[blind-democracy] Re: Ethel Rosenberg(1915-1953) would be One Hundred Today by Norman Markowitz

  • From: Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Fri, 23 Oct 2015 09:30:00 -0400

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 Rob’s 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 Rosenberg’s sons, and also the late Marshall
“Mike”
Perlin, Morton Sobell’s 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 Rosenberg’s 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 defendant’s appeals. Kaufman’s
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 Rosenberg’s 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 administration’s
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-hunter’s 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. Philby’s 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 Hoover’s 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 Sobell’s
“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 Rosenberg’s 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. Truman’s 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 didn’t 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 Party’s 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 Lincoln’s 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 Rosenberg’s
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
Roosevelt’s 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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• 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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