It was pharmaceutical companies in other countries that refused to provide
the drugs for US executions. And I have to ssay that I have been wondering
about the mechanics of it also because when the execution of human beings is
described, we're told that it involves a cocktail of 3 drugs, one of which
is a tranquilizer that puts the person to sleep. The ssecond paralyzes the
muscles, and I can't remember what the third does. And I kept wondering why
our animals can die so much more easily.
Miriam
________________________________
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Alice Dampman
Humel
Sent: Friday, October 23, 2015 6:30 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Ethel Rosenberg(1915-1953) would be One
Hundred Today by Norman Markowitz
Is that the reason?
You mean the pharmaceutical companies have something resembling a conscience
after all and wont make the drugs to kill other people? Who'da thunk it...
And here all this time, I thought they were just incompetent
because, for
example, they seem to be able to produce drugs to euthanize animals
humanely: the vet gives the animal a tranquilizer of some sort, and when the
vet injects the lethal drug, the animal quietly goes limp in your arms.
On Oct 23, 2015, at 9:30 AM, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Now we have lethal injections that don't work efficiently because
the
pharmaceutical companies that made them, won't make them available
for state
murder.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Abby
Vincent
Sent: Friday, October 23, 2015 1:02 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Ethel Rosenberg(1915-1953) would be
One
Hundred Today by Norman Markowitz
I was thirteen, living in the town next to Ossining, where Sing
Sing prison
is. The townspeople believed the Rosenbergs were traitors, but the
talk of
the town was that on the bnight they'd be fried, all the lights in
Briarcliff would be dimmed. Now we have lethal injections, not old
sparkie.
It's just not the same.
Abby
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl
Jarvis
Sent: Thursday, October 22, 2015 9:03 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Ethel Rosenberg(1915-1953) would be
One
Hundred Today by Norman Markowitz
1953. I was 18 when the Rosenbergs were murdered by the American
Empire.
We were just coming through the Great American Witch Hunt, led by
Deacon Joe
McCarthy and his band of Birchers. I still raise up a mental image
of
Richard Nixon, council for the House Un-American Committee, standing
to the
right edge of the TV screen, looking his ugly best. Those were sad
times.
But so are today's times.
Carl Jaarvis
On 10/22/15, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
http://www.politicalaffairs.net/ethel-rosenberg-1915-1953-would-be-one
-hundred-today-by-norman-markowitz/
Ethel Rosenberg(1915-1953) would be One Hundred Today by
Norman
Markowitz
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by: Monday 28 September 2015
Today something remarkable happened in the New York City
Council. The
Council passed a resolution by Councilman Daniel Dromm
honoring the
memory of Ethel Rosenberg on his hundredth birthday. Gale
Brewer,
borough president of Manhatten, then declared September 28
"Ethel
Rosenberg Day of Justice in the Borough of Manhatten."
As someone who first joined the Committee to Re-Open the
Rosenberg
Case in the 1970s, a never really thought I see something
like this as
long as capitalism lasted in the U.S. And the world of the
"partioti act,"
illegal searches and seizures, preventive detention, would
warm the
heart of J. Edgar Hoover, whose name still graces the FBI
bulding in
Washington, even though his monstrous crimes are fairly well
known by
more and more people.
Below I have posted the Rosenberg Fund for Children Press
release of
the remarkable events today above my article because it is
really much
more important My only caveat would be some worry about
separating
Ethel and Julius. Half a century ago, some conservative
scholars,
faced with the overwhelming evidence of the injuste of the
Sacco
Vanzetti, the trial conviction and eventual execution of two
Italian
immigrant anarchists for a robbery and killing on the most
evidence
during the Red Scare of 1919-1920, contended one, the semi-
literate
Sacco was guilty and the eloquent Vanzetti was innocent.
When
information released under the Freedom of Information(far
less
extensive than what we have now) made it clear that Ethel
was brought
into the case to intimidate Julius into confessing and
naming
names(something the Rosenbergs could have done right up to
their last
hours, but refused to do) the fall back position was to
reluctantly
admit that Ethel was the victim of injustice but that Julius
of course
was guilty,
Below the press release from the RosenberFund for Children
I am
reposting an article that I wrote for Political Affairs on
the Rosenberg
case, the great political show trial of the cold war era.
Just as the
Sacco Vanzetti Case, two Italian immigrant anarchists
largely framed
for a robbery and murder in Massachusetts during the post
WWI Red
Scare and electricuted after an international campaign to
save
them(in which activits of the then very young CPUSA,
including the
African-American attorney, William Patterson, were involved)
became
the symbol of both that Red Scare and the the reaction and
repression
which followed, so the Rosenberg case should be a symbol of
the worst
political repression of the cold war era.
Both Julius and Ethel were the victims of injustice as were
Sacco and
Vanzetti. Both died in the electric chair before they
reached the age
of forty, as did Sacco and Vanzetti. Both deserve to be
honored, as
does Abel Meeropol, the teacher, writer and CPUSA activist
who adopted
the Rosenberg boys who have born his name for sixty years.
Under the
name of James Allen, who wrote for CPUSA publications and
famously
wrote the song , "Strange Fruit," the classic anti-lynching
song which
Bille Holliday sang and which was banned on commercial radio
in the
U.S. in 1939, fourteen years before the political execution
of Julius
and Ethel Rosenberg
Norman Markowitz
For information contact:
Amber Black
Rosenberg Fund for Children
(413) 529-0063, amber@xxxxxxx
Ethel Rosenberg Receives Two Honors in New York City on Her
100th
Birthday:
NYC Council Declares "government wrongfully executed Ethel
Rosenberg"
"Ethel Rosenberg Day of Justice in the Borough of Manhattan"
declared
by Manhattan Borough President
September 28, 2015, New York, NY - At 11:00 am Eastern, on
September
28, 2015, in a ceremony on the steps of City Hall, New York
City
Council Members gathered, with three generations of Ethel
Rosenberg's
descendants present, to issue a stunning proclamation in
Ethel's
honor, stating in part, "...the govenment wrongfully
executed Ethel
Rosenberg; now therefore BE IT KNOWN: That we, the
undersigned Members
of the New York City Council, honor the life and memory of
Ethel
Rosenberg in observance of the 100th anniversary of her
birth." See
full proclamation by Members of the New York CIty Countil
here.
"Ethel Rosenberg was wrongfully executed in 1953 which
resulted in her
two young children becoming orphans," said NYC Council
Member Daniel
Dromm (D-Jackson Heights, Elmhurst). "Although nothing can
erase this
terrible loss of life, I am pleased to join my colleagues in
the
Council in posthumously acknowledging Ms. Rosenberg on the
occasion of
the 100th anniversary of her birth. It is my hope that this
tribute
will restore some dignity to the memory of this
much-maligned New
Yorker and her family."
In addition, Gale Brewer, the Manhattan Borough President,
bestowed a
remarkable honor of her own on Ethel, proclaiming, "...I,
Gale A.
Brewer, do hereby recognize the injustice suffered by Ethel
Rosenberg
and her family, and on the occasion of her 100th birthday on
Monday,
September 28th, 2015, proclaim 'Ethel Rosenberg Day of
Justice in the
Borough of Manhattan.'" See full proclamation by Borough
President
Brewer here.
"...To have so many Council Members of my parents' hometown
- my
hometown, my brother's hometown - acknowledge our mother's
achievements and note that she was wrongfully executed is a
dream come
true. Today, a major elected institution of this great city
and
Manhattan's borough President have taken important steps
towards
acknowledging a terrible injustice. Next, it is time for the
Federal
Government to step up to do the same." - excerpt of
statement of
Robert Meeropol, son of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg
"Let me echo Robs thanks to the members of the City
Council, the
Manhattan Borough President and the Public Advocate for
recognizing
the injustice that was done to our mother and, as a result,
to her
entire family.
We also want to make it clear that the unjust prosecution
and
execution of our mother damaged our country as well...We
believe that
the issuance of these proclamations implicitly calls upon
the federal
government to take corrective action. We would like to make
this request
explicitly.
Therefore, we call upon Attorney General Lynch and President
Obama to
acknowledge the injustice done to Ethel Rosenberg back in
1953 as a
way of learning from our past in the hope that similar
injustices will
be avoided in the future."- excerpt of statement of Michael
Meeropol,
son of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg
See full statements of Robert and Michael Meeropol (sons of
Ethel and
Julius Roseberg) here.
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Articles > The Rosenberg Case in Historical Perspective
The Rosenberg Case in Historical Perspective
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by: Norman Markowitz
November 25 2008
tags: headlines for December 2008/January 2009, North
America,
Democracy,
phpIjS7sq.jpg
11-24-08, 9:27 am
The Rosenberg atomic spy case is 58 years old, yet its
reverberations are still being felt. In 1953, within three
years of
their arrest, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were executed for
passing
secret information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet
Union. From the
beginning, many people hotly contested the outcome of the
trial. Many,
on both sides, still use the case to highlight the worst
excesses of
the Cold War. This past September, the release of previously
secret
grand jury testimony related to Ethel Rosenberg's role along
with an
'admission' by Morton Sobell made news. And with the
inevitable host
of misrepresentations and claims made as a result, the case
is worth
reexamining in an historical perspective.
My experience with the Rosenberg case began when I joined
the Fund
for Open Information and Accountability (FOIA formerly the
Committee
to Re-Open the Rosenberg Case) in the mid-1970s. There, I
met Michael
and Robert Meeropol, the Rosenbergs sons, and also the late
Marshall
Mike
Perlin, Morton Sobells attorney in the 1951 trial. I also
came to
know Walter and Miriam Schneir, whose pioneering work,
Invitation to
An Inquest, in effect re-opened the case for a new audience
in the late
1960s.
Prior to my involvement, the Committee to Re-open the
Rosenberg Case
had compelled the FBI to release important but heavily
censored
documents on the case using the Freedom of Information Act.
While the
documents failed to prove Julius Rosenbergs innocence, they
provided
strong evidence that Ethel Rosenberg had been prosecuted as
a ploy to
intimidate Julius. The declassified documents also showed
that Judge
Irving Kaufman, who pronounced the death sentence on the
Rosenbergs,
had in the two years leading up to their execution,
conspired with the
Justice Department to thwart the defendants appeals.
Kaufmans
actions, by any legal standard, violated judicial ethics.
The Anti-communist Cottage Industry
Subsequently historian Ronald Radosh, who formerly
associated with
New Left radicals in the 1960s, joined journalist Joyce
Milton to use
these documents and various interviews in their 1983 book,
The Rosenberg
File.
This book claimed to affirm Julius Rosenbergs guilt. It
presented the
standard House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC)
and FBI
portrayal of the Communist Party USA as a conspiratorial
front for
both a Soviet-led world revolution and Soviet conquest of
the United
States.
At the time of its publication, I strongly criticized the
Radosh and
Milton work as an attempt to legitimize the Reagan
administrations
extreme intensification of the Cold War. Reagan, who not by
accident
gave Judge Kaufman the Medal of Freedom in 1987, had adopted
a Cold
War mentality that also enlisted a cadre of historians to
recycle the
anti-communist ideas of the 1950s. The Witch-hunters
Truth, a
pamphlet published by the Fund, dealt with these issues. In
1983, I
attended a packed town hall debate between the Schneirs and
Radosh and
Milton sponsored by The Nation Magazine. At that debate
various
sections of the left and the former left, ranging from
communists and
ex-communists to Cold War liberals and ex-Cold War liberals
(who came
to support Reagan as self-styled neo-conservatives) showed
up to
cheer and boo the respective sides.
In the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US
government released its decryptions of Soviet intelligence
messages
under the code name Venona Project. Since then,
anti-communist
historians have often used the decryptions in their research
uncritically, even though such documents are notoriously
inaccurate
and politically colored. They created a sort of archival
HUAC, to
latch onto every encoded reference as fact and compile lists
of
agents and dupes of the communist conspiracy. Despite
the fact
that many such references are known to be false or planted,
many
scientists, government officials, non-communist journalists
like the
late I.F. Stone, found themselves accused of being Soviet
agents
because of listings in the Venona files. Julius Rosenberg,
too,
appeared in the Venona files under the code-name liberal
as having
providing information to the Soviets during World War II.
Some additional investigation, however, brought the Venona
Project
into serious doubt. For example, historians uncovered the
fact that
Kim Philby, the leading Soviet agent in the 1940s who also
happened to
head British counter-intelligence, knew about the Venona
Project.
Forced out of British intelligence in 1949 and under
suspicion for
years, Philby fled to the Soviet Union in 1963. Philbys
role and
subsequent exposure suggest that Venona materials from much
of the
1940s should be considered suspect. In addition, few serious
historians doubted that the FBI, under J. Edgar Hoovers
leadership,
would hold itself above doctoring documents to support its
political
schemes. Hoover, after all, had furnished HUAC and Sen.
Joseph
McCarthy with all sorts of distorted and incomplete
documents to foster
their scurrilous investigations.
Historians also now know that Hoover had used FBI files,
many of them
distorted, to blackmail prominent figures.
By the mid-1990s, the case receded into memory. Ronald
Radosh took
to writing books connecting Bill Clinton and the Democrats
with
communists and becoming even more the caricature of a 1950s
red-baiter. By this time, second and third generation
historians, who
studied the Communist Party in the late 1980s and 1990s,
began to
emerge from the smog of anti-communism. Many of them came to
portray
Communist Party activists as making positive contributions
to the
labor movement and to civil rights and other struggles, even
if this
largely non-Marxist and certainly non-communist scholarship
often
looked critically at formal CPUSA positions and leadership.
About that time, I wrote an article for the Encyclopedia of
American
National Biography on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. I dealt
with the
case as a politically motivated one, and addressed the clear
anti-Semitic subtext of the case. My article had an
interesting
effect. Both far rightists on the Internet and historians,
for whom
study of the communist movement can only be the study of
espionage,
denounced the publication for permitting me to write the
article. They
referred to me as a proud, self-confessed, admitted
communist,
which should have disqualified me from writing about the
Rosenbergs,
since anything that I wrote would be untrustworthy and
deceptive. Only
anti-communists, they opined, could write about communists
without
being biased. Some even accused me of insisting that the
Rosenberg
case was simply about anti-Semitism. I felt as though I had
been
transported back into the period I had written about, which
many of my
accusers seemed to have never left.
New Evidence, Old Story
The recent revelations about the Rosenberg case added
important
documentation to what we had been saying for years: that the
authorities fabricated evidence, particularly against Ethel.
On
September 11th, the National Security Archives at George
Washington
University released declassified grand jury testimony by
Ruth
Greenglass, Ethel's sister and wife of alleged accomplice
David
Greenglass. In that grand jury testimony, Ruth claimed that
the secret
information allegedly obtained by David Greenglass and
Julius
Rosenberg was sent to Soviet agents written in her own
(Ruth's)
handwriting. During the trial, however, Ruth testified that
Ethel
Rosenberg typed the information. This perjured contradiction
caused
historians reviewing the new documents to say it both
cleared Ethel
and proved that the federal attorneys on the case made up
evidence against
her in order to include her in the proceedings.
Such a fabrication, by any standard, should have put the
entire trial
into jeopardy. It also shows that the US government executed
a woman
it knew to be innocent.
While the major media largely ignored the Greenglass
revelations, a
new piece of the story emerged at about the same time. On
September
12th, the New York Times published what it called Morton
Sobells
confession. Unfortunately for those who have obsessed over
the spy
story for decades, Sobell made no mention of nuclear
espionage the
whole crux of the case or that he knew that Julius
Rosenberg had
anything to do with nuclear espionage. While the major media
today
seemed firmly intent on continuing this impression, for it
was the
same fabricated nuclear issue that is allegedly handing to
the
Soviets 'the secret of the atomic bomb' for which both
Ethel and
Julius Rosenberg were executed.
Sobell, now over 90, stated clearly that he all he did was
work with
Julius Rosenberg to pass non-nuclear information to the
Soviets during
World War II. Sobell wrote, As for me, I helped an ally
(admittedly
illegally) during World War II. I chose not to cooperate
with the
government in 1950. The issues are now with the historians.
For a man
who spent 19 years doing hard time in federal prison for
those wartime
activities, that is a fairly magnanimous statement.
Secret of the Atomic Bomb
Despite these new revelations, some aspects of the case,
the most
important ones, remain unchanged. There was no such thing as
the
'secret of the atom bomb,' no more than there was a secret
to the
automobile.
Unfortunately, no scientific expert witness had the courage
to say at
the Rosenbergs trial in 1951. Scientists had known about
nuclear
fission, the basic inner-workings of the bomb, since before
World War
II. The atomic bomb project was 'an industry, not a recipe,'
nuclear
physicist Phillip Morrison would say later.
When the US successfully built an atomic weapon, it became
clear
that the Truman administration intended to use it to
threaten the Soviets.
The US government shared nuclear information with the
British during
the war but refused to do so its Soviet allies. When Harry
Truman
informed Joseph Stalin at the Potsdam Conference that the US
had
successfully tested such a weapon, he meant it as an implied
threat to
the Soviets to conform to US dictates. Trumans actions
prompted the
first steps in the nuclear arms race. Stalin immediately
ordered his
subordinates to contact Moscow and make the Soviet atom bomb
project a
high priority.
Americans built the first atomic bomb, but scientists
familiar with
the project understood they would probably not be the last.
The Truman
administration, as part of its developing Cold War policy
against the
Soviets, decided immediately after the war to refuse to work
with the
Soviets in the United Nations to promote a nuclear
disarmament program.
Truman wanted to maintain a monopoly over nuclear weapons,
develop
those weapons in quantity and quality, and use this nuclear
monopoly
to gain global hegemony.
The goal of maintaining a nuclear monopoly failed for many
reasons.
The Soviets successful explosion of a nuclear device in
1949 stood as
only one of many causes for this failure. Political reaction
to the
Soviets successful test led directly to hysterical claims
that Soviet
spies in the Communist Party stole the secret of the
atomic bomb.
Right-wing pundits and demagogues blamed American communists
and the
Soviets entirely for the nuclear war danger, despite the
fact that
only the US had ever used an atomic bomb on people. Based on
that
irrational assertion and using a guilt by association logic,
McCarthyites justified any action to fight the Soviets and
go after
communist movements as well as non-communist groups
suspected of
communist affiliations. The Rosenberg-Sobell political show
trial served
as proof for that assertion.
Spies Among Us
I do not mean to suggest that no spies were involved with
nuclear
questions. No one argued in 1951, for example, that Klaus
Fuchs did
not pass information to the Soviets. Fuchs, however, worked
as an
actual physicist, not an engineer and machine shop operator
like
Julius Rosenberg or a draftsman and college dropout like
David Greenglass.
In recent years, historians also proved that Theodore Hall
met with
Soviet officials in New York in June 1945 and provided them
with a
drawing of a model of the atomic bomb that proved valuable
for their
project. Shortly before his death (he went on to a
distinguished
scientific career in Britain), Hall said that he took these
steps to
keep the US from establishing monopoly control over the atom
bomb and
nuclear weapons after the war. Such a monopoly would have
endangered
the world, he believed.
Likewise, historians think that physicist Joel Koval worked
for the
Soviets. Koval was born in Iowa to pre-revolution immigrants
from
Czarist Russia. Later, the Kovals moved with Joel to
Birobidjan, a
Jewish autonomous region in the Soviet Union established for
Jewish
citizens who wished to live in an area specifically set
aside for Jews.
There, Koval distinguished himself as a student of physics
and then,
in a story fit for Hollywood, returned to the US as an agent
of Soviet
military intelligence. Ironically, the Putin government of
the
capitalist new Russia gave him a posthumous medal.
Abuses of Power
The Soviet Union wasn't the only foreign country with spies
operating in the US during the 1930 and 1940s. During this
time,
America had a large racist, openly anti-Semitic isolationist
right
wing, which only reluctantly joined the war effort against
the Nazis.
This ultra right included corporate leaders who prior to the
war had
been happy to do business with Hitler, as well as US
military and
State Department figures who sought to limit aid to the
Soviets at a
time when they were taking on more than 80 percent of Axis
ground forces
in Europe.
With the future of the world literally hanging in the
balance, World
War II was a desperate and unusual circumstance. Although
the Soviet
Union and the US were allies, the FBI, extensive recent
scholarship
has shown, continued to regard the Communist Party,
anti-fascist
émigrés from Germany and other countries, and all who had
contact with
the Soviet Union during the war as enemies, greater enemies
even than
individuals and groups that had pro-fascist and pro-Nazi
sympathies. J.
Edgar Hoover even put Eleanor Roosevelt and her friends
under
surveillance in an attempt to discredit her and her circle
on
political and personal grounds. And most of the military and
corporate
leaders whose powers now greatly increased during the war
refused to
hide their deep and long-standing hostility to the Communist
Party or
see the war in anti-fascist terms.
Patriotic, Not Subversive
Thousands of Communist Party members in the military
services
initially faced major forms of discrimination, from
segregation into
units that the military reserved for troublemakers to
attempts to bar
them from officers training programs. This didnt prevent an
estimated
15,000 communists from serving in the US armed forces during
World War
II. Some served in the OSS (ironically, the predecessor to
the CIA),
where their knowledge of and commitment to fighting fascism
made them
in effect advanced soldiers. Others received decorations
for
individual acts of heroism. Collectively, the Communist
Party focused
its energies on achieving victory over fascism, winning the
war and the
peace.
Communists organized the campaign to open an early Second
Front,
which, had it come to fruition earlier, might have saved
millions of
lives in Europe and Asia.
The Communist Party made serious mistakes. It supported,
for
example, the incarceration of Japanese Americans, for which
it later
issued a formal apology long before the US government did.
The
Communist Partys total commitment to winning the war and
the use of
all of its influence in all sectors of society, however,
represented
the highest form of patriotism. This sense of patriotic
duty, shared
by millions of working-class people, went unmatched by the
capitalist
class, which had to be bribed with cost-plus contracts to
increase war
production.
Conservative politicians, who turned a blind eye to war
profiteering,
fought to protect corporate profits and sowed the seeds of
racism.
Large sections of the US ruling class felt uneasy with and
expressed
contempt for what they saw as a love affair with the
Soviet people.
Mass media celebrated Soviet heroism and even portrayed
Joseph Stalin
as a friendly Uncle Joe. Capitalists and the right wing
feared that
these sentiments somehow would spill over into a postwar
radicalization, making it more difficult to trot out the
Soviet bogey.
These conditions fostered an environment in which some
people
concluded that providing aid to the Soviet Union to help
their war
effort, despite opposition from right-wing leaders of the
military
industrial complex, served the interests of both the Soviet
and
American people.
Serious students of Communist Party activists in this
period, those
who have looked at rank-and-file communists and their
activism, stress
their identification with and love of the US working class,
its vital
popular culture and its potential to advance democracy and
socialism.
These widely held beliefs became something like a left
American
exceptionalism, a belief that all of US history from the
Declaration
of Independence and Bill of Rights to Lincolns Gettysburg
Address and
Roosevelt's Four Freedoms and Economic Bill of Rights were
large steps
on the road to an eventual socialist great society which
would play
a major role in liberating humanity. While such views may be
criticized as naïve or even utopian, making it difficult for
many to
respond to the massive and relatively sudden postwar
repression, these
views were a far cry from subversive.
Friends of the Rosenbergs have long portrayed them in this
light.
These were people who, for ill or for good, admired both
Soviet leader
Joseph Stalin and President Franklin Roosevelt as advancing
the
struggle for working-class liberation against fascism. They
saw them
as helping to bring about more than a better world, but a
world with
a socialist system that fostered equality, peace and social
justice.
If patriotism in its most simple definition means love of
country,
this was the America that communists defended and loved,
rather than
the America of Standard Oil, Herbert and J. Edgar Hoover,
the
corporate leadership ready and willing to do business with
Hitler,
Mussolini and the Japanese militarists both to make money
and fight
socialist revolutions.
Loose Ends
Attorney Mike Perlin always said that the Rosenberg-Sobell
trial was
a frame-up, and even with the recent statement of his
client, Morton
Sobell, the new material released by the National Security
Archives
showed that. Those who for political purposes continue to
try to make
the history of the Communist Party a story of spies and
conspiracy
should be permitted to wallow in their own irrelevance, both
to any
serious study of the communist movement as a social movement
or for
that matter to any understanding of the complexities of
espionage.
Other questions remain unanswered, some perhaps
unanswerable. Did
the information that Klaus Fuchs, Theodore Hall, Joel Koval
and others
provide the Soviets enable them to get a bomb in four years
rather
than the 10 years estimated by US intelligence? No one can
say. Had
the Soviets not gotten the atomic bomb when they did, would
Truman's
threat to use atomic weapons in the Korean War against both
Korea and
China have been carried out? Quite likely.
Judge Irving Kaufman, in ordering Julius and Ethel
Rosenbergs
execution, accused them of sentencing to death millions,
including
their own children by giving the Soviet Union the secret
of the atom
bomb.
In that rationalization of the death sentence, Kaufman both
told the
big lie of the Rosenberg-Sobell case and expressed perfectly
the
purpose of the trial. No secret of the atom bomb existed
for Julius
Rosenberg to provide anyone. There was, however, the Korean
War and a
new race to build the hydrogen bomb. Above all, Kaufman
pronounced his
sentence during a Cold War that promised war without end.
The ideology
of anti-communism buttressed by the terror that possible
nuclear war
would bring stood at the heart of the trial, the conviction
and the
executions.
Let me conclude by putting the shoe politically on the
other foot.
In the future, the US government may view it politically
feasible to
give historians and journalists the incentive to seriously
study the
relationship of US corporations both before and during World
War II to
their business allies and subsidiaries in Nazi Germany,
Fascist Italy
and Imperial Japan. As a result of those relationships some
corporations made available important secrets used for
information
technology, synthetic rubber, aircraft development and other
materials
of immediate and direct military value to the Axis war
machines.
And perhaps these writers will study those political,
business and
military leaders whom Axis intelligence reports often
commented upon
favorably, not to mention those who leaked information about
Roosevelts pre-war efforts to aid the allies in order to
deliberately
scuttle those efforts, or the military leaders like George
Patton who
wanted an immediate war against the Soviets after
hostilities with the
Germans ended. Perhaps new light may be shed on US military
leaders
who busily prepared preventive war scenarios against the
Soviets in
which the US control of atomic weapons emerged as the
winning weapon
against the Soviet Red Army. Some historians have found bits
and
pieces of evidence to support such views in government
archives (see,
for example, the book IBM and the Holocaust, by Edwin
Black), but
access to classified materials on this side of the issue
might present a
much fuller picture.
--Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor of
PoliticalAffairs.net.
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Comments
Probably no fluke of history at all, that the Rosenberg
and Meeropol
children met Meeropol at a Christmas party at W. E. B. Du
Bois's home.
It shows the wedding of oppressed peoples, and our resolve
as such, to
stop oppression and wrong for good.
Let this wedding continue for good and forever.
We shall win this "good fight".
Posted by E.E.W. Clay, 10/12/2015 9:34am (10 days ago)
Probably no fluke of history at all, that the Rosenberg
and Meeropol
children met Meeropol at a Christmas party at W. E. B. Du
Bois's home.
It shows the wedding of oppressed peoples, and our resolve
as such, to
stop oppression and wrong for good.
Let this wedding continue for good and forever.
We shall win this "good fight".
Posted by E.E.W. Clay, 10/09/2015 4:49pm (13 days ago)
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century.
This is the first of a two part interview.
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