Bernie Sanders the hypocrite

Recently, Senator Bernie Sanders has bravely and courageously toured parts of the country with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in an effort to expose the “oligarchy” and “authoritarianism” of the Trump administration. Bernie is passionately warning the American people about the dangers of a few people in the higher echelons of government making decisions on behalf of the populace. It must, however, be pointed out that Bernie Sanders is a complete and total hypocrite.

I completely acknowledge that if I straightforwardly call someone a hypocrite, then I have an obligation to back up my accusation. Fortunately, or maybe unfortunately, there are multiple lines of evidence to suggest that Bernie Sanders is in fact a complete hypocrite. For one, the people whom he holds in high regard are authoritarians that have terrifyingly bad track records when it comes to human rights.

All of us living in the 21st century have an obligation to the victims of these horrors to learn what actually happened, so that these events are never repeated. One of the “leaders” whom Bernie Sanders has consistently praised throughout the Cold War and in its aftermath is Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.

From the perspective of Bernie Sanders, Cuba was unequal under Batista and then it became more equal under Fidel Castro. Castro taught people to read and equalized society. Everyone was looked after. It was a paradise — unless one were to take a closer look at things. While we take for granted in the U.S. the right to criticize the government, Fidel Castro didn’t really allow for that sort of thing in Cuba. He rounded up thousands of his own citizens and put them in prison without trials for disagreeing with communism or the actions of his government. He didn’t allow for freedom of religious worship. His “literacy program,” which Bernie touts as a massive success, was a mass indoctrination campaign designed to teach young kids to be loyal to socialist revolutionary ideals. Were homosexuals treated well? Not particularly. Castro thought of homosexuality as a bourgeois perversion and rounded up homosexuals and put them in UMAP (Military Units to Aid Production) concentration camps. And that’s just a taste of things.

There are other examples. Bernie Sanders praised the Nicaraguan “leader” Daniel Ortega during the Cold War. Ortega of course crushed political dissent and would not permit people to criticize his government.

Bernie honeymooned in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. He had only nice things to say about the communist paradise that was ruled by a few and crushed individual rights. The Soviet Union managed to kill more people than the Nazis ever did, but Bernie was treated well when he was there, so I guess that’s what counts.

Bernie will criticize the U.S. time and again for intervening in other countries but didn’t seem to care that the Soviet Union imprisoned over 200 million people behind the Iron Curtain, put down the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, and the Czech rebellion in 1968. He conveniently seems to have forgotten about the millions of people who languished in Soviet gulags.

While Bernie seems to consistently praise authoritarian regimes that treat their people horribly, maybe he has more moral fiber than those he lauds. Again, I would say no. For most of his career, Bernie Sanders has stoked rage in his followers and ultimately claims that poor people aren’t well off because the 1% have stolen from them. Additionally, he has claimed that it is immoral to be a millionaire or billionaire. But funnily enough, when Bernie Sanders became a millionaire, it was suddenly very moral to be a millionaire. What a coincidence. At that point it was only immoral to be a billionaire.

He actually made a nice profit off a book on why free market capitalism is bad. I would have thought that he would give the book away for free, but I was clearly mistaken. For a guy who hates the rich, he sure is quick to forgive himself for owning three homes and being worth millions of dollars. In 2016, Bernie donated a mere $10,600 of his $1 million income to charity. So it seems like he wants to be charitable with other people’s money. What a guy.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the little situation going on in the Middle East. You may recall that on October 7th, 2023, Hamas, in tandem with Gazan civilians, invaded Israel and murdered more than 1,200 people, took hostages, and raped countless people. Since then, the IDF is doing what any country’s military would have done after that attack. Israel seeks to ensure that Hamas can never again do what it did.

For most of the time since October 7, you might think that Bernie Sanders has criticized the Hamas authoritarian psychopaths who carried out the attack and use their civilians as human shields, but you would be wrong. He believes Israel, a liberal democracy, needs to be nicer to the people that seek to execute a second Holocaust. Sure, members of Hamas have gone in front of cameras and said they intend to do October 7 again and again and again, but according to Bernie, Israel is the problem. If only Israel was nicer to the people who seek its obliteration, everything should turn out fine. After all, when the allies tried to appease Germany in 1938, all was well.

I could go on, but I am left with several questions: why do dictators like Fidel Castro and Daniel Ortega get free passes in the eyes of progressives like Bernie Sanders? Why does Bernie Sanders feel that it is moral to warn us about economic systems like free market capitalism when socialism has resulted in the deaths of more than 100 million people throughout the 20th century? If communist Cuba was so great, why did more than 2 million Cubans flee paradise? Why would so many of them come to a capitalist country like the U.S. and embrace things like individual liberty? Why did millions of people flee the Soviet Union?

Regarding the construction of the communist paradise, I have heard that in order to make an omelet, you need to break a few eggs. Given the death toll exacted by socialism, this must be one heck of an omelet. Bernie Sanders has said that it is okay to be upset about capitalism. But maybe it’s more appropriate to be upset with socialism and stop bashing the economic system that raised 90% of the human race out of abject poverty. Maybe we should be upset with the people and the economic systems that promise utopia but instead deliver authoritarianism, desolation, and death.

If Bernie Sanders solely focuses on Trump and cannot see or refuses to see the horrors of the people and societies he holds up in high esteem, maybe he is indeed a hypocrite and possibly an evil person. It is fortuitous that a man who hates liberty and despises freedom did not become the leader of the free world.

Dr. Daniel Radin grew up in Glen Rock, where his family belongs to the Glen Rock Jewish Center, and he graduated from the Academy for Medical Science and Technology in Hackensack. He recently finished his PhD and is now finishing his medical degree at Stony Brook.

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