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Sen. Bernie Sanders at the Democratic primary debate in Las Vegas, Nev., February 19, 2020. (Mike Blake/Reuters)It doesnt seem like a cheap shot to point out that Sanders got the reality of Communism wrong in the past and the rest of the world wrong in the present.

Former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, who did not have a great performance in Wednesdays Democratic debate, nevertheless said something interesting.

Were not going to throw out capitalism, Bloomberg said. We tried. Other countries tried that. It was called Communism, and it just didnt work.

Im unclear on when we as in the United States tried Communism, but it was still good to hear a Democrat say something nice about capitalism.

Senator Bernie Sanders didnt like it, though.

Lets talk about democratic socialism. Not Communism, Mr. Bloomberg, Sanders said. Thats a cheap shot. Lets talk about lets talk about what goes on in countries like Denmark ...

Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, has a point. Its unfair to use the label Communist to describe countries that adhere to social democracy (another way of saying democratic socialism, though there are ideological debates about whether the terms are interchangeable). Thats because the defining feature of social democracy (or democratic socialism) is democracy. Not only do social-democratic nations hold elections, they abide by them. Moreover, democracies worthy of the name adhere to things like constitutional rights and human rights including property rights and the rule of law.

None of these things apply to Communist countries such as China under Mao Zedong, Fidel Castros Cuba, or the old Soviet Union. Those countries were authoritarian or totalitarian, hostile to human rights, and contemptuous of democracy.

This, by the way, is an important point, since if the GOP has its way, the 2020 election will be a contest between socialism and capitalism, and a lot of people will throw around Communism in much the same way Bloomberg did.

Still, there are some problems with Sanderss answer an answer he has used in various forms for years.

First, while its true that Sanders does not advocate Communism, its also true that when Communism was still a live proposition in the Soviet Union, Sanders lavished praise on it. Its also true that he remains bizarrely fond of other non-democratic socialist regimes, including Cubas. So while he may not be proposing Communism for the U.S. per se, the fact that Sanders isnt horrified by Communist countries should tell you something about how far he might like to take socialism here.

Sanders supported a MarxistLeninist party that backed the Iranian Revolution and the hostage-taking of Americans. In 1985, he supported the effort by Daniel Ortega, the Soviet-backed Sandinista leader of Nicaragua, to suppress opposition newspapers. Until recently, Sanders was supportive of the dictatorship in Venezuela.

In 2016, when this record started to catch up to him, Sanders said, When I talk about democratic socialism, Im not talking about Venezuela, Im not talking about Cuba. As he said on Wednesday night, hes talking about places like Denmark or, as hes said at other times, Sweden or Norway.

But just as Cuba and the Soviet Union were never the workers paradises Sanders sometimes suggested, those European countries arent the socialist nirvanas he claims either. As my American Enterprise Institute colleague James Pethokoukis has noted, the egalitarian Nordic nations have as many billionaires, relatively, as the U.S. and more concentrated wealth, at least as measured by the share of wealth controlled by the top 10 percent. The Nordic countries are also free-traders and have many of the pro-business policies that Sanders despises here at home.

Sanders, who favors single-payer health care, routinely says we should follow the example of Scandinavian and other countries. He recently tweeted a list of 27 nations with universal health care. But National Reviews Ramesh Ponnuru pointed out that not one of the countries listed has single-payer health care.

Its true that the Nordic countries used to be closer to what Sanders has in mind. But that was decades ago back when Bernie was heaping praise on Communist countries. Those governments recognized that such policies were bad for the economy as a whole, and for the people too. Sure, some European countries have more-generous welfare states and more-progressive taxation than we do. Most also have much worse unemployment and economic growth. But all of that is grist for a different argument from the one Sanders offers. He has an impressive record of seeing only what he wants to see rather than what is at home and abroad.

And it doesnt seem like a cheap shot to me to point out that Sanders got the reality of Communism wrong in the past and the rest of the world wrong in the present.

2020 Tribune Content Agency, LLC

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Bernie Too Often Sees Only What He Wants to See - National Review

The Maoist totalitarian state is being reborn in China under Xi Jinping, who is constructing a personality cult akin to that which surrounded the late Great Helmsman. Xi is determined to strengthen his and the Chinese Communist Partys authority. However, the response of the Chinese government to the COVID-19 virus has undermined the CCPs credibilityand ultimately may threaten the partys hold on power.

Despite the modern worlds many extraordinary medical miracles, the potential of a pandemic, an easily transmitted disease with a high fatality rate, continues to worry medical professionals. Most people have heard of the Black Death, when bubonic plague killed between 75 and 200 million people in Eurasia in the mid-1300s. A century ago the Spanish Flu infected a half billion people and killed between 20 and 50 million worldwide, more than the number of deaths in World War I.

As of mid-February, the number infected exceeds 73,000, with some 1,900 deaths, assuming Beijings statistics are accurate.

The worst pandemic in recent years was Ebola between 2014 and 2016: there were about 28,600 cases and 11,300 deaths, an average 40 death rate, though the fatality rate of specific outbreaks ranged between 25 percent and 90 percent. SARS, severe acute respiratory syndrome, infected almost 8,100 and killed roughly 800 people in 2002 to 2003.

SARS is particularly relevant because it also was a coronavirus that originated in a Chinese wet market that featured the sale of live and wild animals. Beijings response to that health crisis was heavily criticized. In 2004 a report from an Institute of Medicine forum accused the Chinese government of a fatal period of hesitation regarding information sharing and action. The regime was more concerned about presenting an atmosphere of calm and stability during a leadership transition than preventing the spread of a disease of unknown potency and transmissibility.

Luckily, SARS fell short of past pandemics. However, the Chinese government is making similar mistakes in its response to what is now being called COVID-19. The latter appears to be much less deadly than SARS, though apparently more easily spread. As of mid-February, the number infected exceeds 73,000, with some 1,900 deaths, assuming Beijings statistics are accurate. Some doctors and outside researchers estimated that 100,000 or more Chinese actually have been infected.

Wet markets continue to operate, despite the evident risk of transmission of diseases from animals to people, the genesis of both SARS and COVID-19.

Nevertheless, the Xi governments obvious concern belies its official confidence. Vice Premier Sun Chunlan denounced quarantine deserters, indicating that people were evading the governments harsh control measures. The regime just announced that anyone returning to Beijing from elsewhere in the Peoples Republic of China must report to local authorities and self-quarantine for two weeks. Obviously, a pandemic in the nations capital would have significant political and economic implications.

Handling a medical crisis of this nature will never be easy, irrespective of the form of government. The PRC faced an additional challenge because the epidemic hit amid the Lunar New Year, during which tens of millions of Chinese traditionally travel. Many of those on the move are migrant workers, who leave the countryside to work in cities. The circumstances could hardly have been worse.

That the authorities had not stockpiled masks, hand-sanitizer, and more to respond to an unexpected pandemic was perhaps understandable. But refusing to acknowledge let alone confront the swiftly swelling tsunamic of infections made it impossible to catch up.

Nevertheless, the governments response has fallen short of that necessary to slow if not stop the diseases spread. Initial blame rested with the Wuhan provincial government. Wet markets continue to operate, despite the evident risk of transmission of diseases from animals to people, the genesis of both SARS and COVID-19.

Moreover, as the disease first emerged, the province was reluctant to acknowledge reality. Officials failed to admit person-to-person transmission and sponsored a Lunar New Year public potluck dinner with more than 10,000 families intended to set a world record.

Having a big event like this at a time of an epidemic amounts to a lack of basic common sense, observed Shanghai physician Li Xinzhou.

The province also failed to report a single infection during the first half of January, which coincided with a local party congress, so as not to discourage attendance.

Beijing decided to lock down the entire city of 11 million. But the Xi government gave advance notice that it was closing the airport and train station, enabling a flood of people to escape while the door was still open. Five million Wuhan residents ended up elsewhere in China and beyond.

Although Wuhans CCP leadership deserved censureand the party chief since has been removedthe increasing centralization of power orchestrated by Xi discouraged local leaders from taking responsibility.

Even with much of its population missing, the city lacked the essentials to combat the epidemic. The lack of beds caused hospitals to send patients home to self-quarantine without professional care. That the authorities had not stockpiled masks, hand-sanitizer, and more to respond to an unexpected pandemic was perhaps understandable. But refusing to acknowledge let alone confront the swiftly swelling tsunamic of infections made it impossible to catch up.

Although Wuhans CCP leadership deserved censureand the party chief since has been removedthe increasing centralization of power orchestrated by Xi discouraged local leaders from taking responsibility. That is a natural and predictable consequence of shifting power upward to the national leadership. Xu Zhangrun, a law professor who last year lost his position at Tsinghua University for criticizing Xi, argued that the monopoly of power has served to enable a dangerous systematic impotence at every level.

Jude Blanchette of the Center for Strategic and International Studies argued that: Xis leadership style has effectively instilled a wait and see attitude within the bureaucracy, which is leading to slow and hesitant responses from government officials as they wait for pronouncements from Beijing before taking action.

Obviously, the slower the governments reaction, the less effective its response. Indeed, Wuhans Mayor Zhou Xianwang refused to accept blame, telling Chinas CCTV: As a local government official, after I get this kind of information [regarding human-to-human transmission] I still have to wait for authorization before I can release it.

In taking control, the central government seemed uncertain whether to advertise Xis role. Having placed him at the core of the party and affirmed his omniscience and omnipotence, it was not easy to limit his responsibility for handling COVID-19. Nevertheless, for a time Xi disappeared from public view. Speculation on the reason ranged from protecting Xi from infection to insulating him from blame. Some compared the episode to 2012, when the then-vice president similarly vanished, apparently to confront party challenges centered around provincial chief and politburo member Bo Xilai, who was ousted and imprisoned.

Instead, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, who has been marginalized by Xi, was sent to Wuhan to show Beijings concern. Apparently, Li was seen as expendablethough there was no word on whether he was quarantined on his return. Li also was publicly placed in charge of the CCPs leading small group on the epidemic. Most LSGs operate without public attention and at least half are chaired by Xi, presumably to tighten his control of the party and policy apparatus. But not for COVID-19.

Finally, after much speculation, the president and party general secretary ventured onto Beijings streets, with facemask, to highlight the regimes concern. Xi was said to be personally leading and directing efforts to control the virus, and people were told to rally around the party with Xi Jinping at the core. Said to be in personal command, he issued important directions on the issue. He was in full apparatchik-speak: We should fight bravely and resolutely contain the spread of the epidemic, and resolutely win the peoples war, an all-out war, a resistance war to prevent and control the epidemic.

Beijing long refused access to foreign scientists and refused to furnish the virus to other nations laboratories.

Still, the regime was quick to blame the US and other Western nations for banning visitors who had been to the PRC. The Foreign Ministry accused America of having unceasingly manufactured and spread panic. Yet Hong Kong and Russia tightened travel restrictions before America did so.

Official Chinese media complained about the lack of American aid, after refusing US offers. At the time the US was preparing a shipment of materials in short supply. Beijing long refused access to foreign scientists and refused to furnish the virus to other nations laboratories. The Xi regime defended itself by citing flu deaths in America, even though far more Chinese die of that infection.

In any case, despite its best efforts, Beijing could not offload blame for such obvious failings as lack of beds and medical equipment. Indeed, the Xi governments attacks on Washington occurred with the backdrop of increasingly coercive measures being applied in China. For instance, there currently are more than 80 Chinese cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Hangzhou, and Shenzhen, as well as several provinces, under some form of lock-down/quarantine/isolationmore than 45 million people.

The regimes mistakes appear to have damaged its reputation for competence. Nevertheless, so long as the number of infections and deaths do not race wildly out of control, and economic activity soon resumes without a new rush of infections, the consequences of such inefficiency might have only limited political impact. However, these are major hedges. The economy was slowing even before the epidemic and the new restrictions imposed in Beijing suggest that relief remains weeks and perhaps months away.

A soft landing also presumes that the Xi governments existing figures can be trusted. Lack of transparency and honesty may be the regimes greatest weakness in fighting COVID-19. The CCP previously gained a reputation for covering up the partys role in disasters, such as earthquakes and train accidents. The regime also lost credibility attempting to limit the political fall-out during the SARS crisis.

Current skepticism exploded after the death of Dr. Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist who sounded the alarm when he observed the rise in suspicious infections. He was detained by the police and accused of spreading false information. He and seven other doctors were threatened with arrest and forced to admit that they had severely disrupted the social order. He then treated patients, catching the virus and dying at age 34. The government sought to defuse public hostility by claiming that he was still alive and being treated even after his death.

In January the government relaxed control of private reporting, but that ended quickly as Beijing took control of the disease narrative and infection statistics. Accounts of doctors, video bloggers, and ad hoc reporters were deleted.

Lis death set off a social media explosion. In the hours after his death, millions of comments poured in through Weibo, the Chinese Twitter, and other social media platforms. Before he died Li told an interviewer: A healthy society should not have just one voice. Many posts declared I want freedom of speech, which the government removed as quickly as possible. Even some Chinese inclined to trust the government went online to express their anger over his treatment.

Alas, Li was not alone in being silenced. Numerous ad hoc bloggers and citizen journalists plied Wuhans streets and hospitals, filing reports and posting videos. These activists reported nonexistent test kits and full hospital beds, people turned away by hospitals, underreported hospital deaths, uncounted deaths of undiagnosed patients, and increased cremations. These suggested that infection and death rates are higher than officially stated.

In late January the government relaxed control of private reporting, but that ended quickly as Beijing took control of the disease narrative and especially infection statistics. Accounts of doctors, video bloggers, and ad hoc reporters were deleted. Some bloggers, such as lawyer Chen Qiushi, welder Fang Bin, and human rights activist Hu Jia, were detained. The latter two were later released, but the former officially remains in government quarantine.

The regime also distributed its new media line: Sources of articles must be strictly regulated, independent reporting is strictly prohibited, and the use of nonregulated article sources, particularly self-media, is strictly prohibited. Social media providers were told they were under special supervision. Moreover, the regime sent a legion of official journalists to Wuhan and surrounding Hubei province to report on the virus. Cheng Yizhong, a newspaper editor fired for reporting on SARS, nearly two decades ago, opined: All Chinese are suffering the bitterness of CCP monopoly over papers, resources and truth.

This self-serving censorship has highlighted the more fundamental problem of tyranny. Chen Guangcheng, a lawyer and human rights activist who escaped to the US, wrote: The Chinese Communist Party has once again proved that authoritarianism is dangerousnot just for human rights but also for public health. He charged that the CCP has succeeded in turning a public health crisis into a health rights catastrophe.

Similar was the judgment of fired law professor Xu Zhangrun: The coronavirus epidemic has revealed the rotten core of Chinese governance, the fragile and vacuous heart of the jittering edifice of state has thereby shown up as never before. The result, he added, is to abandon the people over which it holds sway to suffer the vicissitudes of a cruel fate. It is a system that turns every natural disaster into an even greater man-made catastrophe.

Ominously, Zhangrun has not been heard from since his article appeared.

A successful conclusion to the epidemicif infections and deaths soon plateau and start to fallmight minimize memories of the Xi governments inadequate preparation and slow response. However, economic losses already are huge, in the tens of billions of dollars. And there appears to be no early end to the crisis.

Xi Jinping and the CCP justify an increasingly authoritarian, even totalitarian regime on the basis of caring for the Chinese people. The COVID-19 crisis has exposed that claim to be a lie.

Zhong Nanshan, an 83-year-old epidemiologist respected for his role in combatting the SARS epidemic, predicted that COVID-19 infections would peak this month and end by April. However, he admitted: We dont know why its so contagious, so thats a big problem. The governments failure to level with people at risk, share information with health care professionals to enable them to respond effectively, and justify to all the tough measures required may not be easily forgotten.

Some observers compare the pandemic to the impact of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the Soviet Union, when Moscow lied to its own citizens and foreign nations with equal enthusiasm. However, that blow was delivered to a regime already in a state of advanced decay. The PRC does not look as vulnerable. Nevertheless, Beijings reputation and prestige have suffered.

Xi and the CCP justify an increasingly authoritarian, even totalitarian regime on the basis of caring for the Chinese people. The COVID-19 crisis has exposed that claim to be a lie. Popular skepticism toward other self-serving government claims will rise in the future.

Similar failure in a future crisis, with regime credibility already damaged, could force political change today considered to be unthinkable. Ironically, Mao likely would understand the regimes peril: A potentially revolutionary situation exists in any country where the government consistently fails in its obligation to ensure at least a minimally decent standard of life for the great majority of its citizens.

Although he was speaking of people at a subsistence level, the principle has broader effect. Which ultimately could be the PRCs undoing.

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Why Chinese Communism Could Be the Final Casualty of the Coronavirus | Doug Bandow - Foundation for Economic Education

Despite the fact that Wednesdays Democratic debate in Las Vegas was the first debate to feature both Jewish presidential contenders, the word Jewish was not mentioned once. On top of that, neither Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders nor former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg took the opportunity to discuss their very different relationships to their American Jewish identities, and how it has affected their politics.

But make no mistake: There was still a very Jewish moment in the debate, and it was a moment that shows just how much and how little Jewish politics has changed in the past decades. Facing allegations from other candidates that he is spending his unimaginable fortune to essentially buy himself the presidency, Bloomberg defended himself by saying he didnt inherit his money but made it. The implied contrast with Donald Trump was obvious; While the current president inherited most of his wealth, he himself supposedly started from nothing, worked hard, and earned his money the old-fashioned way, making his wealth more legitimate than Trumps.

But Bernie Sanders, the other Jew on stage, had a ready response: He denied that Bloomberg actually earned his money at all. You know what, Mr. Bloomberg, Sanders retorted, to rapturous applause, it wasnt you who made all that money. Maybe your workers played some role in that, as well.

It was one of the bluntest and most unabashed articulations of Marxs labor theory of value that weve ever seen in American politics.

Of course, the argument over whether labor or management generates most of the wealth of a company is not a uniquely Jewish argument; in fact, its one of the central debates in economic theory. But it is a debate that has divided the American Jewish community for decades, and in fact played a significant role in the making of modern American Jewish identity.

Fears of a public association of Jews with socialism and communism defined mainstream American Jewish political life throughout the past century, and led to many of the political decisions made by prominent American Jewish organizations. It is well known that Eastern European Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants were disproportionately represented in leftist groups in the first half of the twentieth century.

The numbers are well-documented. In the 1910s, the most predominantly Jewish voting districts in New York elected more Socialist Party members to political office than any other area of the United States.

By 1914, at the outbreak of the First World War, Jews comprised fully 15% of the members of the Socialist Party, despite comprising only 3% of the total US population at the time. In 1920, socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs received 3.4% of the national vote but a whopping 38% of the Jewish vote.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most well-funded organizations of the American Jewish community feared that this disproportionate Jewish representation in left-wing politics would lead to anti-Semitism a fear that was not unfounded.

They responded by trying to erect a quarantine against socialism and communism in organized American Jewish life. In 1920, the Anti-Defamation League circulated to 500 newspapers around the US a series of articles trying to prove that most American Jews were anti-communist. The widely-read American Jewish Chronicle went further, not only arguing that most Jews were not communists, but implying that communist Jews were not really Jews at all. If the more prominent local Soviets have admitted many Jews, it is because these Jews are no longer Jews, the pamphlet argued.

By the late 1940s, the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League worked to formally expel known communists from Jewish community organizations. As Stuart Svonkin notes in his book Jews Against Prejudice, During the late 1940s and early 1950s, with the aid of intelligence provided by the AJCs Staff Committee on Communism local Jewish communities severed their connections with various pro-communist organizations. American Jewish organizations like the ADL and AJC consistently adopted a liberal, anti-communist line, and were active participants in the anti-communist rhetoric of the postwar era.

It was ironic: Because Jews were disproportionately represented in socialist and communist politics in the early twentieth century, post-World War II mainstream American Jewish politics defined itself as explicitly anti-communist in order to combat the fear that anti-Communism would lapse into anti-Semitism.

Bloombergs mix of pro-capitalist economics combined with social liberalism is closely aligned with the politics of the post-World War II American Jewish consensus, while Sanders represents a Jewish identity which it was fighting. Bloomberg represents the model that was supposed to have won out, while Sanders represents a model that many organs of the American Jewish community tried to banish. So it isnt surprising that Bloomberg has been a financial supporter of institutional Jewish organizations, including the Jewish Museum and Hadassah University Medical Center, whereas Sanderss links to this formal Jewish organizational infrastructure are much weaker.

And yet, here comes Sanders, who says he is proud to be Jewish, getting up on stage at a Democratic debate and defending Marxist labor theory to thunderous applause, while Bloomberg gets booed.

Its enough to make you think that maybe the postwar consensus of American Jewish politics is beginning to crack.

After World War II, American Jewish organizations tried to combat anti-Semitism by purging socialists and communists from organized Jewish life. But it may be the socialists who get the last laugh.

Joel Swanson is a Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago, studying modern Jewish intellectual history and the philosophy of religions. Hes skeptical of any consensus, political or otherwise. Find him on Twitter at @jh_swanson.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Forward.

The Jewish establishment once expelled communists. Now Jewish socialists are having the last laugh.

Original post:
The Jewish establishment once expelled communists. Now Jewish socialists are having the last laugh. - Forward

Democratic presidential front-runner Bernie Sanders likes to market himself as a wise old man who just happens to have clown hair but is right about everything, such as the War in Iraq. Yet his opposition to the Iraq War was dictated not by cool-headed geopolitical calculations, but the lifelong habit of romancing American enemies as is typical for communism-lovers.

The recently surfaced press conference Sanders gave following his return from his honeymoon in Yaroslavl, USSR, is a great example of leftist navet about totalitarian regimes. For Bernie to fawn over Soviet culture the way he did indicates a staggering degree of incuriosity. I was only 15 and growing up in Kharkiv, now Ukraine, when the couple visited the USSR, and Im not impressed when I watch Sanders sing Moscows praises

Start with the metro. Sanders said at the time, The stations themselves were very beautiful, including many works of art, chandeliers that were beautiful. It was a very, very effective system.

Its slightly creepy that Joseph Stalin initiated the tradition of building chthonian palaces underneath Soviet cities. The stations are beautiful, no doubt, but effectiveness is a whole different matter. Coverage was so-so, and the rush hour commute was a nightmare, so Sanders classification of the stations as effective is puzzling. People stuffed into trains like sardines.

More importantly, metros were only built in cities with populations exceeding one million. Investing money into extravagant projects makes sense if the goal is to dazzle foreigners, but its also highly unwise considering that the condition of roads across Russia has always been atrocious. Traveling in the USSR, especially in provincial towns such as Yaroslavl, Sanders, an American man with a driver license, would take note of the state of the infrastructure one would think.

Bernie continued:

Their palaces of culture for the young people, a whole variety of programs for the young people, and cultural programs which go far beyond what we do in this country. We went to a theater in Yaroslavl which was absolutely beautiful, had three separate stages. Their cultural programs were put together by professional actors and actresses, including a puppeteer area. And the cost, the highest price of the ticket you can get was equivalent of $1.50.

Its true that the Soviet Union subsidized all sorts of cultural programming for children, such as theaters and youth culture palaces with after-school enrichment programs. Unfortunately, in a socialist economy, that type of institution existed without any feedback from the markets.

I was part of the generation that took yearly field trips to the Theater of The Young Viewer. Ticket costs aside, there was just one such stage in the city, plus the Puppet Theater for the younger kids, and not a lot of demand for the shows. I dont think American cultural programming is in any way inferior, albeit the cost to the consumer might be higher.

When I was 10, I started taking the metro across town to a childrens palace where the after-school activities were offered. The palace, a beautiful pre-revolutionary structure, was named after Stalins henchman Pavel Postyshev. Postyshev presided over Red Terror, purges, and Holodomor, before himself falling victim to Stalinist repressions.

Toward the end of his life, the executioner, by then an alcoholic, was displaying symptoms of paranoia. He once decided that the flame drawn on the box of matches resembled the profile of Leon Trotsky and that sausages, when cut, have swirls similar to swastikas. He ordered the confiscation of all matches and a purge of the grocery.

My generation of Soviets came of age knowing that the USSR was built on tyranny and lies. We are the most cynical generation in Russian history. Once the country crumbled, our lives spun out of control. As a result, Russian speakers my age suffered through high rates of substance abuse, low life expectancies, and through-the-floor birth rates. On the plus side, we grew up with gaudy chandeliers in public places.

Bernies bride, Jane, picked up where her husband left off:

We were astounded with the openness, the optimism, the enthusiasm in the nation. What struck me the most was the way that they dealt with children, and the cultural life of their community. As Howard [another man on the trip] mentioned, they put the money into public facilities, and they have palaces of culture which are paid for strictly by trade union dues, and those have movies and dances, and those have a lot of artistic outlets for people for instance, they might become members of an orchestra and study to play an instrument and perform, and when they go off on performances, it seems not as not something as they are doing on their own, and they need to take vacation time from work, but its seen as providing and contributing to the community life, so it becomes part of their work instead of compartmentalizing their life into job and hobbies. Its all interrelated, and its all under the banner of community involvement.

The First-World problem Jane is trying to solve here is called the fractured modern man, and you wouldnt know it was a problem until you took a fair number of college classes. I mean, is it really that bad to have a job and a hobby?

Her talk of community involvement is rather ridiculous, considering she visited a country with a very low level of trust, no meaningful civic culture, and lots of alcoholism. When the workday was over, most Soviet people didnt go to culture palaces that they viewed as an extension of their work life. They didnt practice violin. They went moonlighting, making money on the side, or shopping, a time-consuming process, or otherwise cared for their families.

Also drinking or maybe watching a foreign movie at the cinema the USSR bought a limited number of those, but drinking was a favorite pastime. Alcohol consumption doubled from 1955 to 1979.

Nobody knows what paid for the construction and maintenance of Soviet culture palaces. In a planned economy with its web of subsidies and bribery, such things are not transparent. The trade union fees, however, were levied on everyone enrolled in a trade union, meaning every worker, because all those employed by the government were automatically enrolled in one, and everyone worked for the government or at least pretended to. As the Soviet joke went, We pretend we work, and they pretend they pay us.

To be in awe of those palaces of culture performances in the late 80s, a visitor would have to be really, really I mean really incurious. I understand the Sanderses went on their honeymoon surrounded by the KGB minders, but wow!The newlyweds were shown performance venues, but did they make an effort to meet an artist? Their tour was literally a Potemkin excursion through the Soviet Union: the best of architecture, no real people.

The late 80s was a difficult time, when the economy had suffered as the country struggled to compete with U.S. military spending. But it was also an incredibly exciting time because Mikhail Gorbachevs glasnost provided an opportunity to learn about the countrys past and discuss a whole universe of new ideas. Jane Sanders is right that there was much enthusiasm and openness in the country, and ordinary people were eager to meet Americans. The Sanderses let them down by staying with their minders.

And the culture palaces? Through most of Soviet history, those were the sanctuaries for second-tier Soviet culture amateurish and produced under the watchful eye of the censor. Top-level Soviet performers didnt start in provincial adult education classes; they were groomed in major cities starting in early childhood.

The kind of entertainment Soviet people wanted most wasnt created by youth puppeteers, either. A handful of officially produced Russian-speaking stars remained popular among people of all ages. Many of those born after World War II developed a preference for Western performers and homegrown underground acts. Recordings of banned performers were bootlegged from friend to friend and sometimes pressed on X-ray vinyl film na kostyah or on the bones. A few Western performers, most notably David Bowie, were allowed to tour the USSR. Soviet bands usually played concerts in apartments.

After a smuggled recording of Soviet underground rock was released in the West, Gorbachev reportedly said, Why cant we do it here? Shortly after, artists featured on the recording got contracts with the sole Soviet recording company, Melodia. Stadiums and other official performance venues opened for musicians who had endured years of prosecution, including being fired from work, expelled from official youth organizations, and sentenced to prison terms.

That was happening when Bernie went to the USSR. Yet with all his excitement about chandeliers, puppeteers, and the KGB-sanctioned rehearsal spaces, he completely missed the zeitgeist. The Vermont communism-lover was as close to liberation as he could ever get, but he chose to bond with his minders. And millennial hipsters think hes cool.

He is a special kind of tourist known to Russians. The tell me something nice about your country tourist, the surely the bad things Ive heard are all CIA propaganda tourist, which is one grade below the lets be nuanced about your situation tourist.

That said, the attitude toward those types of people was generally positive. They were still American, still in blue jeans, and they could tell us a thing or two about the music. We believed them to be basically well-intentioned but hopelessly nave.

After moving to the United States, I no longer believe Bernie-types to be well-intentioned. Regardless, the man who could be led astray that easily should never be the president of the United States.

Katya Rapoport Sedgwick is a writer from San Francisco Bay Area. She has published at The Daily Caller and Legal Insurrection. You can follow her @KatyaSedgwick on Twitter.

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I Lived In Russia When Bernie Sanders Visited, And He's A Dupe - The Federalist

COMMENTARY: In 2020, the United States, the longtime home of free markets, watches millions of its citizens embrace socialism and even communism, the scourge of the 20th century.

Thirty years ago this month, something critical happened in Moscow signaling the end not only of the Cold War, but of the Soviet Union itself.

On Feb. 7, 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev succeeded in banishing the Communist Partys guarantee as the USSRs sole political party. He backed a proposal by free-market reformers to repudiate Article 6 of the Soviet Constitution, which had ensured the more-than-70-year communist stranglehold on power. The communist monopoly was officially ended.

This historic shift was greeted by a top-of-the-fold headline across The New York Times. I still remember where I was when I saw that headline. I was walking down Fifth Avenue of the Oakland section of Pittsburgh, en route to my job at Childrens Hospital and Presbyterian University Hospital, where I was a pre-med student working for the organ-transplant team. The headline hit me like a Soviet SS-20 missile and was a key factor redirecting my path ahead, eventually taking me toward a different field of study, one in which I would go on to spend the next three decades of my life explaining why the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics collapsed and, equally important, why no rational human being should ever choose the destructive road of communism and socialism. As evidence of the political systems history of human-rights violations, conservative estimates of the death toll under communist/socialist regimes in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Cuba and elsewhere number in the tens of millions.

And yet, all along, Ive watched in dismay as an entire generation of young people raised in our public schools and universities not only havent learned the crucial lessons about communism and socialism but, quite the contrary, have been taught that these ideologies really werent all that bad. Socialism and communism, theyre told, merely had not been done properly.

Ive thus spoken to countless groups on college campuses and elsewhere giving talks with titles like, Why Communism Is Bad and Communism, Socialism and Democratic Socialism: What the Heck Is the Difference. This is information they flatly do not know.

Ive sounded that warning for years now, with many colleagues rolling their eyes thinking Im being a tad hysterical. Sure, I could give anecdote after anecdote, but these were just anecdotes. Right?

Well, now we have more than anecdotes. We have hard data, and that data is only getting worse.

In the early 2010s, I noticed a clear break during the Obama presidency. I began to see a flip in surveys asking young people if they preferred socialism. A 2014 survey by the Reason Foundation found that 53% of 18- to 29-year-olds viewed socialism favorably. In 2015, the same year that socialism was the most looked-up word at Merriam-Webster, Gallup found69% of millennials saying they would vote for a socialist president.

Many people shrugged that off. And yet, in the 2016 Democratic primary, millions did precisely that, voting for Bernie Sanders, a lifetime avowed socialist. Sanders got 13 million votes in the Democratic primary 40% of votes that year, and almost as many as Donald Trump received (14 million) in the Republican primary.

In 2020, Bernie is the front-runner for the Democratic Party. That should not surprise us, given a 2019 survey that found that, among registered Democrats, 57% view socialism positively.

High as these numbers are, they continue to increase. A November 2019 survey by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (conducted by YouGov) found 70% of millennials saying that they are likely to vote for a socialist.

And it isnt merely young people. In May 2019, Gallup found that four in 10 Americans generally prefer socialism, with 43% saying socialism would be a good thing for America.

Even more disturbing, praise for communism is on the rise. That November 2019 survey by Victims of Communism and YouGov shows that 36% of millennials say they approve of communism, and 22% believe society would be better if all private property was abolished.

Their ignorance of the crimes of communism is likewise shocking. Amazingly, an October 2016 survey by the Victims of Communism found that one in three millennials and one in four Americans generally believe President George W. Bush killed more people than Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. Yes, you read that right. Few statistics are so revealing of a profoundly sick ignorance.

Alas, likewise disturbing, especially for readers here, is that some Catholics are not immune to this growing enchantment.

Last summer, in July 2019, America magazine published a piece by one of its staff correspondents, Dean Dettloff, titled, The Catholic Case for Communism, along with a defense by the editor in chief, Jesuit Father Matt Malone, Why we published an essay sympathetic to communism. The piece is posted online with a photo of the Communist Crucifix handed to Pope Francis by Bolivias Marxist President Evo Morales.

This is grossly ill-informed and irresponsible on many fronts, particularly given how the Catholic Church has consistently confronted communism and socialism for literally more than 170 years, unlikely any other institution.

In 1846, two years before the Communist Manifesto was even published, Pope Pius IX issued his encyclical Qui Pluribus, which stated that communism is absolutely contrary to the natural law itself and would utterly destroy the rights, property and possessions of all men, and even society itself.In 1849, Pius IX issued Nostis Et Nobiscum, which described both socialism and communism as wicked theories, perverted theories and pernicious fictions.

Such condemnations continued on from papacy to papacy. In 1878, Pope Leo XIIIs Quod Apostolici Muneris criticized communism as the fatal plague which insinuates itself into the very marrow of human society only to bring about its ruin. Pope Pius XIs May 1937 encyclical, Divini Redemptoris (Atheistic Communism), referred to communism as a satanic scourge, a collectivistic terrorism replete with hate. Marxists were the powers of darkness. The evil we must combat is at its origin primarily an evil of the spiritual order, said the encyclical. From this polluted source the monstrous emanations of the communistic system flow with satanic logic.

And as for socialism, Pope Pius XI in May 1931 issued Quadragesimo Anno, which affirmed, Religious socialism, Christian socialism, are contradictory terms; no one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist.

Read that again: One cannot be a good Catholic and a socialist.

As for oddball Christians who confusingly want to be socialists, Pius XI advised a better course:

If they truly wish to be heralds of the Gospel, let them above all strive to show to socialists that socialist claims, so far as they are just, are far more strongly supported by the principles of Christian faith and much more effectively promoted through the power of Christian charity.

If they want to help the poor, they should be Christians, not socialists.

In July 1949, Pope Pius XII issued his Papal Decree Against Communism, which asserted that it was not licit for Catholics to join or show favor to communist parties, nor to publish, distribute, or read publications that support Communist doctrine or activity, or to write for them. The decree even stated that Christians who profess, defend or promote materialistic Communist doctrine incur the penalty of excommunication as apostates from the Christian faith.

Think about that. That means that, quite literally, America magazines piece last summer could have been cause for excommunication in 1949.

Pope Francis has also condemned communism. In December 2013, he said, The Marxist ideology is wrong, though adding: But I have met many Marxists in my life who are good people.

Francis knows how deadly communism has been. In April 2017, Francis decried the many Christians killed by the demented ideologies of the last century. In June 2019 in Romania, he beatified seven communist-era martyred bishops who had endured suffering and gave their lives to oppose an illiberal ideological system that oppressed the fundamental rights of the human person.

To be sure, Francis is a product of a 1970s Argentinian mindset thats skeptical of free markets and favorable toward aspects of collectivism and wealth redistribution. But still, he has condemned Marxism as wrong, as has his Church. Francis knows, as any Catholic should, that Catholics cant support communism or socialism.

As St. Pope John XXIII put it, No Catholic could subscribe even to moderate Socialism. He rightly insisted: Socialism takes no account of any objective other than that of material well-being. It places too severe a restraint on human liberty.

And yet, here we are in the United States in 2020, and young people are praising communism, voting for socialists, and Catholic publications are publishing articles making a Catholic Case for Communism. This is a highly disturbing trend, prompting many of us to wonder if we really did defeat these ideologies when we won the Cold War. We defeated socialism and communism in the war room but not in the classroom.

And so, take a look back and assess where we are today: In 1990, the USSR, the longtime home of socialism and communism, rebuked socialism and communism. In 2020, the United States, the longtime home of free markets, watches million of its citizens embrace socialism and even communism. Pretty sad.

Paul Kengoris professor of political science at Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania.

His books include A Pope and a President andThe Divine Plan and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Communism.

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Soviet Union Rewind: Why Are We Praising Communism Again? - National Catholic Register