Mother Jones - "You Might Very Well Be the Cause of Cancer": Read Bernie Sanders' 1970s-Era Essays [View all]

[TomCADem]

I see a lot of posts referring to videos of Bernie Sanders back in 1988 to deny that he told Warren that a woman could not win against Trump. Well, if we are going to look back at Bernie's public statements as reflective of his current views, then let's look and consider what he has written as noted in this article by Mother Jones. Compulsory education erodes freedom? Rape fantasies?

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/07/bernie-sanders-vermont-freeman-sexual-freedom-fluoride/

Last month Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent socialist seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, repudiated a 1972 essay he wrote for the Vermont Freeman, an alternative newspaper, which included depictions of a rape fantasy from male and female perspectives. On Meet the Press, he dismissed the article as a “piece of fiction” exploring gender stereotypes—”something like Fifty Shades of Grey.”

Yet as the New York Times recently reported, during his years as a contributor to the Freeman in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Sanders often wrote about sexual norms, as he presented a broader critique of repressive cultural forces that he believed were driving many Americans literally insane. His early writings reflect a political worldview rooted in the fad psychology and anti-capitalist rhetoric of the era and infused with a libertarianesque critique of state power. Sanders feared that the erosion of individual freedom—via compulsory education, sexual repression, and, yes, fluoridated water—began at birth. And, he postulated, authoritarianism might even cause cancer.

* * *
In a 1969 essay for the Freeman called “Cancer, Disease and Society,” Sanders, then 28, contended that conformity caused cancer by breaking down the human spirit and inflicting emotional trauma. He quoted liberally from Reich’s 1948 book, The Cancer Biopathy, which, he noted, was “very definite about the link between emotional and sexual health, and cancer,” and he walked readers through Reich’s theory about the consequences of suppressing “biosexual excitation.”

Then Sanders got to the point: “The above references, in no uncertain terms, state that you might very well be the cause of cancer.”