The Delusional Believers in the Rosenbergs’ Innocence Continue to Deny the Truth
The sons of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, Michael and Robert Meeropol and their supporters, seem unable to give up the ghost believing in their parents’ essential innocence. Perhaps their own trauma serves as an excuse for their behavior, but it does not explain the behavior of those who continue to try and keep the old Communist cause of the Rosenbergs’ innocence alive.
So their delusional behavior continues to this day. As each anniversary of the couple’s execution approaches, the die-hard believers in their innocence hold a memorial meeting in New York City. This year, the event takes place at NYU’s Tamiment Center, a venue which as I have pointed out many times, serves as the single center for celebrating the past of the American Communists and their fellow-travelers.
As their announcement reveals, the major speaker will be the Rosenbergs’ youngest son Robert, who will present what he calls “the eulogy I was unable to give,” since at the time of their death, he was only about five years old. The meeting will also try to show the relationship between the spy trials of the 50′s and the war on terror today, since their argument will be that in both cases, the excuse was a phony scare set up by the “ruling class” in order to institute a wave of repression. And they will show a screening of a reading of the Rosenbergs’ “Death House Letters” by the late Howard Zinn and the former African-American Communist Party leader and hero of the 60′s New Left, Angela Davis.
I mention all this because on June 22, a truly impartial and important conference on “The Rosenberg Case, Soviet Espionage and the Cold War,” will take place beginning at 9 a.m. at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. As you look at the schedule and the speakers, you can immediately see that the sponsors have invited a prestigious group of scholars who have worked on the issue of Soviet espionage, and a group whose participants do not all see things the same way.
Let me reproduce one panel, the one on which I will participate, as a good example:
PANEL 2, 11:00 PM to 12:45 PM
“The Rosenberg Case and the Historiography of Soviet Espionage in America”
Chair: Max Holland, Editor, Washington Decoded
Panel:
Bruce Craig, Assistant Professor of History, University of Prince Edward Island
John Earl Haynes, Modern Political Historian, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress and Harvey Klehr, Professor of Political Science, Emory University
Ronald Radosh, Adjunct Senior Fellow, The Hudson Institute, and Professor of History Emeritus, CUNY
Ellen Schrecker, Professor of History, Yeshiva University
Aside from myself, Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, the latter two who have written Spies:The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, the definitive book about Soviet espionage, the other members of the panel are Bruce Craig and Ellen Schrecker, both of whom do not share our point of view. Indeed, Schrecker has argued in many places that the American agents of Stalin had a loyalty to a higher authority than their own country, and represented a universalist loyalty to the cause of a progressive future for humanity, and hence were victims of American repression, despite their actions. At the conference, we intend to have a civil but sharp exchange of views, in which we can each confront our opposites and hence let the audience who listens judge for themselves who are correct about the meaning of Soviet espionage for America.
It is clear, however, that those in charge of waging the campaign for the couple’s innocence, are not willing to participate. We invited both Miriam Schneir, who with her late husband, wrote the most influential book arguing the case for their frame-up, and Michael Meeropol, the Rosenbergs’ eldest son. Both declined to attend. Others invited who refused to come include the noted Columbia University historian Eric Foner, who although he has written about the case many times and even wrote an introduction to the Meeropol’s own book, said he would not attend because he doesn’t consider himself an expert on the case. That did not stop him in the past from writing that they were innocent victims of a frame-up, and in particular regularly attacking my own book, The Rosenberg File, as a fraud.
Obviously, the most outspoken partisans like Miriam Schneir and Eric Foner are afraid to debate their own positions in public, obviously because they know they would be intellectually defeated, and want to be spared the embarrassment. Schneir and Michael Meeropol in particular are advocates for a cause- that of reopening the case- as if there is any doubt about the Rosenberg’s actions at this late date. They prefer to only speak in the intellectual cocoon of their own New York City left-wing circles, where they will be continually celebrated, honored and catered to, as if they had reason and evidence on their own side.
Many years ago, after publication of The Rosenberg File in 1983, when the left-wing went on an assault against the book, the most interesting and revealing comment came from the late head of the American Communist Party, Gus Hall. In an official statement of the CPUSA condemning the book, Hall referred to the Rosenbergs as “the sacred couple,” whom he accused my co-author Joyce Milton and I of defaming their memory.
That give-away term, “the sacred couple,” made it clear that for the Communists, the innocence of the Rosenbergs was a religious cause, not simply a political one. Like Communism itself, the claim of innocence was part of the religious faith they adhered to. That was over 25 years ago, but yet today, the faith of the deluded deniers continues to live on.
For those who wish to do their part in returning sanity to academia, I urge those of you in the D.C. area to consider attending on June 22nd. Admission is free, and the event is open to the public. Just arrive early to make sure you can get a seat.
I think I mentioned this a couple of weeks ago in another post, but I was at the new Museum of American Jewish History in Philly and on their wall of fame was a portrait of Ethel Rosenberg (there was also an exhibit devoted to the case, and it did its best to obfuscate their guilt with the veneer of “McCarthyism,” witch-hunts and anti-semitism.
I suppose I should be thankful that they at least left off Julius’ portrait from the aforementioned wall. The whole display was disgusting and completely wrong.
This is a microcosm of America today.
A denial of the truth in order to mask the intention of the left of tearing down the fabric of this society.
There are fools who consider themselves “centrist” who think that pointing at Soros, Zinn, Chomsky, and their ilk and suggesting that there is an intentional breakdown of this land of ours underfoot….is “going off the deep end”.
There IS a line of demarcation, where an exchange of ideas…CAN be had, and discussed out in the open air.
That is NOT what is now…or has EVER happened with the far left’s infusion of class, racial, and gender warfare. I don’t give a Tinker’s dam what it is called…small c communism, Trotskyite, whatever. It INTENDS to break America’s back (and more and more frequently, Israel’s) through means of lies, distortion,, duplicity and fraud.
It has sunk its rabid teeth into the flesh of America and most recently has hit bone.
It has destroyed the information stream. It has written a vicious revisionist history, filled with slander. And it has its gun sights set on America and Israel.
I have neither the patience nor the inclination to give these despicable cretins the credibility of treating their arguments as having the slightest basis in fact, truth or decency. If they ever grew a conscience or the first seedling of scruples, perhaps one could debate them. But one cannot debate a sniveling liar. One can only point at the lies and expose them.
The far left are life’s losers. And being anywhere within the same breathing space is to risk the diseased air they exhale.
“Indeed, Schrecker has argued in many places that the American agents of Stalin had a loyalty to a higher authority than their own country, and represented a universalist loyalty to the cause of a progressive future for humanity, and hence were victims of American repression, despite their actions.”
How do you exchange views with someone who thinks this way, given what Soviet conditions were known to be at the time that the Rosenbergs were spying?
I am simply aghast at this example of wishful thinking.
At least ask her to define a “progressive future for humanity”, because I am at sea.
Regarding the obvious emotional trauma of the Rosenberg brothers–their parents, most especially their mother, did this to them. Julius and Ethel FREELY chose to ruin the lives and emotional well-being of their sons. All for the greater glory of the Communist Party.
Thanks, Mom
I might go just so as to ask how russian spying differs from modern chinese spying. as well, how was the relationship between the NSA and hoover different/similiar to the relationship between hoover & McCarthy
Dupes.
6. Sharpshooter
Dupes.
No, just insane. They live in a world of fantasy, while ignoring historical reality.
People like Schrecker makes me vomit. I really would like to introduce him to some eastern European friends of mine, whose families has been decimated by the Rosembergs’ progressive heroes. But this should happen before the immense crowd of people – the heirs of the INNOCENTS starved, killed, deported, humiliated – who have actually felt the misery inflicted upon whole countries by the “higher authority of the progressive future”.
I vaguely knew who Eric Foner was, for a long time. His chief claim to fame is that he wrote the principle text on the Reconstruction in the South after the Civil War. I’ve got a copy of it somewhere, never got around to it (I have thousands of books I’ve never read). Anyway, some time ago I picked up a copy of another book Foner wrote called “Who Owns History?” It’s a collection of essays he wrote over the years. One essay he wrote recounts a conversation he had with Gabor Borritt, another Civil War-era historian who’s Hungarian by birth, and who fled that country in the aftermath of the 1956 uprising, having participated in the restistance as a youngster. Borritt mentioned, in passing, that he’d grown up in a totalitarian country where Democracy was suppressed and dissidence from the party line could get you thrown in jail. Foner, who grew up here and whose father was fired from Columbia (where he was a professor) said “Me too.” As if the U.S. even during the McCarthy era could be equated with life behind the Iron Curtain.
So you understand I take what he says with a shaker of salt. Kruschev, in the unexpurgated edition of his autobiography published during the Glasnost era, *thanked* the Rosenburgs for helping the U.S.S.R. develop the bomb. They were guilty.
As for the clown arguing that the Cold War spies were acting in the greater good, we’re talking about the Stalin era here. Outside of Hitler and maybe Mao, can anyone think of a leader in the 20th Century more evil? Giving him the bomb was good in some way? You have to be severely delusional to see things that way.