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

Harry Belafonte, the legendary African-American singer and civil rights activist who passed away at the age of 96, was a trailblazer in many ways. He was a close confidant of Martin Luther King Jr., and supported him financially when he only made $8,000 a year as a preacher. Belafonte even bailed King out of an Alabama jail in 1963 and raised $50,000 to bail out other imprisoned civil rights activists. He also funded voter registration drives in the violent, segregationist South in the early 1960s and supported the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa in the 1980s.

However, there was a darker side to Belafonte that the corporate media conveniently ignored in their rush to lionize the deceased. He was a lifelong supporter of communist regimes that crushed the very civil liberties he claimed to fight for in the United States. He did so even when these regimes were at their bloodiest.

Belafonte’s mentor, singer Paul Robeson, was an unreconstructed Stalinist who defended Joseph Stalin, responsible for killing 20 million of his own countrymen through enforced famines and rigged trials. Robeson turned the countries he “liberated” from Hitler into equally vicious police states. Despite this, Robeson was championed by the American left as a civil libertarian, and 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.”

In the 1980s, at a “World Peace Concert” in Berlin, Belafonte praised the East German regime whose secret police, the Stasi, was considered the most brutal of the communist satellites. He castigated the Ronald Reagan administration for installing nuclear missiles in West Germany as fascist, while portraying the Soviets’ installation of SS-20 missiles in East Germany as promoting peace.

Belafonte was equally laudatory of Fidel Castro, condemning “censorship” in the United States but remaining silent when the Cuban regime imprisoned and tortured dissidents for speaking out against Castro. He even believed that the United States should model itself on Castro’s Cuba. He faulted President Barack Obama for following Constitutional procedure by working with Congress and implied he should have instead behaved “like a Third World dictator” and imprisoned his opponents. Belafonte found another worthy model in communist dictator Hugo Chavez, praising him while he was jailing and torturing political opponents for speaking out against the Venezuelan regime.

While one can admire Belafonte’s work during the civil rights era, his image as a civil libertarian is compromised by his blanket support of communist regimes whose totalitarian behavior he thought American liberals, even presidents, should practice against opponents.

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