If you’re still doubting socialist Bernie Sanders has a soft spot for communism, his continued defense of Cuba’s Castro regime and other communist dictatorships at Sunday’s debate should eliminate all uncertainty. Given yet another opportunity to walk back his praise for Cuba’s brutally repressive totalitarian dictatorship, Sanders refused and continued to heap praise on the barbarous regime (via the New York Post):
Bernie Sanders refused to back down on his controversial support for Cuba’s late Communist dictator Fidel Castro during Sunday’s Democratic presidential debate.
When asked why Cuban Americans should vote for him after he praised Castro’s literacy program despite his human rights abuses, Sanders pivoted to another Communist country: China.
“I think you can make the same point about China. China is undoubtedly an authoritarian society,” Sanders said.
“Okay, but would anybody deny, would any economists deny, that extreme poverty in China today is much less than what it was 40 or 50 years ago? That’s a fact,” he added.
“I think we condemn authoritarianism whether it’s in China, Russia, Cuba or anyplace else, but to simply say that nothing ever done by any of those administrations had a positive impact on their people would, I think, be incorrect.”
So as Noah Rothman points out in Commentary, when Bernie Sanders tells you he’s a socialist, believe him:
Bernie Sanders Defends Socialist Countries Because He Is a Socialist
“Bernie’s notion about how he embraces folks like the Sandinistas, and Cuba, and the former Soviet Union, and he talks about the good things they did in China, is absolutely contrary to every message we want to send to the rest of the world,” Joe Biden claimed during Sunday night’s debate. To this, Bernie Sanders had an equally forceful response. “I have led the charge against all forms of authoritarianism,” he replied, “including America’s so-called allies.”
But the issue was not the standards Sanders aggressively and consistently applies to America’s geopolitical allies but those he relaxes for its adversaries. His failure to address that consistent pattern of behavior in this moment and throughout the debate revealed a fact that Sanders himself does not disguise. Bernie Sanders has spent his career telling you that he is a socialist. Believe him.
Before he became a national political figure, Sanders did not shy away from assuming the mantle “socialist,” unmodified by any banal adjectives. In the early 1960s, Sanders volunteered on an Israeli kibbutz—a fact of which he’s quite proud and frequently discusses. But after he became a federal politician, Sanders declined to elaborate on that communal farm’s location or its political affinities. “Surprise,” read the New York Times headline when they solved the kibbutz mystery in 2016: “It’s socialist.” And hardly the “democratic” sort.
Continue reading the Rothman’s piece HERE.