by Frank Holmes, reporter
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-V.T., has barnstormed Iowa, New Hampshire, and primary states across the country, making hundreds of campaign stops—but one of them from the past has raised serious eyebrows.
Sanders has a Vietnam problem that would’ve made “Hanoi” Jane Fonda blush.
In the past, the Vermont politician has compared the United States to Nazi Germany during a campaign speech to a class of ninth-graders — and that’s just the beginning, critics point out.
Before he became a presidential candidate, U.S. Senator, and mayor of Burlington, Vermont, Sanders was a radical socialist who ran as a perpetual candidate for office for a party called the Liberty Union Party.
The party, which was a socialist organization, nominated him as its standard bearer in multiple unsuccessful campaigns, including U.S. Senate and governor of Vermont.
In 1972, Sanders ran for governor for the party and spoke before the ninth grade class of Rutland Junior High School. But that didn’t stop him from talking about abortion, amnesty for Vietnam draft dodgers, or comparing their country to fascists.
“Some things I’m going to say may upset you,” Sanders told the group of about 30 children, aged 14 to 15 years old.
That’s when he turned to the most controversial issue of his day: the war in Vietnam, which had not yet come to an end.
America’s role in Vietnam was “almost as bad as what Hitler did,” Sanders said.
The North Vietnamese — evidently including the Viet Cong — “are not my enemy,” he said. “They’re a very, very poor people. Some of them don’t have shoes. They eat rice when they can get it. And they have been fighting for the freedom of their country for 25 years. They can hardly fight back.”
More than 58,000 Americans died in the Vietnam Conflict, which lasted from 1955 to 1975. Ho Chi Minh’s North Vietnamese aligned themselves with Communists throughout the region, from Moscow to the Pathet Lao forces in Laos.
Sanders made the vicious comparison in the background of future Senator John Kerry’s “Winter Soldier” testimony in 1971.
The young Kerry testified before Congress that he and his fellow Vietnam soldiers “had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war.”
It turned out the testimony was mostly the work of people who never served in Vietnam.
Fellow Vietnam veteran and future leader of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, John O’Neill, said the statement was a lie and was mounted to an attempted “murder of the reputations of two and a half million of us, including the 55,000 dead in Vietnam.”
“The justification that Hanoi uses for keeping our POWs is that they were engaged in criminal acts there,” O’Neill pointed out, and “someone who comes out and says exactly the same thing could be doing nothing but serving those purposes.”
Unlike Kerry, Sanders had a cartoonish reputation in politics at the time. The Rutland Herald article says Mrs. Shirley Smith’s class “giggled” when they heard of his party.
Sanders won 1.1 percent of the vote that election, but he promised he’d win in the future.
“They won’t laugh next time. They know I’m a human being,” he said.
The Washington Free Beacon unearthed the article on the eve of the Iowa caucuses. But the embarrassing comment is one of several clips highlighting Bernie Sanders’ consistent history as a pro-Soviet socialist during the Cold War.
He said as a child, during a speech about the Communist threat from President John F. Kennedy, he “almost left to puke.”
More recently, videos have surfaced showing that Bernie Sanders praised the USSR’s bread lines as a “good thing,” showed his support for the Soviet Union’s art policies—which he saw while he took his honeymoon in Communist Russia—and his backing of Fidel Castro’s socialist healthcare system.
But Sanders may have the last laugh.
He may just win the Democratic nomination for president — and the commander in chief of the very U.S. armed forces that he slandered.
Frank Holmes is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”