I sincerely believe you are unfairly maligning Bernie. Democratic Socialism is nothing like Communism. The Huffington Post did an article about this a few months back...
History Lesson: Bernie Sanders is no 'Communist,' and 'Democratic Socialists' are as American as Apple Pie.
On another note, do you like manga/anime? Your icon suggests you may...
Your article is a blog aka opinion piece.
First of all, calling the Huffington Post a "blog" is stretching the definition of the term to its limit. Google defines a blog as "
a regularly updated website or web page, typically one run by an individual or small group, that is written in an informal or conversational style."
The Huffington Post is not exactly small:
**
The Huffington Post was launched on May 9, 2005 as an alternative to news aggregators such as the
Drudge Report.
[5][6][7] On February 7, 2011,
AOL acquired the
mass market[8] Huffington Post for US$315 million, making Arianna Huffington editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post Media Group.
[9][10] In 2012,
The Huffington Post became the first commercially run
United States digital media enterprise to win a
Pulitzer Prize.
[11]
In July 2012,
The Huffington Post was ranked #1 on the 15 Most Popular Political Sites list by
eBizMBA Rank, which bases its list on each site's
Alexa Global Traffic Rank and U.S. Traffic Rank from both
Compete and
Quantcast.
[12]**
Source:
The Huffington Post - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Secondly, I suspect you are using the term "opinion piece" disparagingly. While it is true that the author of the article expresses his opinion, he does far more then that. He brings -evidence- for his claims, evidence that you have not disputed. I'll bring up a little of his evidence for the audience to focus on:
**
Actual true-blue communism, a radical strain of Marxism expounded by Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky after the 1917 Russian Revolution, has a dark, scary history: totalitarianism, purges, mass murders, espionage, and global oppression. Calling someone a “Communist,” particularly at the height of the Cold War during the 1950s and 1960s, amounted to accusing them of treason, child beating, or worse.
But most of the people tarred over the years as “communist” by generations of demagogues had nothing to do with any of this. Particularly socialists. And this brings us to Bernie Sanders. No, Bernie Sanders is no communist. In fact, in America especially, socialists like Sanders have often been communism’s worst enemies.
Democratic socialists — the kind Bernie Sanders embraces — have a long history in this country. At their popular height a century ago, they had achieved wide acceptance in the American mainstream. By 1917, the American Socialist Party had won elections all across the country. Two socialists had sat in the United States Congress, socialists had held mayoral offices in 56 towns and cities including Milwaukee and Schenectady. Socialists held over thirty seats in state legislatures from Minnesota to California to Oklahoma and Wisconsin, plus dozens of city council and alderman chairs.**
The author starts out by defining a communist as someone you murders and imprisons people, so they got it wrong from the beginning.
Actually, the article starts out as posted above. Specifically, it refers to communism as practiced during the Cold War by countries such as Russia and China, under the administrations of the likes of Stalin in Russia and Mao Zedong in China. Perhaps you are unfamiliar with these political figures, so I will lay it out for you nice and easy. Here's the amount of deaths that occurred during Stalin's reign:
**Before the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union, researchers who attempted to count the number of people killed under Stalin's regime produced estimates ranging from 3 to 60 million.
[111] After the
Soviet Union dissolved, evidence from the Soviet archives also became available, containing official records of 799,455 executions (1921–1953),
[112] around 1.7 million deaths in the Gulag and some 390,000 deaths during kulak
forced resettlement – with a total of about 2.9 million officially recorded victims in these categories.
[113]**
Source:
Joseph Stalin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Stalin's numbers pale in comparison to Mao's total:
**
critics consider him a dictator comparable to Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin who severely damaged traditional Chinese culture, as well as a perpetrator of systematic human rights abuses who was responsible for an estimated 40 to 70 million deaths through starvation,forced labour and executions, ranking his tenure as the top incidence of democide in human history.[7][8][9]**
Source:
Mao Zedong - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
It's hard to compare to the likes of Stalin and Mao. But let's not forget a few of the things that certain -Capitalist- countries have done as well. The U.S., for instance, in the ongoing war in Iraq:
**
Various scientific surveys of Iraqi deaths resulting from the first four years of the Iraq War estimated that between 151,000 and over one million Iraqis died as a result of conflict during this time.[1] A later study, published in 2011, estimated that approximately 500,000 Iraqis had died as a result of the conflict since the invasion.[2]Counts of deaths reported in newspapers collated by projects like the Iraq Body Count project found 174,000 Iraqis reported killed between 2003 and 2013, with between 112,000-123,000 of those killed being civilian noncombatants.**
Source:
Casualties of the Iraq War - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Socialism has never had these types of ghosts in its closet.