I would say Salvadore Allende in Chile is the exception to the rule that “communism = dictatorship”; he was democratically elected, had no secret police or political prisoners, did not censor the media in any way, and resisted Soviet influence. His reward was a US-backed coup and death, and Chile got to enjoy 15 years of military rule under August Pinochet, banning of all political parties, killing 2000 dissidents, and torturing 30,000 more. But hey, at least Pinochet was a capitalist.
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Yeah, how amoral of him. It only took the rest of America five more months to decide we shouldn’t stand by and let Europe suffer under the Nazis, at which point the USA began supporting the Soviet Union with massive shipments of material supplies. But I guess that support pales in comparison to the support they received by an unknown 17-year-old folk singer joining the Young Communist League. My goodness, how much blood he must’ve had on his hands.
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Guess I shoulda used the /sarc tag. Of course, the point I meant to make was that the consensus on BoingBoing would be that Seeger having been a commie is in fact perfectly OK.
To err is human, and Seeger admitted his error and spent the rest of his life trying to do good. I think that is enough for most folks.
It should also be clear that a lot of boingers probably consider themselves “small-c communists” like Seeger-- some basic communist ideas are reasonable and humane, and that doesn’t mean we have to support gulags or secret police, nor wear olive drab outfits with red stars and interpret all literature though a lens of Marxist theory.
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He was guilty of a being wrong, sure, but besides that he was okay (never was a huge fan, personally, though I thought his environmental work was sometimes excellent). Do you think the thoughtcrime of being a Marxist and eventually renouncing the Soviets when he learned they were brutal totalitarians is uniquely unforgivable?
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Seeger apparently “learned this” round about 1993 or so. I’ll stand by my opinion.
The reasons I like Seeger are not because he was a Marxist (I don’t care about that one way or another other than that it was stupid), but because of his work as an environmentalist. Some of his labor activism was also laudable. His folk music is more of a strike to me than his naive Marxism.
For you, though, it’s the thoughtcrime that’s the problem. Seeger was out of the Communist Party in 1949 because of the Soviets. Here’s what he said about his time in the Party:
Seems fine to me. If he didn’t want to talk about it until later in life, I couldn’t care less, it was his business to deal with as he saw fit, he still left the party in 1949 when he learned they were brutal totalitarians. Nelson Mandela was a Communist too, and I also don’t care, but do admire him for his work.
Also, put a Ron Radosh article in front of me again and I’ll probably spend a long time flaming that troglodyte and ignore all else.
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Well, I thought this sort of work that he did was really cool. Didn’t know about it until he died. (I can’t remember, but I may have found it via BoingBoing in the first place).
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How is a quote from 1993 any kind of proof that 1993 was the moment when he changed his mind? You can take him to task for not being more vocal about it earlier, but whether he was vocal about it or not doesn’t change what he believed during that time. Him leaving the party in 1949 says a lot, and you just shrug it off because it doesn’t fit your narrative.
"I feel that in my whole life I have never done anything of any
conspiratorial nature and I resent very much and very deeply the
implication of being called before this Committee that in some way
because my opinions may be different from yours, or yours, Mr. Willis,
or yours, Mr. Scherer, that I am any less of an American than anybody
else. I love my country very deeply, sir. " --Pete Seeger, Aug. 1955, HUAC testimony
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That is awesome, further props to Seeger for that.
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To be fair, much of what came before the opening of the Soviet Archives was generally speculation as to what was actually happening in the SU, with much of our information came from spying and dissidents - so you can perhaps see why some committed communists might not take that as seriously (they viewed it as political propaganda in part supported by the US/NATO). Lots of people had very different understandings of the SU after the archives opened. The fact that the Russians were opening up access was a big deal and brought many things to light in a more factually-backed way that had only been conjecture prior to this… You see a rather big change in Cold War histories from historians who had access to these documents.
That being said, many leftists condemned the SU after the second world war or even before, if they were aligned with Trotsky. Even though the Soviets attempted to dominate leftist thought in the 20th century, there was still quite a variety of views.
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That’s absolutely true. It’s clear though that Seeger was not among them.
True. But Seeger was an idealist who got royally screwed by the US government (he got blacklisted because of HUAC) so it probably makes sense that he needed to see the explicit proof that Stalin was an authoritarian mass murder and not take the US government’s word on it… People forget just how dangerous it was to be a leftist for a good while there. Not as dangerous as being a political dissident in the Soviet Union, obviously, but lives were destroyed by HUAC (and later programs like COINTELPRO) and it’s not surprising that such bitterness would cloud people’s judgement for a long time after that.
Not necessarily a defense here (though I do think that Seeger is an important American artist), but an explanation.
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I didn’t leave the popular front. The popular front left me.
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Something like that. 
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Is it still ok if your family is involved with Late Stage Capitalism?
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