Originally posted by simplicio
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The fact that Cuba had a literacy program that Castro used to indoctrinate the people including children, while destroying any written material and books that were not approved by his regime is NOT a good thing. The fact that he was teaching people to read his propaganda while shooting others in the back of the head for being subversive is not a good thing.
I dare you to go around praising Mussolini's train service and Hitler's healthcare system and see if people don't see you rightly as a Nazi sympathizing fascist.
I posted that Babylon Bee story about how slavery wasn't all bad because they got free housing and food. It was supposed to point out how ridiculous such a thing would be, but you actually take it as a something correct and good. It wasn't irony to you.
That's why I said you are either a moron or trolling.
Bernie has been praising Cuba and Castro for 40/50 years. When he was called out on it, he came up with this lame 'but Castro had this great literacy program' as a deflection to draw attention away from the fact that he has been cheering on communists and dictators for over 40 years.
Don't be fooled. Sanders is only playing at "democratic socialism" because he knows no one is ready for his true beliefs, communism.
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 an SWP elector in 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 has 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 1981 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."
Four years later, he backed and campaigned for the SWP presidential nominee Mel Mason, a former Black Panther, saying it was important for there to be "fundamental alternatives to capitalist ideology." During the campaign, Mason praised the Russian and Chinese revolutions and said: "The greatest example of a socialist government is Cuba, and Nicaragua is right behind, but it's still developing."
During Pulley's White House run in 1980, he called for the abolition of the U.S. military and the nationalization of "virtually all private industry," as well as the abolition of the military budget and the establishment of "official ... 'solidarity' with the revolutionary regimes in Iran, Nicaragua, Grenada and Cuba," according to a New York Times report at the time.
During that same campaign, Pulley hailed the Cuban revolution as a model for the U.S. and claimed that "racism [had] been abolished" on the island. His running mate, Matilde Zimmermann, described the contention that Cubans lived under a dictatorship as American "propaganda."
"Working people here could learn a lot from the Cuban example," Zimmermann said .
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 Josef Stalin.
...
"They were certainly a revolutionary group ," said Paul Kengor, a professor at Grove City College and an expert on 20th century communism. "One of the SWP's fans was Lee Harvey Oswald, who not only wanted to overthrow our government but actually assassinated our president, John F. Kennedy."
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.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/n...-in-reagan-era
And in case you are wondering, the SWP are actually full blown communists not socialist [the same way the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was communist] and always have been. Read on in the article.
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