Pete Seeger’s Latest Shame—He Proves Again that he Remains a Useful Idiot
With the recent announcement by Pete Seeger that he joined and endorsed the BDS movement to delegitimize Israel (Boycott, Disinvest and Sanctions), Seeger has finally jeopardized any claim he might have had to be known as a supporter of reconciliation, tolerance, justice and peace.
Not only has Seeger joined the BDS movement, he has withdrawn his support from his previous participation in the Arava Institute’s “Virtual Rally for a Better Middle East,” which took place last November, and which I criticized here. That movement was flawed in that it was predicated on moral equivalence between Israel and its enemies, although it sought to work for “cross-border cooperation” and peace between Palestinians and Israelis.
Seeger has disavowed his earlier connection with the Arava Institute because he learned of its cooperation with the Jewish National Fund (JNF), an Israeli mainstream organization in existence during the days of the Yishuv, before Israel was even created. An important JNF mission was to plant trees in Palestine (one of the reasons Israel looks so different from much of the barren Middle East). When Seeger learned that the JNF was funding the planting of trees in the Israeli desert he considered it enough of a reason to withdraw his support from the Arava Institute. He now says: “I misunderstood the leaders of the Arava Institute because I didn’t realize to what degree the Jewish National Fund was supporting Arava. Now that I know more, I support the BDS movement as much as I can.”
As one of Seeger’s supporters explained, “Arava’s online event obfuscated basic facts about Israel’s occupation and systematic seizure of land and water from Palestinians. Arava’s partner and funder, the JNF, is notorious for planting forests to hide Palestinian villages demolished by Israel in order to seize their land. Arava was revealed as a sterling practitioner of Israeli government efforts to ‘Rebrand Israel’ through greenwashing and the arts.”
As writer Hannah Sternberg points out, a press release from the ICAHD on Seeger’s turn-around shows that he believes “that JNF has been involved in ‘dispossessing’ Palestinians since 1901…meaning he considers the perfectly legal and voluntary sale of land to Zionist Jews by the resident peoples of the area in the early twentieth century to be just as much an ‘occupation’ as the military occupation of hostile areas following the Six-Day War, the latter of which is what BDS purports to object to, to avoid criticism that they’re merely hateful of Jews.” She correctly adds: “What Seeger’s making clear here is that he objects to Israel’s very right to exist, aside from the complex international legal ambiguities surrounding the occupied territories, Gaza and the West Bank. According to Seeger’s logic, any Jew in Israel is an occupier, whether he’s building a new home on the West Bank or whether he lives on a communal farm that was purchased inarguably lawfully from a Palestinian a hundred years ago.”
Seeger explains that he did not reach this decision, according to ICAHD coordinator Jeff Halper, before carefully considering the issue. Halper notes that “Pete did extensive research on this. He read historical and current material and spoke to neighbors, friends, and three rabbis before making his decision to support the boycott movement against Israel.” In other words, Seeger spoke to his leftist friends and neighbors, and all of three rabbis! We all know there are plenty of self-proclaimed rabbis, some of them real, who despise Israel. I somehow doubt Seeger searched around to find some who had a different view than those he spoke to. One call to the American Jewish Committee could have provided him with more than a few.
I have written about Seeger so many times that I cannot provide the links to send you to all of them. If you are interested, you’ll have to do a Google or Bing search on your own. The last major controversy that got into the press, and about which I had both letter and phone call exchanges with Seeger, concerned his many years of Stalinism, which I argued he had never publicly come to terms with. I wrote a few articles on this for The New York Sun, when its print edition still was being published. They can be found here, and here.
In the latter piece, I revealed that Seeger had written a new song, “The Big Joe Blues,” the lyrics of which condemned Joseph Stalin, whose regime he had for decades been a major supporter of. I wrote that “I was deeply moved that Mr. Seeger, now in his late 80s, had decided to acknowledge what had been his major blind spot — opposing social injustice in America while supporting the most tyrannical of regimes abroad.” Well, I thought — I disagree with him about many things, but at least he eventually admitted the truth about Stalinism. I wrote that “I honor and admire him for doing so now.”
“When Seeger learned that the JNF was funding the planting of trees in the Israeli desert he considered it enough of a reason to withdraw his support from the Arava Institute.”
Planting trees in the Israeli desert? Not exactly, according to the links you provided, I read the following (from two different articles):
“Seeger’s decision appears to be at least partly linked by the actions of the Jewish National Fund in the unrecognized village of Al Araqib. The JNF insists on planting a new forest on the village site, despite the fact the project causes state authorities to evacuate and destroy the village time after time – 14 times and counting.
“The problem of the unrecognized Bedouin villages in the Israeli south received some media attention recently following the repeated destruction by the state of a village named Al-Arakiv.
“There are more than 40 unrecognized Palestinian-Bedouin villages in Israel, many of them predating the state itself. Their residents are Israeli citizens, but they don’t receive basic services such as water and electricity, and occasionally, they are evicted from their homes and lands.
“A government inquiry committee headed by Supreme Court Justice Eliezer Goldberg concluded a few years ago that the state should grant most of the villages official status, but its report, though officially adopted by the government, was never implemented.”
So Seeger is all pissed about a particular possible injustice? Yeah, right—that’s why he wants to destroy the state of Israel entirely. To hell with him.
In bringing up the issue of unrecognized Bedouin villages, you are ignoring parallel problem: the massive illegal building by Bedouins in the Negev, who have demonstrated their complete disinterest in “legalizing” their homes by flouting the laws of the State. Sure, “world opinion” is up in arms about four shacks built illegally by Jews in an outpost in Samaria, and Israel uses overwhelming force to destroy them (and gets no “credit” in world opinion). Just imagine what would happen if Israel took action against any of the *thousands* of illegal structures built over larger and larger stretches of the Negev desert. The reaction would be fuel to the already huge fire of anti-Israel sentiment. That’s why Israel — to its detriment — doesn’t dare.
‘Just imagine what would happen if Israel took action against any of the *thousands* of illegal structures….’
No need to imagine. Seems like it’s happened many times, which is why, I believe, the inquiry commission was created.
Anyone who actually knows what’s happening on the ground in Israel knows dozens of illegal structures are built for every one that gets demolished. It’s funny to refer to this case as “greenwashing”. Following the logic necessary for that term to be appropriate, any structure built by Arab or Bedouin must be automatically sacrosanct, regardless of whatever legal arrangements are in place. An analogy would be as follows: although already provided with land, subsidies and special legal recognition by the US government, a group of native Americans decide to build structures inside a national park or other public land – let’s say it’s a wetland area that the government is attempting to restore. When the government destroys the structures and proceeds with wetland (or forest, take your pick) restoration, they are resoundingly accused of “greenwashing”.
Think about it a moment, and it adds up to the following: structures built by Arabs and Bedouin are legitimate, whereas those built by Jews are not, laws made by Israel (read: Jews) are not, and therefore the Israeli (read: Jewish) state is not.
Yep, it is anti-Semitism. Go ahead, accuse me of tarring any critic of Israel as anti-Semitic. When one thinks a bit, it becomes obvious that most “critics” of Israel in fact are. It’s the only way to render their perverse logic intelligible.
Don’t use the term Palestinian-Bedouin because if there is one thing the Bedouin hate, it is being lumped together with the Palestinians.
Just have a close look at the situation in Jordan between the “true” Jordanians, the Bedouin, and the Palestinian Jordanians.
Actually, if you want it from the Israeli angle pay attention to relations between, for example, the Bedouin of Shibli in Northern Israel and the surrounding Arab villages.
By the way the Bedouin are nomadic and change their place of abode too often while ignoring any planning regulations and refusing to pay rates and taxes.
I don’t get people who boycott Israel. Yes there are some crappy things happening for sure but this is a slow motion civil war and in no way one sided just because Israel has the upper hand and that is really what people object to. People seem to think that indicates that Israel can just unilaterally end the struggle, create a Palestinian State and every one can have a party. The fact is that one reason there is no Palestinian State is that there is no indication that there will not simply be more agitation whose thirst will in no way be slaked by a nation.
The fact seems to be that the Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank haven’t so much stopped terrorist attacks as they have been prevented by Israel from carrying them out. I don’t know why Israel’s detractors think some kind of award should be handed to the Palestinian Arabs for being walled away from potential victims.
Although charges of apartheid have been leveled at Israel it doesn’t seem as if it is true any more than the trenches in World War I were apartheid. I’m not sure how much sun people expect to shine in such a disastrous conflict with so much hatred on both sides or where it could shine.
Maybe Pete should volunteer to revive and write some songs for the “Pioneers of Tomorrow”, the Sesame Street that teaches hate instead of the alphabet. If this goes on, a commemorative postage stamp of the state of Palestine will also be the actual size of the state of Palestine. Can anyone come up with an example in history of a people less willing to negotiate who had less to negotiate with than the Palestinian Arabs?
Like Norman Finkelstein and Noam Chomsky, the misguided musicians who lend a hand in this give hope but don’t have to live with the consequences of the fact that, like an animal in the grip of an anaconda, the more the Palestinian Arabs struggle, the less room they have to breathe. This is not philosophy or morality, it is not ethics or justice, it is simple reality one must wake up to because life is not fair nor is war and this is especially true in the case of the former Mandate of Palestine because of the monumental lack of pragmatism within the culture of the Palestinian Arabs. The huge irony is that the greatest failure in the history of this conflict for the Palestinian Arabs has been violence but it is the only real thing they consistently resort to.
Ah, yes, that great Soviet patriot, Pete Seeger…
Is old Pete still with us? Old Pete and friends were boycotted years ago. You know the beginings of Folk music. Even before the sixties. REDREDRED.
Investgated by Committee, House of Unamerican Activities, think that was the name. Check out his bio if it has not been scrubbed. So old Pete is still able to cause a ripple? 91 years old. Time or him and ilk to go away.
Pete Seeger is a perfect example of why leftists are the true reactionaries. They live completely in the past, unable to see the world in front of them and with no real interest in the future. Also, they are unalterably square.
To realize how reactionary Leftists are, all one need do is consider one of Seeger’s Big Hits; the Malvina Reynolds song “Little Boxes.” This sneering song derides the homes—”little boxes made of ticky-tacky”—in a suburban development of the early postwar years. I have read somewhere that Reynolds wrote it with a specific suburb of San Francisco in mind, but no longer recall which one.
Well, what’s so terrible about people owning their own homes? Wouldn’t you think that Lefties would celebrate this, given that home ownership by ordinary middle-class people was something that was very difficult in the pre-WWII years? Back before WWII, it was not uncommon for people to live in rooming houses or boarding houses; merely being able to afford an apartment with furniture of one’s own, rather than a furnished room, was an advance in status. The big boom in home ownership did not happen until after the Second World War.
But the Leftists did not welcome this advance of personal status; they were all gung-ho for “worker housing,” Soviet-style. So the “little boxes,” the houses that people were able to buy on GI Bill loans, had to be derided. Ironically, the song talks—again, sneeringly—about how “the people in the houses all go to the university…and they all get put in boxes and they all come out the same.” Today, those university grads do, for the most part, all come out the same—as thoroughly-indoctrinated Leftists. Yet the song survives, and Leftists still feel smug about sneering at the “conformity” of Americans.
I always heard it was Daly City. In a post-Berlin Wall world his Idiocy is primarily Useful for domestic consumption ?
I believe it was those Henry Doelger developments on the Daly City hillside facing SF and Berkeley. Aesthetically they were rather uniform, but each one was home sweet home to a single family, and they were affordable by economic (not politicalspeak) standards.
Leftists and unelected central-planning fonctionaires think with their guts, and wish to enforce their quasi-aesthetic diktats on the public, no matter what it costs. Malvina’s sneers for Daly City’s appearance cloaked her collectivist beliefs in the false flag of American individualism, pretending that houses that look alike produce groupthink citizens.
Would she have approved a subdivision of architectural masterpieces? Absolutely not. Too much exceptionalism. She would be right in line with today’s urban planners, who decree upon us the big boxes of densified apartments, each one a matrix of ‘little boxes all the same’, of the sort mandated by Seattle for urban land use. Yeah, there’s a red one and a blue one and a green one and a yellow one… and they all lack garages, and they all vote just the same.
Malvina and the planners are winning today, having hijacked the American dream of creative land use away from the owners of property, and economic freedom away from hopeful entrepreneurs by masses of tangled regulations. Time to reverse the trend.
Malvina Reynolds – another absolutely typical folkie. Born to leftist Jewish immigrant parents in SF, married a labor organizer, went to UC Berkeley and earned a doctorate degree in English in 1938. Mother Maybelle Carter she wasn’t.
And she was definitely not Elizabeth Cotten, the black woman who was Pete Seeger’s dad’s maid and who wrote the song “Freight Train” – which as I recall was a big hit for Pete.
How the hell does the label “folk” even apply to a creature like this? The “folk” were the ones living in those “ticky-tacky” houses she sang about. Funny how the “folk” become targets of scorn when they don’t passively follow the party line…
“why leftists are the true reactionaries”
http://www.abcdunlimited.com/ideas/reactionary.html
Old Man Seeger is just another frustrated liberal hate thumper in the land of many hate thumpers.
Israel is a scapegoat for the evil of the world. And there is plenty of evil people, Leaders, and countries to go around. I think there is a lot of envy towards Israel. Seriously what would the Jew haters have to talk about/do if Israel did not exist? I think the would go insane with all the idle time they would have on their hands… Like giving up an addiction…
So, Palestine is not considered ‘evil’ ? It is alleged, some person(s) unknown in Palestine is responsible for killing an Israeli family in a cowardly way – ‘as they slept’ in the dark so the murderers couldn’t be seen? The world thinks this is a good thing? Deserved perhaps? Why?
The Jews of Israel have been persecuted throughout history, and they, as far as I know have not succumbed to it. They grew stronger as Israeli’s in spite of it. Not many [as a 'people'] can say the same.
Look at the Nation Israel Built. The democracy they developed. I believe the Jews as a people have suffered enough, they suffered terribly under the hand of Hitler and his ilk. That is not to say many others did not suffer under Hitler, they did. The Jews got the bulk of it.
I don’t hate Israel like others do. I think for once they have come to the point where they can truly defend themselves, and they will. So, if the bully’s of the world come a knocking…Israel will be as always, ready…
Shalom.
Israeli internal politiics have become “Americanized” over the past 30-plus years in a way only Great Britain comes close to, in that the major parties there are so closely associated with their Republican and Democratic Party counterparts in the United States. That explains in large part why people like Seeger feel free to hate Israel the way they do.
The connection between Likud and the Republican Party innthe minds of liberals, and the Israeli voters’ trending since the late 70s away from Labor and to Likud have made Israel and it’s people in the eyes of the left no better than what they see as the racist hicks in the South who reliably vote Republican year after year.
Sub out hatred for fundamentalist Christianity when it comes to “Jesusland” (as the left dubbed flyover country after Bush’s re-election) for the anti-Seimitism that Seeger’s former hero, Uncle Joe, practiced, and it’s easy for the left to demonize the Israelis and at the same time turn violent Palestinian protestors into the equivalent of Dr. King on the Birmingham bus (which might be true if Dr. King had blown up the Birmingham bus). Just as the belief in their own righeouness in something like the Wisconsin collective bargaining battle makes the left believe any actions against Republicans in that state is justified, so their hatred for those in power in Israel and the people who support them legitimizes any actions taken against Israel. If they refuse to vote the way the left wants, than in the minds of the left, they forfeit their right to exist.
Send this to Pete -
http://vimeo.com/16779150
I repeat: Anyone ever notice these commies live to be very ancient and never stop? Is it the terror of meeting their maker which keeps them on life support? Thirty more years of George Soros, Fidel, Hugo, et al?????????????????
I have notice that these lefty types seem to live forever also. Maybe they have made a deal with the devil?
Well, those are the ones who survived the purges. In its developmental stage, leftism is extremely lethal in large doses.
Serious question: Why would anyone even remotely care what some worn-out retread “folk singer” from the 1960′s thinks or does?
Pete Seeger has, in fact, NOT joined the BDS movement, and has reasserted his support for the Arava Institute and his participation in its virtual rally. Sadly, the BDS movement – and not Pete himself – put out a press release that purposefully misrepresented Pete’s position. Pete endorses only an artistic boycott of the settlements, as advocated for by Jewish Voice for Peace, but does not endorse the principles and sanctions advocated by the BDS movement.
I have not found any statement or press release indicating this anywhere, and I searched widely. The newspaper articles contain direct quotes from PEte that I cited. I find problematic his other stance that you approve, and I blogged earlier and put in a link to the Virtual rally original statements. You should read that as well.
Pete’s been around a long time; he should be well aware of how movements use people, and distort what they say. If indeed you are right, he should make a clear principled statement of his position to the press. And since you are in touch with him, you should send him my blog, as well as the video one of the people commenting posted. Ron
According to Wikipedia, Seeger’s support of the BDS movement is “wavering.” So, yes, send him the video. But we supporters of Israel should also acquaint ourselves with stories like the following, from the Jewish Daily Forward:
http://www.forward.com/articles/136418/
Oh is that all? Thanks for clarifying the old commie’s good intentions. (sarc)
Seeger’s leftist policies were obvious fifty years ago, so there should be no surprise that his anti-American actions persist into his tenth decade. I could never listen to him or any song of his covered by anyone else. The very freedoms his enthusiasts cheered in 1960 are the very freedoms he would have removed were his sentiments to reach fruition. Who cares what this congenital malcontent supports? In fifty years no one will know his name.
Seeger’s definition of peace is, no surprise, the same as the Communist Party’s – absence of opposition to the Communist agenda. Any dummy knows there will always be a naturally occurring struggle while the proletariat/Palestinian/Union members throw off their shackles, c’mon man get with the program!
It’s been over 50 years, but we had a song about him when I was in school. This is what I can remember of it:
This is the song written by my late friend, Roy Berkeley, of whom I blogged about earlier. Amazing you heard it in school. It was from a parody of “The People’s Songbook,” called “The Boss’s Songbook,” put together by Roy and Dave Van Ronk, who was a Trotskyist. Ron
According to Seeger’s logic, any Jew in Israel is an occupier, whether he’s building a new home on the West Bank or whether he lives on a communal farm that was purchased inarguably lawfully from a Palestinian a hundred years ago.”
So how did Seeger come to be in America?
He is not a descendant of the “native” population is he?
Hypocrite.
I should have argued that there were no Palestinians 100 years ago but the Ottoman Empire ruled by Turkey which is not Arab.
The “Palestinians”, per se, only came into being in the 1960s, whereas before Israel became independent Palestinian referred to those Jews in the mandated territory after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire.
Palestine was a term of the Roman empire, and the Brits used it for centuries after that.
Your telling us Palestine was comprised of Turks because it was part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire?
He is telling you that Palestinians were Jews, and as Jews built up the Palestinian mandate under Britain, Arabs moved in from other Arab countries to work for them. The so called Palestinians of today are largely descendents of immigrants that came after Israeli independence. You may know, or recall that Samaria was part of TransJordan from 1948 to 1967.
Yassar Arafat, for example, was born in Egypt. He was, after being caught flagrante delecto, given a choice: To be stoned to death as an homosexual, or to become a terrorist. He probably killed more Arabs with his AIDS than he killed Israelis by terrorism.
Ron – I’m sure there are those out there who will shake their heads, and say — let’s stop talking about the old codger already. But you’ve made some excellent points here… especially that Seeger’s angry rejection of any “association” with the JNF via the Arava Institute shows that he rejects the legitimacy of *any* Jewish presence in this land, even on land legally purchased well before the founding of the State.
Recent laws passed by the Knesset supporting the legality of State lands being used specifically for Jewish-only communities are a clear-headed response to what’s happening on the ground. Jews are denied the right to live in all-Arab towns — in areas that far outnumber those contentious, isolated building projects in east Jerusalem covered so fervently and frequently in the media — and Palestinians risk being assassinated by PA goons if they sell land to Jews. So, if there are de facto all-Arab towns in Israel that do not admit Jews, there is no reason in the world why the Jewish state should prevent State lands being used for communities that are Jewish by definition.
I can understand pacifism. The Amish are pacifists, they live their lives in a pacifist model. Pete Seeger, et al., are not pacifists. They do believe in force and the power of The State. The marxists are not merely reactionary, what they are is a modern, industrial version of feudalism. They believe in a ruling class that forces everyone to live a certain way.
You are absolutely right! The Marxists and Fascists of the left must impose their ideology on the rest of us. They hate liberty.
Feudalism gives the communists way to much credit. Marx looked at the US southern slave plantation, and extrapolated from that to industrial society. The Communists think of themselves living in the Big House as the fitting reward for their greater social consciousness, and deeper understanding of Marxism-Leninism. Our women should be class that our betters enjoy them, and be glad to be offered an opportunity to serve them.
I also support the BDS movement-Blind, Dumb Singers- of which Pete Seeger is eminence grise.
This odious group is a subset of Humanity Against the Elements, better know as its acronym, HATE.
Full disclosure: I hate folkies. Those white, middle-class, college-educated leftist cadres who tried, in the 40s, 50s and 60s, to gull us into believing that Communism was as down-home American as apple pie, quiltin’ bees, and “Turkey in the Straw.” They were not musical people. They were political people using music as a weapon against the class enemy. “This machine kills fascists.” Seeger may have been one of the worst of the bunch – although for general ickiness I think it’s hard to beat Peter Paul & Mary.
Still, I was surprised to see Seeger’s name in the title of a PJM article, and even more surprised at the vehemence of the article itself. His influence outside his circle of lefty/musical friends and admirers must be close to nil. Nobody under the age of 50 knows who he is. I’m sort of wondering why it’s necessary to keep re-visiting Pete Seeger and his political doings. There must be more influential and dangerous people on the BDS membership rolls. Why obsess over this washed-up old commie banjo player?
Because, as Sean Curnyn writes in his blog at http://www.cinchreview.com, “The significance of Seeger’s latest public move shouldn’t be underestimated. I imagine it counts as a visceral signal to all manner of old lefties and some younger lefties that it’s “OK” to get on board with this dangerous BS BDS campaign.”
Moreover, if he has no influence, look at the video of his 90th Birthday celebration at Madison Sq. Garden. Plenty of young people in the audience who filled the hall. And he was on Letterman and other shows. He got a standing ovation from the Letterman audience. No influence? Doesn’t look that way to me.
I must be really out of it. Honestly, I wasn’t aware that he still had that kind of following. But I guess that’s the folkie effect in operation. This avuncular useful idiot was so successful in identifying himself with wholesome, traditional Americana and his “beloved” little songs that most people don’t remember him as a propagandist for our enemies. Nostalgia for the “folk revival” and 60s youthful idealism must be a big factor. I imagine that personally he’s a very pleasant guy. And he’s not a bad musician and singer if you like that kind of thing. (Personally, I’d rather listen to the entire Alan Lomax collection than one precious little Pete Seeger song.)
Well, I guess if he didn’t keep making political statements and taking political stands, people who write political blogs wouldn’t keep shining the spotlight on him. So by all means, have at the old codger.
There’s no traitor like an overaged forgotten traitor.
I’ll *try* to make it through this post without those dreaded “ad hominem” attacks … but Radosh’s article is so pathetic and poorly researched that it may be difficult.
Do you all know the definition of a “straw dog argument”? That’s what we have here. Two pathetic, despicable self-promoters — Radosh and ICAHD’s Jeff Halper — using Pete Seeger’s name to propel their own agenda.
To explain: I edit the folk music magazine Sing Out!, and have worked with Pete for more than 30 years. When Jeff Halper’s press release began making the rounds as “news” on a number of web sites, we started getting calls from folks — people, that is, not the news aggregators or bloggers! — asking if this was true. ICAHD had mailed us their Press Release, too … but frankly it looked more than a little “Unibomberish,” and the quoted attributed to Pete made little sense to me. So I *called* Pete to ask him directly, and he *denied* that he had joined the boycott, officially or otherwise, knew nothing of the press release (though he *has* known Halper “for years”), and stated that his position was “complex and still evolving” but that he mostly supported Theo Bikel’s position against *new settlements*, but believes that a continuing open dialog is essential. Clear and straight up: NO BOYCOTT.
It took a couple days to try and run ahead of Halper’s despicable self-serving misrepresentations … but eventually, ARAVA put forward this clarifying refutation of ICAHD’s release:
http://www.jta.org/news/article/2011/03/02/2743164/pete-seeger-clarifies-bds-position
Note, too, that even other bloggers who share Radosh’s dislike for Seeger and his politics were able to easily find *that* article … thus avoiding simply arguing with the wind:
http://www.divestthis.com/2011/03/wasnt-that-time.html
Note that BOTH the ARAVA clarification — which was disseminated by H’Aretz News Service — and the subsequent blog were both weeks old before the posting of this article.
The bottom line is this: Pete is 91. He’ll turn 92 this May. While he’s still a constant and active reader and thinker, his memory is, to put it frankly, shot. Anyone and everyone who knows and works with him is very aware of this … BECAUSE PETE, HIMSELF, EXPLAINS IT AT THE START OF EVERY CONVERSATION. Jeff Halper, who posted and dispersed the Press Release, without any actual permission from Seeger is despicable. But so is Ron Radosh — Internet blogger who can’t figure out how to Google — for not doing at least a LITTLE research to back up his “ad hominem” attack on Pete for something that he never actually did.
Shame on you!!
Mark,
You very well know,since you edit Sing Out!, that I have known Pete for longer than you have. I helped him break the blacklist and got him college bookings when he needed them most, I took lessons from him, and undoubtedly you saw me in Jim Brown’s film about him as well. So don’t lecture me about how you know Pete and I’m just trying to score by making ad hominem remarks about him.
Moreover, if you go back to my original blog about Pete and the ARAVA event about which I wrote, I was critical of him for that as well. Here is what I wrote in it, and here is the link again: http://pajamasmedia.com/ronradosh/2010/10/23/pete-seegers-continuing-naivete-on-how-to-achieve-peace/. I wrote this on the blog:
“Let’s take a moment and look at this ridiculous moral equivalence. He wants an economic boycott of Israel, although he evidently is not in favor of doing anything to stop Hamas or Hezbollah aggression against Israel, including the rocket attacks a few years ago. In Seeger’s eyes, the only guilty party that is preventing peace in the Middle East is Israel. He also seems to be rather unaware that Israel pulled out of Gaza, and that it is run by Hamas, and is not occupied by Israel. Nor does he seem to know much about the Palestinian Authority and its weak position in the West Bank.
So he agrees with boycotting Israel “financially,” he says, but he is not for “boycotting dialogue.” His kind of dialogue, of course, amounts to a dialogue of the deaf, in which Israel would suffer from economic boycott by the West while the extremists of Hamas are allowed to plot their aggression without opposition and their desire to destroy Israel goes without protest.
Seeger says he does not want to “abandon the world to those who believe in violence.” But if he bothered to look at evidence, instead of uttering his useless platitudes, he would soon learn that Israel has made substantive peace offers over and over, only to be rebuffed by Palestinian leaders who never agree to recognize Israel’s very existence as a Jewish state. On this point, they have been consistent since 1947, when they opposed the UN’s decision to partition old Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state.
Why should we be surprised? Throughout the 1950’s and 1960’s, Seeger called for peace, peaceful co-existence between the United States and the Soviet Union, singing songs like “Put My Name Down, Brother, Where Do I Sign?” a ballad in favor of the Soviet Union’s phony international peace petition that favored unilateral disarmament by the West while leaving the Soviet atomic stockpile intact. He would sing and give his support to peace rallies and marches covertly sponsored by the Soviet Union and its Western front groups and dupes—-while leaving his political criticism only for the United States and its defensive actions during the Cold War.
That the Western and international Left sees Seeger as some kind of traitor speaks only to its own complete extremism. Seeger should pause and ask himself whether these are the people he sees as misguided allies, and instead of his meaningless vague calls for peace, do something really brave—sing and speak out on behalf of Israel’s right to exist freely as a Jewish state in the Middle East, without having to constantly face the threats of its destruction by the Jihadists and their western left-wing allies.”
I stand by those arguments. You might have checked them out, since the link was in this article.
The point is, that all through his career, Pete has stood with whatever leftist cause was fashionable, whether right or wrong. And for most times, everything he supported in the realm of foreign policy was wrong. At a moment when Israel’s existence is at stake, and is threatened by most of the world and Islamic fascists in its own region of the world, any artist worth his salt would stand for its right to exist and defend Israel against those who never would recognize and never will recognize its existence as a Jewish state. And those folks are the ones Pete is standing with, rather than fighting them, as does the Spanish left-wing journalist whose words I cite in my blog.
Pete never fought for peace int he 50′s. He stood instead with the Soviet propaganda campaigns of the time- singing songs like “Put My Name Down” on behalf of the so-called Stockholm Peace Petition, a call for US uniliteral disarmament and favoring the Soviet military. Like everyone else in the leftist folk community, your love for Pete, his music and his great work in spreading folk music blinds you to his essential political blindness that he has held all of his years, even when he was quite young- and had no excuse.
Joe Glazer once put Pete up in his home in Maryland, and he told me he confronted Pete and asked him: “How could you not know about Stalin and his crimes?” And Pete replied; “I didn’t know.” Well Joe Glazer did, as well as thousands of other people who had their eyes open, and still liked folk music- like Dave Van Ronk,Bob Cohen whose own comment is above on this page, and who led the Mississippi summer folksinger’s caravan during Freedom Summer and who drove Pete all through Mississippi, and my friend Danny Kalb, a great artist and anti-Communist who accompanied Pete on one of his Columbia albums, as well as on Phil Ochs’ first album.
I apologize for not finding the new press release, but the real issue is not one of dialogue, because only one side, Israel’s enemies, refuse to talk since they want Israel’s destruction. That is why Pete should condemn Hamas and the Palestinian Authority for refusing to negotiate and to accept the Jewish state as a reality, and he should condemn them for teaching their own youth in their own media both anti-Semitism along with hatred of Jews and Israel itself. Again, see the video one commentator posted, and send it to Pete.
As for Bikel, he can speak for himself. But settlements is not the issue, since Israel’s enemies consider all of Israel a settlement, and the current expansion is only in areas everyone knows is within territory that if peace would be declared, would be part of Israel.The current government has not expanded in areas outside this line, something Israel’s critics never seem to acknowledge.
As for the falsity of the charge, that is the fault of BDS and its propaganda machinery, and Jeff Halper, whomever he is. Also, Pete should make clear that he stands with Dylan and others who perform in Israel, and is against the artist boycott of performing there. This is the main thing. I’m waiting for him to do that. If he does, I will take back my current critique of him. Has he even listened to Dylan’s “Neighborhood Bully,” more to the point now than ever?
I’m waiting for your answer.
RON RADOSH
Pete Seeger was a wonderful entertainer, and had a voice well suited to harmony. He made a lot of people happy. This is what entertainers do.
But, for the life of me, I never comprehended why any educated person ever considered his, or any entertainer’s thinking. Why would anyone value his foreign policy thoughts more than a truck driver, anchorman, athlete, or real estate agent? Does standing in front of a camera, convey knowledge and wisdom? Does plucking strings deify a person? I have accepted reality, well endowed actresses with low necklines testify before Congress on deadly serious matters. I just do not understand why anyone seriously considers what comes out of their mouth. Ditto Mr. Seeger.
Palestine, and Israel, will have peace, when their people select peaceful, loving leaders. I pray for peace in their Jerusalem.
Ron’s blog on Seeger is both spot-on and tragic. It is an accurate critique of Seeger, and sad that Pete is still towing the Line. There is a scene in Josh Dunaway’s bio of Seeger, at least when first published, that has Seeger smashing his fist through a wall because he is so angry about the Palestinians plight – angry for the Palestinians, angry at Israel – and this was a number of decades ago.
One is reminded, also, that Trotsky (of Jewish origins) defended Palestinian workers back in maybe the 1920s against their “exploiting” Jewish bosses.
The thing that none of these critics that I’m aware of, ever do is even attempt to be “fair and balanced”. Never do they condemn the violence of Palestinians or the violence and hatred of their culture. For them the Palestinian is the Noble Savage. Romanticizing the poor and powerless has always been a pattern of the Communist/Socialist secular religion. Going much much further than “not blaming the victim”, they worship the victim, never asking how they got there in the first place.
The sad thing about Seeger, is that such a musically talented man, who got so many of us singing and strumming, and who spoke so passionately about peace and understanding, should have been and continue to be so blind to reality – the reality of Communism, the reality of the Middle East, and the reality of human nature.
Ironically, Tzena Tzena was a song used by the Israeli army as they trained soldiers to defend Israel. Seeger and the Weavers not only sang that and “Hey Daroma” but also “Artza Aleinu” another pioneer song. Ron is absolutely right that at the beginning Isreal with it’s kibbutzim and Labor government looked like the long cherished dream of a socialist state.
There is nobody more that Pete and his ilk hate than the capitalist – home grown or foreign. I am giving a paper with Lauren Weiner (who has written on the folk song movement in Commentary Magazine) at Hofstra U. in April called “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Stalin Last Night” about the 1935 Comintern ordered Popular Front and some of the both negative and positive things it did involving the folk music movement that became the folk revival in the 1960s. One of the stories we will tell and sing about is Huddie Ledbetter and Alan Lomax being thrown out of Lomax’s rental because the landlord didn’t want any “colored folks” in his house. Lomax was sitting around with a group of other Pop Fronters and they were laughing and saying this was all happening because Washington, DC was a “bourgeois town”. Ledbelly liked the sound of this (to him) new word and made the well-known “Bourgeois Blues” out of it. But “bourgeois” was a cuss word to the Commies – it equalled Capitalists – and America was a Capitalist country. The fact, as Lauren points out, that many “workers” were often more racist than the wealthy, is ignored in this world-view.
The hatred of Capitalism (which is also Democracy) compared with the religious love for Communism (which is also dictatorship) is a long last scourge of both stupid as well as stupid talented people. Someone was telling me that the poet Ezra Pound first admired Lenin before he fell in love with Mussolini.
As long as people long for an impossible future – paradise or call it what you want – they will be blind to the reality of humans and human society – both the positives and negatives. That Seeger is one such ignoramus might be forgivable, but that he championed a mass-murderous regime, and now champions a culture of hatred and anti-Semitism, is not.
Thanks Ron for keeping tabs on Seeger – there is always hope, tho not much, that he will see the error of his ways and recant – perhaps that would teach some of his avid followers including the Israeli-hating Jews that what they believe is not totally right (or left). We have Sean Penn who loves dictators like there was no tomorrow, and other artists who are very talented but not very bright about the world and its challenges. How do we keep them straight?
Shalom, Cantor Bob Cohen
I will give the folkies credit for one thing: they brought real folk performers into the public consciousness and made it ok for “sophisticated” people to enjoy our country’s traditional music. I do admire their efforts to collect, preserve, and popularize music made by ordinary people. The fact that they saw those efforts as a way to advance their questionable political cause doesn’t detract from the positive results.
I guess that’s the main thing that confuses me about Seeger and other folkies. Did they genuinely love the music and the “unsophisticated” people who made it? Would any of them have picked up guitars and banjos if they hadn’t associated those instruments with the working class struggle against capitalism? When I hear a Pete Seeger song, I always wonder whether he’s entertaining or indoctrinating. I’m pretty sure Robert Johnson wasn’t acting as a vanguard of the Revolution when he recorded “32-20 Blues.”
That’s the good thing about what people like Alan Lomax did. Thanks to his recordings, I can listen to pure folk music – no communist propaganda, no BS, just music. And I can draw my own conclusions about what it means politically.
Though I grew up with a lot of folkie music, and indeed very much enjoyed it (still do, somewhat), I cannot disregard the fact that the great service of seeking out and cataloguing folk music was also part of the original Communist push to take over American popular culture.
Did Lomax and Seeger go into little-known byways to seek out obscure songs, as a sort of aural version of the WPA photographs of sharecroppers and dustbowl victims? Most certainly, yes. But as they harvested these songs, they were also working as little lefty Johnny Appleseeds, sowing the seeds of their own communist beliefs among the people of the hinterlands. Returning to the worlds of recording and academia with their bountiful folk harvest, they became the vault guardians and gatekeepers of America’s folk legacy, which was the first deep taproot Communism sank into America; the first basis on which Communism could claim to be, not an alien ideological weed, but a movement truly of “the folk.”
This legacy lives on at PBS and NPR.
Good explanation, thanks. It seems like an accident of history – so many factors came together in the 20s and 30s to make it American communists, and not some other group of people, who preserved and popularized our traditional music. We’re always wondering why so many musical performers lean left. Maybe that all started with Lomax, Seeger, Peoples Music, etc. It’s now a tradition – or a taint, depending on how you look at it.
He never had any claim.
He’s just another leftist.
Arrest Seeger – sedition. Way too much freedom in this country. Way to much.
Can’t arrest him. It would be wrong – just like the s**t that happened to him in the 50s was wrong. The government has no right. However, that doesn’t mean some of his fellow citizens can’t point out the fact that his cornpone persona hides the mind of a dedicated United Front cadre.
It’s almost comical, but not surprising that the leftists like Seeger who were celebrating the kibbutzim back in the early days as some sort of socialist utopia in the wilderness are now taking the side of the fascist regimes whose goal is to make the middle east judnfrei!
Re Pete Seeger:
He claims that he left the Communist Party USA around 1959, but the Party never LEFT him. In fact, Seeger expanded his support of communist parties, fronts, and causes by raising funds for the Maois-oriented/Red Chinese subsidized weekly, ‘The Guardian’; supported the Trotskyite “Socialist Workers Party” and its various fronts (PRDF, WONAAC, etc); the Trotskyite-turned Stalinists “Workers World Party” and their fronts, PAM, APC, ANSWER and International Action Center (IAC), as well as miscellaneous other “socialist” groups.
Why should he suddenly get a conscience and support Israel against its jihadist and marxist neighbors? At least he is consistent in his being a communist. You don’t need a Party card to be a red. As the old saying goes, “It’s all in your mind”.
Communism is an addictive form of mental illness and Seeger has been one of the sickess of the sick, esp. in the entertainment industry for over 60 years. Good music – yes; sane – No!
Another load of bilge from the late-flowering McCarthyist Ron Radosh. All but useless idiots are likely to ignore it, as usual.
“He Proves Again that he Remains a Useful Idiot”
Well, that’s half right.
He’s an idiot.
Useful? Not so much.
And, Seeger never supported peace per se.
He was a big ol’ warmonger whenever his communist friends were fighting.
Jewish Liberalism is de facto detatchment from Torah. It is a self-inflicted suicide, an apo-dictic of the heart. In the end it will lead to exposure and shame at the judgement seat of G-d. Too bad for the Hudson Valley Bard and the nations who walk with him. Their destination is the Abyss.
A note: Subsequent to the JTA “clarification” of Seeger’s position (March 3rd), Adalah-NY updated their original 2/28 press release as follows:
( http://adalahny.org/press-releases-other/folk-music-legend-pete-seeger-endorses-boycott-of-israel/ )
Everything nice and clarified, then?
putting pressure on jewish rejectionists who reject a new arab state in the west bank, gaza and the arab neighborhoods is not an anti-zionist act, it is a pro-zionist one. ultimately it is the only way a jewish state can survive — if the the palestinians and their supporters stop throwing rocks and setting off bombs and start peacefully chanting “one man one vote,” that’s when zionism is finished. no jewish state can afford to rule indefinately over milliions of extremely FERTILE, disenfranchised arabs in “judea” and “samaria.”
Seeger survived and triumphed over attacks by HUAC and the Klan. He’ll prevail over the wingnuts as well.