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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| Once a Moonbat, Always A Moonbat.... |
| 2005-07-17 |
| NOTE: I grew up listening to the Kingston Trio, the Highwaymen, and The Weavers, Pete Seeger's group. The Weavers were great folksingers. Unfortunately, as political commentators, they really had their heads up their collective asses. And don't let the 'victim of McCarthyism' meme throw you, Mr. Seeger has has a VERY long and profitble career. EFL's, RTWT. Mike For people with a particular taste in music, Pete Seeger is still a cultural icon. For too many others, mentioning his name gets a blank look and a question: "Is he related to Bob?" Well, no. Pete (he insists on being called Pete) was one of the creators of modern folk music. He's in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Songs that he wrote, helped write or helped make famous include "If I Had a Hammer," "We Shall Overcome," "Turn, Turn, Turn" and "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" Music is not Pete's only legacy, though. As he puts it, he was a lefty. Actually, he was a member of the Communist Party USA in the 1930s and early 1940s, and he sang at Communist rallies and events. Fifty years ago this summer, on Aug. 25, 1955, he became a target for the House Un-American Activities Committee, a committee of the U.S. House of Representatives that was a creature of the Red Scare. HUAC called dozens of entertainers, politicians and businesspeople and grilled them about any contacts with communism. Pete is 86. He's still a lefty, viewing with alarm the war in Iraq, dehumanizing technology and the power of oligarchies. He still lives on a mountaintop near Beacon, N.Y., that he and his wife, Toshi, bought 60 years ago. His singing voice is almost gone, but he's still performing. And he's still happy to find an audience, whether it's a school full of kids or one inquisitive reporter who dropped in on Pete in Beacon, the day before his annual Strawberry Shortcake Festival. Question: How did you learn that you had been called to testify? Answer: I was standing out there in the parking lot of this little house and barn. A man parked and got out and said, "Are you Pete Seeger?" Handed me an envelope. Well, I opened the envelope and called out, "Toshi, they finally got around to me." I was just a little-known folkie. Question: Why not simply answer the committee's questions? Answer: This is what [my] lawyer told me. He said, if you answer about your own past politics you're going to have to answer the question, "Did you know so-and-so, who was a Communist?" and so on. And in effect I said, "I'll tell you anything you want to know about myself, but I'm not going to testify about anybody else." Question: How did you become a communist? Answer: I joined the Young Communist league in 1937 in college -- because Hitler was helping Franco take over Spain. And [Maxim] Litvinov stood up in the League of Nations – he was the Soviet representative in the League of Nations – and said all aggressors should be quarantined, that is, boycotted. He was talking about Japan in Manchuria, Italy in Ethiopia and Hitler and Franco and so on. Well, they just laughed. Question: But didn't Stalin turn out to be one of the worst despots of the 20th century? Answer: Well, when it comes to big ones. But there's bad ones all over. And, you know, for 50 years, the United States has helped control the politics of Latin America. And they have the School of the Americas, they call it, in Fort Benning, Ga. Training military – Latin American military men – how to torture, how to massacre, how to assassinate. Question: But the U.S.S.R. really was an enemy of the U.S.A., yes? Answer: Not necessarily. The communists claimed, I won't say they all believed it, that they would encourage revolutions all around the world. But the people of each country had to make their own revolution. It wasn't Soviet soldiers helping Mao Zedong take over China. They could applaud them and perhaps even help them. But they didn't likewise in Vietnam or Cuba. Question: You refused to answer questions about Communist Party events that you had played at. What if the investigators today wanted to question someone they thought had performed at an al-Qaeda fund raiser? Answer: That's an interesting thing. It's almost laughable. Anything is possible, though. I'd say, "If you are accusing me of that, I demand a trial with my right to question witnesses." Question: As was true in the 1950s, these are fearful times. Are we living in more or less dangerous times than 50 years ago? Answer: In some ways the danger is more now – the danger of misinformation being spread across the country in seconds. There's so much money behind the present administration, they can literally do anything they want. They can break up any one organization or any one person. What are they going to do about millions, though? Millions of good organizations. Millions of good little things. |
| Posted by:Mike Kozlowski |
#1
That's not the whole story about Mr. Seeger's anti-fascist credentials. From Wikipedia:
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| Posted by: Phil Fraering 2005-07-17 21:31 |