Kathy Shaidle quotes from this passage by Ronald Radosh on the Rosenberg’s guilt. Kathy also highlights a couple of key sentences by Radosh:
Finally, one more point needs to be made. The Rosenberg’s defenders continually fall back on the claim that after all, they were only helping an “American ally.” The implication, of course, is that the Soviets needed what we chose not to give them; they were only helping a mutual victory against fascism when the reactionary American government held back weaponry that was rightfully due the Soviets. After all, the Rosenbergs saw the Soviet Union as the vanguard of anti-fascism, and they helped Stalin as the good anti-fascists they were.
There is one problem with that defense. Julius Rosenberg became a Soviet spy and set up his network before June of 1941; in other words, during the years of the infamous Nazi-Soviet Pact, when Stalin aligned his country with Hitler’s Germany. He saw himself as a Soviet partisan fighting behind enemy lines on behalf of Soviet Communism. He was, as David Greenglass put it to me, a “soldier for Stalin.” Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and their recruits, including Morton Sobell, wanted to do anything necessary for the Soviet cause, before, during and after the war against Hitler. When it came down to it, they were first and foremost Soviet patriots who hid their treachery on phony remonstrations of their love for America.
The Rosenbergs weren’t the only Soviet patriots (a.k.a. useful idiots, as Stalin himself put it) making “phony remonstrations” of their own in 1941.
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