Communist Folk Singer Pete Seeger Dies at 94

A long obituary at the New York Times, "Pete Seeger, Songwriter and Champion of Folk Music, Dies at 94." This passage is telling:

In 1955 he was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee, where he testified, “I feel that in my whole life I have never done anything of any conspiratorial nature.” He also stated: “I am not going to answer any questions as to my association, my philosophical or religious beliefs or my political beliefs, or how I voted in any election, or any of these private affairs. I think these are very improper questions for any American to be asked, especially under such compulsion as this.”

Mr. Seeger offered to sing the songs mentioned by the congressmen who questioned him. The committee declined.

Althouse likes that as well, "'I am not going to answer any questions as to my association, my philosophical or religious beliefs or my political beliefs, or how I voted in any election, or any of these private affairs'." (Via Memeorandum.)

Here's Seeger's entry at Discover the Networks:

In 1945 Seeger became the national director of People's Songs, Inc, an organization designed to “create, promote and distribute songs of labor and the American People.” Within a few years, the California Senate Fact-finding Committee reported that:

"People's Songs is a vital Communist front … one which has spawned a horde of lesser fronts in the fields of music, stage entertainment, choral singing, folk dancing, recording, radio transcriptions and similar fields. It especially is important to Communist proselytizing and propaganda work because of its emphasis on appeal to youth, and because of its organization and technique to provide entertainment for organizations and groups as a smooth opening wedge for Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist propaganda."

Seeger parted ways with the Communist Party in 1950 and eventually renounced strict Stalinism, in favor of socialism and pro-labor activism. "I realized," says Seeger, "I could sing the same songs I sang whether I belonged to the Communist Party or not, and I never liked the idea anyway of belonging to a secret organization."

In 1955 Seeger was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee, whose questions about his past Communist ties he answered evasively or not at all. The following year Seeger was indicted for contempt of Congress. In 1961 he was found guilty of that charge and was sentenced to ten years in prison, though in 1962 his conviction was overturned on a technicality.

In the 1960s Seeger was deeply involved in the civil rights movement and its hallmark demonstrations. His musical interpretation of an old spiritual, which he called We Shall Overcome, became a signature song of the movement. The song was played at the founding meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1960. In subsequent years, Seeger would perform benefit concerts on SNCC's behalf.

Historian Ronald Radosh writes: "Throughout the 1950’s and 1960’s, Seeger called for peace, peaceful co-existence between the United States and the Soviet Union, singing songs like Put My Name Down, Brother, Where Do I Sign? -- a ballad in favor of the Soviet Union’s phony international peace petition that favored unilateral disarmament by the West while leaving the Soviet atomic stockpile intact. He would sing and give his support to peace rallies and marches covertly sponsored by the Soviet Union and its Western front groups and dupes -- while leaving his political criticism only for the United States and its defensive actions during the Cold War."

Seeger was an opponent of America's involvement in the Vietnam War. He similarly opposed the U.S. military campaigns and weapons buildup during the Reagan years of the Cold War. He supported the Nuclear Freeze Movement of the 1980s -- a Soviet-sponsored initiative that would have frozen Soviet nuclear and military superiority in place and would have rendered Reagan unable to close that gap to any appreciable degree. Seeger has used his status as a folk icon to lend support to a number of leftwing causes and initiatives.

I don't see it yet, but I expect far-left historian Erik Loomis to post a glowing obituary at some point, at Lawyers, Gays and Marxists. (See Robert Stacy McCain for Loomis' background, "He’s a Lumberjack, and He’s OK: The Wobbly Scholarship of Erik Loomis, Ph.D.")

Expect updates. It's going to be interesting to see the leftist bloggers salivate over Seeger's anti-American legacy.

On Cue, Far-Left Partisans for Pete Seeger Bring the Hate

It's still early, but I expect it's going to be an interesting day of leftist hatred.

At Alicublog, Roy Edroso calls me an "asshole":

http://t.co/997UgzFeS7 RT @elongreen Look forward to reading @edroso on Seeger.
— edroso (@edroso) January 28, 2014

Then this idiot tells me to "fuck off" on Twitter:

@AmPowerBlog @MsEBL I say this without malice, but "Fuck you!" #PeteSeeger did more for social justice in one day than Repubs did in 50 yrs

— Peggy Brava (@PeggyBrava) January 28, 2014

Here's disgusting hate-troll Repsac3 spewing the pro-Communist propaganda:

Pete Seeger: This Man Surrounded Hate and Forced it to Surrender | The Nation http://t.co/oaBHiPjAle

— J. Casper (@repsac3) January 28, 2014

And Bird Dog takes the heat in the comments at Maggie's Farm:

I saw him perform several times. Grew up middle class, went to prep school and Harvard, affected a working class style but I doubt any working class people were ever interested in him. A likeable old commie, naive and innocent to the end.

*****

No, he was a totalitarian monster and a fraud, and his so-called folk music was also a fraud. He should have died 90 years ago, instead he polluted America for decades. As did all the other so-called folk artists, all of whom were Communist frauds.

*****

Good grief! The guy was an old Commie geezer who never found an enemy of this country he couldn't find a way to support.

He championed the Soviets (you might remember them) during the"nuclear freeze" in the 80's and was an outspoken liar and propagandist about the motives of Ronald Reagan, one of the finest American's who ever swore the office of President.

Obummer probably had to bite his lip and choke back a tear.

My earlier entry is here, "Communist Folk Singer Pete Seeger Dies at 94" (with, so far, one hate-addled apologist for Communism in the comments).

BONUS: Da Tech Guy links, "If only Leni Riefenstahl was a Communist like Pete Seeger…" Thanks!

'America's Most Successful Communist' Trending at Memeorandum

Pretty funny when an almost 10-year-old article on a depraved folk-rock Communist gets linked up by enough bloggers to get a thread on Memeorandum. Heh.

.@RSMcCain Heh. This 2005 piece on Pete Seeger is trending at Memeorandum: "America’s Most Successful Communist." http://t.co/6r0Qn2kg6x

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) January 28, 2014

PREVIOUSLY: "Communist Folk Singer Pete Seeger Dies at 94," and "On Cue, Far-Left Partisans for Pete Seeger Bring the Hate."

@Edroso Commenter Threatens Workplace Harassment Over Pete Seeger Communist Blogging — UPDATED AND BUMPED!!

It's one of the leftists over at Roy Edroso's blog, who writes:

Wonder how your employer's administration would enjoy reading a copy of this comment?

The comment's at the link.

Interesting how Edroso's entire community of depraved harassment leftists are down with it. No push back. F-k 'em. It never ceases to amaze me that virtually the first response of all leftists is to contact your employer. It's too pat. I understand more than ever why people blog anonymously. Personally, I've always put my reputation out there. Regressive leftists can't debate you. They can't win on the merits. All they have are lies and harassment. I've been through this too many times to recount. I'm up to a half dozen or so attempts to have me fired, a couple of which have instigated frivolous investigations.

These people are driven by hatred. All in a day's blogging, I guess.

Here's the search tag for "workplace harassment," which is voluminous.

Previous Communist Pete Seeger blogging is here.

*****

UPDATED!!

My department chair has been contacted by someone named "Selwyn Hollis."

I have sent this Hollis person an email to their gmail account of the same name. I have not heard back.

Also there is a Dr. Selwyn Hollis, Professor of Mathematics, at Armstrong Atlantic State University, Savannah, Georgia. I cannot confirm if my harasser is the same as Professor Hollis.

Again, I do not know if this is the same "Selwyn Hollis"?

However, if readers are concerned, and need information or confirmation on "Selwyn Hollis," they should inquire with the Chairman of the Department of Mathematics, Dr. James Brawner:

Department of Mathematics
College of Science and Technology
University Hall 297
11935 Abercorn Street
Savannah, GA 31419

Thanks dear readers. And remember, never cave to these assholes. All they have are threats and intimidation. They never win debates on the merits. They attack and harass like the evil assholes they are. F-k 'em.

Terror-Lawyer Lynne Stewart Released from Federal Prison

I saw the headline "compassionate release" earlier today, but I didn't know they were talking about left-wing terrorist attorney Lynne Stewart.

Shameful. She should rot in jail.

At the New York Times, "Judge Orders Release of Dying Lawyer Convicted of Aiding Terrorism":

A federal judge in Manhattan ordered a “compassionate release” on Tuesday for Lynne F. Stewart, the former defense lawyer convicted of assisting terrorism who is dying from cancer in a federal prison in Texas.

Ms. Stewart, 74, who was convicted in 2005, sought release in 2013 under a Bureau of Prisons program for terminally ill inmates, but did so without the bureau’s support. The judge, John G. Koeltl of United States District Court, rejected the request in August, but indicated that he would look favorably upon such action if the Bureau of Prisons itself made such a motion....

Ms. Stewart, in a 12-page handwritten letter to the judge during the summer, said she did not want to die in prison, “a strange and loveless place,” as she put it. “I want to be where all is familiar — in a word, home.”

Judge Koeltl’s order says that Ms. Stewart shall be released “as soon as her medical condition permits, the release plan is implemented, and travel arrangements can be made.”

This woman is vile. Screw her.

See Sharon Chadha, at FrontPage Magazine, "Lynne Stewart, Jihadi Lawyer." And Michelle Malkin, "No Tears for Lynne Stewart":

The jihadists’ favorite American lawyer, Lynne Stewart, reportedly has stage-4 breast cancer. Her radical friends — ranging from the “Party for Socialism and Liberation” and “Workers World” to Pete Seeger, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal — want her freed from jail. There’s only one decent response to the Lynne Stewart Fan Club’s criminal-coddling demand:

No, hell, no....

This case remains a shining example of just how dangerous it is for America to give foreign-born jihadists the full panoply of American constitutional rights and all the attendant benefits of a civilian trial. Stewart’s treacherous collaboration with the Blind Sheik endangered — and cost — innocent lives.

Stewart remains unrepentant. She called 9/11 an “armed struggle.” Upon her initial sentencing, she boasted that she could serve the term “standing on her head.” After she was convicted of aiding and abetting Rahman, she told an interviewer she “would do it again.”

Now she wants mercy, medical comforts and freedom? No, hell, no. This messenger gal for murderous barbarians made her prison bed. Die in it.

The Left Still Harbors a Soft Spot for Communism

From Cathy Young, at Reason:

In the mid-1980s, in my student days at New Jersey’s Rutgers University, I once got into an argument at the campus pub with a student activist who thought communism was unfairly maligned. (Back then, I had a reputation as a right-wing extremist because I didn’t think it was crazy to call the USSR—from which my family and I had emigrated a few years earlier—an evil empire.) When I mentioned the tendency of communist regimes to rack up a rather high body count, the young man parried, “Well, what about all the people capitalism kills? Like the people who die from smoking so that tobacco companies can make money?”

Having recovered from shock at the sheer idiocy of this argument, I ventured to point out that cigarettes weren’t exactly unknown behind the Iron Curtain. I don’t recall where things went from there; but I was reminded of that conversation the other day, after reading an honest-to-goodness apologia for Communism on Salon.com, a once-interesting magazine that’s rapidly becoming too embarrassing to list on my résumé.

The author, Occupy activist and writer Jesse Myerson, already caused some controversy last month with a Rolling Stone article that outlined a five-step plan toward eliminating inequality and collectivizing wealth. But at least in that piece, Myerson limited himself to extolling a visionary American brand of kumbaya communism rather than defend any of its actual, real-world versions. Here, in an article that purports to correct Americans’ “misconceptions” about communism, he takes the further step of arguing that the real thing wasn’t as bad as we think.

Among these alleged misconceptions: the notion that “Communism killed 110 million people for resisting dispossession.” As an example, Myerson cites a comment by Fox News host Greg Gutfeld that “only the threat of death can prop up a left-wing dream, because no one in their right mind would volunteer for this crap. Hence, 110 million dead.”

Where’s the error? Well, says Myerson, the actual death toll probably wasn’t 110 million. (True; it may have been just under 100 million, which makes it so much better.) Besides, Myerson argues, many of the people killed by the Soviet regime were not resisters against communist utopia or collectivization—they were themselves communists who ran afoul of Stalin.

But here, Myerson battles a straw man. Not even the fiercest anti-Communist has ever suggested that all the victims of the “left-wing dream” died in defense of property rights. Rather, building and sustaining a system based on expropriation required such levels of violent coercion that the repressive juggernaut inevitably began to crush its own—as well as random victims who were neither communists nor anti-communist resisters. (People would end up in the gulag because a spiteful neighbor reported them for a disrespectful remark about Stalin, or simply because the local authorities needed to meet their quota of arrests.)

Myerson offers other well-worn excuses: the Soviets had to fight a civil war, and also “faced (and heroically defeated) the Nazis.” He leaves out the part where Stalin tried to team up with Hitler to gobble up Eastern Europe, refused to heed warnings of an attack for which he left his country shockingly unprepared, and then sent millions of untrained and barely armed recruits to certain slaughter.

As for Red China, Myerson acknowledges that tens of millions died in the famine that resulted from Mao’s “Great Leap Forward”—“a disastrous combination of applied pseudoscience, stat-juking, and political persecution designed to transform China into an industrial superpower”—and then summarily dismisses the notion that communism might be to blame. “Famine,” he explains, “is not a uniquely ‘left-wing’ problem.” Not even, it seems, when that famine is caused directly by the policies of a left-wing regime.

Then, Myerson tries to make the case that capitalism is just as homicidal as communism—and, in a bold stroke of what passes for logic at Salon these days, includes in his indictment deaths that might happen in the future. Specifically, he wants capitalism held accountable for the future death toll from human-made, capitalism-driven climate change. Myerson might be terribly disappointed to learn that, just like smoking-related health problems, environmental degradation is not always the result of capitalist greed: in fact, it’s widely believed to have been particularly bad under communist regimes.

Myerson’s muddled screed might not merit a second thought if it his defense of communism was just a personal eccentricity. Unfortunately, toned-down versions of such whitewashing are fairly common not only on the left but even in mainstream liberal opinion. In 2005, reviewing the book, Mao: the Unknown Story, by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff chided the authors for their overly negative view of the subject: “Mao, however monstrous, also brought useful changes to China. … Mao’s legacy is not all bad.” This rose-tinted view also explains why Westerners who dote on mass-murdering dictators of the left, such as folksinger and onetime Stalin devotee Pete Seeger, tend to get a pass from the media as misguided idealists with their heart in the right place.

More.

And ICYMI, from Robert Stacy McCain, "Intellectuals and the Total State: @JAMyerson’s Dilettante Marxism."