Can a once-committed Stalinist win a Nobel Peace Prize?
Probably.
In this upside-down, inside-out, morally perverted parallel universe in which we live, it almost seems likely.
Of course, if Yasser Arafat, the father of modern terrorism, could win one, it kind of takes the sheen off the prize for people of goodwill.
The question comes up because one long-time, diehard Communist Party member, Pete Seeger, is actively campaigning for one – or, at least, his "progressive" pals are on his behalf.
The semi-retired folksinger recently celebrated his 90th birthday with 15,000 fans at Madison Square Garden. Appropriately, Barack Obama sent a greeting.
As Seeger's apologists like to put it, "since the late 1930s, Seeger has been a political activist and a troubadour for social justice in the U.S. and human rights around the world. He has used his remarkable talents as a performer, musician, songwriter, and folklorist to engage other people, from all walks of life, across generations and cultures, in causes to build a better and more civilized world. He almost singlehandedly popularized the notion that music can be a force for social change."
The article goes on, as so many previous articles have, about how Pete Seeger was unfairly persecuted for his socially conscious activism during the "McCarthy era."
What the article doesn't say – and they seldom do – is that Seeger was indeed a card-carrying and proud member of the Communist Party USA. He gleefully traveled to the Soviet Union to bolster his friend Josef Stalin at the very time the tyrant was systematically killing tens of millions of his own people, imprisoning others in slave labor camps and brutally repressing the rest.
That's a record that certainly deserves consideration for a Nobel Peace Prize, isn't it?
Certainly if you consider winners have included the likes of Arafat, Al Gore, the United Nations inventors of the fraud of "global warming," Jimmy Carter, Kofi Annan, Shimon Peres, Mikhail Gorbachev, United Nations Peacekeeping Forces and Henry Kissinger.
And if you consider that Ronald Reagan, the man who brought an end to the Cold War and the Soviet Union, was snubbed, it all makes perfect sense.
I'd have to say Seeger is an odds-on favorite given recent Nobel infamy.
You might even recall that Seeger was asked to sing at Obama's inaugural celebration at the Lincoln Memorial in January. That should have been a signal as to what we should expect in his first 100 days in office.
In 1994, at age 75, he received the National Medal of Arts (the highest award given to artists and arts patrons by the U.S. government) as well as the Kennedy Center Honor, where President Bill Clinton called him "an inconvenient artist, who dared to sing things as he saw them."
Perhaps the biggest travesty came in 1996, when he was inducted into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame. Those who made the award must have forgotten about Seeger's rage at Bob Dylan's first performance with electric guitars. Seeger tried to disconnect the electricity to stop the performance. He told some of his confidants if he had an ax, he would have used it to cut the cables that evening.
How's that for open-mindedness, artistic freedom, peace, love and harmony.
"If the world is to survive," Seeger recently said, "the whole human race must realize how important it is that we learn how to communicate with each other, even if we disagree strongly."
Unless, of course you disagree – or use an electric guitar.
Nobel Prize? He's a sure thing.