If I Had a Sickle

The recently demised Pete Seeger was the person for whom the term "Useful Idiot" was originally coined.

Kathy Shaidle writes in Taki's Magazine:

After tormenting the rest of us for nigh on a century, last week that unrepentant communist and multimillionaire folk “singer” Pete Seeger was shipped off to the Devil’s gulag.

I awoke to the welcome news via a friend’s email that had the subject line “Finally.” (This friend and I really need to relaunch our old website “Boomer Deathwatch” one of these days.)

Naturally, most mainstream media tributes to Seeger left out his refusal to (kind of) denounce Stalin until 2007 (!) and his nasty (and lucrative) little song-stealing habit.

About that Uncle Joe business: A few years back, a firm but gentle scolding in the New York Sun by Seeger’s former banjo student turned anticommunist “neocon” Ron Radosh prompted a letter from his old teacher.

“I think you’re right,” Seeger conceded weakly. “I should have asked to see the gulags when I was in [the] USSR,” he said, oblivious to how much that sentence sounds like the setup to a grim Russian joke of Soviet-era vintage.

Read the rest HERE