Pete Seeger has (finally) denounced Stalin. And written a new song about it.

[Update on Monday morning]

More Pete Seeger discussion here. Some people don't think that he deserves as much credit as he's getting for denouncing Stalin, when he still refuses to denounce communism itself. I think they're overexpecting a very old dog to learn a new trick.

Stalin was anomalous, his rule a heresy. Long live The Revolution! Blah, blah, blah.

Radosh has been good as something of a New Left whistleblower. I liked his explanation of the success of the Weather Undergound folk evading the law. Despite their claims of hiding among the proles, they were rich kids hiding out on their estates.

One song I well remember from Seeger was the one attacking suburbia,

"little houses made of ticky tacky . . "
"little people made of ticky tacky . . ".

Based on his avowed political stance presumably he was advocating that they live in giant state built/run mega apartment blocks instead. If the dictionary should add another definition to the word "fool" it should consist of Pete Seeger's name and nothing else.

Gaah!

Substitute "boxes" for "houses" in above post.

That was "Little Boxes." Seeger sang it and made it famous, but it was written by Malvina Reynolds.

Blood drips from the hands of the apologists of the Soviet Union. Were "justice" applied, the apologists would be no more, by human hand.

They will be no more eventually, in the fullness of time. Is that "justice"? Nope. But it is the law, and that is a very different matter.

Malvina Reynolds was a Communist party member too. She wrote Little Boxes after the failure of the CPUSA's postwar campaign for public housing, which was trying to take advantage of the WWII housing shortage. It was probably the last CPUSA campaign aimed at ordinary American working people. After that the CP stuck to burrowing in to civil rights organizations, etc.

Problem was the VA loan and the rapid development of suburbia solved the housing problem first.

MG, did I read that correctly? Did you just call for the killing of people who say nice things about the Soviet Union?

Did you just call for the killing of people who say nice things about the Soviet Union?

That's not how I read it... I think he was referring to those who glossed over the bad things about the Soviet Union while saying nice things.

For instance, Artemus, do you think having the a great Ice Hockey team was worth the long lines for bread, communal housing, and oh yeah, the purges? Do you think the machine gun nests and land minds along the Berlin Wall was to prevent the West Germans from taking advantage of free health care and affordable housing in the East?

Artemus,

No, you do not read me correctly.

The Soviet Union no longer exists. Its misanthropic machinations are no more, although the reverberations of them will continue for decades. If someone wants to wax nostalgic for it, they deserve scorn and contempt.

I refer to those (such as Seeger the elder, or Pulitzer Prize winner Duranty) who had every opportunity to lift the veil of Stalin's deceit, and didn't. Millions of our fellow humans are dead, and lay in the killing fields of Siberia.

If justice existed, the American protectors of the Soviet system would have hung long ago. However, we live under the rule of law, not justice. And law requires an executive branch willing to take the institutional risks of turning over that stream-embedded rock, to learn what vermin crawl under it.

I hope that clarifies it.

Viva Che! The peasants he killed were fertilizer for The Revolution (TM)!

Uh...OK. Your posts are an interesting combination of muscular anticommunism and legalistic hairsplitting, with just a soupçon of majesty.

Artemus,

It is interesting that you interpret my posts that way.

I am attempting to express, however imperfectly, my rage that Brecht's Threepenny Opera remains the status quo. Mack the Knife, whether his actual name be Stalin, Mao, or Castro, continues to have his enablers amongst the elites.

My revulsion against communism is based on its misanthropic principles. My revulsion against its apologists and its defenders is based on the irrationality of these groups.

My "legalistic hairsplitting" is merely an acknowlegdment that my concept of justice is, like everyone else's a personal one; it is the obedience to law (among a few other institutions) that keeps American society from devolving into tribal warfare.