Last Call For This Topic, Too

Perhaps the many movies and PBS shows they've done about the Rosenberg case never included the fact that many, perhaps most of the people involved in their prosecution and execution were Jewish but that is a fact.  It is a fact that far from being a powerless and persecuted minority in New York State, Jews, like every other majority white ethnic group which faced some discrimination, when compared to people who aren't white, had a relatively discrimination-free path to gaining an education, entry into the professions and, with the benefits that come to white people through their white skin and with voting power, achieved political and legal power.

Roy Cohn is an interesting example because he was a gay man - a group which was, white or not, subject to massive discrimination and attack.  He was known to be gay, as can be heard in the recordings of the Army McCarthy hearings in 1954 when Joseph Welch  certainly alluded to Cohn's sexual orientation, making it clear that he would expose him explicitly if he got rough.  For that, Cohn could have suffered the kind of penalty he would not have for being Jewish.  Nevertheless Cohn's path to power and money was made smooth by the fact that his father, Albert C. Cohn, was made a member of the New York Supreme Court in 1929.  He was elevated to the higher court by New York governor Herbert Henry Lehman, who was also Jewish, in 1937.  The idea that Jews were the victims of the sort of discrimination claimed at that time is far fetched.

I will admit that as a totally amoral and willing tool of the super-rich and super-powerful, Roy Cohn's career benefited enormously from his lack of morals and shame.  But that's no different from any lawyer for organized criminals.  If a lack of morals can be considered a talent, he had it. 

The contention that the Rosenbergs were the victims of antisemitism is just another layer of myth spread over them to turn them into super-martyrs by Communists and the kind of lefties who were prepared to be duped by that effort mounted primarily through the history-twisting world of theater and movies.   And you know the golden rule of Hollywood, if you made gold out of something, do a remake.  

We now know that they weren't victims of anything on the basis of innocence though it is certainly arguable that it is possible, though hardly certain that Ethel Rosenberg was overcharged and, by the laws of the time, over-sentenced, something her husband was in the strongest  position of anyone in the world to do something about.  

What they were were victims of the death penalty system, but no more so than anyone who was murdered by the state for any other crime.  But they don't write books and plays, movies, TV shows, magazine articles, etc. about even those known to be innocent, at least not in the numbers that they've made them about the Rosenbergs. You have to wonder why that is, especially those many, many innocent victims of the death penalty who weren't white and middle-class with jobs that allowed them to have clean fingernails.  

Now, hasn't this been fun, kicking over the phonied up history of this case that is the stock and trade of such a big part of for-profit leftyism.   I wonder if they'll rehash it for the fourth decade and counting at that phony fun fair of futility, the Left Forum, this year. 

But I'm going to ignore your taunts and concentrate on encouraging the exposure of the Putin Regime's attempt to hijack our government and destroy democracy here and elsewhere for his crime family's benefit.   It's remarkably resonant with Stalin's attempts to do that which the Rosenbergs and the other American Communists were a part of.   I find what we can learn about the enduring similarities between Communists and white-supremacist-fascism and their usefulness to Republican-fascism interesting.   

Egalitarian democracy, in all its pedestrian glory and metaphysical, non-scientific foundations, is the real alternative to fascism and its cousins, it's no surprise that Putin wants to see it end.  He's no different from Stalin, just less pretentious in his criminality.   A totalitarian despot for the TV era.

Update:  Oh, no, on the contrary.  The Communists and other Marxists and such associated jerks as anarchists have done enormous damage to the United States.  But it is in their role in associating themselves with the genuine American left and so discrediting the egalitarian-democratic left, weakening the real left, disempowering the American left, distracting it from its real obligations and goals.  One of the most effective and, so, worst ways they did damage to the American left is through duping the democratic left into feeling sorry for them and championing them and a raft of stupid positions that were either stupid or counter-productive.

It is in the egalitarian-democratic left, traditional American liberalism being damaged, discredited and disempowered by the Communists that their real damage to the United States came, not through idiotic bumbling attempts at old-fashioned espionage and their absurd Socialist-realist-Eastern-European agit-prop bull shit.

It's Stalin's ideological grandson, Putin, who has managed to do what he did to us and a lot of that was done through the tools handed to him by the dupes in such groups as the ACLU and the "free speech" industry.  Those. American trash TV and computer technology did what Stalin could never have done.

If liberals had sensibly rejected Marxism and anarchism and realized they were the enemies of egalitarian democracy from the start, we'd have a far, far better country right now.

Update 2:  If traditional American style equality and democracy liberals were damaged by their getting suckered by the Marxists, socialism was pretty much entirely trashed by the same thing.  We can't even start to realistically hope for a restoration of socialism, which must be egalitarian-democratic if it is to exist as a legitimate entity, until every aspect of the terminal cancer of dialectical materialism is removed from it.   Especially the materialism of it.  Materialism is fatal to egalitarian democracy.

Personally, as a non-anti-Marxist socialist, I suspect the old ideas of socialism will need to give way to an entirely new framing of economic justice and democracy.  The old framing was too easily hijacked.