Link of the Day (2): Excellent piece from AlJazeera about the political importance of Pete Seeger

Pete Seeger concert photo b&w (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Seeger at 86 on the cover of Sing Out! (Summer 2005), a magazine he helped found in 1950 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Link of the Day (2): Excellent piece from AlJazeera about  the political importance of Pete Seeger,recently dead at the age of 94, after seven decades of musical activism. Hisepitaph could be: he never bowed his head to anyone.

(“It’s not that Seeger did a lot of good despite his longtime ties to the Communist Party; he did a lot of good because he was a Communist.

“This point is not to apologize for the moral and social catastrophe that was state socialism in the 20th century, but rather to draw a distinction between the role of Communists when in power and when in opposition. A young worker in the Bronx passing out copies of the Daily Worker in 1938 shouldn’t be conflated with the nomenklatura that oversaw labor camps an ocean away.

“As counterintuitive as it may sound, time after time American Communists such as Seeger were on the right side of history — and through their leadership, they encouraged others to join them there.”)