DEFINING BERNIE SANDERS

DEFINING BERNIE SANDERS

IN PURSUIT OF THE TRUTH -  HTTP://WWW/CINOPSBEGONEBLOGSPOT.COM - TUES. JUNE 18/19

 

"Bernie Sanders Campaigned for Marxist Party in Reagan Era" by Joseph Simonson, May 30/19

 

    "Bernie Sanders campaigned for the Socialist Workers Party in the 1980 and 1984 presidential campaigns and was investigated by the FBI for his ties to the Marxist group.

 

Sanders has always played down the extent of his involvement with the party, which included radicals who praised the Soviet Union and Cuban communists, and has denied ever being a member. Asked in 1988 about his role as a SWP elector in the 1980, he said: "I was asked to put my name on the ballot and I did, that's true." In fact, his ties to the party are deep and enduring.

The 2020 Democratic presidential primary candidate and United States senator from Vermont, now 77, often scoffs at comparisons between his brand of self-described "democratic socialism" and communism. In recent years he said he is merely interested in having the United States look more like Sweden, a social democracy with a broad welfare state but a well-functioning private sector.

 

But his personal files from his time as mayor of Burlington, from 1881 to 1989, archived at the University of Vermont, show that he supported and campaigned for the communist SWP and maintained a close relationship with its senior members. While Democrats campaigned for President Jimmy Carter in 1980 and Walter Mondale in 1984, Sanders spent the Reagan era supporting fringe Marxists with no chance of reaching the White House.

 

In 1980, Sanders "proudly endorsed and supported" Andrew Pulley, the party's presidential candidate, who once said that American soldiers should "take up their guns and shoot their officers."  Sanders was one of three electors for Pulley on the Vermont ballot, stating in a press release: "I fully support the SWP's continued defense of the Cuban revolution."

 

For years later, he backed and campaigned for the SWP presidential nominee Mel Mason, a former Black Panther, saying it was important for there for there to be "fundamental alternatives to capitalist ideology," During the campaign, Mason praised the Russian and Chinese revolutions ..... "I think Bernie was pretty in-the-camp with us and other socialist organizations," Mason told the "Washington Examiner" in an interview. "We talked regularly and he also said that if I ever made it to Burlington, he was going to give me the key to the city."

 

But Mason, 75, now a psychotherapist and former NAACP official living in California, indicated that after the 1980, he & Sanders had drifted apart, & Sanders began touting insufficiently radical policies...

In 1979, members of SWP's leadership circulated a document that called for "the destruction of the bourgeois state apparatus," arguing such an act "is a necessary prerequisite for the conquest of state power by the working class." Archives of the SWP's official paper., the Militant, demonstrate a devotion to what its writers believe was the "true" purpose of the Russian Revolution, before it was supposedly corrupted by Joseph Stalin....

 

A flier in Sanders' archives shows that he was a featured speaker at the 1982 SWP "Campaign Kick-Off-Rally" in Boston for the party's candidates for governor, lieutenant governor, and Congress.

"At a time when the Democratic and Republican parties are intellectually and spiritually bankrupt, it is imperative for radical voices to be heard which offer fundamental alternatives to capitalist ideology. I wish Mel Mason good luck on his campaign," Sanders wrote in a letter to the Militant in January 1984...

 

Sanders also kept dozens of socialist publications in his personal files, such as the "Socialist Republic, a defunct paper published by the Marxist Industrial Union Party. Articles in the Socialist Republic touted "The importance of Socialist Propaganda" and "social ownership of all resources and industries." Other ... papers celebrated Marxist revolutionaries in Latin America....

 

By 1988, Sander had his eyes on federal office. While he never shed his socialist label, he endorsed Jesse Jackson in that year's Democratic presidential primary, Sanders was first elected an an independent in 1990.

George H. Kubeck -  Bernie and his wife went on a honeymoon trip to Communist Russia. Interesting!