DONALD TRUMP [should be] DISQUALIFIED

We are a small country so you might not know much about the history of Finland, but we're very familiar with the horrors of communism. My grandfather had to leave his home at the age of 8 when Soviets invaded and ravaged his home town. His father was shot dead by soviet troops. His mother was young and couldn't afford to feed my grandpa so he was given to foster family. Back then Finland was VERY poor and there was no middle class to speak of, in fact this "robust middle class" you talk about is relatively recent development in this country.

However, it's not just communists Finns are familiar with. My great-grandma was a little girl in 1918 when there was a civil war in Finland. One day she noticed that her parents did not return from work and had to survive on her own for 2 days. Both her parents had been arrested by "white guards" (wealthy ruling class with support from Germans) and taken to a prison camp simply because they were working class and spoke Finnish. My other great-grandfather was nearly executed for the same reason at the age of 17. He survived but many were not as lucky.

Heck, the annexation of Finland (which thankfully did not succeed completely) and much of eastern Europe was something that the NAZIS AND SOVIETS planned TOGETHER. We ended up having to fight both the communists and the nazis. In the end our stolen land was ceded to Soviet Union in a "peace treaty" orchestrated by the winners: communists AND their capitalist allies Brits, Americans and French.

There's extremists on the right and left, older generations in Finland have experienced both. If you're playing the communist card, you should show some evidence that Sanders is supporting communist ideas.

I'm actually more of a classic liberal (but I don't like labels, I just support what I feel seems right) and I think the taxation and public sector in Finland is way over the top. But I believe that people should have a right to health and education regardless of what kind of family they're born in. I believe in equal oppurtunity. This is what Bernie stands for, not gulags.

However, The BIGGEST reason US and the world for that matter need Bernie is because big corporations and billionaires should NOT be able to buy elections. I think that's a travesty of democracy and ultimately it has terrible consequences. Lets take take oil lobbyists for instance, they're trying to destroy the climate of this planet for their personal gains and making sure that US continues to support tyrannies like Saudi Arabia, no better than the communists that killed my and your relatives. Different ideology (Islamic Wahhabism), but extremist and undemocratic one either way.

Nazism and communism are essentially the same thing. Superficially, they are opposites, but substantively they are identical. At the extremes, you've got these groups pretending to stand for the opposite ideologies, but it seems you've been witness to the basic fact that their methodologies of rule and ways of thinking are identical. Dying in a communist genocide or being dragged away in the middle of the night by the KGB is not really any different than dying in a Nazi genocide or being dragged away in the middle of the night by the Gestapo.

Sanders is very easy to see as communist. He's promising the lower classes tons of free stuff, through higher taxes to take the money from the evil rich, and is stoking its hatred towards the more affluent classes. This has been a fairly steady escalating trend in America for the last couple decades -- it is decidedly not fashionable to be explicitly communist because, as you said, it's done so much damage. But if you read American liberal policy, you will see that the very same ideas are at play, they've just been disguised to appear as something different. Karl Marx talked about class warfare, the proletariat being oppressed by the bourgeois. Sanders and his supporters in the left are always bringing up the concepts of "privilege" and "oppression." While this superficially seems different from communism, "privilege" is essentially, according to them, something that wealthier people have because they have accumulated wealth and this wealth is by its nature an injustice, the "oppression," and must be returned to the "oppressed" people. Accumulating wealth is subjected to a leap of logic, whereby this accumulation cannot be just toiling at a job and earning a paycheck, it MUST be bad and oppressive. If you have a bank account, you stole it from the workers. Just like Marx. Behind all the political mumbo jumbo, that's what the left in America is really after, Sanders especially. If you go into the Bernie supporters' communities and listen for a couple months, you'll see it again and again. One of them slipped up and told me: "it just hasn't been tried properly in a country yet. YOU HAVE TO HAVE FAITH." The increased vitriol and prominence of these arguments is precisely the force that is getting Sanders so close to power. In Bill Clinton's time, he wouldn't have had anybody looking at him.

Bernie is not equal opportunity, he is equal outcome. Equal opportunity is what America had all along, even in the 1800s, you slave away hard enough, you get results. But some, in capitalism, fall and fail. Bernie promises utopia by taking away the prospect of failure, and that's precisely what the Russian communists promised too -- and delivered: everybody equal, in the form of welfare. You want me to explain that, I ask how much time you've got.

My family was in the Soviet Union proper since before the Communists rose to power, until we left as political refugees in late 1988. If you want horror stories about communism, I can give you my own, but it seems you know what I am talking about because you have some of your own.

Wealth buys power. Simple as that. Might be unfair, but it is what it is. There is no such thing as politics by the middle or lower classes, in ANY nation, the Soviet Union included. No governments have more income disparity than communist ones. In North Korea, Kim Jung-un feeds himself deeper and deeper into morbid obesity while his slaves are starving to death to the point of resorting to cannibalism; photos have been taken of children sitting on the street because they are too weak to move. 1930s Russia, in the Ukraine, was doing essentially that. The American capitalism utilizes checks and balances because our Founders took political corruption as a given, and tried to keep the pols at each other's throats, and off of ours. That is why Capitalism is better than what Bernie's after -- Bernie gets to fight people just like himself, just as evil as himself, and we are left alone to have a house, a spouse, two-to-three-kids and a dog.

I am not a liberal but I think classic liberals have their uses, such as pushing through women's suffrage, and latest gay marriage, and things like that. They do fight for progress, but the radicals among them have been communist since communism existed. Both the right and the left, in America right now, are becoming more and more radicalized, and that's precisely why the communization of the American left is bringing us Bernie. Promising income redistribution and tons of free stuff, as well as fighting "oppression" by the "privileged" classes is very familiar to me.

As far as the Middle East goes, look, like I said, money buys power. The Middle East should be completely impoverished, they were very developed in the Middle Ages but suffered regression towards modern times. If it wasn't for their near-infinite oil, nobody would listen to them, but oil moves the world, from gas for cars to plastic, and who has the most oil WILL be listened to -- both by America and by Europe. I personally am not a fan of Saudi Arabia, but they're less psychotic than Iran, who I think WILL nuke everybody if they get the means.

bullpomegranate

Counter arguments, or shut up. If you can't counter the argument, you can't counter the argument, and you're trying to make grandstanding and personal attacks obfuscate the fact you don't have any historic knowledge to actually argue with.