11 arrested in protest at Sen. Bernie Sanders’s office over war in Ukraine
11 arrested in protest at Sen. Bernie Sanders’s office over war in Ukraine
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Why must every faction of Progressives attack each other. Bernie Sanders is the most solid progressive I know of, but Code Pink wants to attack him because his Ukraine support isn't anti-war? I'm anti war. In particular I'm anti the war that Russia started by invading Ukraine. Anti war doesn't mean just letting the bad guy do whatever they want. If so, then anti-war is pro tyranny, because they always let the aggressor invade.
One of the things that made me really like Sanders when he was first campaigning for president was when I looked up his record on American war and he had a voting record that tended to follow a quote from him that amounted to something like (paraphrasing), "War should be the last resort, but if a war is started, we need to see it fully see it through."
It's not like siding with Ukraine and getting into that conflict is supporting warfare. It's seeking to prevent warmongers from profiting off a senseless war. The idea that abandoning Ukraine to just be invaded and allowing Russia to get whatever they want by force is an, "Anti-war," stance is fucking absurd.
The left loves nothing more than to bicker over ideological purity.
The right falls in line
False narrative.
We have less than a dozen morons here. They don't represent anyone but themselves.
Meanwhile we have entire factions of the Republican party at war with themselves from the Lincoln Project to the infighting in the House just this week.
All of them intend to vote for Trump in November, regardless of legal court findings, if they have any chance to vote form him, through legal means or otherwise they will all do it.
The left has always had its share of morons.
Well-meaning morons, but morons nonetheless.
The issue is that the centrist and right wing media latch on to the narrative of these fringe weirdos and pretend that they represent the entirety of the left wing, even though there are WAY MORE lefties who find them disdainful.
Bernie voted for the bombing of Yugoslavia, he is not a "solid progressive"
Yugoslavia was invading Kosovo and commiting ethnic cleansing of Albanians at the time. Agree or disagree with how it was executed, it fits with the idea that he opposes the aggressors in war
Most of the ethnic cleansing happened as a result of the war. The intervention lead to an intensification of ethnic conflict.
The intervention was a key reason the war ended after multiple years of conflict and ethnic cleansing. Are you saying that ending the war caused more ethnic cleansing afterwards than was already happening? That ending war made things less stable?
The war itself made things less stable and, arguably, more people died as a byproduct of the war than if the war had never happened.
The fact that things recovered (ish) is a convenient coincidence and not the expectation. If you look at other times the US or NATO intervened, you'll see why it's not a given that things will be more stable afterwards.
Well we can play "what if" all we want, but bringing it back to the main point of Sanders, you can argue all you want about if it was the correct course of action but his vote was to stop an invading force.
Sure, but that's a perfectly valid reason for anti-war protestors to dislike him. There's a belief out there that diplomacy can resolve most conflicts and that military force should only be used after diplomacy is exhausted.
There's a reason the UN hadn't yet approved an intervention.
That's a fair argument to make
There’s a reason the UN hadn’t yet approved an intervention.
Russia is on the Security Council and can veto it...
Russia indicated they would veto and both China and India were also opposed to it (though India doesn't really matter in terms of UNSC resolutions). Remember that Russia had been voting for earlier resolutions on the issue (1160 and 1199) and China had been abstaining to prior votes under the policy of nonintervention on internal matters.
It's important to note that, according to this translation of the Serbian Assembly, on March 23rd, the Serbian government had accepted the notion of Kosovo's autonomy under the condition of avoiding NATO intervention:
- The National Assembly of the Republic of Serbia empowers the state delegation to sign a political agreement on self rule in Kosovo-Metohija on which agreement will be reached by representatives of all ethnic communities living in Kosovo-Metohija
(at the time, Albanians were still by far the dominant ethnic community).
I'd argue that NATO intervention was likely to be one of the key factors that stopped Russia from advocating for the agreement. With pressure from all other parties, it's hard to imagine a world where Serbia wouldn't be forced to come to a more agreeable compromise. The OSCE KVM prior to the deterioration of negotiations was doing it's job of preventing further escalation, after all, and it's important to note that only about a third of the 1.2 million Albanians displaced by the war had been displaced up to that point (largely due to work by the KVM) and that, as a direct consequence of NATO intervention, the forced displacement of Kosovar Albanians was accelerated significantly.
So you are pro genocide?
Because Bernie's a lukewarm progressive at best nowadays and he's incapable of actually influencing policy. The Democratic party is stuck in a rut caused by decades of neoliberal policy (which, for example, is why Clinton got so many resources during the Democrat primaries) and refuses to even consider a more radical alternative.
Voting isn't working to actually institute change in America. Either the country needs to push more power down to the states, or it needs complete electoral reform to remove the FPTP system that got America into this mess.