he was mayor of to one town in the Soviet Union and one town in Nicaragua and that those programs still injured this day so that to me is very different from reading the perspective of someone who really tells you that hey during a certain spirit of his life he was a socialist and he was a communist and then he realized something and he really changed his perspective if your fundamental agenda is helping the poor if your fundamental agenda is improving health care if your fundamental agenda is improving education then you would go to an exam in the countries that have the best education system in the world the education system that works the best for poor people the best education of the whole rates in tuition you would visit the countries in the world that have the best health care systems in the world you would visit the countries that really had the best economies that it lifted the poor out of poverty or where they had almost zero unemployment hit hit Japan it's still true of Japan today to her remarkable extent but Japan in the 1980s you're talking about 2 percent unemployment 2.5 percent it was so unnerving to the Americans that there's still this myth circulating in the newspapers that the Japanese do the math for the unemployment rate in an unfair we're like oh no they're cheating they're not cheating do it I studied the economics of Japan University oh it's real the 2.5 percent unemployment in the 1980s it's real the success of their automotive industry it was real Bernie Sanders lived through it and was he interested no he was buying himself an airplane to get to Nicaragua and making excuses for that regime he was by himself and everyone to get to the Soviet Union and so on and you know people won't let him off the hook by using this term socialist what what happened to socialists in the Soviet Union you know this the Year 1917 is the year of the revolution meaning the Bolshevik Revolution there's more than one revolution and it's your Russia and they're kind of clustered uncomfortably close together ok you know they had elections you can find that out on Wikipedia it was really hard to find that out in the Soviet Union back when the commies controlled education system and you know who won the elections it wasn't the Bolsheviks it was the Socialists you may think now from the perspective 2019 that the difference between socialist and communist is like the difference between chocolate and chocolate chip but it's not what happened after the Bolsheviks lost the elections was that they hunted down and murdered every single member of the Socialist Party in the whole country every single person who is elected to Parliament all the winners in their Parliament were hunted down and murdered in the most brutal way imaginable we have a lot of witnesses to that history because many of the members of parliament themselves and many of their supporters the Socialists who got way more votes and way more seats in the Bolsheviks by far a lot of them fled step by step ever further east it was toward Siberia lot of them didn't make it as far as Siberia you know what's up it's a huge country from east to west they were hunted down and died as the russian civil war time if you were a socialist if you were a Democratic Socialist as Bernie Sanders described himself you would have more reason than anyone else to utterly despise the Soviet Union because the Soviet Union was a country founded on hunting down and killing people like you people with precisely your political ideology instead what Bernie Sanders was in the parlance of postmodern communism he was a fellow traveler he was someone who got along with and supported communists without really being explicitly a communist himself um I say again there's every reason to regard the candidacy of Bernie Sanders Oh as a positive and hopeful thing for the future of the United States of America his past political beliefs matter you can't be any more morally pure than the people you make excuses for if you made excuses as for the Soviet Union in support of Fidel Castro in Cuba it matters