Where Have All the Kulaks Gone?
Pee Seeger has been a disciple of Woody, a Weaver, and that apotheosis of oxymoron: a folk superstar. But he was first, last, and always a Communist.
Until now (via Kathy Shaidle):
Pete Seeger, America’s best-known and most influential folksinger, wrote me a letter a few days ago. I did not expect to hear from him. Last June, I wrote in these pages about the new documentary on his life. The article ran under the headline “Time for Pete Seeger To Repent.”
…
So I felt some trepidation when I got Mr. Seeger’s letter. Surely he was angry, or at the least peeved, by my article. I had been a banjo student of his in the 1950s and regarded Mr. Seeger as my childhood hero and mentor. But for decades since then, I have been publicly identified as an opponent of much of what he has believed—that the Rosenbergs were innocent, for example, or that Fidel Castro was a friend of the poor.
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.”
That sounds a little self-pitying, Pete. It’s not like you’re in a tiny minority who meekly mewl peace in the face of riotous mobs bellowing war. It only takes a Saddam and various apologists, enablers, and anti-American Americans to hobble opposition to his murderous regime.
I used to think Pete Seeger was one of the greates American of this century—but I see things differently now. It is America that is great, one of the greatest nations in history to have birthed and protected for decades such a blind and feeble-minded banjo player. What was he, the model for Deliverance?