The name of the concert was “We are One: The Obama Inaugural Celebration At The Lincoln Memorial." Well, one of the performers last night was Pete Seeger, a self admitted Communist.
No, I’m not exaggerating.
Pete Seeger joined the Young Communist League at age 17, way back in 1936. Six years later, he joined the Communist Party.
He was a staunch defender of Uncle Joe Stalin. He described himself as an “artist in uniform.”
In 1945, Seeger became president of People’s Songs, Inc. Within a few years, the California Senate Fact-finding Committee said:
"People’s Songs is a vital Communist front … one which has spawned a horde of lesser fronts in the fields of music, stage entertainment, choral singing, folk dancing, recording, radio transcriptions and similar fields. It especially is important to Communist proselytizing and propaganda work because of its emphasis on appeal to youth, and because of its organization and technique to provide entertainment for organizations and groups as a smooth opening wedge for Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist propaganda."
Since then he as done everything a good leftist should do:
Seeger was an opponent of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. He similarly opposed the U.S. military campaigns and weapons buildup during the Reagan years of the Cold War. He supported the Nuclear Freeze Movement of the 1980s — a Soviet-sponsored initiative that would have frozen Soviet nuclear and military superiority in place and would have rendered Reagan unable to close that gap to any appreciable degree.
Seeger has used his status as a folk icon to lend support to a number of leftwing causes and initiatives. In 1999, along with Ed Asner and Ossie Davis, Seeger served as an Advisory Board Member of Mumia 911, a group of artists and performers that opposed the execution of convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu Jamal. The organization depicted Mumia’s case as an admixture of multiple elements: "racism, the death penalty, police brutality, incarceration of Black and Latino youth, persecution of revolutionaries, and government suppression of dissent." "We are building a culture of resistance to stop the killing of Mumia Abu-Jamal," said Mumia 911, "and to transform the reactionary political climate in which those clamoring for his execution have thrived."
In 2000 Seeger was a signatory to a political advertisement in the New York Times calling for an immediate end to America’s economic sanctions against Iraq. The ad charged that the U.S. was responsible for "killing … over one million Iraqis, mostly children under five." Fellow signers included Rosie O’Donnell, Thomas Gumbleton, Daniel Berrigan, Philip Berrigan, Ed Asner, Mike Farrell, William Sloane Coffin, Rev. James Lawson, Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, Joan Baez, Richard Dreyfuss, Liam Neeson, Martin Sheen, Ramsey Clark, Howard Zinn, and Noam Chomsky.
In 2002 Seeger was a signatory to the "Statement of Conscience" crafted by Not In Our Name, a project of C. Clark Kissinger‘s Revolutionary Communist Party. This document condemned not only the Bush administration’s "stark new measures of repression," but also its "unjust, immoral, illegitimate, [and] openly imperial policy towards the world."
In the months prior to the 2003 war in Iraq, Seeger appeared as a guest speaker and performer at numerous peace rallies across the United States. He supported the activities of such high-profile anti-war leaders as Medea Benjamin of Global Exchange and Leslie Cagan of United For Peace and Justice.
In 2003 Seeger endorsed a statement condemning the Smithsonian Institution’s plan to exhibit the Enola Gay, the B-29 Superfortress used in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. He and his fellow 250+ signers — among whom were Noam Chomsky, Martin Sheen, Norman Lear, and Oliver Stone – were opposed to the aircraft being regarded in a "celebratory" manner.
Seeger is a National Advisory Board member of the Disarm Education Fund, which seeks "to ban all private ownership of handguns." Other board members include: Robert Schwartz, Aris Anagnos, Ed Asner, Mario Obledo, Michael Ratner, Dave Dellinger, Martin Sheen, Spike Lee, Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, Ramsey Clark, and Howard Zinn.
Between 1993 and 2006, Seeger made $3,700 in campaign contributions to political candidates, $800 of which went to Independents and $2,900 to Democrats, most notably Maurice Hinchey and Bernie Sanders.
In 1995, Seeger said, "I still call myself a communist because communism is no more what Russia made of it than Christianity is what the churches make of it."
In 2000, he said, "I’m still a communist, in the sense that I don’t believe the world will survive with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer."
In 2008, he’s singing for Barack Obama.
