Thanks for the e-mails in relation to the previous post on Pete Seeger and his letter to Ron Radosh, including those quoted below.

Joe H. says:

… I read your latest RWB post re: Pete Seeger w/interest, since my family were victims of “Old Joe” in Poland. It’s nice to know that he finally acknowledged the evil in Stalin’s regime. That’s one thing that has driven me nuts about the Left, especially in this country, is their complete & total ignorance of the evils of Communism, as shown by the idiots who wear Che t-shirts. Many, if not all of them, have never really known what fascism & communism are about and if they did, I’m they would beg on their knees to have their prior lives again.

Sue R. of Australia is not terribly impressed by Seeger’s words and says:

… His comment to Radosh about how he’s a friend of his town’s Republican mayor smacks of that old patronizing phrase, “Some of my best friends are … ”

I can’t say I’ve ever been much of a fan of Seeger. I have vague memories of seeing him on TV in my childhood and even at that young age he came across as a bit holier-than-thou to me. Therefore, not following his career closely I’ve always believed he was just a fairly benevolent kind of leftie so I was shocked to read about his anti-FDR song and subsequent backflips and supposed ignorance of Stalin’s treatment of the Jewish community.

I’m guessing Bob didn’t talk too much to him about politics.

I sometimes wonder with these old Lefties who now - after all these years - concede Stalin’s evil if it’s not just for show. It’s also obvious judging by some of the comments posted in response to the articles that those beliefs are still just as strong. Pictures of Che Guevara seem to be just
as in vogue with young people today as they were in the ’60s. I wonder when they’ll wise up about him.

Richard looks significantly more kindly on Seeger and says:

Good for Pete, and yes, he could have recanted sooner, but I know some old commies who are going to take their silence to the grave, and I think it has to do with not wanting to face the shame; the great shame of the atrocities, and the lesser shame of having been wrong. Seeger’s a big man for speaking up - even 54 years later. And, of course, Stalin was a greater threat than McCarthy. Stalin was a psychopath, McCarthy was just a sociopath.

You know, whatever his faults, and wrongheaded political stands, I think Pete Seeger is as close as we get to having a living saint on our shores. Sure, he’s as left as you get, but what he’s always been aiming for is the unification and celebration of humanity, and his faith (belief in things unseen) has been unshakable. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a Pete Seeger concert, I’ve been to a few (how’s that for stereotyping myself?) and the guy emanates such loving kindness that you can’t but help to want him and the world to be right (no pun intended.) Though it seems that his recent comments about the “majority,” of human beings having faith in violence is a step away from his core, I hope his optimism doesn’t desert him.

But, here’s some lyrics from one of Pete’s “students -” I’m sure you know which one:

Democracy don’t rule the world
You better get that in your head.
This world is ruled by violence
But I guess that’s better left unsaid.

Richard, funnily enough, is not the only correspondent who quoted those lines, and they occurred to me in the same way, at this sentence in Radosh’s article:

He [Pete Seeger] acknowledged that he underestimated, and perhaps still does, “how the majority of the human race has faith in violence.”

Dylan’s line about the world being ruled by violence is from 1983 (Union Sundown), but you can make a strong argument that it’s been a realization that has always been inherent to his songs. When he wrote, “How many times must the cannonballs fly / Before they’re forever banned,” was it in the expectation that they soon would be banned, or isn’t the power of the question rather in its unanswerability?

Pete Seeger, in his late 80s, seems still to be grasping for a knowledge of human nature that his sometime student Bob Dylan seemed to possess without straining in his early 20s. (Or, more importantly, a knowledge that his work possessed.)

I guess it’s something that Seeger is at least grasping for it.

It’s a funny way that he puts it, that the majority of the human race has “faith” in violence, but maybe it works as well as any formulation. To quote Jack Fate in that movie blockbuster “Masked and Anonymous”: “I’ve got a lot of respect for a gun.” You can call it respect or faith or just plain facing facts, but when a gun is being pointed at you, it speaks louder than any piece of paper or idealistic notion. That’s something Stalin certainly knew, and all tyrants and would-be tyrants know, and will continue to know, until the end of time. I’m not telling anyone any news here, I suppose.

Anyway, as I’ve been mulling over Ron Radosh’s article, and Seeger’s song about Stalin, it’s these lines in the song that now have me thinking:

He had a chance to make / A brand new start for the human race / Instead he set it back / Right in the same nasty place

Josef Stalin had a chance back then to make a brand new start for the human race, Pete Seeger is telling us, now in 2007. Gosh. Really? Is this — despite it all, and despite all he’s seen in his 80+ years on the planet — still what Pete Seeger believes? You may argue that to focus on this is making a lot over an offhand line from a songwriter long past his prime, but honestly I think that the lyrics are artful enough — and Seeger’s accompanying remarks are coherent enough — to tell us that the songwriter still has a very good possession of his faculties.

Leave out, for the sake of argument, Stalin himself and all that he represents in our consciousness today. Insert your favorite non-Stalinistic communist leader. For that matter, insert a fictionalized and somewhat idealized communist leader. Was there really ever a chance back there for a “brand new start for the human race”?

I think that perhaps in the answer to that question lies a great deal. Certainly therein is a great gulf between Seeger’s work and Dylan’s. And perhaps a great gulf between a lot of us, on many different issues. But recognizing gulfs is a necessary precursor to bridging them, I suppose. (If I had a hammer I’d build a bridge.)

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