Around 50 people staged a peaceful sit-in at the Washington DC office of Bernie Sanders on Wednesday to request that the Senator from Vermont discontinue his support for the war in Ukraine. Nearly a dozen of them left in handcuffs.
“He knows diplomacy is the right thing,” one activist said in a video as they were being hauled away by police. “He knows peace is the right thing. We’re here to tell him we need peace. He needs to call on Biden to go to the negotiating table.”
Tragically, this isn’t the first time Bernie Sanders has used the presence of police to arrest and intimidate anti-war voices.
In April 1999, protesters occupied Bernie’s Vermont office to speak out against his support of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia and the ongoing war against Iraq. He responded to them the same way he responded to protesters this past week over Ukraine. As one activist involved with occupying Bernie’s office wrote at the time:
“The response to our occupation of Bernie’s office was, unfortunately, consistent with his lurch to the mainstream. At 6:30 PM, one half hour after closing time, Philip Fiermonte of Bernie’s staff had 15 of us arrested for trespass. Sanders refused a conference call with those in the occupation, which was carried out nonviolently and with no disruption to his staff. Fiermonte claimed he could not contact Sanders for the four hours of the occupation– if true, it still another way Bernie has gotten out of touch in the Congress.”
“To see Bernie turn pro-war is very disappointing,” another activist involved with the protest told the Burlington Free Press.
According to a 2000 Human Rights Watch report, about “five hundred civilians died in ninety separate incidents” as a result of NATO bombing in Yugoslavia:
“One third of these incidents and more than half the deaths occurred as a result of attacks on illegitimate or questionable targets. Nine incidents were a result of attacks on targets that Human Rights Watch concludes were non-military in function. This includes the headquarters of Serb Radio and Television in Belgrade, the New Belgrade heating plant, and seven bridges that were neither major transportation routes nor had other military functions.”
In the space between 1999 and 2023, Bernie supported other American interventions as well. For example, while he famously rejected the invasion of Iraq in 2003, he then proceeded to support various funding bills which kept the war going. In 2009, he rejected a proposal to shut down Guantanamo Bay. In 2011, he supported a “no-fly zone” over Libya, which led to an intervention that plunged the country into chaos persisting to this day. In 2014, he supported economic sanctions against Russia, US airstrikes in Syria and Iraq, and yelled at protesters during a town hall event after they called him out for his refusal to fully condemn Israel’s bloody offensive into Gaza earlier that summer.
Since Biden took office in January 2021, Bernie has voted for CIA torture apologist and drone warrior Avril Haines as Biden’s Intelligence Director, voted in support of former Raytheon board member Lloyd Austin as Biden’s Defense Secretary, and voted in support of Libya war cheerleader Antony Blinken as Biden’s Secretary of State.
And of course he has voted to fund the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, which is what ultimately brought protesters to his office in the first place. When questioned last year over his support for the war, Sanders replied: “Democrats? Warmongers? When you have Putin breaking all kinds of international laws, unleashing an incredibly disgusting and horrific level of destruction against the people of Ukraine?”
Taking Bernie’s record into consideration, it shouldn’t be too surprising that he has responded to anti-war activists not once — but twice now — with arrests.
Jon Reynolds is a freelance journalist covering a wide range of topics with a primary focus on the labor movement and collapsing US empire. He writes at The Screeching Kettle at Substack. Reprinted with permission.
We are surrounded by f&ckery by “representatives”.