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this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2024
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Today I Learned
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Scotland and Norway have the right to roam, where there are land owners but they do not have the right to keep you off their land. As far as I'm concerned that's the bare minimum for a decency, even though it's a long shot from communism.
But Guthrie was a communist. This was before Stalinism and a lot of the bad connotations given to communism since - I doubt he would have embraced much of what have happened in the name of communism. But he was a union man.
Well, Guthrie was actually alive at the same time as Stalin so we don't actually have to speculate on that. In reality, Guthrie praised Stalin, even going so far as praising the Soviet invasion of Poland, and criticizing the US for providing supplies to Finland during the Winter War. It actually wasn't that uncommon for left-wing people in the West to support Stalin at the time, though some, for example, Pete Seeger, later changed their views. Guthrie never did, even during the height of the Cold War, when McCarthyism meant he got blacklisted, he was still saying stuff like, he hoped the communists won in the Korean War, and he never apologized for or recanted his views on Stalin.
At the height of McCarthyism, I think anyone would be a fool to believe anything told by the American government or official narratives.
Unlike Pete Seeger, who died in 2014, Guthrie died in 1967 with Huntington's disease so severe he hadn't been able to talk for a good while when he died. It's also a fact that Huntington's disease affects your mental state, and Guthrie did to some degree go crazy before he died. He got the disease from his mother, and her reaction to the illness is the origin of the family tragedies that made it so natural for Guthrie to write about his hard travelling.
There's also accounts Guthrie was a real jerk in the final years, which again can be attributed to Huntington's disease.
As for Korea, America had no fucking business there.
The comments I mentioned were long before Huntington affected him in his later years. Like, I'm talking about his comments on events as they were happening, when he was fully cognizant, and singing and writing smack dab in the middle of his career. You can't just put your own positions into his mouth and write off everything he ever said to the contrary to Huntington's. It's both demonstrably false and also not really cool for you to do, like, he's entitled to having his own views regardless of losing his mind to illness later on.
Woody Guthrie was ditched by his deadbeat, KKK member dad at 14, and grew up into the Great Depression. Those circumstances don't tend to produce moderate politics. Everything I've seen about him suggests he saw things in very black and white terms, with the communists (including the USSR and Stalin) being the only real alternative to the racism and poverty he saw under capitalism and fascism. You can say that wasn't the right perspective but that was his perspective.
You are, of course, right about Korea, but I brought it up because at the time it was a pretty controversial and fringe view, that he was willing to standby even under threat of persecution.
For sure, the American left were blue eyed in regards to what was happening in the Soviet Union during McCarthyism. I just find it hard to judge them too harshly for that, considering their experience of being prosecuted at home for no good reason, and their first hand experience of how American capitalists wage a full-on war against organized labour.
My way into Guthrie's thinking is through the songs he wrote, and what emerges through that is a man who absolutely has his heart and brain in the right place. I have no doubt he had his shortcomings as a human, as we all do.
That's fair. I only wanted to set the record straight.