The troubadour of totalitarianism Pete Seeger passed away last week. Historian Ron Radosh, who himself was a red diaper baby, growing up in a pro-communist family, and for years was a man of the left, in 2007 recalled Seeger’s allegiance to Communism:
When the blacklist came to an end — of course the film concentrates on his victimization in those dark years — Mr. Seeger finally reached millions of Americans who, during the Civil Rights movement and Vietnam, came to believe there was never any merit to anti-communism, that it was the same as McCarthyism. Mr. Seeger went to visit North Vietnam in 1972, and came away ecstatic about the beautiful country and the peace-loving people there. We hear nothing about the political prisoners, the boat people, or about Ms. Baez’s lone protest after the war’s end against political oppression on the part of those she called “aging Stalinist leaders,” a protest that Mr. Seeger, for once, took no part in. Instead we see the video of him singing his anti-war hit, “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy.”Supporters of Communism like Mr. Seeger are on the same moral level as supporters of fascism and it speaks volumes about the dedication of many on the left in this country to democracy that he was constantly lionized as a hero on the port side of our politics.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHNsRZ8iqFc
That guy is serenading Stalin in . . .
I saw, on-line, that in his testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, he compared himself to Jesus before Pontius Pilate.
More proof for the old adage, “Only the good die young.”
“Supporters of Communism like Mr. Seeger are on the same moral level as . . . “Catholics for Choice”/supporters of abortion.
This is WHY we (my generation) fought.
” . . . .the beautiful, peace-loving people of Vietnam . . . ”
In March 1973 (so-called Paris Peace Accords), the U.S. withdrew its troops from Vietnam, as Messrs. Clinton, Kerry , Seeger, et al had urged.
In December 1974, the Democratic Congress I call the post-Watergate Congress the VietCongress) ended military aid to South Vietnam.
In April 1975, Saigon fell.
According to a 2001 investigation by the Orange County Register, Hanoi’s communist regime imprisoned a million Vietnamese without charge in “re-education” camps, where an estimated 165,000 perished. ‘Thousands were abused or tortured: their hands and legs shackled in painful positions for months, their skin slashed by bamboo canes studded with thorns, their veins injected with poisonous chemicals, their spirits broken with stories about relatives being killed,’ the Register reported.
“Laos and Cambodia also fell to communists in 1975. Time magazine reported in 1978 that some 40,000 Laotians had been imprisoned in re-education camps: ‘The regime’s figures do not include 12,000 unfortunates who have been packed off to Phong Saly. There, no pretense at re-education is made. As one high Pathet Lao official told Australian journalist John Everingham, who himself spent eight days in a Lao prison last year, ‘No one ever returns.’
“The postwar horrors of Vietnam and Laos paled next to the “killing fields” of Cambodia, where the Khmer Rouge undertook an especially vicious revolution. During that regime’s 3 1/2-year rule, at least a million Cambodians, and perhaps as many as two million, died from starvation, disease, overwork or murder. The Vietnamese invaders who toppled the Khmer Rouge in 1979 were liberators, albeit only by comparison.
“In the aftermath of America’s withdrawal from Vietnam, hundreds of thousands of refugees fled Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. According to the U.N. High Commissioner on Refugees, between 1975 and 1995 more than 1.4 million Indochinese escaped, nearly 800,000 of them by boat. This does not include “boat people” who died at sea, 10% of the total by some estimates.
A while back, you posted a piece on a Vietnamese bishop/priest. We had a Vietnamese priest in our parish. I was never able to get up the guts to apologize for not saving his country.
Notwithstanding Pete Seeger’s political views, on July 9, 2013 I suspect his heart broke when he lost his wife of 60 years, Toshi.
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Just six months later, on January 27, 2014, when he breathed his last breath and shed his mortal coil, his soul comprehended its immortality.
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And on that very day in the presence of the beatific vision, Pete Seeger’s Communism finally died.
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May his soul and that of his wife Toshi, all the faithful departed, rest in peace and may perpetual light shine upon them.
Yes. Serenading Lenin and Stalin in Heaven:
“In 1932-33, the Ukraine, formerly the breadbasket of Russia, was turned into a desolate wasteland during the ‘Holodomor.’ Malcolm Muggerage wrote in his book, War on the Peasants, ‘On one side, millions of starving peasants, their bellies often swollen from lack of food; on the other, soldiers, members of the GPU (secret police) carrying out the instructions of the dictatorship of the proletariat. They had gone over the country like a swarm of locusts and taken away everything edible, they had shot or exiled thousands of peasants, sometimes whole villages, they had reduced some of the most fertile land in the world to a melancholy desert.’ More than 7 million people died so that their farms could be collectivized by Moscow.
T. Shaw writes..”Yes. Serenading Lenin and Stalin in Heaven:…”
I believe we allwill witness the beatific vision as we stand before God in judgment; whether we get to stay there for eternity or are remanded elsewhere is for God alone to judge.
Back to history, this article shows again that as far as leftists were concerned, World War Two was all about saving the USSR from Germany. One wonders: had Hitler not invaded the USSR and had Pearl Harbor still happened, would the leftists have demonstrated in support of the poor Japanese?
TomD: Seeger and all the other useful idiots were on orders from their handlers(just as they were during the Vietnam war) extreme peace advocates. See, it was Hitler and Stalin against the World, until Hitler invaded Russia.
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Yes. Yes. Serenading Lenin, Mao, and Stalin in Heaven…
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“The policies of the Communist Party in China caused more than 76 million people to starve between 1958 and 1961. Called the Three Years of Great Chinese Famine, the government had ruled that changes in farming techniques were the law. People were not allowed private plots to grow their own food and all farms were arranged into communes (collectivism strikes again). Yang Jisheng, a Chinese historian wrote in his book Tombstone, ‘In Xinyang, people starved at the doors of the grain warehouses. As they died, they shouted, “Communist Party, Chairman Mao, save us”. If the granaries of Henan and Hebei had been opened, no one need have died. As people were dying in large numbers around them, officials did not think to save them. Their only concern was how to fulfill the delivery of grain.’ To this day, Yang Jisheng’s book about the famine is banned on Mainland China.”
Seeger sings L’internationale and it is so appropriate. Nixon is said to have asked Chou En Lai what he thought was the impact of the French Revolution on Western Civilization and Chou was said to reply that it was too soon to tell. The story may be misconstrued. Perhaps Chou thought Nixon meant the recent student riots in France. Nonetheless, the answer would be right even if the Nixon story is flawed. Is there a more discernible track in the forest of history than that which leads from the French Revolution to communism and beyond? The beast evolves and mutates but the taxonomy is doubtless. The revolutionary Red Cap of Liberty led to the death of perhaps a hundred million people in the Twentieth Century and the virtual enslavement of vastly more unfortunate souls. How did the troubadour of totalitarianism internalize such a ghastly fact? Only God knows and is competent to judge him. We recoil in horror because it is the only decent human response.
Pete Seeger is a person that I never paid any attention to during my lifetime. He has shown he was one of Lenin’s useful idiots. Interesting…and apt that the overrated blowhard Bruce Springsteen would praise Pete Seeger.
Bob Seger…..now that’s another story. Bob Seger is over 60 and still rocks. Sunspot Baby is one of the greatest breakup songs ever. Seger could not have known that the lyrics are an ad for Life Lock.
She packed up her bags and she took off down the road
Left me here stranded with the bills she owed
She gave me a false address
Took off with my American Express
Sunspot Baby
She sure had me way outguessed
She left me here stranded like a dog out in the yard
Charged up a fortune on my credit card
She used my address and my name
Man that was sure unkind
Sunspot Baby
She sure has a real good time
I looked in Miami
I looked in Negril
The closest I came was a month old bill
I checked the Bahamas and they said she was gone
I can’t understand why she did me so wrong
But she packed up her bags
And she took off down the road
Said she was going to visit sister Flo
She used my address and my name
Put my credit to shame
Sunspot Baby
I’m gonna catch up sometime
Sure had a real good time
That’s a lot better than anything Pete Seeger sang.
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