Why it is Unlikely Sandernistas Will Catch Russiagate Fever and Why He Should Be Held Accountable Anyway

Danny Haiphong, BAR Contributing Editor

04 Mar 2020

Bernie Sanders’ rise to frontrunner status has done nothing to challenge the endless wars waged by the US, yet he is sure to face more smears and attacks the more his campaign succeeds.

“When his opponents smear him with wild Russiagate charges, Sanders take the bait.”

Just a day before the Nevada caucus, the U.S. intelligence apparatus briefed Bernie Sanders about an attempt by the Russian government to interfere in the process on his behalf. The Washington Post, a trusted mouthpiece of the C.I.A. in the corporate media, reported the story without any evidence to support the claim. This was in keeping with the last four years of the U.S. intelligence apparatus’ Russiagate operation. Russiagate has served as a McCarthy-esque attack on any inconvenience to imperial rule both domestic and foreign. And Bernie Sanders took the bait.

To be fair, Bernie Sanders has never challenged Russiagate orthodoxy. Sanders has largely parroted the line of U.S. intelligence that Russia “hacked” the 2016 election to help Trump win the White House. His response to the intelligence briefing was no different. Sanders told Russia to “stay out of our elections” and called Russian president Vladimir Putin an “autocrat” and a “thug.” In his continuing bid to differentiate himself from Donald Trump, Sanders reiterated that he would not tolerate any foreign power meddling in U.S. elections. When Michael Bloomberg opened the South Carolina debate attacking Sanders with Russiagate smears, Sanders defended himself with anti-Russian talking points.

“Russiagate has served as a McCarthy-esque attack on any inconvenience to imperial rule both domestic and foreign.”

Yet the claim that Russia is looking to sow chaos in U.S. politics by aiding Sanders’ campaign is just as ridiculous as the intelligence apparatus’ non-stop innuendo which positions Trump as an agent of the Kremlin who worked with WikiLeaks to cheat Hillary Clinton from winning the 2016 election. Russiagate enthusiasts ignore the fact-free basis of their arguments or that election meddling has historically been a job reserved for the United States. Over the last half century alone, the U.S. has overthrown nearly one hundred governments around the world by directly interfering in their political process. Russiagate was never designed to take down Trump. It was designed to preserve a world order where the United States ruthlessly and violently calls the shots.

The protection of the old and decaying imperialist order requires lies, and plenty of them. Russiagate is the biggest lie of them all. This lie is deployed whenever the U.S. ruling class is presented with another indicator of political crisis. It is no coincidence that the so-called revelation of Russian support for Sanders came directly before the Nevada primary. The U.S intelligence apparatus understood full well that Sanders was going to win big in Nevada. By making Sanders a target of the Russiagate operation, U.S. spooks and their corporate backers hoped to undermine the obvious popularity that Sanders’ politics enjoys with large portions of the Democratic Party base.

“Election meddling has historically been a job reserved for the United States.”

The effort fell short in Nevada, forcing the intelligence spooks to clarify that their briefing was “overstated.” Should Sanders continue to steamroll the competition on Super Tuesday and beyond, the Sandernistas will have little reason to catch Russiagate fever. Like most people in the U.S., Sandernistas are more concerned with healthcare, jobs, and immigration. This doesn’t mean that Russiagate should be dismissed. In fact, that Russiagate smears are largely ignored speaks to a different problem all together. Ignoring the problem doesn’t make it go away. And Bernie Sanders’ rise to frontrunner status has done nothing to challenge the endless wars waged by the U.S. war machine abroad, of which Russiagate is a critical component.

Sandernistas are understandably sensitive to criticism of Bernie Sanders because of the intense attack that he has faced from the corporate media and the oligarchs in control of the Democratic Party. The attack has been so intense that many leftist organizations and communist parties have called for critical support of Bernie Sanders. Some readers of Black Agenda Report (BAR) have confused BAR’s analysis of the reasons why the Democratic Party establishment is so afraid of Sanders for outright support of his campaign. Such a conclusion fails to consider that BAR has been one of the few independent media outlets that has criticized Bernie Sanders for his imperialist sympathies. Even worse, it privileges an emphasis on condemning Sanders over the strategic, ideological, and organizational questions that must be answered in order to move the anti-imperialist cause forward rather than back.

“BAR has been one of the few independent media outlets that has criticized Bernie Sanders for his imperialist sympathies.”

Bernie Sanders’ long history of taking the Russiagate bait reflects an enduring structural problem with the Democratic Party. That is, the Democratic Party is the War Party. And as such, there are parameters that a social democrat, no matter how earnest they are about Medicare for All and a Green New Deal, cannot cross lest they be completely shunned from the U.S. political process. Russiagate is not the only example of Sanders walking the imperialist path. While he repeatedly calls for the world’s nations to come together to disinvest from weapons production and invest instead in substantial climate change policy, Sanders has continued to bad mouth nations under the gun from U.S. imperialism like Venezuela as corrupt dictatorships that deserve no gestures of friendship from a future Sanders administration.

Bernie Sanders should be held accountable for offering no plan to cut the Pentagon budget or reduce the catastrophic military footprint of the United States. The trillion-plus dollar military albatross is not only an instrument of mass murder, but the top polluter of the planet as well. Sanders should be briefed by the people that warmongering language toward China and the DPRK doesn’t serve the interests of working people in the United States. He should be reminded that the U.S. invasion of Iraq is not so different from the NATO-led invasions of Yugoslavia, Libya, and Syria. The U.S. military and its various organs have one major priority and that is the protection and enrichment of the very class of oligarchs who see Sanders as an existential threat to their austerity regime. Selectively choosing which U.S. interventions matter and which do not as Sanders does by calling out the 1973 C.I.A coup in Chile and then claiming Xi Jingping is a dictator shows that no amount of social democratic progressivism can change the fact that the U.S. presidency is an instrument of imperialism.

“Sanders has continued to bad mouth nations under the gun from U.S. imperialism like Venezuela.”

Sanders cannot take all the blame for leading the masses astray on the question of war and peace. A principle reason why an anti-imperialist movement has not emerged from the growing popularity of social welfare reform is that the most anti-war sector of the U.S. populace, Black America, has yet to recover from four decades of brutal state repression and political misleadership. The Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) is bringing together Black left organizations and their friends in the movement to rebuild the Black consensus on peace. BAP organizers have created a petition and a candidate pledge to demand that war become a central issue in the 2020 election. The petition demands presidential candidates agree to a fifty percent decrease in the U.S. military budget, the closure of the 800-plus military bases around the world, and the abolition of AFRICOM and the Department of Defense’s 1033 weapons transfer program to local police departments. Both the pledge and the petition provide concrete tools for anti-war activists and the general movement to demand that Sanders and his massive base make the struggle against imperialist aggression a priority in the 2020 election.

The truth is that the more Sanders becomes “electable,” the less likely the issue of war and peace will find room in the 2020 election. Electability in the U.S. electoral system means capitulation to the imperial imperatives of the one percent. While Sanders certainly won’t backtrack on his domestic social welfare agenda, he is sure to face more intense anti-communist smears and attacks the more his campaign succeeds. The more Sanders is attacked by the ruling class, the more his supporters and Sanders himself may think twice before challenging the U.S. intelligence apparatus and the war machine. The U.S. ruling class will not elect its own grave digger. It is up to the power of the people to demand what Sanders nor any other candidate dares to utter. No one is above the truth, especially when millions of lives and the self-determination of nations are what’s at stake. Not Bernie Sanders, not anyone.

Danny Haiphong is an activist and journalist in the New York City area. He and Roberto Sirvent are co-authors of the book entitled American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People’s History of Fake News--From the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror (Skyhorse Publishing). He can be reached at [email protected], on Twitter @spiritofho, and on Youtube at The Left Lens with Danny Haiphong.

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