by Adam
Johnson
During the Miami Democratic
debate (3/9/16),
Sen. Bernie Sanders was asked about sympathetic comments he had made in 1985
about the left-wing leaders of Cuba and Nicaragua. Despite repeated
questioning, Sanders refused to retract his remarks:
MARIA ELENA SALINAS,
UNIVISION: Senator, in retrospect, have you ever regretted the
characterizations that you made of Daniel Ortega and Fidel Castro that way?
SANDERS: The key issue here
was whether the United States should go around overthrowing small Latin
American countries. I think that that was a mistake …
SALINAS: You didn’t answer the
question.
SANDERS: … Both in Nicaragua
and Cuba. Look, let’s look at the facts here. Cuba is, of course, an
authoritarian, undemocratic country, and I hope very much as soon as possible
it becomes a democratic country. But on the other hand, it would be wrong not
to state that in Cuba they have made some good advances in healthcare. They are
sending doctors all over the world. They have made some progress in education.
I think by restoring full diplomatic relations with Cuba, it will result in
significant improvements to the lives of Cubans and it will help the United
States and our business community invest.
Former Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton followed up moments later:
You know, if the values are
that you oppress people, you disappear people, imprison people or even kill
people for expressing their opinions, for expressing freedom of speech, that is
not the kind of revolution of values that I ever want to see anywhere.
Clinton’s sudden—and hypocritical—support
for “human rights” notwithstanding, the moment was predictable as it was
routine. It’s been 25 years since the end of the Cold War, so younger voters
may not be used to these types of loyalty rituals. But whenever the issue of
socialism—or communism, its more fear-inducing cousin—comes up, the press must
attempt to compel those who have previously expressed support or sympathy for
red politics to “denounce” their prior statements. Sanders’ refusal to do so
caused noticeable agitation among the moderators.
It’s to be expected that this
line of questioning would be advanced by Univision, which has deep ties to
anti-Castro Cuban-Americans in Miami.
Lead debate moderator Jorge
Ramos—who, to his credit, is open about his “point-of-view
journalism”—has long been a harsh critic of socialist governments in Latin
America. In addition to his standard on air and online
editorials, Ramos and Univision partnered with media giant Disney to create
Fusion, a nominally left media publication that frequently criticizes the leftist
government of Venezuela and communist Cuba.
(Univision is owned by an investment group led by Haim Saban, Clinton’s single-biggest
financial backer.)
A handful of Clinton partisans
jumped at the chance to paint Sanders as a far-left loony who likes to cozy up
to “dictators.” Salon’s Amanda Marcotte, one of the media’s most
reliable
Clinton
boosters,
jumped right in, linking to
a recent Daily Beast piece by Michael Moynihan, former senior editor of
libertarian Reason magazine and current Vice/Bank
of America talkshow host, who did a
rundown of Sanders’ dreaded leftist past. Suddenly, a topic Marcotte had never
once
tweeted
about, or expressed any public concern for, was of utmost importance and needed
to be brought to the forefront of public discourse.
The Daily Beast’s Jonathan
Alter followed suit, tweeting out
after Sanders praised Cuban healthcare, “Bernie a lefty sucker for Cuban line
on healthcare. If he got sick there, he’d medevac out. And where’s his concern
for human rights there?” Alter’s concern about “human rights” was hard to
discern when he wrote “Time to Think
About Torture” for Newsweek in November 2001, imploring liberals to
consider the practice so long as it didn’t involve “cattle prods or rubber
hoses.” In his almost 6,000 tweets, this is the first
time Alter’s employed the words “human rights.” Like Marcotte, such urgent
liberal principles only seem to pop up when it serves their preferred
candidate’s talking points.
A third such instance again
involved the Daily Beast, which published “Hey,
Bernie, Don’t Lecture Me About Socialism,” by Garry Kasparov. Kasparov,
chair of the dubious
Human Rights Foundation, is the author of the subtly titled book, Winter Is
Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped.
In his piece, the famous chess player-cum-neocon offered up some warmed-over
capitalist bromides:
And that while inequality is a
huge problem, the best way to increase everyone’s share of pie is to make the
pie bigger, not to dismantle the bakery…. A society that relies too heavily on
redistributing wealth eventually runs out of wealth to redistribute. The
historical record is clear. It’s capitalism that brought billions of people out
of poverty in the 20th century. It’s socialism that enslaved them and
impoverished them.
It’s no surprise the Daily
Beast would be ground zero for Sanders red-baiting; this is, after all, the publication
that claimed communist Cuban troops had been deployed
to Syria based entirely on one spurious Fox News report, and despite numerous
requests from FAIR to do so, refused to correct this
error. There’s something almost charming about the Daily Beast’s crusading
Cold War posture in 2016, or at least there would be if it didn’t serve as
fodder for Clinton partisans to offer tacit apologies for Reagan’s right-wing
death squads.
So far, the smear doesn’t seem
to have picked up much traction. Though the Washington
Post, Business
Insider and Talking
Points Memo did straight reporting on the issue—thus helping advance the
trope—generally the effect of these tactics don’t seem to have as much purchase
as they used to.
Nevertheless, the enterprise
of demanding those on the left “denounce” governments unfriendly to the United
States, particularly socialist ones, remains a favorite pastime of centrist
media—such is the function of those seeking to push Sanders on his support for
the Cuban and Sandinista governments.
The Daily Beast’s Moynihan
postured on Twitter:
“What I learned from Twitter: The Somoza and Batista dictatorships were bad, so
supporting the dictatorships that replaced them is good.” As Sanders noted, the
Cuban government is undemocratic, but the Nicaraguan government that replaced
Somoza is in no sense a dictatorship. The Sandinistas stood for election in
1984, winning 67 percent of the vote. Then they stepped down when they were
voted out in 1990. They were voted back in in 2006, and were re-elected in
2011. This is peculiar behavior for a “dictatorship.”
In the 1980s, when Sanders was
praising the Sandinistas, there were some limits on civil liberties; for
example, the US-funded newspaper La Prensa faced censorship. Since the US at
the time was also funding the Contras, a guerrilla army that was systematically
killing civilians in an effort to overthrow the Nicaraguan government,
under current US law the leadership of La Prensa would have been imprisoned for
providing material assistance to terrorists.
There’s a stark contrast
between the Univision moderator taking Sanders to task for 30-year-old comments
about Nicaragua, and the lack of any questions about Hillary Clinton’s policies
as secretary of State toward Honduras. After Honduras’ left-leaning elected
president was overthrown in a 2009 coup, Clinton worked
behind the scenes to legitimize the coup regime—with the result that
Honduras is now one of the most violent nations on Earth.
Clinton will, no doubt, not be
asked to denounce the coup she helped usher in. That’s because only Sanders had
the gall to support countries under attack by the United States, and must
therefore play the tedious “denouncing” game.
Sanders, as candidates for the
presidency often do, has also praised the US, but he will never be asked to
denounce his country for killing of millions of Indochinese in the 1960s and
1970s. Clinton, who has infamously praised
Henry Kissinger, will never be asked to denounce the former Nixon aide for
personally overseeing
the terror bombing of Cambodia that killed at least 150,000 civilians.
Condemnations, in the centrist
press, only work one way. Crimes carried out by capitalist countries, namely
the US, are one-off “mistakes” or “follies” or “blunders,” while the offenses
of socialist countries are existential products of an unmitigated evil that
must be categorically denounced — lest one be called a dictator or commie
apologist. Recalling America’s past, one gets a line-item veto—LBJ’s civil
rights record, good; the carnage of Vietnam, bad—but when it’s America’s
enemies, it’s all or nothing.
Such a double standard shows
not a concern for human rights, but for weaponizing liberal sympathies: namely,
the idea of human rights, used to muddy the waters and ultimately promote
America’s imperial ends. It is an almost 90-year-long tradition—and one on
full, depressing display in the latest round of Sanders red-baiting.
© 2016 Fairness and Accuracy
In Reporting (FAIR)
Adam Johnson is an associate
editor at AlterNet and writes frequently for FAIR.org. Follow him on
Twitter at @adamjohnsonnyc.
