By Michael Moynihan
Thursday, April 13, 2017
After the ISIS-orchestrated bloodbath in Paris last
November, CBS News informed the three Democratic presidential candidates that a
forthcoming debate it was hosting would be shifting focus from domestic to
foreign policy.
It seemed like an uncontroversial decision. But it was
enough to send Bernie Sanders’s campaign into paroxysms of panic. During a
conference call with debate organizers, one Sanders surrogate launched into a
“heated” and “bizarre” protest, complaining that CBS was trying to “change the
terms of the debate…on the day of the debate,” according to a Yahoo News
source.
Still, the clamor from Bernie’s camp wasn’t that
bizarre. Bernie understands that the frisson Sanderistas audiences
experience isn’t activated by conversations about the Iran nuclear deal. No,
Sanders disciples are slain in the spirit by repeated-ad-infinitum
sermons about billionaires twisting mustaches, adjusting monocles, and
jealously guarding their “rigged system.” It was this message that vaulted
Sanders from the mayor’s office to Congress and into the Senate. But
foreign-policy questions, The New York Times noted, had a habit of
pushing him “out of his comfort zone.”
So here we are: The candidate accused of not caring about
foreign policy was the same politico who, years ago, was routinely accused of
preferring foreign affairs to the tedium of negotiating overtime pay with the
local firefighter’s union. Indeed, after he was elected mayor of Burlington, Vermont,
Sanders turned the town into a fantasy foreign-policy camp. In his 1997 memoir,
Outsider in the House, he asked, “how many cities of 40,000 [like
Burlington] have a foreign policy? Well, we did.”
What were the policies and ideas that animated his
small-town internationalism? In a recent interview with CNN’s Chris Cuomo,
Sanders was asked about a comment he made in 1974 calling for the CIA’s
abolition. He qualified, hedged, and offered a potted history of CIA meddling
in the affairs of sovereign countries, all while arguing half-heartedly that
his views had long-since evolved toward pragmatism.
If CNN can ambush Sanders by reaching back to 1974 and
his not-entirely-unreasonable criticism of the CIA, perhaps another
enterprising television journalist will ask the candidate-of-consistency one of
the following questions:
— Do you think that American foreign policy gives people
cancer?
— Do you think a state of war—be it against the
Vietnamese communists, Nicaraguan anti-communists, or al Qaeda’s Islamists—justifies
the curtailment of press freedoms?
— Do you stand by your qualified-but-fulsome praise of
the totalitarian regime in Cuba? Do you stand by your unqualified-and-fulsome
praise of the totalitarian Sandinista regime in Nicaragua?
— Do you believe that bread lines are a sign of economic
health?
— Do you think the Reagan administration was engaged in
the funding and commissioning of terrorism?
A weird palette of questions, sure, but when Sanders was
mayor of Burlington, he answered “yes” to all of them. Hidden on spools of
microfilm, buried in muffled and grainy videos of press conferences and public
appearances, Mayor Sanders enumerated detailed—and radical—foreign-policy
positions and explained his brand of socialism. (If you find foreign-policy
debates tedious, feel free to ask Sanders if he still believes that “the basic
truth of politics is primarily class struggle”; that “democracy means public
ownership of the major means of production”; or that “both the Democratic and
Republican parties represent the ruling class.”)
In the 1980s, any Bernie Sanders event or interview
inevitably wended toward a denunciation of Washington’s Central America policy,
typically punctuated with a full-throated defense of the dictatorship in
Nicaragua. As one sympathetic biographer wrote in 1991, Sanders “probably has
done more than any other elected politician in the country to actively support
the Sandinistas and their revolution.” Reflecting on a Potemkin tour of
revolutionary Nicaragua he took in 1985, Sanders marveled that he was, “believe
it or not, the highest ranking American official” to attend a parade
celebrating the Sandinista seizure of power.
It’s quite easy to believe, actually, when one wonders
what elected American official would knowingly join a group of largely
unelected officials of various “fraternal” Soviet dictatorships while, just a
few feet away, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega bellows into a microphone
that the United States is governed by a criminal band of terrorists.
None of this bothered Sanders, though, because he largely
shared Ortega’s worldview. While opposition to Reagan’s policy in Central
America—including indefensible decisions like the mining of Managua harbor—was
common amongst mainstream Democrats, it was rare to find outright support for
the Soviet-funded, Cuban-trained Sandinistas. Indeed, Congress’s vote to cut
off administration funding of the anti-Sandinista Contra guerrillas
precipitated the Iran-Contra scandal.
But despite its aversion to elections, brutal suppression
of dissent, hideous mistreatment of indigenous Nicaraguans, and rejection of
basic democratic norms, Sanders thought Managua’s Marxist-Leninist clique had
much to teach Burlington: “Vermont could set an example to the rest of the nation
similar to the type of example Nicaragua is setting for the rest of Latin
America.”
The lesson Sanders saw in Nicaragua could have been
plagiarized from an editorial in Barricada, the oafish Sandinista
propaganda organ. “Is [the Sandinistas’] crime that they have built new health
clinics, schools, and distributed land to the peasants? Is their crime that
they have given equal rights to women? Or that they are moving forward to wipe
out illiteracy? No, their crime in Mr. Reagan’s eyes and the eyes of the corporations
and billionaires that determine American foreign policy is that they have
refused to be a puppet and banana republic to American corporate interests.”
But Sanders was mistaking aspirational Sandinista
propaganda for quantifiable Sandinista achievement. None of it was true, but it
overlaid nicely on top of his own political views. Sanders’s almost evangelical
belief in “the revolution” led him from extreme credulity to occasional fits of
extreme paranoia.
For instance, in 1987 Sanders hosted Sandinista
politician Nora Astorga in Burlington, a woman notorious for a Mata Hari-like
guerilla operation that successfully lured Gen. Reynaldo Perez-Vega, a
high-ranking figure in the Somoza dictatorship, to her apartment with promises
of sex. Perez-Vega’s body was later recovered wrapped in a Sandinista flag, his
throat slit by his kidnappers. When Astorga died in 1988 from cervical cancer,
Sanders took the occasion to publicly praise Astorga as “a very, very beautiful
woman” and a “very vital and beautiful woman,” positing that American foreign
policy might have given her cancer. “I have my own feelings about what causes
cancer, and the psychosomatic aspects of cancer,” he said. “One wonders if the
war didn’t claim another victim; a person who couldn’t deal with the tremendous
grief and suffering in her own country.”
(Sanders often lurched toward conspiracy theory to make
banal historical events conform to an ideological narrative. He argued that
Ronald Reagan was as Manchurian president created by millionaires who run
corporations: “Some millionaires in California said ‘Ron, we want you to work
for us. We want you to become governor.’ They sat around a table. A dozen
millionaires. They made him governor. And then they made him president. And he
did his job effectively for those corporations.”)
The conflict in Nicaragua exacerbated Sanders’s more
extreme positions. He asked a group of University of Vermont students to
consider how “we deal with Nicaragua, which is in many ways Vietnam, except
it’s worse. It’s more gross.” His answer was to raise money and civilian
materiel for the revolution, establish a sister city program in Nicaragua, and
act as a mouthpiece for the Sandinista government.
The local Vermont journalist corps, with whom Sanders had
an extraordinarily contentious relationship, occasionally questioned Sanders on
Nicaragua’s increasingly dictatorial drift.
In 1985 Sanders traveled to New York City to meet with
Ortega just weeks after Nicaragua imposed a “state of emergency” that resulted
in mass arrests of regime critics and the shuttering of opposition newspapers
and magazines. While liberal critics of Reagan’s Nicaraguan policy rounded on
the Sandinistas (talk-show host Phil Donahue told Ortega that his actions
looked “fascist”), Sanders refused to condemn the decision. He was “not an
expert in Nicaragua” and “not a Nicaraguan,” he said during a press conference.
“Am I aware enough of all the details of what is going on in Nicaragua to say
‘you have reacted too strongly?’ I don’t know…” But of course he did know,
later saying that the Sandinistas’ brutal crackdown “makes sense to me.”
What “made sense” to Sanders was the Sandinistas’ war
against La Prensa, a daily newspaper whose vigorous opposition to the
Somoza dictatorship quickly transformed into vigorous opposition of the
dictatorship that replaced it. When challenged on the Sandinistas’ incessant
censorship, Sanders had a disturbing stock answer: Nicaragua was at war with
counterrevolutionary forces, funded by the United States, and wartime
occasionally necessitated undemocratic measures. (The Sandinista state censor
Nelba Blandon offered a more succinct answer: “They [La Prensa] accused
us of suppressing freedom of expression. This was a lie and we could not let
them publish it.”)
To underscore his point, Sanders would usually indulge in
counterfactual whataboutism: “If we look at our own history, I would ask
American citizens to go back to World War II. Does anyone seriously think that
President Roosevelt or the United States government [would have] allowed the
American Nazi Party the right to demonstrate, or to get on radio and to say
this is the way you should go about killing American citizens?” (It’s perhaps
worth pointing out that La Prensa never printed tutorials on how to kill
Nicaraguans. And it’s also worth pointing out that in 1991, Sanders complained
of the “massive censorship of dissent, criticism, debate” by the United States
government during the Gulf War.)
Or how about the Reagan counterfactual: “What would
President Reagan do if buildings were being bombed? If hospitals were being
bombed? If people in our own country were being killed? Do you think President
Reagan would say, ‘of course we want the people who are killing our children to
get up on radio and explain to the citizens of the country how they are going
to kill more of our people?’”
Or perhaps Abraham Lincoln can convince you: “How many of
you remember what happened in the American Civil War and Abraham Lincoln’s
feeling about how you have to fight that war? And how much tolerance there was
in this country, during that war, for people who were not sympathetic to the
Union cause?”
While Freedom House and Amnesty International agitated on
behalf of La Prensa, Sanders was making excuses for the government that
censored its articles, prevented it from buying newsprint, harassed its
staffers, and arrested its journalists. “The point is,” he argued, “in American
history the opposition press talking about how you could kill your own people
and overthrow your own government was never allowed…Never allowed to exist.”
The Burlington Free Press mocked Sanders for
playing the role of internationalista dupe and lampooned him for
expressing, after just a brief, government-guided tour of Nicaragua, “such
approval of the Sandinistas on the basis of what was at best a cursory
inspection,” an instinct that “says more about his naïveté in the foreign policy
field than anything else.”
Sanders countered that he was free to quiz real
Nicaraguans on their political allegiances, but they “laughed” when he asked
which party they backed because “of course they are with the
government.” When asked about the food shortages provoked by the Sandinistas’
voodoo economic policy, Sanders claimed that bread lines were a sign of a healthy
economy, suggesting an equitable distribution of wealth: “It’s funny, sometimes
American journalists talk about how bad a country is, that people are lining up
for food. That is a good thing! In other countries people don’t line up for
food: the rich get the food and the poor starve to death.” When asked about
Nicaragua’s notoriously brutal treatment of the Miskito Indians, the Free Press
noted that Sanders “attempted to cut off” the line of questioning. (Ted Kennedy
called the Sandinistas’ crimes against the indigenous Miskitos
“unconscionable,” “intolerable,” and “disturbing,” commenting that they were
relocated at gunpoint to “forced-labor camps which resemble concentration
camps.”)
Through the Mayor’s Council on the Arts, Sanders tried to
bring some revolutionary third-worldism to Vermont when he funded cable-access
television that showed “films from Cuba [and] daily television fare from
Nicaragua.” At a press conference, Sanders highlighted the grants that allowed
the importation of “films produced in Nicaragua, that appear on Nicaraguan
[state] television, on Channel 15. We have films from Cuba on Channel 15.”
Ah, yes, let us not forget the democratic socialist
Shangri-La in Havana. In 1989 Sanders traveled to Cuba on a trip organized by
the Center for Cuban Studies, a pro-Castro group based in New York, hoping to
come away with a “balanced” picture of the communist dictatorship. The late,
legendary Vermont journalist Peter Freyne sighed that Sanders “came back
singing the praises of Fidel Castro.”
“I think there is tremendous ignorance in this country as
to what is going on in Cuba,” Sanders told The Burlington Free Press
before he left. It’s a country with “deficiencies,” he acknowledged, but one
that has made “enormous progress” in “improving the lives of poor people and
working people.” When he returned to Burlington, Sanders excitedly reported
that Cuba had “solved some very important problems” like hunger and
homelessness. “I did not see a hungry child. I did not see any homeless
people,” he told the Free Press. “Cuba today not only has free
healthcare but very high quality healthcare.”
Sanders had a hunch that Cubans actually appreciated
living in a one-party state. “The people we met had an almost religious
affection for [Fidel Castro]. The revolution there is far deep and more
profound than I understood it to be. It really is a revolution in terms of
values.” It was a conclusion he had come to long before visiting the country.
Years earlier Sanders said something similar during a press conference: “You
know, not to say Fidel Castro and Cuba are perfect—they are certainly not—but
just because Ronald Reagan dislikes these people does not mean to say the
people in these nations feel the same.”
There is, of course, a mechanism to measure the levels of
popular content amongst the campesinos. Perhaps it’s too much to expect
a democratic socialist to be familiar with the free election, a democratic
nicety the Cuban government hasn’t availed itself of during its almost 60 years
in power.
But Sanders has long been attracted to socialist
countries that eschewed democracy. He recalled “being very excited when Fidel
Castro made a revolution in Cuba” in 1959. “It just seemed right and
appropriate that poor people were rising up against a lot of ugly rich people.”
In an interview with The Progressive, almost 30 years later, Sanders was
still expressing admiration for the Cuban dictatorship: “And what about Cuba?
It’s not a perfect society, I grant, but there aren’t children there going
hungry. It’s been more successful than almost any other developing country in
providing health care for its people. And the Cuban revolution is only 30 years
old. It may get even better.”
During his tenure as mayor, Burlington established
sister-city programs in Nicaragua and the Soviet Union, and tried—and failed—to
create one in Cuba.
By the 1980s, certain elements of the radical left were
still defending the honor of the Cuban revolution. But few had kind words for
the Soviet Union, with most political pilgrims having long since wandered to
Cuba, Vietnam, China, and Cambodia. And Sanders too was routinely critical of
the Kremlin, criticizing the invasion of Afghanistan and acknowledging the lack
of freedom in the Soviet Union, while still managing a bit of socialist
fraternity, praising Moscow for constructing the “cleanest, most effective mass
transit system I have ever seen in my life…you wait 15 seconds in rush hour
between trains.” He was “impressed” by the state-run youth programs “which go
far beyond what we do for young people in this country.”
Sanders has long claimed to be a “democratic
socialist”—the type of lefty who loves Sweden, but is offended by the
totalitarian socialism that dominated during the Cold War—but he has long
employed the tepid language of “imperfection” when discussing the criminal
failures of undemocratic socialism. Totalitarians with unfriendly politics are
correctly met with derision and thundering demands for extradition and
prosecution. So Sanders succinctly described the Chilean murderer, torturer,
and destroyer of democracy Augusto Pinochet as a “mass murderer, torturer, and
destroyer of democracy.” And Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos is rightly
tagged as a “crook and murderer.”
Perhaps at this point I don’t need to point out that
Fidel Castro is likewise a crook and a murderer. Or that Sandinista strongman
Daniel Ortega, while achieving none of the milestones Bernie Sanders once
claimed he had achieved, stole enormous amounts of money from the Nicaraguan
people and was, to name just one example, behind the infamous bombing at La
Penca which killed seven people (including three journalists).
So to my fellow journalists: the next one of you who gets
caught in one of Sanders’s riffs about the CIA’s involvement in the overthrow
of Iranian leader Mohammed Mossadegh, ask him one of my questions. Ask him how
consistent he has been on foreign policy. And help him answer a question posed
by a Burlington Free Press journalist in 1985, who wondered if his
useful idiot trip to Nicaragua would come back to haunt him in a future race.
“The answer is ‘probably.’ But I’ll be damned if I know
how.”
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