MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
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The Beauty of the Blacklist: In Memory of Pete Seeger
By A Guy Called LULU on Wed, 01/29/2014 - 3:03pm |Pete Seeger’s death has prompted several reminiscences about his 1955 appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). And for good reason. Two good reasons, in fact.
URL:
http://coreyrobin.com/2014/01/29/the-beauty-of-the-blacklist-in-memory-of-pete-seeger/
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I started to just add this to the already going thread on Seeger but it is actually about much more than Seeger. If nothing else, the poem make it worth a read.
by A Guy Called LULU on Wed, 01/29/2014 - 3:03pm
Yes, the poem is worth a read - but it's also disconcerting to think of 20 million or so dead from Mao's Great Leap Forward in the 50's, or the 20 million or so murdered in Stalin's great purges and Beria's reign of terror - basic facts that should be overtly stated in then analyzing how to preserve peace & freedoms & constitutional rights while assholes run amok. Of course it's much simpler to discuss them apart - as if promoting Stalin's party in Ukraine had nothing to do with expulsions to Siberia, or that Communist focus on Hollywood wasn't severely aware of the propaganda value of limiting US pushback against expanding Iron Curtain consolidation for example (the taming of Hungary 1956 for example).
How many dead or slave-labored Ukrainians or Poles are worth the right of 1 Hollywood writer to write or Pete Seeger to sing? The Chinese felt emboldened to occupy Tibet and Xinjiang in the 50's - Deng Xiao Peng's early legacy before he discovered market reforms. How much did the US communist left's actions help this development?
Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being dwells on the need to take responsibility for one's actions - even if like Oedipus one might not only be not trying for those results, but trying one's damndest to avoid it, completely unaware of how they tied together - doesn't matter, you broke it, you bought it. In Kundera's case it was the Prague Spring photographers, trying to document the new freedoms who ended up being witnesses for the state in cracking down on the revolution. Ooops!
by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 01/29/2014 - 7:28pm
The poem was completely new to me. I wonder how it might have struck me if I wasn't introduced to it as Robin did. I did just a little googling to discussions and questions about its meaning and every one I ran across talked about it as being positive about the place of the common man in all those situations, but now reading it in the context that I did, I think that it did refer as much to the other side of the coin. Most everyone going along with the program and more than once the program had been to tear down Babylon. No king did that by them self either. Hey man, it's a job, somebody has to do it. So many records to keep.
Seeger lived through the years that made a well known saying seem to make sense. One variation of it was, "A young man who is not a communist has no heart but an old man who is still a communist has no brain". I don't know the history well enough to know how soon it should have been obvious that the idealistic idea of communism wasn't going to work out in Russia and that it had turned completely ugly and whether Seeger was slow to see it.
So I can see cuttin' Seeger a little slack while he's still warm, he was entertaining and inspirational on the right side of things for a long time, IMO. You are certainly right about countering the bs about some famous figures when they die. Kissinger, for instance, does not deserve one second of silence. Obviously, I can't wait.
That Youtube BBC dramatized documentary movie about the selling of "the final solution" linked to by Robin is quite good. It credibility is not even weakened by its name, "Conspiracy".
by A Guy Called LULU on Wed, 01/29/2014 - 8:57pm
I can see cutting Seeger a lot of slack - but I kinda want to know why.
After Koestler's Darkness at Noon in 1938, what bit of "we didn't know" was honestly conceived?
by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 01/29/2014 - 10:13pm
The "how many dead are worth the right of one Hollywood writer to write" query makes it sound as if the blacklist was saving lives. I hope that isn't your meaning
by Aaron Carine on Thu, 01/30/2014 - 8:36pm
Not quite - it's that we fight for the right of free speech, but sometimes seem unaware how little we fight for the right of people not to be killed or abused - especially elsewhere, such as those elsewhere growing our bananas or putting together our iPhones or those budding democrats in 1950's overthrown by our CIA or thos just suffering like East Europe from the limits of our willingness to care in chopping up spheres of interest.
The snippy comment about Prague not caring about our labor problems either still bothers me, only partly for personal reasons. Prague abandoned by Chamberlain & FDR in the Munich agreement giving away the Sudetenland, Prague abandoned by Truman when he ordered Patton to hold up at Plzen to let the Russians be seen as liberators, Prague abandoned by the west when Stalin staged a coup to overthrow Czechoslovakian democracy, Prague ignored by LBJ as the Warsaw Pact armies rolled in to crush the Prague Spring.
Chinese workers in sweat shops probably don't think about GM & Chrysler workers either, nor do fruit pickers in the Caribbean. We talk about our free speech - but not theirs, as they endure brutal work to support our standard of living and luxury - not right - to free speech.
We on the left have a problem, because spent so much time denouncing aggressive anti-communist actions from McCarthy to the Vietnam/Cambodian Wars to Reagan's Star Wars, but so little time either denouncing or finding better cures for Communist murder of 10's of millions in the Soviet Union, China, Ho's atrocities in Vietnam, Cambodia, et al., and imprisonment of East Europe, Turkic Asia & Tibet for 40+ years.
My comment on Seeger was to remind of that - while standing up for free speech at the McCarthy trials was important, Seeger's involvement in promoting Stalin and explaining away the occupation of Poland may be as important - at least worth considering. Unfortunately, our freedoms are backed by the pain and suffering of others around the globe, but we for the most part only see the local papers, the inconveniences we suffer.
by Anonymous PP (not verified) on Fri, 01/31/2014 - 4:29am
"Budding democrats in the 1950's" referred to Mossadegh in Iran - ironically now our pariah state - but certainly applies to others as well.
by Anonymous PP (not verified) on Fri, 01/31/2014 - 4:32am
The New Left and much of the old Left opposed the Soviet Union. In general, criticizing the United States doesn't require us to give equal time to another offender, and there is often a greater obligation to criticize the evils of "our side" than the evils we have nothing to do with. Not always, though.
by Aaron Carine on Fri, 01/31/2014 - 3:01pm
PP, since my snippy comment still bothers you, even though I thought I explained what I meant, let me try again: I did not mean they didn't care about us, or we didn't care about them. I was answering a question about why Seeger wasn't over there singing protest songs with them. What I meant, and obviously didn't convey well--and probably should have left alone--was that our protest songs wouldn't have meant much to them. They wouldn't have been singing our protest songs. They had their own problems.
Hope that puts an end to your stewing.
by Ramona on Fri, 01/31/2014 - 5:40pm
Just to clarify,
1) yes, they cared about our protest songs - figures like Havel were huge fans of counter-culture figures like Zappa and Lou Reed, as was the earlier generation from the Prague Spring, where Ginsberg snuck in to Prague to join in the protests and the beat generation was idolized
2) Seeger was a promoter for Stalin in the west, and carried some responsibility for that role he adopted for more than a decade. To say he "stood behind workers every time" is pretty ironic when Eastern European workers for 2 generations were essentially low-paid labor for Uncle Joe & Russia, sending their excess production Moscow's way - which is one of the ways the Soviet Union propped its system up for so long - those calls to the workers meant more time in horrendous conditions in the mines, collective farms, huge spewing factories that destroyed the mountains & nearby streams. That Koestler gave the wakeup call to the Beria years in 1938 gave less excuse to Seeger for his romanticism.
You might enjoy Skvorecky's "The Engineer of Human Souls" (only marginally about Stalin), Kundera's The Unberable Lightness of Being (not the movie), or Viewegh's
Báječná léta pod psa (The Blissful Years of Lousy Living)
which works as both book & movie by Petr Nikolaev. (note: none of these are depressing - the last 1 quite humorous)
Ironically, a number of the Czech heroes who fought the Nazis as part of the underground or in foreign armies were either executed or placed in prison camps by the Communists as too strong & dangerous to the state - Milada Horakova being one who even Einstein, Churchill & Eleanor Roosevelt tried to save - instead her execution was slow strangulation for 15 minutes.
by PeraclesPlease on Fri, 01/31/2014 - 7:16pm
This whole thread has been interesting. Thank you for sharing this link, I had never heard of her before. How terrible and sad her fate. How is it you can find these things, is it a study of your's?
by Resistance on Fri, 01/31/2014 - 7:38pm
My backyard ;-)
by PeraclesPlease on Sat, 02/01/2014 - 2:46am
From what you say here, I think you might enjoy this documentary if you haven't seen it:
http://www.thirteen.org/beatles/about/
I know did. Especially as I have always had an interest in the Velvet Revolution stuff, and got to know someone who was a member of an important artist/intellectual dissident group in Leningrad in the 70's, but I had no idea about any of the earlier Beatles subculture stuff (except vague things about the Soviet's powers-that-be trying to stem the tide against blue jeans, rock n'roll, and long hair and the like.)
Edit to add: they have the full video available here:
http://www.thirteen.org/beatles/video/video-watch-how-the-beatles-rocked...
This, from the first link is really the gist of it:
And there is ample evidence to support that opinion in the documentary, some of it actually quite touching.
by artappraiser on Fri, 01/31/2014 - 10:10pm
That was fun.
Just last night I bumped into some Beatles songs on YouTube and lost an hour or so listening and remembering the early mid-Sixties and thought how lucky The Beatles were in their timing, something someone in the documentary also noted.
Must be a sign that it is finally time to replace my old vinyl albums with MP3s(?). I think this one will be first:
In My Life
by EmmaZahn on Sat, 02/01/2014 - 12:15am
My cassette with "In My Life" is too worn out to make an MP3 with. Back in the olden days, another life, I bought a used MGB without being aware it didn't have a radio, only a tape deck. I owned like 3 cassettes at the time, and had not much in the budget for more, partly because I had just bought the MGB. One of the tapes was a Beatles greatest hits mix from the beginning to Abbey Road. It got played thousands and thousands of times. It still works, but you can imagine...
by artappraiser on Sat, 02/01/2014 - 8:24pm
Yep, good stuff - much as they tried they couldn't keep out the Beatles or even the Monkees, and couldn't shut down the thousands of imitation bands & look. And the kids didn't trust Radio Free Europe - they understood propaganda's propaganda from either side. But The Animals? Procol Harum? Zappa? Golden. Of course getting a bootleg cassette - which didn't even become a mass format until 1968 - much less a real album was much harder and more dangerous.
Even today, much of the music in the East is twisted with the nostalgic very aged 60's band feel.
by PeraclesPlease on Sat, 02/01/2014 - 2:52am
I just find the whole phenomenon so intriguing. That the nostalgia for what happened is so strong that it still affects their music scene today, even with young people, just makes it more interesting.
Some random thoughts:
When the problem is people drowning in agitprop or an ideology, passionate counter-agitprop (including "protest lyrics") may not ever be a good response.
Freshness of style is revolutionary and inspirational in itself, opening minds to new worlds. More than one person in the documentary opined that the phenomenon happened because the music was apolitical. Maybe only people who already feel "free" respond well to protest lyrics and other ideological art along the same lines?
An especially interesting point made in the film was about "coolness" and timing. That in '61 and '62, the Soviet Union was "cool" and that many youth were therefore inspired believers. And had Beatlemania happened at that time, instead of a few years later, when the USSR had become "not cool," Beatles music would not have infected Soviet youth in the same manner. Basically that the powers that be that rejected the Khruschev modus operandi made a really big mistake. Throw in thoughts of Pete Seeger in at this point, i.e., would it have helped if the powers-that-be promoted his style of music? Or not?
If it's an essence of conservatism to desire resurrection of, or reference to, old styles of art, what does it mean that they are now so nostalgic about The Beatles and that they still affect lots of their music?
by artappraiser on Sat, 02/01/2014 - 12:33pm
I prefer to remember Pete Seeger for "We Shall Overcome" and "this Land is Your Land."
There was a discussion of how soon the criticism of a recently deceased person should come when Nelson Mandela died. Seeger supported a murderer but also defied the House Unamerican Activities Committee.
Mandela appeared to use the Communists as a matter of convenience. Bayard Rustin left the Communist Party and joined the ranks of the Civil Rights movement
Eric Snowden fled to a country that has harsh homophobic laws, represses journalists and imprisons activists like Pussy Riot. Excuses are made for why Snowden had to do what he did. Perhaps Seeger felt that the failure of the US to fully address issues of poverty and civil rights along with its policy of overthrowing foreign governments led Seeger to make the choice for Russian support just as Snowden made his choice.
by rmrd0000 on Sat, 02/01/2014 - 1:05pm