Bernie Sanders Praises Chinese Leadership: 'They've Done a Lot of Things for Their People'
When it comes to socialism, Bernie Sanders can apparently always see a bright side.
The Chinese government might run a totalitarian state of one-party communist rule, and China might currently be in the process of trying to crush the last elements of freedom in the former British colony of Hong Kong, but the socialist senator from Vermont says it’s not all bad.
Too bad he can’t give the same kind of credit to the capitalism that built the wealthiest society the world has ever seen.
In an interview with The Hill that was published Tuesday, the socialist senator from Vermont said, basically, that China is getting a bad rap.
“China is a country that is moving, unfortunately, in a more authoritarian way in a number of directions,” Sanders told interviewer Krystal Ball. “We would hope they would have moved toward a democratic, more democratic form of government and [they’re moving] in the opposite direction.”
“And they’re a country that vigorously protects their own interests.”
Considering China has been making its neighbors nervous lately by trying to expand its control over areas like the South China Sea, that’s a mild way of putting it.
But Sanders sees a bright side.
“But what we have to say about China, in fairness to China and its leadership, is, if I’m not mistaken, they have made more progress in addressing extreme poverty than any country in the history of civilization, OK?” he said. “So they’ve done a lot of things for their people.”
Well, one could make the argument that Chinese communism had done a lot for the people. One could also make the argument that it murdered its own people by the millions through various man-made famines and socialist repression.
(Estimated death tolls vary, and any information is unreliable in a dictatorship, but History.com put the minimum number at 15 million with higher-end estimates at about 70 million. Either way, it’s a staggering number.)
That number doesn’t include the number of abortions due to the country’s barbaric “one-child” policy in place from 1979 to 2013, which restricted the vast majority of Chinese women to having only one offspring.
In 2013, the U.K. Telegraph reported China’s Health Ministry estimated the country had seen 336 million abortions over the course of the policy.
That’s more than the current population of the United States.
And those grim statistics don’t even count the soul-crushing aspect of life in a totalitarian society.
Meanwhile, Sanders is much more likely to rain abuse on the United States and capitalism — the system that actually raised more people out of poverty than any other system on earth because it sets loose the creative abilities of individual human beings.
Operating for their own benefit, the benefit of their families and the benefit of their communities, Americans have created the most powerful, wealthy and benevolent nation in history. Anyone with eyes can see it, but leftists refuse to look.
It might be understandable that a socialist like Sanders — who literally honeymooned in the dictatorship of the old Soviet Union in 1988 — could never grasp or admit those truths.
It might be understandable that a socialist could praise the joys of breadlines in a socialist country.
But it’s utterly confounding that so many Americans — even the Americans who call themselves liberals — could consider electing such a man the president of the United States.
And that’s where Democrats are today.
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