Nonsense? It is a review of the book Double Lives: Spies and Writers in the Secret Soviet War of Ideas Against the West, by Stephen Koch. With whom do you disagree? Koch or the reviewer, Mark Y. Herring?
Herring also reviewedStalin's apologist : Walter Duranty, the New York Times man in Moscow, by S.J. Taylor. I thought that book quite good. Is there something about Herring or these two books I should know but don't?
My reply was on topic. The Rosenbergs were not alone. There was an entire nest of traitors which worked for the Soviet Union from 1920 until the end of the Cold War.
The U.S. Senate has confirmed this to be true.
REPORT OF THE COMMISSION ON PROTECTING AND REDUCING GOVERNMENT SECRECY (1997). Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Chairman:
(John) Reed was a Soviet agent. On January 22, 1920, he received from the Comintern gold, jewels, and other valuables worth 1,008,000 rubles for Party work in the United States. (Note: over $1 million US)The United States Government did not know this. It has only just been discovered in Soviet archives . . .The "everybody does it" excuse doesn't work. All those you claim on the right who defended despots ended up fighting both communism and fascism. They same isn't true on the left. Many on the left defended Hitler when he was allied with Stalin and only became pro-war after the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union. There are literally hundreds of prominent left wingers one can name who aided and abetted the Soviet Union and other communist regimes. Look at Robert Scheer today. A man who thought Kim Il Sung was a hero of the people now is a national columnist.Tom Wicker saw no moral difference, he said, between Pol Pot and Lon Nol. Noam Chomsky, a denyer of the Cambodian Holocaust, gets crowd wherever he goes. Ed Anser and Mike Farrell, supporters of Soviet client states in Central America, are icons of the left. Barbara Lee, who sat on a committee created by the Communist Party USA, is a member of congress.For the next seven decades the United States Government would be the object of a sustained Soviet campaign of infiltration and subversion. There would be, as with Great Britain, a measure of success among elites, but in the pattern now already seen, an ethnic factor would be the most prominent.
In the beginning, most American Communists would be Russians. The Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) was organized at Moscow’s behest in 1921, merging Reed’s Communist Labor Party with the Communist Party of America, organized by a former socialist, Midwesterner Charles Emil Ruthenberg. The membership was not large and was overwhelmingly foreign-born . . .more
From IMDB
Reds (1981)
Writing has been the only escape of Louise Bryant until she goes to a lecture one night in 1912 and is mesmerized by a radical journalist, John Reed. She leaves her husband and goes to Greenwich Village with Reed where she keeps writing, covering the 1913 Armory Show of post-impressionist paintings from Europe. Reed is so wrapped up in changing the world that Louise leaves him for awhile and stays with a playwright, Eugene O'Neill. She returns to Reed. He goes to Russia and covers the 1917 Revolution. She never forgets Reed. the only American to be buried next to the Kremlin wall.
Summary written by Dale O'Connor {daleoc@interaccess.com}
This movie tells the true story of John Reed, a radical American journalist around the time of World War I. He soon meets Louise Bryant, a respectable married woman, who dumps her husband for Reed and becomes an important feminist and radical in her own right. After involvement with labor and political disputes in the US, they go to Russia in time for the October Revolution in 1917, when the Communists siezed power. Inspired, they return to the US, hoping to lead a similar revolution. A particularly fascinating aspect of the movie is the inclusion of interviews with "witnesses", the real-life surviving participants in the events of the movie.
Summary written by Reid Gagle
So...we had a movie glorifying a traitor to the United States. Financed by Warren Beatty and the other Hollywood commies. Like I said, we need Senator McCarthy again. He was right.
Arthur Miller and Norman Mailer both attended this pro-Stalin pep rally:
A Conference in New York
In March 1949, New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel played host to one of the strangest gatherings in American history. Less than four years after Allied troops had liberated Hitler's concentration camps, 800 prominent literary and artistic figures congregated in the Waldorf to call for peace at any price with Stalin, whose own gulag had just been restocked with victims of his latest purge. Americans, including Lillian Hellman, Aaron Copland, Arthur Miller, and a young Norman Mailer, joined with European and Soviet delegates to repudiate "US warmongering." Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich told the delegates that "a small clique of hatemongers" was preparing a global conflagration; he urged progressive artists to struggle against the new "Fascists'' who were seeking world domination. American panelists echoed the Russian composer's fear of a new conflict. Playwright Clifford Odets denounced the ``enemies of Man'' and claimed the United States had been agitated into ``a state of holy terror'' by fraudulent reports of Soviet aggression; composer Copland declared "the present policies of the American Government will lead inevitably into a third world war."
The Waldorf conference marked another step in the Communist Information Bureau's (Cominform) campaign to shape Western opinion. A series of Soviet-sponsored cultural conferences beginning in September 1948 called for world peace and denounced the policies of the Truman administration. The conference at the Waldorf-Astoria, however, was the first to convene in a Western country and, not coincidentally, was also the first to meet organized and articulate opposition.
The Cominform could hardly have picked a riskier place than New York City to stage a Stalinist peace conference. New York's large ethnic neighborhoods were filled with refugees from Communism, and its campuses and numerous cultural and political journals employed hundreds of politically left-leaning men and women who had fought in the ideological struggles over Stalinism that divided American labor unions, college faculties, and cultural organizations before World War II.
Stealing the Show
A handful of liberal and socialist writers, led by philosophy professor Sydney Hook, saw their chance to steal a little of the publicity expected for the Waldorf peace conference. A fierce ex-Communist himself, Hook was then teaching at New York University and editing a socialist magazine called The New Leader. Ten years earlier he and his mentor John Dewey had founded a controversial group called the Committee for Cultural Freedom, which attacked both Communism and Nazism. He now organized a similar committee to harass the peace conference in the Waldorf-Astoria.
To give her due credit Mary McCarthy also attended Sidney Hook's contra-conference.
The topic is the guilt of the Rosenbergs and the details of their trial and conviction. I guess you can say Willi Munzenberg has relevance. Pretty tenuous though. Every major, and many minor, governments spy on as many of their allies, enemies, competitors and possible competitors as they can.
All those you claim on the right who defended despots ended up fighting both communism and fascism. They same isn't true on the left. Many on the left defended Hitler when he was allied with Stalin and only became pro-war after the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union.
Wrong. Politics continued right up to the attack on Pearl Harbor. After that it became much more dangerous to voice anti-American sentiment of any kind and those who felt or thought that way went underground.
Look at Robert Scheer today
This is really off topic.