Harry Belafonte. Dead at 96.

[Batesmotel]

Loved his music. RIP. 

[Borg warner]

1 hour ago, Batesmotel said:

Loved his music. RIP. 

Me too. In the late 50's when I was just a young lad, his calypso songs were popular around the same time as the Kingston Trio's song, "Tom Dooley"

 

[Borg warner]

6 minutes ago, Borg warner said:

Me too. In the late 50's when I was just a young lad, his calypso songs were popular around the same time as the Kingston Trio's song, "Tom Dooley"

 

And here he was in 1977:

 

[Mrs.Cicero]

I loved his music but his politics got crazy supporting that Commie Bernie Sanders, among other equally questionable things, like being grand master of the NY Pride Parade, etc.

[Fnfalman]

I was neither impressed with his music nor his commies tendencies.  

 

Although  his acting was pretty good in the movie White Man’s Burden starring John Travolta.  

[minderasr]

Here’s What Corporate Media Won’t Tell You About Lifelong Communist Harry Belafonte

Harry Belafonte, the trailblazing African-American singer and civil rights activist who died this week at the age of 96, is in some ways an admirable figure. A confidant of Martin Luther King Jr., he financially supported the latter who only made $8,000 a year as a preacher and bailed King out of an Alabama jail in 1963 as well as raising $50,000 to bail out other imprisoned civil rights activists. He funded voter registration drives in the violent, segregationist South in the early 1960s, and in the 1980s the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa.

But there was a less than admirable side to Belafonte, one unmentioned in the corporate media stampede to lionize the deceased. He was a lifelong supporter of communist regimes that crushed the very civil liberties he “fought” for in the United States. He did so often when these regimes were at their bloodiest.

The root of such hypocrisy and moral relativism may have come from Belafonte’s mentor, singer Paul Robeson. Robeson was an unreconstructed Stalinist, defending Joseph Stalin who killed 20 million of his own countrymen through enforced famines, and rigged trials, and turned the countries he “liberated” from Hitler into equally vicious police states; all the while Robeson was being championed by the American left as a civil libertarian

Belafonte learned his lessons from Robeson well. He too kept two sets of books; supporting civil liberties in America while lauding communist dictators who crushed them in so-called “people’s democracies” abroad. Like Robeson, he championed atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg not for being innocent of giving atomic information to Stalin, but for doing so for the cause of “peace.”

 

https://thefederalist.com/2023/04/26/heres-what-corporate-media-wont-tell-you-about-lifelong-communist-harry-belafonte/