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Read The Letter That Turned Folk Icon Pete Seeger Into An FBI Target
Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him… The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are.
The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.
– H.L. Mencken
At 23-years old, Pete Seeger was an Army Private anxiously awaiting the opportunity to be deployed to fight fascism in the midst of World War II, when he became outraged by injustice in his own backyard. As such, he wrote the following letter to the California chapter of the American Legion:
Dear Sirs –
I felt shocked, outraged, and disgusted to read that the California American Legion voted to 1) deport all Japanese after the war, citizen or not, 2) Bar all Japanese descendants from citizenship!!
We, who may have to give our lives in this great struggle—we’re fighting precisely to free the world of such Hitlerism, such narrow jingoism.
If you deport Japanese, why not Germans, Italians, Rumanians, Hungarians, and Bulgarians?
If you bar from citizenship descendants of Japanese, why not descendants of English? After all, we once fought with them too.
America is great and strong as she is because we have so far been a haven to all oppressed.
I felt sick at heart to read of this matter.
Yours truly,
Pvt. Peter Seeger
I am writing also to the Los Angeles Times.
For this thoughtful expression of his First Amendment rights, Pete Seeger ended up on an FBI watch-list; a place he would remain for the next thirty years. Following a Freedom of Information Act request, we now have access to his shocking 1,800 page file (well most of it, with the exception of 90 pages which are apparently still too embarrassing for public consumption).
Mother Jones reports:
From the 1940s through the early 1970s, the US government spied on singer-songwriter Pete Seeger because of his political views and associations. According to documents in Seeger’s extensive FBI file—which runs to nearly 1,800 pages (with 90 pages withheld) and was obtained by Mother Jones under the Freedom of Information Act—the bureau’s initial interest in Seeger was triggered in 1943 after Seeger, as an Army private, wrote a letter protesting a proposal to deport all Japanese American citizens and residents when World War II ended.
Seeger, a champion of folk music and progressive causes—and the writer, performer, or promoter of now-classic songs, including as “If I Had a Hammer,” “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?,” Turn! Turn! Turn!,” “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine,” “Goodnight, Irene,” and “This Land Is Your Land”—was a member of the Communist Party for several years in the 1940s, as he subsequently acknowledged. (He later said he should have left earlier.) His FBI file shows that Seeger, who died in early 2014, was for decades hounded by the FBI, which kept trying to tie him to the Communist Party, and the first investigation in the file illustrates the absurd excesses of the paranoid security establishment of that era.
“Absurd excesses.” Kind of reminds me of another era.
In July 1942, Seeger was drafted into the Army. (“I was almost glad when I heard from my draft board,” he later wrote in a diary.) He was assigned to be trained as an aviation mechanic at Keesler Field in Mississippi. While in the Army, he kept up with the news, and in the fall of 1942, Seeger, who was then 23 years old, wrote a letter of protest to the California chapter of the American Legion.
How did the American Legion respond? It forwarded Seeger’s note to the FBI in San Francisco. And somehow this matter was brought to the attention of the Military Intelligence Service of the War Department. Within weeks, military intelligence was investigating Seeger—and soon updating the FBI on its effort. The official “reason for investigation,” as numerous military reports forwarded to the FBI noted, was that “Subject wrote letter protesting and criticizing the California American Legion’s resolution advocating deportation of all Japanese, citizens or not, after the war, and barring all Japanese descendants from citizenship.”
Seeger had become a target merely because he had objected to mass deportations. The secret investigation coincided with the completion of Seeger’s training as an aviation mechanic. He expected to be deployed to active duty. But while he was under investigation, those orders never came. He watched the rest of his training class be sent to airfields, but he stayed put. At first, he wasn’t sure why. He was frustrated.
The report concluded that Seeger was “an idealist whose devotion to radical ideologies is such as to make his loyalty to the United States under all circumstances questionable.” Seeger, this memo claimed, was “potentially subversive.” The document was sent to J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI.
Another military intelligence report concluded that Seeger’s “Communistic sypmpathies.…and his numerous Communist and otherwise undesirable friends” rendered him “unfit for a position of trust or reliability.” A third report said Seeger is “intensely loyal at this time. He is eager to join the battle actively against Fascism, and is applying himself to improve his military and technical knowledge to be of greatest service.” But it added that if the Communist Party line shifted against the war, Seeger could be susceptible to “potential subversion.” This report also focused on his love for Toshi Ohta: “While this relationship appears on a high plane, this Officer believes it to be unorthodox and one which might lead to divided loyalty in the event this country’s treatment of the Japanese were not in accord with the views of himself or the woman he expects to marry.” It went on to point out that “as an entertainer, his songs have been colored subtly toward idealistic classlessness.” And this memo concluded, “Despite [Seeger’s] intelligence and desire to apply himself to the destruction of the enemy, this officer believes that enemy to be Fascism and not necessarily any enemy of the United States.” That is, Seeger was more loyal to an abstraction than his country. The recommendation: that he remain under surveillance as a “potentially subversive” person.
After the war, Seeger remained an FBI target. It was a time of communist hunting. Confidential informants had fingered Seeger as a party member or sympathizer, and throughout the 1950s the FBI generated hundreds of reports on Seeger. The bureau closely tracked his musical performances and his appearances at political events. It monitored his associations with groups and persons suspected of being linked to or controlled by the Communist Party. FBI agents called his booking agency and pretended to be people who wanted to arrange a Seeger performance in order to collect information on his travels within the United States and overseas. The burgeoning folk music world overlapped with the progressive movement (which the bureau saw as riddled with and dominated by commies) and Seeger was at the nexus.
In 1955, Seeger was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Asked if he was a communist, Seeger defiantly replied, “I am not going to answer any questions as to my associations, my philosophical or religious beliefs or my political beliefs or how I voted in any election or any of these private affairs. I think these are very improper questions for any American to be asked.” He did not plead the Fifth Amendment. He took a stand, telling the committee, “I would be very glad to tell you my life, if you want to hear of it.” He added, “If you want to question me about any songs…I will be glad to tell what songs I have ever sung, because singing is my business.” Seeger told the committee, “I have sung for Americans of every political persuasion…I have sung in hobo jungles, and I have sung for the Rockefellers.”
The congressmen running the commie-hunting committee were not pleased. In 1957, Seeger was cited for contempt of Congress for not answering the questions about his political associations. Four years later, after much legal wrangling, he was found guilty after a three-day trial. Seeger was sentenced to a year in prison. He remained free on bail, and a year later, the conviction was overturned when a federal appeals court determined the original indictment had been defective. After that, the Justice Department dropped the case.
So the legal system set him free, yet the intelligence establishment did the following.
Seeger’s FBI files indicate the FBI actively monitored the contempt case against Seeger. Its agents stayed in contact with the prosecutors handling the case, as the bureau kept gathering information on Seeger’s connections to progressive organizations—civil liberties and civil rights outfits, peace groups, pro-labor entities, and the like—that it deemed subversive. It closely watched his use of his passport.
After the contempt case concluded, the FBI remained on the Seeger beat. When the folk singer traveled abroad, according to a 1963 FBI note from Hoover to the State Department, the bureau notified the CIA and asked for any information it might obtain on Seeger overseas. At one point, when Seeger played a series of concerts in Hawaii in 1963, the FBI collected information on the shows, noting that an audience member from an “avowedly anti-Communist organization” had reported to the bureau that Seeger had sung a song that was “low keyed propaganda to the effect that America is a land of conformity” and also played a song from Japan about nuclear bombs.
FBI surveillance of Seeger continued into the early 1970s. A 1971 FBI report listing evidence of his “CP Sympathy” noted that Seeger had entertained at a benefit concert for three soldiers who had refused to serve in Vietnam because they believed the war there was illegal, immoral, and unjust. Also, it pointed out that he had raised money at a Los Angeles concert for a group called Southern Californians to Abolish the House Committee for Un-American Activities. A 1972 FBI memo reported that Seeger “has manifested a revolutionary ideology.” The message: He still needed watching.
Of course, none of this should be the least bit surprising to anyone who has followed the FBI throughout its history, including modern day witch-hunts, such as the targeting of late internet prodigy Aaron Swartz.
Importantly, the FBI isn’t always on the wrong side of history by accident, it is a reflection of the fact that the organization is little more than an enforcement arm of the status quo, as opposed to a protector of the people.
Here are just a few examples I’ve covered in the past:
The New York Post Reports – FBI is Covering Up Saudi Links to 9/11 Attack
FBI Moves to Broaden Hacking Authority – Google Says it Poses “Monumental Constitutional Concern”
The Full Letter Written by the FBI to Martin Luther King Has Been Revealed
»
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more of a rodent
It's really stupid fucks like you who will be the first in line.
hopefully right after your worthless ass
i for one enjoy your trolling.... keep pissing off the hopple heads
Thank you J. Edgar Hoover. If there is a hell I hope you are eternally being ass-raped by a constantly running flame-thrower the size of a 100mm cannon. How come that fucking puke is never drug out into the light for the walking, talking shit-heel that he was. He is a permanent human stain on our national history.
I think Hoover would enjoy ass-raping by a flame thrower so you need a better punishment.
For J Edgar justice would be hot naked women in hell constantly offering him sex...
No country maintained such a high level of civil liberties during a major conflict as the US did during WWII .... it's a cold, hard fact .... you young leftist punks .... have no clue what a totalitarian system is like .... and your naivete is dangerous .... start defending liberty .... and stop attacking it .... before you lose it for all of us ?
Monetas, what you've just wrote is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever seen. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having read it.
I can't recall anyone on ZH attacking liberty. Naivete yes, perhaps a bit clueless about totalitarianism in comparing USA to a totalitarian State. However, the plan is put in motion to either turn the USA into a totalitarian State, destroy it or blow up any nation that interferes with the London financiers or the DC MIC.
"only proles and animals are free"
whatta pooftie
If you don't realize that it was lost a long time ago, what are you doing here?
All war and wars are a con you moron. All sides are backed by banksters and industrialists including WW1 and WW2 plus all the rest. Wake up stupid.
freddie,
i like you and need to thank you for turning me to lamecherry
but all wars are not cons... some are very, very necessary....
granted the wars of our lifetime may not be on that list, but there is always a need a to fight and defend.... without that, truth is dead from the start
All wars are bankers wars
https://youtu.be/9k__fOI0Mzw?list=PLoGFeZiqmbWRzSQ4JJdmuWNhwn3ot9qD9
Mark Krieger's heros are ruined jews, pornographers, lowly political and entertainment types. The Talmud is pornography.
Jews had best decide soon whether they want slavery or freedom, and stop lyng, using the West for their feeble, deluded concept of supremacist, militarist Zionism, beholden to the City of London; weak slaves of debt.
Seeger was a clueless hillbilly fan boy of Joe Stalin aka mass murderer. The Bolsheviks were tools of the international banksters. Communism was a scam for the elites to loot Russia and mass murder 25 million Russian Christians.
Woody Guthrie was the real deal. So real that Seeger and Bob Dylan totally ripped off Guthrie.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaI5IRuS2aE
Our brother, Woody Guthrie. Happy Christmas, my fellow Americans. This land for you and me.
as was Will Rogers
Jane Fonda is one of this idiot's "heros"? Serioudly?
Her dad was a great actor and had great screen presence.
Going back to Dave McGowan's stuff about Laurel Canyon, the Seee Eye Aye's sheep dipped hippie movement and Hollywood.
Fonda, like many of the parents of California pop stars or actors, was military intel or See Eye Aye or other MIC shill. The Fonda were also a founding family of the USA came here circa 1650 AD.
Dave McGowan put together so many things like Laurel Canyon, mind control programs, Abe Lincoln's murder, faux moon landings and more that he figured out too many things. Sadly, dave recently died of cancer. My guess is he figured out stuff that people did not want figured out. The whole Fonda clan are shit bag elites. They put Jane on Ted Turner because they were afraid of Ted's CNN when it first came out. By the time Ted sold out it became See Eye Aye NN - very liberal but very pro war - any war. .
http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/
http://www.whale.to/b/inside_the_lc.html
Mr. Peter Fonda. Of course, we all know that Fonda is the son of good ol’ Hank Fonda, lovable Hollywood liberal and all-around nice guy. And certainly even a contrarian such as myself would not be so bold as to suggest that Henry Fonda might have some skeletons in his closet … right? Just for the hell of it though, there are a few chapters of the Hank Fonda saga that we should probably review here.
We can begin, I suppose, by noting that Hank served as a decorated US Naval Intelligence officer during World War II, thus sparing Peter the stigma of being the only member of the Laurel Canyon in-crowd to have not been spawned by a member of the military/intelligence community. Not too many years after the war, Hank’s wife, Francis Ford Seymour, was found with her throat slashed open with a straight razor. Peter was just ten years old at the time of his mother’s, uhmm, suicide on April 14, 1950. When Seymour had met and married Hank, she was the widow of George Brokaw, who had, curiously enough, previously been married to prominent CIA asset Claire Booth Luce.
http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=93940.0
http://www.illuminati-news.com/articles2/00225.html
http://www.mygen.com/Laurel_Canyon-David_McGowan_report.htm
Henry Fonda, on the other hand, is a direct descendent of Jellis Douw Fonda and Hester Jans Fonda, Dutch colonists who arrived in New York circa 1650 and settled near what would become Albany. The Fondas had sailed out of Friesland, Netherlands on a ship dubbed the Valckenier, which happened to be co-owned by a very wealthy Dutchman by the name of Jan-Baptist van Rensselaer. And Mr. van Rensselaer, as those who have been paying attention in class will recall, happened to be from the bloodline that would one day produce a guy by the name of David van Cortland Crosby.
well for all the slagging off at commies, hows the wolrd ran by the smartest guys in any room going now? hows that prosperity going? im sure theyre doing great.
Judging by the comments so far, I guess Christmas good-will feelings are over, whatever you believe.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaI5IRuS2aE
What was old is now new. Don't get angry. Get ready. Happy Christmas.
Fuck this communist and all others past and present. They are rotting this Republic from within.
EVERYTHING from the family, traditions and everything that made this country great is being torn apart by these fucking assholes. The libtards/commies NEED to be purged!
Judging from the authors posted picture, I guess his heros are commies. Why the fuck is this post on here in the first place?
Who has taken over ZeroHedge???
I wish Hoover et.al would have killed off all of the fuckin' commies way back when.... then we wouldn't be in the asshole state we are in now.
Ok let's ask the Tylers to only post your agenda preferences, clownfuck.
"I wish Hoover et.al would have killed off all of the fuckin' commies way back when...."
Well, I'm sure that Hoover would haved loved the chance to blow them away ... so to speak.
Pete Seeger was a Socialist/Communist. Now Right Wing Capitalistas are holding him up as a Hero of Freedom? What a HOOT.
First of all socialism is not communism, you can have one without the other. Second, socialism is only a dirty word if you are a selfish rich bitch, if you are not, and hate socialism your an idiot (or do you not drive on roads, like clean water, human rights....).
Americans had best get their affairs in order and reject socialists, communists, corporatists, demoncraps, repugnants.
Keep the Constitution. Keep the guns. Don't get angry. Get ready.
This land is your land and mine, for you and me.
Woody Guthrie, a song for you and me, most disliked by faker jews who tell the USA to serve Israel and the City of London first; their genocdal Israhell mania and insolvent banks, BIS BS.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaI5IRuS2aE
Even I have an FBI file. Big deal. Securities license will do that. Also that gun conviction, heh, heh.
Rebels are almost always slurred.
Demokracy did not landed on amerikan shore yet
Seeger was more loyal to an abstraction than his country.
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Do remember, his so-called "country" is an overt fiction, which has even less substance than an abstraction (well, a valid abstraction, that is).
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It is very sad to see how even thoughtful, good-natured human beings get suckered by cliches and popular misconceptions. Like, for example, "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". Like, for example, the notion that various political systems are fundamentally different, when in fact they are all fundamentally the same (fictional and authoritarian), with only surface and style differences.
It is almost as if the vast majority of human beings can only pick from a list of items supplied by others (the predators-that-be or some other self-proclaimed "authority"). This prevents them from recognizing what they must recognize to understand or achieve what they fundamentally want, but cannot enunciate.
Pretty much, what I do here in ZH is place these fundamentals in front of everyone to think about and evaluate. The two fundamental comments that I've made a million times that apply to this article are:
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#1: Fundamentally, two kinds of human beings exist (two kinds of human behavior), namely "predators" and "producers". Human producers create the goods and goodies they need to survive, prosper and enjoy life. Human predators steal the goods and goodies they need to survive, prosper and enjoy life.
Producers create. Predators destroy. If human producers were to clearly understand this, and understand that producers should and must treat human predators like predators of any other species, life would be good. Instead, human producers insist they can treat human predators like other producers. Factiod: This cannot work, this has not worked, and this is why mankind is a failed species and well on its way to well-deserved extinction.
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#2: Fundamentally, two kinds of human organization exist. The first might be called "individualism" or "live and let live". In this approach, each human is free to live his own life however he wishes, and leaves the other 8 billion human beings free to live their lives however they wish. This is fundamentally peaceful, because nobody is trying to force others, either directly and personally, or through human predator intermediaries (predators who pretend to be the fictions called "law", "politics", "government").
The second approach is "collectivism" or "authoritarianism", all of which are essentially the same, but pretend to be very different ("democracy", "fascism", "socialism", "communism", etc). Sadly, almost all humans today choose then advocate some form of "collectivism" and "authoritarianism", thinking the tiny differences are significant.
In this approach, all 8-billion human beings (the "collective") directly and/or indirectly (via human predators AKA "law" AKA "authorities" AKA "government") attempt to force all 8-billion human beings (the "collective") to behave the way they want and choose. This assures no individual is free to live his life as he chooses, and assures eternal warfare at every scale (from town to county to state to nation to global).
And so, the fundamental choice is the following:
#1: A life of peace and happiness; "peace" because nobody is trying to force you to do anything, or not do anything (in your own life), and "happiness" because you get to live the way that makes you happy.
#2: A life of eternal warfare against 8-billion others, and eternal unhappiness; "warfare" because everyone is trying to force and dominate everyone else, and "unhappiness" because everyone must live a life much different from the life that would make them happy.
For someone who doesn't sucker for soundbites, or choose their positions and beliefs from a platter of false alternatives created by the most egregious power-lusting human predators, the choice is as simple as simple can be: peace, happiness, individualism.
For everyone else (the vast majority), the choice is only between forms of warfare and misery.
What an obvious choice... for any individual who managed to recognize this is the fundamental choice! But the overwhelming insanity of human beings never realize this is the fundamental choice, and so fall into the collectivist authoritarian trap promoted by the human predators-that-be, and suffer a life of eternal warfare and misery. How sad, how stupid, how insane.
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From time to time I wonder. Is there any way someone could state these issues in a way that large numbers of human producers would awake from their illusions, delusions and fictions? And say "screw this, I refuse to accept the fraud that is "authoritarianism" and "collectivism" (in every variation)? Probably not. The fatal flaw in human consciousness appears to be so strong and so habituated that... the vast majority of humans are forever caught like a moth eternally flying into and getting burned by the bright lightbulb of absurd fictions the predators-that-be have inserted and habituated in their brains via parents, family, friends, school and media.
At least we know a vanishingly tiny minority of humans can and have come to understand these issues well enough to avoid or reverse the fatal flaw in human consciousness. But that does little... almost nothing... for the vast majority. In fact, as this article makes clear, these few need to mostly keep their mouths shut, or risk ending up caged in some hidden gulag... or just offed.
Other part of story was very effective 30 year campaign to keep Pete Seeger off TV - including yanking the Smothers Brothers show avweek after they broke the blackout and had Seeger on.
Jane Fonda is a moron. She when to Vietnam and when the prisoners tried to communicate through her she turned them in to the North Vietnamese.
If you disagree with the war fine, but to screw a prisoner like that just plain deserves to be put against the wall and shot.
And for my new friend Obama bin Laden: Niggardly
Cops love steroids, drugs, and alcohol.
Even the federal investigative and intelligence variety.
Pete was awesome - an American in the true sense of the word.
http://libertyblitzkrieg.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Screen-Shot-2015...
If these are your heros then I hope the FBI has a file on you!! These times are different. I can't believe one would attempt a comparison.
Pete Seeger came to my middle school in 1964 (I think it was) and played a few songs, 'Inch by Inch', 'This land is your land' and 'If I had a Sickle and Hammer'.
They musta been trying to make us all little commies but it didn't work.
I remember wondering what it was about, having a musician come in. We never, ever had any other musicians play during school hours.
He was a fair singer and his guitar sounded good.
We did have a magician once, he could catch goldfish out of thin air on his fishing pole. Another time they had some dude bring in weird animals for a show-n-tell.
Pete was there for the same reason, I reckon.
"Although I disagree with what you say I will defend to the death your right to say it".
"The English are the only people who would shoot one of the nobility,pour Encourager
les Autres (to make an example of)".... Voltaire
Pete Seeger was one of thousands whose lives were ruined for exercising his rights as an
American.I find it disturbing to read about the HUAC being able to slander and libel a persons'
character but not having the guts to move a hundred feet out the Capitol building where
free speech is protected,and the victim could sue the malefactor.
Read about what happened to Joe Macarthy when he went after the Army Officer.Hah!
As a result of the political blacklisting there were suicides,divorces,wrongful terminations,
people lost their careers and houses,families were broken apart.Was it all worth it?
The genesis was the "loss of China",which had to be blamed on someone other than the
fantastically corrupt Nationalist Chinese leadership.
We sunk a ton of money into China,Vietnam,Iraq,Ukraine,etc. What did we get in return?
Zip.....Lastly,if the deep state are afraid of a few popular folk singers,then they really are
completely paranoid.
It should be clear by now that when Wall Street (The Fed) crashes for the last time,they will be
looking for someone to blame.Otherwise what's the point of the FEMA camps?
american exceptionalism, until obambam coopted the phrase and turned it into an arrogant empty boast about zionazi usa, always meant the usa had the only .gov that was organized around a document that explicitly attempted to prevent the excess of .gov. the constitution is the most radical .gov construct out there. that's why it is never proposed as the foundation of all the new democracies the usa has founded over the years.
that document has been effectively shredded so the usa is no longer exceptional. it is still a better example of what is out there but not so exceptional that living in the usa is any different than living in singapore except for tax purposes.