Only in America would a singer who insults a U.S. President (Lyndon Johnson) as “a big fool” in song be awarded the National Medal of the Arts by a U.S. President (Bill Clinton), hailed as a “Living Legend” by the U.S. Library of Congress, and be invited to play at a U.S. Presidential inauguration (Barack Obama’s.)
Oh I realize this speaks well for our 1st amendment rights. But it also brings to mind a snicker by former Brazilian President Janio Quadros circa 1961: “Those Americans are much like women. They have a masochistic streak. The more you slap them around, the more you get out of them.”
That singer, by the way, is the recently-deceased leftish troubadour Pete Seeger. In their tribute the Washington Post hailed him as “America’s best-loved commie.” Author and expert on commie fellow-travelers Ron Radosh writes that (at his prodding in 2007) Seeger finally repented for his infamous Stalin-philia, even composing a song to that effect titled “Big Joe Blues.” The song’s Big Joe was “Uncle” Joe Stalin and the song made it clear that Joe Stalin –rather than Joe McCarthy—had been the real threat to freedom in the 50’s. Alas, Seeger never actually released the song for airplay and only sang it privately to friends. So Seeger’s reputation remained pristine among most commie fellow-travelers.
Unsurprisingly, the Castro regime’s captive (literally!) media contributed heavily to the Seeger tributes and eulogies this week. After all, in 1999 Pete Seeger had eagerly visited Cuba to proudly accept the Castro regime's highest cultural honor, the Medal of the Order Felix Varela, in honor of Seeger's “humanistic and artistic work in defense of the environment and against racism.”
In brief: famous peacenik Pete Seeger proudly visited the Stalinist dictator who brought the world closest to nuclear war of any in history to eagerly accept an award “against racism” from the Stalinist/Apartheid regime that jailed and tortured the most black political prisoners in modern history!
An article in Castro’s eunuch media by the regime’s eunuch cultural ambassador ( singer Silvio Rodriguez who often met with Pete Seeger) relates how three years ago during a meeting in New York Seeger lamented to Rodriguez that: “conditions in Latin America had not improved because of the U.S. (Imperialism, presumably.) But that this would change in the next 15 years.”
So here he was at age 91: still blaming the U.S. and (presumably) capitalism for the woes of the Third World as brought about by its own thieves, frauds and scoundrels.
Shortly after his meeting with Rodriguez, Pete Seeger joined ranks with several U.S. celebrities (Danny Glover, Martin Sheen, Oliver Stone, Glover, Susan Sarandon, among many others) to boost one of the Castro regime’s most vital campaigns by signing a letter to “Free The Cuban Five.” The letter starts:
“We are dismayed that the Cuban 5, who have committed no crime against the United States nor posed any threat to this country’s national security, have now been imprisoned for 12 years. The Five monitored the activities of violent groups of Cuban exiles in Miami, activities that had already resulted in the deaths of thousands of Cuban nationals. They sought simply to protect their country from further acts of terrorism.”
Here’s what Castro’s KGB-trained terrorists (“The Cuban Five”)—convicted by U.S. Federal jury and upheld all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court—are actually guilty of:
On September 14, 1998, the FBI uncovered a Castro spy ring in Miami and arrested ten of them. Four others managed to scoot back to Cuba. These became known as the “Wasp Network,” or “The Cuban Five” in Castroite parlance. According to the FBI’s affidavit, the 26 charges against the convicted Castro-spies championed by Seeger:
•Gathering intelligence against the Boca Chica Air Naval Station in Key West, the McDill Air Force Base in Tampa and the headquarters of the U.S. Southern Command in Homestead, Fla.
•Compiling the names, home addresses and medical files of the U.S. Southern Command’s top officers, along with those of hundreds of officers stationed at Boca Chica.
•Infiltrating the headquarters of the U.S. Southern Command.
•Sending letter bombs to Cuban-Americans.
•Spying on McDill Air Force Base, the U.S. armed forces’ worldwide headquarters for fighting “low-intensity” conflicts.
•Locating entry points into Florida for smuggling explosives.
Pete Seeger’s poster-boys also infiltrated the Cuban-exile group Brothers to the Rescue, who flew unarmed planes to rescue Cuban rafters in the Florida straits, also known as “the cemetery without crosses.” The estimates of the number of Cubans dying horribly in the “cemetery without crosses” run from 50-85,000. Brothers to The Rescue risked their lives almost daily, flying over the straits, alerting and guiding the Coast Guard to any balseros, and saving thousands of these desperate people from joining that terrible tally. (Prior to Castroism, by the way, Cuba was swamped with more immigrants per-capita than the U.S., including during the Ellis Island years.) So you can imagine how the Cuban exodus embarrasses the Castroites, including those in the U.S.
By February of 1996, Brothers to The Rescue had flown 1,800 of these humanitarian missions and helped rescue 4,200 men, women and children. That month Danny Glover’s and Pete Seeger’s cause célèbre’ passed to Castro the flight plan for one of the Brothers’ humanitarian flights over the Cemetery Without Crosses.
With this info in hand, Castro’s Top Guns, jumped into their MIGs, took off and valiantly blasted apart (in international air space) the lumbering and utterly defenseless Cessnas. Four members of the humanitarian flights were thus murdered in cold blood by communists. Three of these murdered men were U.S. citizens, the other a legal U.S. resident.
Pete Seeger, whatever else you might say about him, was certainly consistent.