To those steeped in socialism I can understand the lionization of Seeger aka "Moscow's Canary" and "Khrushchev's Songbird."

1936 joined the Young Communist League
Harvard drop out in 1938 (poor grades lost his scholarship)
Dodged WWII military service. Performed under the stage name "Pete Bowers" in order to avoid compromising his father's government career.

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.
1942 joined the Communist Party
1948 started the Weavers, the house band for the American Communist Party

Writer Alec Wilkinson notes that Pete is the son of a composer and a Communist who believed that a song was only good if it was good for something (such as inspiring the masses to revolution). "The main question, then," the elder Seeger wrote in a manifesto that his son took to heart, "should be not 'is it good music?' but 'what is music good for?';

(WSJ Book Review By Michael Ybarra 04/02/2009 page W9)

The elder Seeger quit the party after the Moscow show trials engineered by Stalin in 1938. Seeger the younger stayed onboard until 1949, when he too quit, although he continued to perform at party rallies for years after. "I thought Stalin was the brave secretary Stalin," he tells Mr. Wilkinson, "and had no idea how cruel a leader he was."

But Stalin's cruelty was not exactly a secret during these years. Why did Mr. Seeger stay so long? How could he reconcile his concern for the downtrodden in his own country with his unquestioning support of a murderous regime that punished dissent not merely with blacklisting but, if you were lucky, with a stint in the gulag?
Was his departure anything more than tactical?
Did he ever really change his view of Soviet Communism?
These questions go unexplored by Mr. Wilkinson.

One of the benefits of a long life is the opportunity for mature reflection on youthful error. On the evidence of "The Protest Singer," Mr. Seeger is truly ageless.

(David Boaz - Commentary Guardian Friday 14 April 2006)

"Seeger's long habit of following the Stalinist line."
As the ex-communist scholar Ronald Radosh puts it, "Seeger was antiwar during the period of the Nazi-Soviet Pact; pro-war after the Soviet Union was the ally of the United States; and anti-war during the years of the Cold War and Vietnam".

To everything there is a season. We can only hope that soon it will be the season for holding accountable those who worked for Stalinist tyranny, as we have held accountable those who worked for National Socialist tyranny.

(Ron Radosh - former student and friend of Seeger - New York Sun, June 12, 2007)

For years, Mr. Seeger used to sing a song with a Yiddish group called "Hey Zhankoye," which helped spread the fiction that Stalin's USSR freed the Russian Jews by establishing Jewish collective farms in the Crimea. Singing such a song at the same time as Stalin was planning the obliteration of Soviet Jewry was disgraceful. It is now decades later. Why doesn't Mr. Seeger talk about this and offer an apology?

According to the film, (Power of Song) one of Mr. Seeger's greatest accomplishments was his tour with third-party Presidential candidate Henry A. Wallace in 1948....Nowhere do we learn that Wallace's campaign was in fact a Communist Party-run affair, and that had he been elected, Wallace announced he was going to appoint men to his Cabinet who we now know were bona fide Soviet agents.

Mr. Brown's film lionizes him, and lets viewers believe that his old causes were on target, that his opponents were in essence war criminals.

A sympathetic but accurate film would praise Mr. Seeger as an individual and an artist, and would honor him for his contribution to American music and for his dedication to causes he believed in. But it would dare to criticize him for his anachronistic and false political views.

"If I Had a Hammer (And Sickle), excerpts a column from David Boaz on "the old, but still interesting, topic of why the modern press gives commies better press than they give Nazis, hooked to the New Yorker's recent Pete Seeger profile."

(Michael Moynihan - Reason - April 29, 2009 quoting Steve Chapman, "America Honors its Troubadour of Totalitarianism":)

"For his entire career, Seeger's art has been a weapon in the service of a cause that has produced more suffering, destroyed more lives and piled up more corpses than any other form of government in human history.

"Somehow, a few nice tunes don't seem to make up for all that."

Happy birthday, comrade!

BOAZ - guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2006/apr/14/post33?commentpage=1
MOYNIHAN - reason.com/blog/show/133183.html
RODOSH - .nysun.com/arts/time-for-pete-seeger-to-repent/56379/
YBARRA - online.wsj.com/article/SB124122975068879643.html#mod=WSJ_topics_obama
(Mr. Ybarra is the author of "Washington Gone Crazy: Senator Pat McCarran and the Great American Communist Hunt." )

Sincerely,
Gargoyle

A man of "integrity?" Who states in a 2007 documentry that he resigned from the Weavers when the three other band members agreed to perform a jingle for a cigarette commercial but cannot see the log in his own eye.