Posted on 09/02/2007 2:59:14 PM PDT by PJ-Comix
The New York Times has now corrected a "smear" about Pete Seeger being 50 years too late in denouncing Stalin. Thanks to the intrepid research of Times reporter Daniel J. Wakin, the record has now been set straight. Pete Seeger was only about 40 years too late in criticizing Stalin.
What inspired Wakin to make this "major" correction was a report by historian Ron Radosh in the August 31 New York Sun that Pete Seeger sent him a letter recently expressing his regret that he didn't see what anybody with a pair of even slightly discerning eyes could have spotted: that Joseph Stalin was evil. In reponse to Radosh's criticism of the former Communist Party member for slavishly following the Stalinist party line, Pete Seeger sent him a letter which was excerpted in Seeger Speaks — and Sings — Against Stalin:
I almost fell off the chair when I read Mr. Seeger's words: "I think you're right - I should have asked to see the gulags when I was in [the] USSR." For years, Mr. Seeger continued, he had been trying to get people to realize that any social change had to be nonviolent, in the fashion sought by Martin Luther King Jr. Mr. Seeger had hoped, he explained, that both Khrushchev and later Gorbachev would "open things up." He acknowledged that he underestimated, and perhaps still does, "how the majority of the human race has faith in violence."
More importantly, Mr. Seeger attached the words and music for a song he had written, "thinking what Woody [Guthrie] might have written had he been around" to see the death of his old Communist dream. Called "The Big Joe Blues," it's a yodeling Jimmie Rodgers-type song, he said. It not only makes the point that Joe Stalin was far more dangerous and a threat than Joe McCarthy - a man Mr. Seeger and the old left view as the quintessential American demagogue - but emphasizes the horrors that Stalin brought.
"I'm singing about old Joe, cruel Joe," the lyrics read. "He ruled with an iron hand / He put an end to the dreams / Of so many in every land / He had a chance to make / A brand new start for the human race / Instead he set it back / Right in the same nasty place / I got the Big Joe Blues / (Keep your mouth shut or you will die fast) / I got the Big Joe Blues / (Do this job, no questions asked) / I got the Big Joe Blues."
Mr. Seeger continued in his letter to me: "the basic mistake was Lenin's faith in [Party] DISCIPLINE!" He often tells his left-wing audiences, he said, to read Rosa Luxemburg's famous letter to Lenin about the necessity of freedom of speech. And despite all of my criticisms of Mr. Seeger over the years, he ended warmly, saying: "You stay well. Keep on."
Well, now the New York Times has a big scoop, This Just In: Pete Seeger Denounced Stalin Over a Decade Ago. Yes, instead of being a whole 50 years late, Pete Seeger was only about 40 years tardy in denouncing Stalin:
Mr. Radosh, who once studied banjo with Mr. Seeger, said in an interview that he had idolized him, but he has become a dogged critic of Mr. Seeger’s politics. Mr. Radosh wrote that he was “deeply moved” that the singer, “now in his late 80s, had decided to acknowledge what had been his major blind spot opposing social injustice in America while supporting the most tyrannical of regimes abroad.”
But in fact, Mr. Seeger, 87, made such statements years ago, at least as early as his 1993 book, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” In the book, he said in a 1995 interview with The New York Times Magazine, he had apologized “for following the party line so slavishly, for not seeing that Stalin was a supremely cruel misleader.”
Thank you for that correction of the record, Mr. Wakin. We should give Pete Seeger credit for being only about 40 years, not 50 years, late in seeing the evils of Stalinism. Of course, Seeger's revelation still came to him about 40 years after even Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev himself denounced Stalin in his widely publicized Secret Speech made in 1956. With all the books, reports, and documentaries about the true nature of Joseph Stalin in the interim, one has to wonder what leftwing cocoon Seeger was living in during all those years so as to be unaware of the evils of Stalinism.
Oh well, at least we should be thankful that Seeger finally woke up from his self-induced slumber and tardily noticed that Stalin was hardly the warm "Uncle Joe" of fond leftwing memory. At least that puts him ahead of Studs Terkel who, so far as is known, has yet to utter even a single word of criticism of Dear Uncle Joe.
I find the public support our ‘enlightened’ celebrities are willing to give mass killers and sadistic tyrants more than a little disturbing. Barbara Walters and various actors don’t seem the least bit bothered by the likes of Mao, who killed at least 60 million, or Castro, whose jails are virtual death camps. I’ll don’t wonder how the German people tolerated the Holocaust because I can see it happening right here in my own country.
He didn't, so I don't.
Yep, though only from the leftists.
But Jimmah Carter says that Americans need to “get over their inordinate fear of Communism”. I thought it was common sense to be afraid of something so stupid, unaccountable and deadly.
Pete Seeger ...the man who went semi-bezerk and wanted to cut the electric cables to Bob Dylan’s band’s amps the first time Bob went electric at the Newport Folk Festival back in the early 60’s ...
Fine. Now what about nytimes icon Walter Durante's epiphany? I believe Mr. Durante was around in 1956. When did he get it?
Pete’s STILL proud of that.
But Jimmah Carter says that Americans need to “get over their inordinate fear of Communism”. I thought it was common sense to be afraid of something so stupid, unaccountable and deadly.
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Carter is as stupid and naive about hard-line Communists, as FDR was about Joseph Stalin....in spite of Churchill yelling at him about it. Liberals = dangerous fools.
Don’t ever describe liberals as stupid, foolish or naive because then you exonerate them for their mental shortcomings.
These are intelligent people who knew the exact nature of communism with their eyes wide open and failed to condemn it which means that liberals like Jimmah Carter are pure EVIL!
):^(
70 years late as far as I’m concerned; Ol’ Pete was supporting the nazis because Stalin and Hitler teamed up.
These are intelligent people who knew the exact nature of communism.....
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But at the same time, refuse to acknowledge the total failure of it as a system of government, replaced by their always very short-sighted lust for absolute power and control. Evil? Without a doubt...at the full expense of the collapse of our Constitutional Republic.
—I eagerly await an apology from Lillian Hellman-—
There have been several articles around in the past few years concerning American leftists who saw the light. 9/11 woke up a few, but even with that assistance 40 years seems about right for an American leftist to come to his/her senses. That is, the small minority who are capable of coming to their senses.
Most are hopeless.
I think he’s only mad at Stalin because he killed Trotsky.
“These are intelligent people who knew the exact nature of communism.....”
I agree some are intelligent, but most are so self-important, self-righteous, and self-absorbed in their emotion driven need to “make a difference” or even “save the planet”, that their intelligence does them little good. All their do gooding is just a quest to fulfill childish emotional needs.
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