Anticipating A Brawl Because I Just Dissed Phil Ochs On Sam Seder's Channel

Phil Ochs once told an interviewer he was “born in Moscow in 1917.” In fact, he entered the world via El Paso, Texas in 1940, but neither truth in particular nor reality in general ever came easily for Ochs, the preeminent troubadour of the New Left and an ardent SDS and Yippie camp follower. A remarkably gifted songwriter and political propagandist, on the one hand he was known to sing the praises of Mao Zedong, Idi Amin, the Viet Cong and Charles Manson, while also admitting he probably would be shot for singing his kind of protest music in a country like China.

Phil Ochs was an ass.  By the time he was born the beneficiaries of the Russian Revolution had already amassed a body count that rivaled the one Hitler was just starting to pile up, and those already massive mountains of those murdered by the commies would get bigger and bigger, even before Mao started his own mountain range of corpses even as the American left went from the old fashion for Stalinism to Maoism.   I was there, I remember the enthusiasm of such atheist lefties for Mao, some of the old lefties of my age cohort still yearn for the days when Progressive Labor destroyed SDS out of Maoist principles.  In China the cultural revolution was killing what is estimated as between two and ten million people.   

Given that list of his enthusiasms above, compiled by one of his online admirers, I wouldn't be surprised if he hadn't offed himself if he'd have supported Trump.  Loads of old lefty leftists took the baby step into fascism and Nazism, that started way back in the 1930s and continues today.   Loads of the guys who named names for HUAC and Joe McCarthy had been full fledged Party members.  I don't have any problem imagining any of them then or now taking that baby step into another anti-democratic ideology, what Marxism is by definition.   Look at how the goddamned Nation Magazine tells us we need to be nice to Mr. Putin, the foremost sponsor of fascism and neo-Nazism, today. 

The "new (now very old) left" SDS, the Yippies, total failures that should be left on the dust heap of history.   They never produced anything but the Nixon presidency.   Their antics probably delayed the end of America's war in Southeast Asia.