Pete Seeger, Stalinist

When I was very young, I went to Fieldston Outdoors daycamp, which I recall as having been a generally fun experience, but which involved a lot of annoying folk music, including -- especially -- annoying Pete Seeger songs. Thus, all my life I've harbored a drudge against folk in general and Seeger in particular. Thus, imagine my delight when I discovered years later that Seeger wasn't just another friendly hippie, but actually a hard-core Stalinist, the kind of guy who followed the party line out of Moscow through the ups-and-downs of the Hitler-Stalin pact.

David Boaz (via Brad DeLong) spells out the details. I can't, however, really condone Boaz' bashing of the Little Red Schoolhouse which is near where I grow up and which I promise you isn't churning out little Communist footsoldiers.

Comments

So Boaz is totally wrong about the one thing you have personal knowledge of, but you think we should trust him about the other stuff?

Posted by cs | July 23, 2007 9:57 AM

Red-baiting really doesn't become you, Matt.

Posted by lemuel pitkin | July 23, 2007 10:02 AM

Wow. So picking on an actual Stalinist -- as Matt says, not some hippie who's a communist in Rush LImbaugh's imagination, but an actual Stalinist -- is "red-baiting"?

Posted by too many steves | July 23, 2007 10:03 AM

Spellcheck doesn't work for everything, Matt.

In the first paragraph, you need grudge rather than drudge; in the second, you need grew rather than grow.

Sorry to begin the day (or, at least, my day) with nitpicking, but those errors hurt my ears.

Posted by THS | July 23, 2007 10:05 AM

If we're going to bury everyone who was insufficiently enthusiastic about entering World War 2, can we just plough the GOP under and be done with it?

Posted by phil | July 23, 2007 10:12 AM

"Seeger was antiwar during the period of the Nazi-Soviet Pact; pro-war after the Soviet Union was the ally of the United States; and anti-war during the years of the Cold War and Vietnam."

I know nothing about Seeger and have no dog in this fight but that is hardly a damning indictment. While it may have all been motivated by his love for Uncle Joe, this arc of views was not exactly uncommon. Which awesome wars was Seeger supposed to have supported "during the years of the Cold War and Vietnam."

Normally we reserve the hard core Stalinist charge for those who clung with Uncle Joe even after the horrors of his regime were undeniable. Is Seeger in that camp? I have no idea, but Boaz doesn't make the claim.

Posted by Snoopy | July 23, 2007 10:17 AM

Note: No actual evidence for Seeger's supposed Stalinism is presented in Boaz's column. Going from antiwar to prowar and back is not in itself evidence of Stalinism. If Boaz has any examples of Seeger saying stuff like "Gulag was too good for that bastard Solzhenitsyn", he should share them.

Not that this means Seeger wasn't, etc. But the "Stalin's songbird" headline, just like "aging Stalinist" (and, BTW, most of the standard libertarian propaganda) isn't substantiated.

Posted by Sembtex | July 23, 2007 10:18 AM

Two points:

1) My aunt and uncle run Fieldston Outdoors day camp, and likely did when Matt was a camper there. Another instance of the incestuous nature of blogs and their comment threads.

2) When I was a camp counselor there 7ish years ago, the Pete Seeger asthestic still ran strong in the camp's blood--we had the afternoon folk song sessions, plays about the White Men taking the Hudson River area from its Native American habitants, and so on. Also, mandatory swim lessons three days a week.

The one time I actually heard Pete Seeger perform was when he visited a camp field trip and played for us. The kids were able to sing along to his every word, if you catch my drift.

Glad to find another generally satisfied customer of Fieldston Outdoors, though.

Posted by Ben | July 23, 2007 10:20 AM

There is a distinction that both Boaz and MY elide here, i.e., the distinction between being a "Stalinist" in the sense of being supporter of Stalin in Russia, with full knowledge of what was going on there, and being a "Stalinist" in the sense of being a sympathizer in the United States, who didn't have any firsthand knowledge of what was going on and had at least an arguable basis for distrusting the secondhand reports. Obviously neither person is a good thing to be, but the latter type is more accurately described as an person with really bad judgment rather than as an abettor of genocide.

By way of comparison, we regard Himmler and Charles Lindbergh very differently, and rightly so, even if Lindbergh's conduct can't be completely excused. I don't see that there's a difference between Lindbergh and Seeger here (other than Lindbergh was a fully mature adult at the time and Seeger was just out of college).

Posted by alkali | July 23, 2007 10:20 AM

Red-baiting really doesn't become you, Matt.

Actually it seems to me he's engaged in that equally egregious sin, folk-singer-baiting.

Posted by Ryan | July 23, 2007 10:20 AM

This is not exactly a revelation. Here is Pete Seeger commenting on Pete Seeger's Stalinist past:

"My father, Charles Seeger, got me into the Communist movement. He backed out around '38. I drifted out in the '50s. I apologize [in his recent book] for following the party line so slavishly, for not seeing that Stalin was a supremely cruel misleader."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Seeger

Posted by El Cid | July 23, 2007 10:30 AM

This of course matters to Boaz because the American communist movements' down is uppism is something that a good member of the Craniac faction of the libertarian party can really understand at a primal level.

I don't have a brief for seeger other than my son liking to say "low bridge, everybody down" when I carry him on my shoulders. I don't condone membership in CPUSA. But the man appeared before the committee in the '50s and he pled the 1st. Didn't name names. Suffered the consequences. Unless you think we should have locked him up until he did, I'm not sure what the point of all this is.

Posted by benton | July 23, 2007 10:31 AM

"Seeger was antiwar during the period of the Nazi-Soviet Pact; pro-war after the Soviet Union was the ally of the United States" Wow, who knew that F.D.R., was a Communist.

Posted by Carlos | July 23, 2007 10:34 AM

A partial dissent from alkali (like several other commenters, I don't know enough about Seeger to say anything about the main question). Apart from the two types alkali rightly distinguishes, there were people on the left outside the USSR who, above and beyond being soppy over Soviet Communism, were Stalinists in a harder and more blameworthy sense. This usually involved hewing to the ever shifting party line by vilifying other people on the left (Trotskyites, real and imagined and so on). Alkali is right that before we passed judgement on Seeger, we'd have to know more about where he stood at different phases of what was after all an extremely long career.

(Meanwhile--my secret shame--I must confess to a sneaking fondness for folk music. Have listened, and I blush to admit it, to an Ian & Sylvia LP within the last 24 hours.)

Posted by J | July 23, 2007 10:36 AM

My favorite part of that Boaz piece was the obligatory "why won't people understand that Socialism was far worse than Fascism!!!" from the type of guys who think that public transportation and school lunches are unforgivably Stalinist.

I know you're frustrated that so many of your anti-governmental allies turn out to be racist nuts, but Sweden STILL doesn't has Gulags.

As for Seeger, Matt, I'm with the "er, evidence?" guys. Because I didn't actually see any. The best we got was a link to some other guy ranting on FrontPage.

Yeah.

Right.

Posted by Demosthenes | July 23, 2007 10:43 AM

I clicked through to the Boaz piece to see the evidence that Seeger was a "hard-core Stalinist," only to find -- as others have noted -- that it's not there. Indeed, the "hard-core" label seems to be MY's gift. As El Cid suggests, Wikipedia turns out to be more useful:

Seeger is known for his ardent political beliefs and his involvement with leftist political organizations, including the Communist Party. An article written in 2006 by an official of the American libertarian Cato Institute reported that in the early years of World War II, political opponents called him "Stalin's Songbird".[9] His supporters called him "America's Tuning Fork" and "A Living Saint".[10] Seeger's anti-war record Songs for John Doe, released in 1941, took the Communist Party's non-interventionist line after (Hitler and Stalin signed a non-aggression pact in 1939). At that time Seeger was also strongly anti-Franklin D. Roosevelt, owing to what he considered the President's weak support of workers' rights. After Germany’s breaking of the pact and its attack on the Soviet Union, the pacifism of Songs for John Doe were an embarrassment to the new "patriotic" line of the Communist Party and copies were quickly removed from sale. The remaining inventory was reportedly destroyed. Only a few copies exist to this day. After the invasion of the Soviet Union, Seeger and the Communist Party became strong proponents of military action against Germany; he was drafted into the Army, where he served in the Pacific. He did not serve in a combat unit, his job was to entertain the American troops with music. (Originally the Army had trained him as an airplane mechanic.) When people later asked him what he did in the war, he always answered 'I strummed my banjo'. Seeger left the Communist Party in 1950, five years before Nikita Khrushchev's Secret Speech revealed Stalin's crimes and led to an exodus from the Party. "I realized I could sing the same songs I sang whether I belonged to the Communist Party or not, and I never liked the idea anyway of belonging to a secret organization."[11] He became an anti-Stalinist but remained a Socialist.

So if Boaz thinks the New Yorker is deceptive for failing to mention that Seeger was a Communist, what does it say that Boaz omits to mention that Seeger left the Communist Party 57 years ago? That would just get in the way of slamming the NYT.

Posted by Tyrone Slothrop | July 23, 2007 10:44 AM

"Seeger was antiwar during the period of the Nazi-Soviet Pact; pro-war after the Soviet Union was the ally of the United States" Wow, who knew that F.D.R., was a Communist.

Boaz, I'd imagine, were you to get enough liquor into him.

Posted by Demosthenes | July 23, 2007 10:45 AM

I learned to play banjo from Pete Seeger's book, which sold at capitalist prices in bourgeois small businesses 40 years ago. So I was pleased when I ran into him at National Airport (now named after the Master Bourgeois Nemesis, an accident of a temporary setback in the Dictatorship of the Proletariat).

I asked him (having failed to find out elsewhere) if it was true that he had won the Lenin Peace Prize on one of his (many) trips to Moscow, the true center of the universe as well as the wellspring of love for Mother Russia.

"No," he smiled (smirked?) and said.

Perhaps they're waiting so they can do it posthumously. That's when we'll find out whether those "Little Boxes" he used to sing about are actually six feet under, period, or whether they're truly the "Many Mansions" that await the saved in Paradise.

Pete. Paradise. Think about it.

Well they stuffed Lenin, so anything is possible.

Posted by Chris Inwien | July 23, 2007 10:47 AM

What the hell is a "drudge," and how does one harbor one? Is this a typo or a major malapropism?

Posted by Philly | July 23, 2007 10:51 AM

Well, you CAN dredge a harbor...

Posted by Philly | July 23, 2007 10:53 AM

In 1940, the magnitude of the crimes of Hitler and Stalin were not widely known in the west. Indeed, many of the worst crimes of both had yet to be committed. And to suggest that wanting to weaken or abolish the institution of private property, however impractical that might be, is on its face as evil as being a racial supremacist--in effect, positing moral equivalence between American socialists and the KKK--is deeply offensive.

Posted by kth | July 23, 2007 10:59 AM

Pete Seeger was TWENTY-ONE YEARS OLD in 1941. He did join the CP (in 1942)- and he quit in 1950. Unlike David Boaz, he served in the US Army for three years.

In the 1930's, the CP was the only political organization in the US that actively fought for racial equality. Seeger was always at the forefront in that struggle. Among other things, he wrote the version of "We Shall Overcome" that became the anthem of the civil rights movement.

To see how the right red-baits the use of music in progressive politics in America, see
http://www.city-journal.org/html/15_3_urbanities-communist.html
From the original collectors of folk songs like Alan Lomax, to Woody Guthrie and Seeger, to Bob Dylan and on down to Bruce Springsteen - commies and dupes all of them. There were never any reasons to sing out against racism, or unemployment, or unjust wars, or the destruction of the environment. Every progressive cause in the history of the US was just a front for the commies.

Posted by bloix | July 23, 2007 11:05 AM

Matt's grudge against being force-fed folk-songs as a kid seems pretty poorly thoughtout to me. Let's see:

1) empowering dissent from prevailing paradigm;
2) community-based communication;
3) politics as entertainment; and
4) left-wing analysis.

I can't see how any of that helped to shape Matt's personality or contributed to his current line of work.

Posted by Ephus | July 23, 2007 11:08 AM

Demosthenes, that is very funny.

Posted by walt | July 23, 2007 11:11 AM

I saw an excellent new documentary about Seeger at the Silverdocs festival this year... I believe it will eventually air on PBS. It's well worth watching to see both the kernel of truth in Boaz's charge, and to understand why it's also a dirty cheap shot.

Few white Americans did more for the Civil Rights movement than Pete Seeger. His life story is much, much more than campfire songs and card-carrying communism.

Your claim that you hold a "drudge" against him is hilarious, and much more ironic than, say, rain on your wedding day.

Posted by LaFollette Progressive | July 23, 2007 11:12 AM

What Sembtex said.

There's no evidence in this column, or anywhere else I can find on the web, that Seeger supported Stalin explicitly, or was in any contact with Stalin's government, or espoused ideals that could be called "Stalinist."

So where does this assertion that he's a "hardcore Stalinist" come from? Just because Boaz uses the phrase doesn't make it in any way remotely true...

Posted by Mr. Noah | July 23, 2007 11:12 AM

"Your claim that you hold a "drudge" against him is hilarious, and much more ironic than, say, rain on your wedding day."

Ironically, though, it's less ironic than ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife.

Posted by Petey | July 23, 2007 11:18 AM

Posted by Philly | July 23, 2007 10:51 AM:"What the hell is a "drudge," and how does one harbor one? Is this a typo or a major malapropism?"

Isn't a drudge someone who is forced to do all the dirty boring jobs for very little money if at all?

Posted by kth | July 23, 2007 10:59 AM:"In 1940, the magnitude of the crimes of Hitler and Stalin were not widely known in the west. Indeed, many of the worst crimes of both had yet to be committed."

I beg to differ. It is true that Hitler was still starting out on his campaign of mass murder in 1940, but everyone knew precisely who and what Stalin was. The Communists were never ashamed of it until later. Stalin certainly was not. It took them a long time to realize that honesty was not the best policy by which time there were hundreds of thousands of eye witnesses in the West and plenty of evidence of mass murder - for those that did not want to believe otherwise.

Posted by kth | July 23, 2007 10:59 AM:"And to suggest that wanting to weaken or abolish the institution of private property, however impractical that might be, is on its face as evil as being a racial supremacist--in effect, positing moral equivalence between American socialists and the KKK--is deeply offensive."

Sure. To the KKK. Anyone who wants to abolish the institution of private property *via* *the* *mass* *murder* of entire classes is vastly more evil than the KKK. Private property really is a right on which all other rights are based. Any attack on it is inherently a call for massive human rights violations. That may not be obvious to you but you are welcome to think about the status of people with no rights to private property we know of - slaves, Soviet citizens etc etc.

Posted by bloix | July 23, 2007 11:05 AM:"Pete Seeger was TWENTY-ONE YEARS OLD in 1941. He did join the CP (in 1942)- and he quit in 1950. Unlike David Boaz, he served in the US Army for three years."

So what? People held it against Pope Benedict that he was a member of the Hitler Youth. If youthful idealism took anyone else into the Nazi Party I doubt we would all be so forgiving. He quit but he did not change his views that much. And of course he may have been drafted. And spent the war playing music as opposed to fighting.

Posted by bloix | July 23, 2007 11:05 AM:"In the 1930's, the CP was the only political organization in the US that actively fought for racial equality."

I am not convinced that is true and even if it was, so what? The fact that they were right on one issue does not change the fact that they were vastly more wrong on vastly more subjects - and of course that their solution to racism would have left everyone vastly worse off.

Posted by bloix | July 23, 2007 11:05 AM:"There were never any reasons to sing out against racism, or unemployment, or unjust wars, or the destruction of the environment. Every progressive cause in the history of the US was just a front for the commies."

But the reasons are not the real issue. The solutions are. To sing out about unemployment is a good thing - but not when the solution is gassing Jews or murdering everyone richer than a middling peasant. It is not enough to say that you are opposed to some contemporary evil, your solution must be an improvement and it must be proportional to the change desired.

Posted by HeiGou | July 23, 2007 11:24 AM

In 1940, the magnitude of the crimes of Hitler and Stalin were not widely known in the west. Indeed, many of the worst crimes of both had yet to be committed. - kth

the distinction between being a "Stalinist" in the sense of being supporter of Stalin in Russia, with full knowledge of what was going on there, and being a "Stalinist" in the sense of being a sympathizer in the United States, who didn't have any firsthand knowledge of what was going on and had at least an arguable basis for distrusting the secondhand reports. - akalai

By the 1930's there was plenty of evidence, for those who were willing to look, of the mass-murder going on in Russia under the soviets - not only under Stalin but from the very beginning under Lenin. The problem wasn't lack of evidence at all - it was the desire of people to ignore unpleasant, inconvenient, truths.

Just like the neocons knew the truth and refused to grant any credibility to the evidence that undermined their "Saddam has WMDs" narrative and automatically rejected it as propaganda spouted by liars at worst or dupes at best, huge numbers of early 20th-century communists in the west simply refused to credit the evidence of the murderous nature of the Soviet regime. The evidence that WAS available was either dismissed out-of-hand as imperialist propaganda or minimized with excuses about how Russia "needs to defend herself" from Western subversion. Western communists who had been to Russia, seen the truth, and spoke up upon their return were vilified by their fellow party members for giving ammo to anti-communists.

The only reason anyone was ignorant about Stalin was because they deliberately closed their eyes.

Posted by r4d20 | July 23, 2007 11:25 AM

By the 1930's there was plenty of evidence, for those who were willing to look, of the mass-murder going on in Russia under the soviets - not only under Stalin but from the very beginning under Lenin. The problem wasn't lack of evidence at all - it was the desire of people to ignore unpleasant, inconvenient, truths.

Really? Cites, please.

Posted by alkali | July 23, 2007 11:39 AM

Many if not most early communists in the U.S. were humanitarians, idealists ("Boy Scouts," as my late uncle, a CPU member at the time who volunteered for the Lincoln Brigade to fight Franco in the Spanish Civil War, later referred to them).

Pete Seeger was one of my childhood heroes and is still one of the very few human beings I would be willing to die for. He's spent his entire life working for the benefit of others. Yes, he's made mistakes, but from the highest of motives.

From his Wikipedia page (undated): "I still call myself a communist, because communism is no more what Russia made of it than Christianity is what the churches make of it. But if by some freak of history communism had caught up with this country, I would have been one of the first people thrown in jail."

How anybody but a right-winger could possibly find his songs "annoying," I simply can't imagine.

Posted by Swift Loris | July 23, 2007 11:41 AM

Those who wished to ignore unpleasant, inconvenient truths including the US government and the mainstream media who rebranded Stalin as kindly Uncle Joe as soon as it was useful.

Our current government is populated by central american death squad supporters. If only Boaz had some bad thoughts about them.

Posted by Snoopy | July 23, 2007 11:42 AM

Compare people like Pete Seeger, whose Stalinist allegiance were eventually abandoned and apologized for, versus people like Michael Ledeen, who truly admire Mussolini-style fascists and instead of being folk singers are directly advising our government.

Of course, it wasn't Pete Seeger who directly aided, armed, funded, and protected actual genocide in Guatemala, that was Reagan, his CIA, and all of his Congressional enablers and their pundit worshippers.

So I'll put Pete Seeger's antiquated and abandoned Stalinism against Reaganite death squads and genocidalists any day.

Also, Pete Seeger didn't carpet bomb Cambodia from 1965 - 1973, handing power directly to the crazy but formerly marginal Khmer Rouge, whom conservatives pretend they hate, as though they cared one whit at any time for any Cambodians' lives.

Once again, that was the product of US hawks, not formerly Stalinist folk singers.

Posted by El Cid | July 23, 2007 11:46 AM

I'm a communist; fuck you.

Posted by Gregorio | July 23, 2007 11:50 AM

How anybody but a right-winger could possibly find his songs "annoying," I simply can't imagine.

Lots of his songs are wonderful, but he's got at least one children's album that's horribly didactic. You keep wishing he'd stop instructing his little pupils and just sing.

Posted by Tyrone Slothrop | July 23, 2007 11:51 AM

Posted by Swift Loris | July 23, 2007 11:41 AM:"Many if not most early communists in the U.S. were humanitarians, idealists ("Boy Scouts," as my late uncle, a CPU member at the time who volunteered for the Lincoln Brigade to fight Franco in the Spanish Civil War, later referred to them)."

As, no doubt, would many Nazi veterans present themselves. However Boy Scouts rarely join parties with explicitly genocidal political programs. Would-be mass murderers do. Your uncle could have joined a mainstream socialist party, as many could have joined a German nationalist party, but chose instead to sign up for a blood bath.

Posted by Swift Loris | July 23, 2007 11:41 AM:"Pete Seeger was one of my childhood heroes and is still one of the very few human beings I would be willing to die for. He's spent his entire life working for the benefit of others. Yes, he's made mistakes, but from the highest of motives."

Working for the benefit of others? So he has not made millions from his records, which no doubt he gives away for free, and he does not campaign to maintain property prices in the area in which he lives? How interesting. Chomsky has adopted a tax minimization scheme to prevent paying taxes he does not have to. Think Seeger has too?

Posted by Snoopy | July 23, 2007 11:42 AM:"Those who wished to ignore unpleasant, inconvenient truths including the US government and the mainstream media who rebranded Stalin as kindly Uncle Joe as soon as it was useful."

Ahh I knew it was only a matter of time before the "Only America is Vile" cheer squad came out.

Even if this is so, and it is about FDR, so what?

Posted by HeiGou | July 23, 2007 11:52 AM

"How anybody but a right-winger could possibly find his songs 'annoying,' I simply can't imagine."

To be fair to Matt, I have heard a recording of Seeger performing "There's a Hole in the Bucket," which is often performed at camps, and it is indeed the most annoying song ever written.

However, he's also the guy who wrote "Turn, Turn, Turn," "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy," and arranged the modern version of "We Shall Overcome." Credit where credit is due.

Posted by LaFollette Progressive | July 23, 2007 11:57 AM

Posted by El Cid | July 23, 2007 11:46 AM:"Compare people like Pete Seeger, whose Stalinist allegiance were eventually abandoned and apologized for, versus people like Michael Ledeen, who truly admire Mussolini-style fascists and instead of being folk singers are directly advising our government."

Sorry but when did Seeger ever apologize for it? When has Michael Ledeen ever admired a Mussolini style Fascist? For that matter, in comparison with Stalin, why is your comparison even rational?

Posted by El Cid | July 23, 2007 11:46 AM:"Of course, it wasn't Pete Seeger who directly aided, armed, funded, and protected actual genocide in Guatemala, that was Reagan, his CIA, and all of his Congressional enablers and their pundit worshippers."

Well no it was not. There was no genocide in Guatamala until the US cut off aid. That would have been Carter. Which Reagan did not change. The genocide occurred while Guatamala was getting no US aid at all (and in fact had US aid been available, it probably would not have happened as the Americans would not have let it). Naturally I expect so very little from you, I do not expect an apology for this libel and smear. Instead I'll content myself by thinking smugly about the utter intellectual bankruptcy of the Left that such comments are not only allowed to pass but seem to be approved of.

Posted by El Cid | July 23, 2007 11:46 AM:"So I'll put Pete Seeger's antiquated and abandoned Stalinism against Reaganite death squads and genocidalists any day."

So you'll choose real support for real genocide over a fantasy? See above.

Posted by El Cid | July 23, 2007 11:46 AM:"Also, Pete Seeger didn't carpet bomb Cambodia from 1965 - 1973, handing power directly to the crazy but formerly marginal Khmer Rouge, whom conservatives pretend they hate, as though they cared one whit at any time for any Cambodians' lives."

Nor did anyone else. And that did not hand power directly to anyone - it was aimed at keeping the crazies out of office. It was Seeger who was working hard to get the crazies in the KR into office. And it was the anti-War Left that openly did not care how many Cambodians died as long as America lost.

Posted by El Cid | July 23, 2007 11:46 AM:"Once again, that was the product of US hawks, not formerly Stalinist folk singers."

And once again it was the result of Seeger's folk songs and his friends on the Stalinist left working to undermine America's foreign policies and bring Pol Pot to power.

Posted by HeiGou | July 23, 2007 12:06 PM

"and he does not campaign to maintain property prices in the area in which he lives? How interesting."

This is hilarious. Seeger lives in a small wood-frame house that he built with his own hands, overlooking the Hudson. His children grew up there. At 86, he still cuts firewood with an axe. He has never spent 30 seconds campaigning to do anything about property values - except, of course, that his work in turning the Hudson from a sewer into a living river may have increased waterfront values.

Posted by Bloix | July 23, 2007 12:11 PM

I've been involved with Democratic Socialists of America, and its predecessor organizations DSOC & NAM (among the founders Michael Harrington, Barbara Ehrenreich, Irving Howe) since the Reagan era. Occasionally I still run into unreconstructed Stalinists at anti-war and impeachment demonstrations, organized by World Can't Wait and ANSWER. And, that isn't attendees, it is the speakers!
One of our most energetic members in San Francisco, Betty, is a dual member of the CPUSA. Joined the CPUSA back in the early 50's. At one of our meetings about three yrs. ago, the subject of the
brutal collectivization of agriculture in the USSR, the sham Purge Trials from '36-'38 and the GULAG came up. Within a minute, Betty was shouting all the old, tired lies of the CPUSA and its fellow travellers, during the 30's about Trotsky being a Fascist, a Kulak owning two cows being a Rich, Class Enemy Wrecker. This went on for an hour, in which we were also informed that Norman Thomas of the Socialist Party, was a, "Social Fascist, " worse than a real Fascist, since he gave left-wing cover to a corrupt, phony pseudo-democracy.
On Central American death squads, btw, I was a member of the Committee in Solidarity With The People of El Salvador, which supported the marxist-leninist guerillas of the FMLN during the Reagan era. In CISPES, which was full of M-L's and
naive Christians, it was considered "red-baiting, " to acknowledge the unjustified assasination of communist poet Roque Dalton by his fellow communists in a competing politico-military org. in the FMLN. An alleged dual agent of the Cuban DGI and the CIA!

Posted by Michael Pugliese | July 23, 2007 12:20 PM

How is this post relevant, Matt? If the Atlantic pushing you to be "fair and balanced?" In the midst of all your cogent posts re: the war and the NBA, you shovel out the same old commie baiting I expect from MSM commentators. Pete Seeger is a committed lefty. Read his own words on the subject-- he stresses his belief in personal freedoms and asserts he would be the first in the gulag. Really, did "hard-core Stalinists" take any guff from dirty peace-loving hippies? No. Seeger's Soviet Communism/ Roman Catholicisn analogy is perfect: great ideas can be co-opted and misinterpreted. That said, let me defend Stalin.

Stalin was a brute and an asshole. No one liked him; he was a bully and enforcer who gained power by toadying, coercion and manipulation. He was an isolating drunk with sociopathic and paranoiac tendencies. He also inherited a woefully divided and confused revolutionary party facing the arduous task of GOVERNING and unwieldy state with very little infrastructure and numerous violent factions, not to mention an heritage of repressive autocracy and meat-grinder warfare. It was also the most populous nation in the world and the most non-immigration-based diverse. To govern a nation like this in an entirely unprecedented manner presents challenges to say the least. To industrialize, feed, and rule this nation is nigh impossible; to ready it for war with the most agile and aggressive military in the world is inconceivable. Yet Stalin did so. As a Nabokovian Menshevik, I am no fan of Stalin, but without him, Tweedledum FDR and TweedleeDUMMER Winnie Poo Churchill would have been crushed by Hitler. Stalin made nice with Hitler because the USSR was a fucking mess and unready for any kind of conflict. And yet somehow they prevailed, through collectivism (albeit somewhat coerced collectivism) and sheer sacrifice. He was never Kind Uncle Joe, but he was, at least from 41-45, necessary Uncle Joe.

Posted by Gregorio | July 23, 2007 12:25 PM

@Michael: I found your post informative, but why did it read like a Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap bottle?

Posted by Gregorio | July 23, 2007 12:28 PM

Ironic there is a, "La Follette Progressive, " here as a poster. Guess who opposed La Follette when he ran for re-election vs. Joseph McCarthy when old , "Tail Gunner Joe, " ran for the US Senate and defeated him? The Communist Party, USA and the Wisconsin CIO COPE, which was controlled by the Wisconsin CP. The CPUSA in Wisconsin actively supported McCarthy that yr.! La Follette was a anti-Stalinist so he had to be opposed. You can find corrobotation for this in the university library bookstacks by finding bound volumes of Studies on the Left from 1962, IIRC in a piece by historian Robert Schaeffer, IIRC. Studies on the Left was a New Left journal from Madison, Wisconsin founded by students of William Appleman Williams like James Weinstein, founder of In These Times.

Posted by Michael Pugliese | July 23, 2007 12:29 PM

Gregorio>...@Michael: I found your post informative, but why did it read like a Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap bottle?

Heh, a decade among hippies, Dead Heads and New Age nutters in Santa Cruz can do that!

Posted by Michael Pugliese | July 23, 2007 12:36 PM

For apologetics for the Khmer Rouge by Chomsky, Gareth Porter and others on the Left, back then see,
http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/genocide/cambear3.htm
The Khmer Rouge Canon 1975-1979

Posted by Michael Pugliese | July 23, 2007 12:41 PM

Ironic there is a, "La Follette Progressive, " here as a poster. Guess who opposed La Follette when he ran for re-election vs. Joseph McCarthy when old , "Tail Gunner Joe, " ran for the US Senate and defeated him?

It's really not ironic at all that I showed up on this thread. My name is LaFollette, and I'm a Progressive. I'm familiar with the history.

Robert LaFollette, Sr. was a hero of the anti-communist, anti-war American Left, and Robert Jr. was also committed to progressive social change while strongly opposing the CPUSA. Pete Seeger, unfortunately, can't say the same. He eventually wised up a bit and led, I believe, a mostly admirable life. There's really no excuse at all for Stalin's American apologists during the 1940s and 1950s, except to say that most of them were utopian dreamers who did not actually advocate Stalinist policies in America... they supported a fantasy of communism that Stalin sold them, not the reality of mass purges, slave labor, and artificial famines. It is fortunate that most of the American Left had better sense than Pete Seeger did. His later contributions to American culture, however, speak for themselves.

Posted by LaFollette Progressive | July 23, 2007 1:01 PM

Stalin was a brute and an asshole. No one liked him; he was a bully and enforcer who gained power by toadying, coercion and manipulation. He was an isolating drunk with sociopathic and paranoiac tendencies ...

... and is still more popular than Bush!

Posted by justawriter | July 23, 2007 1:01 PM

Posted by Gregorio | July 23, 2007 12:25 PM:"Read his own words on the subject-- he stresses his belief in personal freedoms and asserts he would be the first in the gulag."

Well he would say that wouldn't he? He cannot know who would be first in the Gulag and somehow I don't see Fellow Traveler going first anyway. He is hardly going to admit the truth.

Posted by Gregorio | July 23, 2007 12:25 PM:"Seeger's Soviet Communism/ Roman Catholicisn analogy is perfect: great ideas can be co-opted and misinterpreted."

Indeed. And so can bad ideas. A Communist is someone who rejects the path of democracy and peaceful political change for state-organized terror. Seeger is perfectly clear in what he believes. Why do you distort his record? The analogy sucks as it is possible to implement Catholicism without auto de fe's. It is not possible to be a Communist without a Gulag.

Posted by Gregorio | July 23, 2007 12:25 PM:"That said, let me defend Stalin."

Bizarre.

Posted by Gregorio | July 23, 2007 12:25 PM:"Stalin was a brute and an asshole. No one liked him; he was a bully and enforcer who gained power by toadying, coercion and manipulation. He was an isolating drunk with sociopathic and paranoiac tendencies."

As far as I can see none of those comforting myths have much truth except perhaps that brute bit.

Posted by Gregorio | July 23, 2007 12:25 PM:"He also inherited a woefully divided and confused revolutionary party facing the arduous task of GOVERNING and unwieldy state with very little infrastructure and numerous violent factions, not to mention an heritage of repressive autocracy and meat-grinder warfare."

So you mean because he was such a mass murderer who inherited power from another mass murderer, he was forced to go on being a mass murderer? The Party might not have been so divided and confused if so many people weren't being killed. Russia had excellent infrastructure as it happened. Those factions were in large part so violent because they were being liquidated. Kerensky did not have to murder millions and yet he too had the same problems. Why not?

Posted by Gregorio | July 23, 2007 12:25 PM:"It was also the most populous nation in the world and the most non-immigration-based diverse."

Apart from India on both counts and China on the first. Neither of which, as a matter of fact, required a tenth the deliberate mass murder that Stalin imposed on Russia. Indeed India required none at all - despite a massively smaller infrastructure etc etc.

Posted by Gregorio | July 23, 2007 12:25 PM:"To govern a nation like this in an entirely unprecedented manner presents challenges to say the least."

True. To skin a country alive was a challenge. Of course to rule like Kerensky did not present the same challenges.

Posted by Gregorio | July 23, 2007 12:25 PM:"To industrialize, feed, and rule this nation is nigh impossible"

And yet the Tsars did it and did Kerensky. It is impossible to run it via an utterly unrealistic economic system but why this should justify murdering millions in the fight against reality escapes me.

Posted by Gregorio | July 23, 2007 12:25 PM:"to ready it for war with the most agile and aggressive military in the world is inconceivable."

You mean the Soviet Army was going to fight itself?

Posted by Gregorio | July 23, 2007 12:25 PM:"but without him, Tweedledum FDR and TweedleeDUMMER Winnie Poo Churchill would have been crushed by Hitler."

With no Stalin there would have been no Hitler. It was Stalin's destruction of the Popular Front, his terror which put the fear of God into the Middle Classes, his Faustian Pact with Hitler that made the War possible.

Besides, without FDR Stalin would have lost.

Posted by Gregorio | July 23, 2007 12:25 PM:"Stalin made nice with Hitler because the USSR was a fucking mess and unready for any kind of conflict."

How do you know this isn't retrospective amoral cynical apologetics? I suggest he wanted Hitler to destroy France.

Posted by Gregorio | July 23, 2007 12:25 PM:"And yet somehow they prevailed, through collectivism (albeit somewhat coerced collectivism) and sheer sacrifice."

Somewhat? The Old South had "somewhat coerced" slavery by that measure. Not through. Despite. Stalin junked most of collectivization for the duration. Farmers made a fortune.

Coming up next you'll no doubt tell us about how Hitler made some nice roads.

Posted by HeiGou | July 23, 2007 1:17 PM

So where's the Stalinist part?

For Seeger to prefer the Soviet Union over Hitler was not an unusual position for that time. The extent of Stalins repression was not known for some time.

Doing the work of right wing hatchet men seems unlike you, Matt. But then folk music is awfully annoying.

Posted by Horatio Parker | July 23, 2007 1:31 PM

Soviet Union > Nazi Germany P.E.R.I.O.D.

Unless, of course, you're Winston Churchill. Then it's a tossup.

Posted by Gregorio | July 23, 2007 1:34 PM

I don't have a dog in this fight. I have a similar loathing of folk music, especially of the Pete Seeger variety but I don't think charges of stalinism are warranted. For me, the term stalinist only applies to those people who actively engaged in apologetics on behalf of Stalin after the public revelations by Khrushchev of his crimes. That doesen't apply to old Pete.

But these threads are always fun to read for the colorful reactions they bring. I love watching (presumably) modern urbane, at peace with capitalism, social democrat-lite American liberals - who are not the commie sympathizers or the 5th column boogeymen McCarthyites and other reactionaries make them out to me - squirm and turn on the defensive whenever the honor of some old Red, even a particularly brutal and sociopathic one is besmirched. I've seen a lot of these discussions on politically oriented blogs over the last couple of years and the reaction is always the same. I don't know what that means exactly, I was just always struck by it.

Posted by DRR | July 23, 2007 1:44 PM

I think we're missing the real point here, which is that folk music sucks.

Posted by too many steves | July 23, 2007 1:55 PM

The only girl I've ever loved
Was born with roses in her eyes
But then they buried her alive
One evening 1945
With just her sister at her side
And only weeks before the guns
All came and rained on everyone
Now she's a little boy in Spain
Playing pianos filled with flames
On empty rings around the sun
All sing to say my dream has come

But now we must pick up every piece
Of the life we used to love
Just to keep ourselves
At least enough to carry on

And now we ride the circus wheel
With your dark brother wrapped in white
Says it was good to be alive
But now he rides a comet's flame
And won't be coming back again
The Earth looks better from a star
That's right above from where you are
He didn't mean to make you cry
With sparks that ring and bullets fly
On empty rings around your heart
The world just screams and falls apart

But now we must pick up every piece
Of the life we used to love
Just to keep ourselves
At least enough to carry on

And here's where your mother sleeps
And here is the room where your brothers were born
Indentions in the sheets
Where their bodies once moved but don't move anymore
And it's so sad to see the world agree
That they'd rather see their faces fill with flies
All when I'd want to keep white roses in their eyes

Posted by Jeff Mangum | July 23, 2007 2:01 PM

I have to side with the anti-folkies. Seeger's real crime is that he is a folk singer - no one cares that Aaron Copland was a communist, the man could write real music. And I'm sorry "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy" is a trite annoying song. Folk music gave the left a black eye for a long time and really bears a lot of the blame for making being liberal "uncool" among Generation Xers. Even the name is a misnomer, it's not "folk", since it's usually written and performed by overeducated children of the middle class, and it's barely music. If it hadn't been for the saving grace of the Clash and punk rock in the 70s, folk music alone probably would have forced me to become a conservative.

Posted by vanya | July 23, 2007 2:08 PM

Posted by El Cid | July 23, 2007 11:46 AM:"Also, Pete Seeger didn't carpet bomb Cambodia from 1965 - 1973, handing power directly to the crazy but formerly marginal Khmer Rouge, whom conservatives pretend they hate, as though they cared one whit at any time for any Cambodians' lives."

Nor did anyone else. And that did not hand power directly to anyone - it was aimed at keeping the crazies out of office. It was Seeger who was working hard to get the crazies in the KR into office. And it was the anti-War Left that openly did not care how many Cambodians died as long as America lost.

You're absolutely wrong and an absolute idiot. You know absolutely zero about anything which affected Cambodia or Cambodian power.

The one and over-riding factor which gave the Khmer Rouge the opportunity for power was nearly a decade of U.S. carpet bombing.

The one academic institution closely studying the issue -- and you are supposedly the one concerned with "best" arguments -- is Yale's Cambodian Genocide Project. Check out both the bombing data as well as the primary documents, in English and local languages.

Feel free to issue insane theories on how carpet bombing was actually somehow not driving the rural population to support the Khmer Rouge.

It was the US hawks and their bombing campaign which handed power directly to the Khmer Rouge. (And you can rant and rave like your fellows over at FrontPageMag about how every scholar in the world who wasn't cheering the bombing was some Maoist whose conclusions are compromised.)

It was the US hawks and their carpet bombing for nearly a decade which gave power to the Khmer Rouge.

http://www.yale.edu/cgp/us.html

Noam Chomsky didn't do it. Pete Seeger didn't do it. Leagues of Berkeley students didn't do it.

And not one hawk had any suggestion of what to do once the Khmer Rouge (to whom they handed power via nearly a decade of carpet bombing) took over, other than what actually happened, that is, Viet Nam invaded and tossed out the regime.

So you can try and hawk your wares that it was those U.S. commies and Maoists what loved them some Khmer Rouge, but it was you and your ilk who thought that by bombing the hell out of an entire nation that somehow it would keep nice people in charge.

Shockingly, a near decade's worth of carpet-bombing left nasty people in charge.

Not Pete Seeger. Not Noam Chomsky arguing about how many were or weren't dying under the Khmer Rouge.

Nope, it was LBJ's and Nixon's bombing of Cambodia which loved, cherished, favored, supported, nourished the genocide.

That's right -- not hordes of anti-American folk singers, nor riots in Paris, but good old fashioned US hawks. They were the *real* friends of the Khmer Rouge, without whom the Khmer Rouge could never have seized power.

And the Guatemala genocide was real -- not fictional, not made up, no, good real Christian conservatives favored and personally endorsed by Reagan who roamed the hillsides murdering entire Mayan communities.

Seer Taak indeed my ass.

Posted by El Cid | July 23, 2007 2:22 PM

I actually like Pete Seeger's music and don't really care much about his politics. His performance of children's songs can be annoying, but he also recorded a lot of good stuff!

For example, check out "We Shall Overcome: Complete Carnegie Hall Concert." It's great. You won't be disappointed!

Posted by blah | July 23, 2007 2:23 PM

Since 1994, the award-winning Cambodian Genocide Program, a project of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University's MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, has been studying these events to learn as much as possible about the tragedy, and to help determine who was responsible for the crimes of the Pol Pot regime. In Phnom Penh in 1996, for instance, we obtained access to the 100,000-page archive of that defunct regime's security police, the Santebal. This material has been microfilmed by Yale University's Sterling Library and made available to scholars worldwide. As of January 2006, we have also compiled and published 22,000 biographic and bibliographic records, and over 6,000 photographs, along with documents, translations, maps, and an extensive list of CGP books and research papers on the genocide, as well as the CGP's newly-enhanced, interactive Cambodian Geographic Database, CGEO, which includes data on: Cambodia’s 13,000 villages; the 115,000 sites targeted in 231,00 U.S. bombing sorties flown over Cambodia in 1965-75, dropping 2.75 million tons of munitions; 158 prisons run by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime during 1975-1979, and 309 mass-grave sites with an estimated total of 19,000 grave pits; and 76 sites of post-1979 memorials to victims of the Khmer Rouge.

Posted by El Cid | July 23, 2007 2:25 PM

Provide proof Seeger was specifically a "Stalinist". If there is no proof then labeling someone a "Stalinist" is called "smearing". I expect this from the Right, not from Mr Yglesias.

Posted by RationalDem | July 23, 2007 2:25 PM

And who can deny the greatness of a song like "The Bells of Rhymney"?

Posted by blah | July 23, 2007 2:31 PM

Hey, you folk haters, Pete Seeger wrote "We Shall Overcome." Anyone here want to tell us what a crime that was?

The problem with you kiddies is that you think music is something you plug into your ears with little white buds so you can be all alone no matter where you are.

Pete Seeger didn't sing to people. He taught people to sing for themselves. If you don't sing, you won't like Pete Seeger. But how many of you can sing without the assistance of a machine?

And Vanya, Waist Deep in the Big Muddy was a powerful song in 1967 - when everyone understood just who that "tall man" was. Not every song has to appeal to every generation.

PS- Seeger was a college dropout. You're more over-educated than he is.

Posted by Bloix | July 23, 2007 2:31 PM

Out of curiousity, I went looking for the New Yorker piece that was the ostensible spur for the Boaz piece, and I can't find it. Boaz doesn't link to it>, and a search on the New Yorker's site for "seeger" pulls up nothing in the two years prior to April 2006, when Boaz was writing. WTF?

[An earlier version of this comment with links included seems to have been screened by The Atlantic's software, so I'm trying again sans links.]

Posted by Tyrone Slothrop | July 23, 2007 2:35 PM

"In this day of materialist culture, the most revolutionary song is one you sing yourself."

- Utah Phillips

Posted by justawriter | July 23, 2007 2:36 PM

Bombs Over Cambodia: New Light on US Air War Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan

...In 1975, Pol Pot’s genocidal Khmer Rouge forces took power in Cambodia after a massive U.S. bombing campaign there. New information reveals that Cambodia was bombed far more heavily during the Vietnam War than previously believed — and that the bombing began not under Richard Nixon, but under Lyndon Johnson.

In the fall of 2000, twenty-five years after the end of the war in Indochina, Bill Clinton became the first US president since Richard Nixon to visit Vietnam. While media coverage of the trip was dominated by talk of some two thousand US soldiers still classified as missing in action, a small act of great historical importance went almost unnoticed. As a humanitarian gesture, Clinton released extensive Air Force data on all American bombings of Indochina between 1964 and 1975. Recorded using a groundbreaking IBM-designed system, the database provided extensive information on sorties conducted over Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Clinton’s gift was intended to assist in the search for unexploded ordnance left behind during the carpet bombing of the region. Littering the countryside, often submerged under farmland, this ordnance remains a significant humanitarian concern. It has maimed and killed farmers, and rendered valuable land all but unusable. Development and de-mining organizations have put the Air Force data to good use over the past six years, but have done so without noting its full implications, which turn out to be staggering.

The Bombing Database

The still-incomplete database (it has several “dark” periods) reveals that from October 4, 1965, to August 15, 1973, the United States dropped far more ordnance on Cambodia than was previously believed: 2,756,941 tons’ worth, dropped in 230,516 sorties on 113,716 sites. Just over 10 percent of this bombing was indiscriminate, with 3,580 of the sites listed as having “unknown” targets and another 8,238 sites having no target listed at all. Even if the latter may arguably be oversights, the former suggest explicit knowledge of indiscretion. The database also shows that the bombing began four years earlier than is widely believed — not under Nixon, but under Lyndon Johnson. The impact of this bombing, the subject of much debate for the past three decades, is now clearer than ever. Civilian casualties in Cambodia drove an enraged populace into the arms of an insurgency that had enjoyed relatively little support until the bombing began, setting in motion the expansion of the Vietnam War deeper into Cambodia, a coup d’état in 1970, the rapid rise of the Khmer Rouge, and ultimately the Cambodian genocide. The data demonstrates that the way a country chooses to exit a conflict can have disastrous consequences. It therefore speaks to contemporary warfare as well, including US operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Despite many differences, a critical similarity links the war in Iraq with the Cambodian conflict: an increasing reliance on air power to battle a heterogeneous, volatile insurgency.

“We heard a terrifying noise which shook the ground; it was as if the earth trembled, rose up and opened beneath our feet. Enormous explosions lit up the sky like huge bolts of lightning; it was the American B-52s.”

—Cambodian bombing survivor, Kampong Thom

In the years since the Vietnam War, something of a consensus has emerged on the extent of US involvement in Cambodia. The details are controversial, but the narrative begins on March 18, 1969, when the United States launched the Menu campaign. The joint US–South Vietnam ground offensive followed. For the next three years, the United States continued with air strikes under Nixon’s orders, hitting deep inside Cambodia’s borders, first to root out the Viet Cong (VC)/North Vietnam Army (NVA) and later to protect the Lon Nol regime from growing numbers of Cambodian Communist forces. Congress cut funding for the war and imposed an end to the bombing on August 15, 1973, amid calls for Nixon’s impeachment for his deceit in escalating the campaign...

The Secret Bombing of 1965

Thanks to the Air Force database, we now know that the US bombardment started three-and-a-half years earlier, in 1965, under the Johnson administration. What happened in 1969 was not the start of bombings in Cambodia but the escalation into carpetbombing. From 1965 to 1968, 2,565 sorties took place over Cambodia, with 214 tons of bombs dropped. These early strikes were likely designed to support the nearly two thousand secret ground incursions conducted by the CIA and US Special Forces during that period. B-52s — long range bombers capable of carrying very heavy loads — were not deployed, whether out of concern for Cambodian lives or the country’s neutrality, or because carpet bombing was believed to be of limited strategic value...

...The Cambodian bombing campaign had two unintended side effects that ultimately combined to produce the very domino effect that the Vietnam War was supposed to prevent.

First, the bombing forced the Vietnamese Communists deeper and deeper into Cambodia, bringing them into greater contact with Khmer Rouge insurgents. Second, the bombs drove ordinary Cambodians into the arms of the Khmer Rouge, a group that seemed initially to have slim prospects of revolutionary success.

Pol Pot himself described the Khmer Rouge during that period as “fewer than five thousand poorly armed guerrillas . . . scattered across the Cambodian landscape, uncertain about their strategy, tactics, loyalty, and leaders.”

Years after the war ended, journalist Bruce Palling asked Chhit Do, a former Khmer Rouge officer, if his forces had used the bombing as anti-American propaganda. Chhit Do replied:

"Every time after there had been bombing, they would take the people to see the craters, to see how big and deep the craters were, to see how the earth had been gouged out and scorched . . . . The ordinary people sometimes literally shit in their pants when the big bombs and shells came. Their minds just froze up and they would wander around mute for three or four days. Terrified and half crazy, the people were ready to believe what they were told.

"It was because of their dissatisfaction with the bombing that they kept on co-operating with the Khmer Rouge, joining up with the Khmer Rouge, sending their children off to go with them. . . . Sometimes the bombs fell and hit little children, and their fathers would be all for the Khmer Rouge."

A Cambodian witness responded to an earlier publication of this article by writing:

“I could not agree with you more based on my experiences during the bombing in Takeo around 1972. The bombings were [spreading] further into towns and villages. My parents’ house was hit by the bombs, and we had to move to the opposite side of the country. We had known [that] almost the entire village that survived from the bombings had joined forces with the Khmer Rouge.”

The Nixon administration knew that the Khmer Rouge was winning over peasants. The CIA’s Directorate of Operations, after investigations south of Phnom Penh, reported in May 1973 that the Communists were “using damage caused by B-52 strikes as the main theme of their propaganda,” and that such propaganda was “effective.” But this does not seem to have registered as a primary strategic U.S. concern.

“They are murderous thugs, but we won’t let that stand in our way”

...If the Cambodian experience teaches us anything, it is that miscalculation of the consequences of civilian casualties stems partly from a failure to understand how insurgencies thrive. The motives that lead locals to help such movements don’t fit into strategic rationales like the ones set forth by Kissinger and Nixon. Those whose lives have been ruined don’t care about the geopolitics behind bomb attacks; they tend to blame the attackers. The failure of the American campaign in Cambodia lay not only in the civilian death toll during the unprecedented bombing, but also in its aftermath, when the Khmer Rouge regime rose up from the bomb craters, with tragic results. The dynamics in Iraq, or even Afghanistan, could be similar.

Posted by El Cid | July 23, 2007 2:37 PM

"Pete Seeger didn't sing to people. He taught people to sing for themselves."

That's great politics and great up-with-people stuff, but it's bad music. Most people shouldn't sing.

Posted by too many steves | July 23, 2007 2:37 PM

Link for above:

http://www.japanfocus.org/products/details/2420

Posted by El Cid | July 23, 2007 2:40 PM

"I still call myself a communist, because communism is no more what Russia made of it than Christianity is what the churches make of it. But if by some freak of history communism had caught up with this country, I would have been one of the first people thrown in jail."

Posted by Pete Seeger | July 23, 2007 2:46 PM

Actually, when Seeger got all of Carnegie Hall to sing "We Shall Overcome," it was pretty amazing musically. It sounds very haunting and beautiful.

Posted by blah | July 23, 2007 2:46 PM

"Pete Seeger didn't sing to people. He taught people to sing for themselves."

That's great politics and great up-with-people stuff, but it's bad music. Most people shouldn't sing.

"Never be afraid to sing out. If it sounds good, it's harmony. And if it doesn't, it's jazz."

- Pete Seeger

Posted by justawriter | July 23, 2007 2:56 PM

parties with explicitly genocidal political programs

There are a lot of negative things you can justly say about communism, but calling it "explicitly genocidal" isn't one of them.

Posted by rea | July 23, 2007 3:39 PM

"Most people shouldn't sing."

What a pathetic thing to say. I suppose you think most people shouldn't dance, either. Or cook, I suppose. Or sew, or play soccer, or write, or do anything other than consume.

Posted by Bloix | July 23, 2007 3:43 PM

Re: Ben Kiernan on the bombing of Cambodia. Yup, read that a few weeks ago. Don't dispute the research...as I read the William Shawcross book on Cambodia, Nixon and Henry K. long ago.
However on Kiernan, read the Cal Berkeley dissertation I posted the URL of, above. Another apologist for Third World Stalinism and Maoism, when it mattered. (He has repented, ran the Yale Genocide Project for a while...has Chomsky and Edward Herman? Nope.)
http://www.google.com/search?q=Ben+Kiernan+Chomsky

Posted by Michael Pugliese | July 23, 2007 4:03 PM

http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/genocide/cambear2.htm
Starvation and Revolution

At Cornell, George McTurnan Kahin, director of the Southeast Asia program from 1961 to 1970, and professor of international relations at the University since 1951, became an expert on the Vietnam conflict. One of his students was Gareth Porter, soon to become a leading "scholar" on both Cambodia and Vietnam. Kahin's foreword to Gareth Porter's and George C. Hildebrand's book, Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution (1976), praises it for "what is undoubtedly the best informed and clearest picture yet to emerge of the desperate economic problems brought about in Cambodia largely as a consequence of American intervention, and of the ways in which that country's new leadership has undertaken to meet them."[64] Porter, who was probably a classmate of Laura Summers, co-authored the most famous book of all Khmer Rouge defenses published.

The Khmer Rouge Canon's Sine Qua Non

Nowhere was the war so brutal, so devoid of concern for human life, or so shattering in its impact on a society as in Cambodia. But while the U.S. government and news media commentary have contrived to avoid the subject of the death and devastation caused by the U.S. intervention in Cambodia, they have gone to great lengths to paint a picture of a country ruled by irrational revolutionaries, without human feelings, determined to reduce their country to barbarism. In shifting the issue from U.S. crimes in Cambodia to the alleged crimes of the Cambodian revolutionary government, the United States has offered its own version of the end of the Cambodian war and the beginning of the new government.

--Porter and Hildebrand, 1976[65]

In 1976, SEAP graduate Gareth Porter, and his colleague George C. Hildebrand published a small, unread, but important book entitled Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution. It is important for two reasons: first, it was the first English-language book of the events unfolding in Cambodia (becoming the sine qua non for proponents of the standard total academic view).[66] Second, it rationalized everything the Khmer Rouge did and were doing (from the evacuation of Phnom Penh residents and hospital patients to the forcing of monks into hard labor). It became a veritable bible for defending the Khmer Rouge. Kiernan, Chomsky, Herman, and Caldwell all referred to the book favorably. In Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution, Porter and Hildebrand offer what appears to be insurmountable evidence contrary to the reports of atrocities taking place in revolutionary Cambodia, renamed Democratic Kampuchea.

Porter and Hildebrand's Sources

Using "suppressed" documents and "official" bulletins courtesy of the Government of Democratic Kampuchea, they argue that the April 17th, 1975 evacuation of Phnom Penh, was due to the U.S. war on the people of Cambodia, which resulted in the overpopulation of Phnom Penh (from 600,000 to 2-3 million between 1970 and 1975) and therefore its necessary evacuation. Furthermore, they argue that the explosion of corruption under the Lon Nol regime was the direct result of U.S. foreign aid, and that in turn, it exacerbated death, malnutrition, and disease in Phnom Penh, making it uninhabitable. Curiously, Porter and Hildebrand in their 100 plus pages book refer to the Khmer Rouge only by their more palatable coalition name of NUFK (National Front for a United Kampuchea, also known as "FUNK" in French acronyms).[67] They pepper their book with propaganda photos directly from the new regime.

In chapter 2, titled "The Politics of Starvation in Phnom Penh" Porter and Hildebrand attack the media reports of atrocities, as did Summers in Current History, because they were based on a single account written by Sydney Shandberg for the New York Times three weeks after the evacuation while cooped up in the French embassy. Porter and Hildebrand write, "The article was a weak foundation for the massive historical judgment rendered by the news media. It contained no eyewitness reports on how the evacuation was carried out in terms of food, medical treatment, transportation, or the general treatment of evacuees."[68] While it is true that Shandberg could not venture outside the embassy, from his vantage point he see more than Porter and Hildebrand could have, while in the United States. The point of not having eyewitnesses to corroborate or contradict reports of atrocities will becomes important when the Chomsky-Herman book is discussed at length in the following chapter. Continuing their critique of the mass media, Porter and Hildebrand write, "Nor was there any extensive analysis of the reasons Shandberg attributed to the revolutionary leadership for the action."[69] Here, Porter and Hildebrand refer to the circumstances of postwar Cambodia, circumstances which they insist were deplorable because of U.S. actions that prompted the evacuation. Like Chomsky-Herman, they assert the evacuation saved lives.

Porter and Hildebrand discount stories similar to New York Times journalist Sydney Shandberg's as sensational (by of their titles alone) and write "commentators and editorialists expected revolutionaries to be `unbending' and to have no regard for human life, and because they were totally unprepared to examine the possibility that radical change might be required in that particular situation."[70] Nowhere is the romance with revolutions more obvious than it is here. Porter and Hildebrand expect revolutionaries to bend and to be humanitarian because their indoctrination had taught that revolutions were good. Phnom Penh was in the jaws of starvation when the Khmer Rouge "liberated" it, so they argued, and that there was no other alternative than to evacuate everyone. By defending the Khmer Rouge, via justification of their policies, Porter and Hildebrand resort to official explanations and sources of information. Revolutions notwithstanding, there is no mention of any crime committed by the Khmer Rouge during the evacua