yes, and it's important to remember what access to The Truth was like in a world waaaaay before the Internet, way before 24-hour rolling news, before every home had a TV set, before plane travel became commonplace and affordable...

All you had to base your ideas on were reports of other people who'd been to those countries. If you were a Communist in the US, you could be forgiven for thinking that what you were hearing about Stalinist Russia was propaganda/lies spread by the American Right, because, well, that's the sort of thing the American Right would have been saying anyway!

I'm not sure you could even call the faith Western lefties had in Soviet Russia "naivety" (up to a historical point, of course). People had to decide what they thought about something by weighing up available facts, but there weren't nearly so many facts available.

Pete Seeger changed his opinion about things when the facts changed. That makes him an intelligent person.

(Oh, and that young Bob Dylan was very much a "disciple" of Woody Guthrie strikes me as indisputable, unless you want to split hairs on definitions on words. If you don't think the word "disciple" is appropriate, pick a different one: "acolyte", "groupie", "devotee", "champion" or just "very, very, very, very big fan". You don't have to like Bob Dylan's music, or his personae, or consider him folk, to recognize this fact.)

(Oh, and to state Dylan was "cashing in on folk" is a bit like saying the early Beatles were "cashing in on R&B" or that the Rolling Stones were "cashing in on blues". Anyone who charges money for their music can be said to be "cashing in" on something or other...)