Posted on 01/23/2004 1:52:40 AM PST by kattracks
A little bit of embarrassment seems to be in order: An article in Sunday's L.A. Times Calendar section (seems to be unavailable unless you're a subscriber) reports on a new documentary about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg ("an exceptional documentary, short-listed for this year's Academy Award, a compelling emotional narrative laced with explosive political material"), who were convicted in the 1950s of spying for the Soviets, and executed for it. The documentary was directed by their granddaughter, Ivy Meeropol. The article is not by any means entirely pro-Rosenberg, but I was still struck by the second paragraph below:
But what also drove [Ivy] was the fact that "I was tired of the simplistic version of this story, what history remembers, the way everyone thinks they stole the secret of the atomic bomb. I knew this wasn't true, I knew they were more than that, and I wanted to bring their story to people who don't know it or have closed their minds to it. And I needed to know what was worth standing up for, what they were willing to die for."
What this involved was re-creating the world of left-wing activists from which the Rosenbergs emerged, entering it through interviews with friends like Osheroff who are still alive and remember a time of hunger and privation, when, as one says, "you had to be dead from the neck up not to feel radical change was necessary." People, Ivy says, who were "idealists with good intentions who sincerely believed the Soviet Union was a better way. It's painful that people continue to dismiss that, and I wanted to reclaim it for them."Now I'm sure that some, perhaps many, American Communists, including those who continued supporting the Soviet Union into the 1950s -- past the Ukrainian famine, past the purges, past the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, past the enslavement of Eastern Europe -- were misguided "idealists with good intentions." True, to remain "misguided idealists," they had to have willfully blinded themselves to the reality of what the Soviets were doing. But human beings have a remarkable capacity to do that sort of thing.
Still, the fact remains that either these "left-wing activists" were evil (i.e., not really misguided idealists, but people who fully supported slaughter and tyranny in the name of Communism) or fools: People who failed to realize that Communism would create more hunger and privation, as well as suppressing freedom and killing people. And at the same time, history shows that many of those who didn't "feel radical change was necessary" (a category that of course includes many New Dealers, conservatives, moderates, and many others) -- who were supposedly "dead from the neck up" -- were smarter, wiser, and more humane.
I don't think I'm asking for much here -- just a bit of embarrassment. "Our friends were dupes of the Soviets, and it turns out many of their opponents were actually smarter and more morally well-grounded than they were, but we should remember that they were just misguided idealists with good intentions" might work. I'm not sure whether it will work for everyone, but it's at least plausible. "You had to be dead from the neck up not to feel radical change was necessary," said when many of the "dead from the neck up" have now been obviously vindicated by history and those who supported pro-Soviet "radical change" have been proven to be fools or worse, is not a strong argument.
Unless, of course, after all that has been discovered about the awful history of the 20th century, you still think that your pro-Soviet buddies were actually right. In which case, I wish you had spent 1937 in the "better way" of the Soviet Union, rather than in the "hunger and privation" of the United States. Or that part of 1937 before you really did become "dead from the neck up."
Eugene Volokh teaches First Amendment law at UCLA School of Law.
I well recall asking my Mom
( the old Sarge who ended up in Intelligence in WWII )
"Mommy, why did they have to die?"
Her answer to a little child remains with me to this day...
"Son, what they did could kill millions of American civillians..."
"Venona" should bring tears of burning shame, btw, to the Meeropol woman. Her parents were liars, spies, and traitors, and they did turn their backs on the fairest and most open-minded nation on earth, to work in the shadows for one of the century's great mass-murderers.
Like killing Stalin and restoring the stolen property of the farmers in Ukraine?
In the Spring of 1943 the US sent to the USSR, via the Lend-Lease Program, tens of tons of nuclear materials - including enriched uranium. [See Richard Rhodes, Dark Sun, Chapter Five, "Super Lend-Lease"].
The head of the Lend-Lease Program at that time was Harry "The Hop" Hopkins - FDR's alter ego. Hopkins is now known from the VENONA Project to have been Soviet "Agent No. 19."
N.B., The TRINITY TEST at Alamogordo, NM was in the Summer of 1945.
Affirmative- she was a WAC Master Sarge in Caspar, Wyoming, and a truck wreck that caused her to forget how to feed herself or walk ( head injury ) kept her from shipping out with the Platoon she commanded to Europe... they moved her over to intelligence after rehab.
She went to her grave saying "I know things I can't tell you about..." Her oath was good to the end.
This info and more was what led Sen. McCarthy to say that Soviet agents infested the highest levels of government. Hollywierd commies still mock him for it.
The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America's Traitors by Herbert Romerstein, Eric Breindel as well as Witness by Whittaker Chambers should be required reading for all high school seniors in the U.S. and a condition of graduation.
Of course, these people never quit and Morton Sobell still denies his part in the conspiracy: My interest in this event is more than academic. I was convicted with Ethel and Julius Rosenberg of "conspiracy to commit espionage" in 1951--a conviction achieved through government-sponsored perjury--and served more than eighteen years in prison. Since I am named twice in the presently released decrypted messages, I am naturally a bit skeptical of pronouncements emanating from our government's law agencies.
May they all rot in hell.
What I would like to see done are movies and tv docu-dramas not only depicting the Rosenber spy ring, but revealing all the Rosenberg sympathizers and fellow travelers in the print media who must have numbered in the thousands.
All moms are in Intelligence!
(Shameless, gratuitous plug for my darling wife and mother of my children .. blessed of the Lord and a member of the vast, and growing, branch of the Stay-at-home, homeschooling, rightly dividing the word of truth conspiracy.)
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