Pete Seeger in His Own Words by Pete Seeger & Rob Rosenthal & Sam Rosenthal

Author:Pete Seeger & Rob Rosenthal & Sam Rosenthal [Seeger, Pete]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317254270
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2015-11-16T23:00:00+00:00

“Freedom of Speech Versus Access to Information,” 1986

Letter to Marvin Frankel, lawyer and human rights

activist, dated July 18, 1986; found in Seeger files

Dear Marvin Frankel,

I read with interest the abridged copy of your speech in “The Na-tion” and am writing now to ask if by any chance you would have an extra copy of your complete speech. I think the problem of freedom of speech and access to information may be the crucial contradiction which the human race may not be able to solve. I have not solved it. Though I have been wrestling with it all my life.

Twenty-five years ago I was able to stay out of jail because of the First Amendment. “I have a right to my opinion, and you have a right to your opinion,” I told to Congressman Walter and the Un-American Activities Committee. And I still really believe this, even to the point of saying to my friends in Skokie that the American Nazis have a right to march and so does the Ku Klux Klan.16 I would even give them the right to appear on television, although I’d be listening to every word to see if I could find a way to sue them for libel. It seems to me the best way to handle these home-grown fascists is to expose them and their friends in very high places and use ridicule, as did Malvina Reynolds,17 the songwriter, when she wrote that great song, “The Klan, The Klan, They call on every red-blood fighting man. If you’re pure and white and bigot, Get your courage from a spigot, And defend your racial purity the very best you can.”18

However, I know that at times I have acted the part of the censor. I have been an editor, deciding what was to go in a magazine; as a singer, I choose what songs not to sing. I have withheld information from children and grandchildren when they are very young or elderly relatives who were ill. In one of our boats on the Hudson River, we have posted a sign, “You can argue with the captain—some of the time,” implying that when there is an emergency, you shut up and do what you’re told. Likewise it seems to me that it is hard to criticize the Nicaraguans for censoring the press in the wartime situation they face, although when I go there next January I would hope to persuade them that a good libel law is more effective in the long run—not just more pleasing to world liberalism.

The biggest problem, though, I believe comes up in the area of scientific information. My father, an old scholar, said, “Most scientists have at some time in their life made a religious decision from their gut feeling it is a good thing to be a scientist. But if the world were destroyed by sophisticated science, could we say that it was a good thing to have been a scientist?” My father had to admit that this way of thinking

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