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Last week we ended with a small item on Pete Seeger thinking we were done with the subject. But then John Fund, knowing Pickerhead’s Russian history bent, sent along his National Review article on The Totalitarian Troubadour. Particularly telling in Fund’s piece is how Seeger and his ilk did 180 degree turns on the instant of the German June 22, 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union.

… The late John P. Roche, who served as president of the liberal Americans for Democratic Action in the 1960s and was a speechwriter for Hubert Humphrey, once told me that the success American Communists had in the 1930s by wrapping their ideology in the trappings of American traditions had to be remembered. “If authoritarianism of the right or left ever comes to America it will come surrounded by patriotism and show business,” he told me. “It will be made fashionable by talented people like Pete Seeger.”

Roche vividly recalled how American Stalinists suddenly flipped on the issue of Nazi Germany after the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 brought the two former adversaries together. “Stalinists acclaimed this treaty as the high point of 20th century diplomacy,” Roche wrote in 1979. He vividly recalled “the laudatory speech” that the future congresswoman Bella Abzug gave in support of the pact at HunterCollege in 1940.

The next year, Pete Seeger, a member of the Young Communist League, lent his support for the effort to stop America from going to war to fight the Nazis. The Communist-party line at the time was that the war between Britain and Germany was “phony” and a mere pretext for big American corporations to get Hitler to attack Soviet Russia. The album Seeger and his fellow Almanac Singers, an early folk-music group, released was called “Songs for John Doe.” Its songs opposed the military draft and other policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Franklin D, listen to me,
You ain’t a-gonna send me ’cross the sea.
You may say it’s for defense
That kinda talk ain’t got no sense.

Just one month after the album was released, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. The album was quickly withdrawn from circulation, and Seeger and his buddies immediately did a 180-degree turn and came up with new songs:

Now, Mr. President
You’re commander-in-chief of our armed forces
The ships and the planes and the tanks and the horses
I guess you know best just where I can fight . . . 
So what I want is you to give me a gun
So we can hurry up and get the job done!

Seeger may have formally left the Communist party in 1949, but for decades afterward he would still identify himself as “communist with a small c.”

We can honor Seeger the singer and mourn his passing. But at the same time we should respect the power that popular culture has over people and warn against its misuse. The late Andrew Breitbart lived largely to remind us that culture is upstream of politics — our culture is a stream of influence flowing into our politics.

Pete Seeger aimed to change both our culture and our politics. Howard Husock wrote at NRO this week that he “was America’s most successful Communist.” …

David Goldman, in the person of Spengler, was not kind to Seeger at all. At the end of the pull quote, there is a reference to “folksingers” in the Soviet Union. We will have more on that. 

I first heard Pete Seeger perform when I was five or six, when I was a red-diaper baby and he was blacklisted and drunk. What I recall most about the encounter was that the tip of his needle-nose glowed bright red. He was performing for a children’s group of some sort at a time when his Communist background kept him out of public venues. His records — not just the Weavers albums, but the early Asch 78′s of the Almanac Singers — were daily fare in my home, along with Woody Guthrie’s children’s songs. My parents knew Guthrie casually; my father once organized a concert for him at BrooklynCollege, and my mother was Arlo Guthrie’s nursery-school teacher.

I was not just a Pete Seeger fan, but a to-the-hammer-born, born-and-bred cradle fan of Pete Seeger. With those credentials, permit me to take note of his passing with the observation that he was a fraud, a phony, a poseur, an imposter. The notion of folk music he espoused was a put-on from beginning to end. …

… His capacity to apologize for the brutalities of Communist regimes — including their repression of their own “folksingers” — remained undiminished with age, as David Graham reported in the Atlantic. …

The Wiki on those folksingers in Ukraine calls them Kobzars or Kobzarski

… Blind itinerant musicians, known as kobzars and lirnyks, organized themselves into guilds along the same lines as professional craftsmen. These professional itinerant musicians would gather at regular meeting spots on particular dates to celebrate religious feasts, administer examinations for the induction of novices and masters, and collect money for placement of votive candles under icons of patron saints and to also discuss the business of the guild.

During the Soviet period the Kobzar guilds ceased to exist. …

A blog from Art Ukraine quotes the composer Dimitri Shostakovich on how those wandering musicians “ceased to exist.”  Keep in mind this deed was by the government of Joseph Stalin that was defended time and again by Pete Seeger. The circumstances are similar to the 1940 murder of Polish officers, policemen and intellectuals in KatynForest. A few hundred folksingers gets lost in the millions murdered by the Communists. Here’s Shostakovich;

“I am not a historian. I could tell many tragic tales and cite many examples, but I won’t do that. I will tell about one incident, only one. It’s a horrible story and every time I think of it I grow frightened and I don’t want to remember it. Since time immemorial, folk singers have wondered along the roads of Ukraine. They’re called “lirniki” and “banduristy” there. They were almost blind men—-why that is so is another question that I won’t go into, but briefly, it’s traditional. The point is, they were always blind and defenseless people, but no one ever touched or hurt them. Hurting a blind man—what could be lower?

“And then in the mid thirties the First All-Ukrainian Congress of Lirniki and Banduristy was announced, and all the folk singers had to gather and discuss what to do in the future. ‘Life is better, life is merrier,’ Stalin has said. The blind men believed it. They came to the congress from all over Ukraine, from tiny, forgotten villages. There were several hundred of them at the congress, they say. It was a living museum, the country’s living history. All its songs, all its music and poetry. And they were almost all shot, almost all of those pathetic blind men killed.

“Why was it done? Why the sadism — killing the blind? Just like that, so that they wouldn’t get underfoot. Mighty deeds were being done there, complete collectivization was under way, they had destroyed kulaks as a class, and here were these blind men, walking around singing songs of dubious content. The songs weren’t passed by the censors. And what kind of censorship can you have with blind men? You can’t hand a blind man a corrected and approved text and you can’t write him an order either. You have to tell everything to a blind man. That takes too long. And you can’t file away a piece of paper, and there’s no time anyway. Collectivization. Mechanization. It was easier to shoot them. And so they did.”

 

Pickerhead pleads guilty to knowing too much minutia about Russian and the Soviet Union. However we should all pay attention to the irony that the system of government that promised to do so much for common citizens, in fact did; by killing more of them than any other state in the 20th Century.

R. J. Rummel author of Death by Government provides these estimates of the most brutal governments of the last century;

61,911,000 Murdered: Soviet Union
35,236,000 Murdered: Communist Chinese
20,946,000 Murdered: German National Socialists
10,214,000 Murdered: Nationalist Chinese

Pete Seeger has a lot to atone for.

Back to the state of the union show. Andrew Malcolm has a post and with it a chart comparing the length of speeches for presidents since Reagan. What president has been kindest to us? Ronald Reagan of course.

… Obama has clearly run out of ideas. He’s recycling ones from his unremarkable address last year and even some distinct phrasings from his predecessor’s State of the Unions. He’s also taken to “small ball,” last week meeting to cut voters’ waiting times and last night offering a way for workers to save for retirement.

Ironic because Obama used to criticize Bill Clinton for seizing on small ideas to give the impression of meaningful activity. But great news for Obama’s opponents.

This is the historic fellow who arrived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue promising a radical transformation of American society. And now, thanks in large part to his own gaffes, scandals and political ineptitude, he’s reduced to dickering over voting lines and college loan interest rates.

And threatening to issue executive orders because the Congress he’s above wooing like a real political leader is, in a bipartisan way, acting like an equal branch of government.

Which it is. …

 

… State of the Union addresses do not rescue doomed presidencies. But Obama had an opportunity to sketch a new, more positive path for the 1,087 days left on his White House lease.

Instead, Jay Leno referred accurately in his late-night monologue to the Obama administration as “lame Duck Dynasty.”

Sean Davis at The Federalist has 11 facts about the minimum wage you didn’t hear during the state of the union. Number 11 shows the corruption involved.

11) A Change In The Minimum Wage Often Triggers Union Wage Hikes And Benefit Renegotiations

The famous investment banker J.P. Morgan said something along the lines of, “Every man has two reasons for everything he does:  a good reason and the real reason.” Giving minimum wage workers a little extra cash is the White House’s “good” reason for supporting a hike in the minimum wage. But what’s the real reason? Richard Berman, a union analyst, studied numerous union contracts and published his findings on their terms in the Wall Street Journal in 2013:

The labor contracts that we examined used a variety of methods to trigger the [wage] increases. The two most popular formulas were setting baseline union wages as a percentage above the state or federal minimum wage or mandating a flat wage premium above the minimum wage.

Other union contracts stipulate that, following a minimum-wage increase, the union and the employer reopen wage talks.

[...]

Minimum-wage hikes are beneficial to unions in other ways. The increases restrict the ability of businesses to hire low-skill workers who might gladly work for lower wages in order to gain experience. Union members thus face less competition from workers who might threaten union jobs.

And there you have it. The “real” reason behind the minimum wage push is to pay back the labor unions who helped re-elect the president in the form of higher wages, increased negotiating leverage, and less competition for jobs. The president’s decision to unilaterally hike the minimum wage for federal contract workers to $10.10 an hour doesn’t really make sense until you view it through that lens (is there a critical mass of federal contractors who make only the minimum wage?).

Unfortunately, when it comes to politics, the good reason is rarely, if ever, the real reason.

NY Times interviews Salman Khan of the Khan Academy.

In 2008, Salman Khan, then a young hedge-fund analyst with a master’s in computer science from M.I.T., started the Khan Academy, offering free online courses mainly in the STEM subjects — science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Today the free electronic schoolhouse reaches more than 10 million users around the world, with more than 5,000 courses, and the approach has been widely admired and copied. I spoke with Mr. Khan, 37, for more than two hours, in person and by telephone. What follows is a condensed and edited version of our conversations.

Q. How did the Kahn Academy begin?

A. In 2004, my 12-year-old cousin Nadia visited with my wife and me in Boston. She’s from New Orleans, where I grew up.

It turned out Nadia was having trouble in math. She was getting tracked into a slower math class. I don’t think she or her parents realized the repercussions if she’d stayed on the slower track. I said, “I want to work with you, if you are willing.” When Nadia went home, we began tutoring by telephone. …

… The Internet videos started two years later when a friend asked, “How are you scaling your lessons?” I said, “I’m not.” He said, “Why don’t you make some videos of the tutorials and post them on YouTube?” I said, “That’s a horrible idea. YouTube is for cats playing piano.” …