Watching Bernie at the Fox News Town Hall: Memories of the Soviet Union
By Roger L. Simon April 15, 2019
Strange as it may seem, watching Bernie Sanders on the Fox News town hall Monday night brought back memories of the Soviet Union for me. I went there for the first time in 1987, one year before Sanders went to the communist country. I was on a cultural exchange arranged for crime writers; Bernie was there to get married.
Although I was more or less still on the left, I found what I saw horrifying. Bernie took off his shirt and sang â€This Land Is Your Land.â€
In other words, although we were in the USSR at basically the same point, we apparently visited different countries. I can remember spending much of my time talking to Soviet writers, listening to their tales of oppression, and their desperate desire to leave the country for freedom in America. In several cases, they asked my help to get out, which I had no way of giving them. As they made their pleas, my schoolboy Marxism drained out of me.
I also noticed the sparse prison-like conditions as we moved across the country from Leningrad to the Crimea, how we were followed everywhere, how the stores were empty, how everyone seemed depressed or drunk or both. Well, almost everyone. Some high party officials seemed to be living well. Paradoxically, if you were looking for income inequality, nothing beat the USSR.
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