Pete Seeger, American Communist

[Ken Burch]

12. Pete stopped being an "actual Stalinist" in 1950, when he quit the Party.

The real reasons the Right wouldn't ever let up on him were that:

A) Pete wouldn't "name names" when called before HUAC. "Naming names" was never a practical necessity...the FBI already KNEW who all the Party members were...it was just done to expose those people to public shaming and the destruction of their lives. Pete just didn't want to destroy people he knew and cared about, especially since the overwhelming majority of American communists never did anything that was personally evil.

B) Pete refused to appease them Right by becoming a professional anti-leftists, or by becoming(as those bastards also seemed to feel entitled to demand) an unquestioning supporter of the capitalist system and our blood-soaked foreign policy tradition.

He should have denounced Stalin(they ALL should have)and realized that, but even if he and all of the other former CP'ers had done that, it wouldn't have changed anything in the Soviet Union or "Eastern Europe". Stalin was completely impervious to outside pressure.