No, I didn't bother looking to see if the Left Forum has, finally, decided to let go of claiming that the Rosenbergs or even just Ethel got framed. Even their sons admit that Julius was the Stalin spy he was accused of being and if anyone was to blame for Ethel being unjustly framed for something she didn't do, it was him and, possibly, higher-ups in the Communist establishment who ordered them to not talk. As far as I'm concerned, he and quite possibly she have the same moral status as spies for Hitler or Hirohito. The extent to which she is responsible for her end is unknowable unless we know what she knew and there isn't any way to know that unless direct evidence of that surfaces and I wouldn't even care about it then. There are numerable cases of unjustly convicted, unjustly imprisoned and unjustly executed people that don't get any notice. I'd rather concentrate on more recent ones of those.
But just think of all of the theatrical wailing and moaning and lying and posing over those deaths - in the past, just about all of it now discredited by the lie that they were both framed when we now know that was a lie in at least his case. I think we've given the first couple of atomic spying more than enough of our time. There's no one left to hold accountable now that her brother is dead. And I don't care.
Update: We've been through this before. I am absolutely opposed to capital punishment, the Rosenbergs shouldn't have been executed. Neither should have Troy Davis, Claude Jones, George Stinney Jr, . . . who, unlike at least Julius Rosenberg and not beyond question Ethel Rosenberg, were not guilty of the crimes they were convicted and murdered by the state for. I wonder if any of those names were ever mentioned at any Left Forum.
I will also mention that, though it's certainly true that Judge Kaufman was hardly admirable in his conduct of the case and Roy Cohn was scum, the crimes the Rosenbergs were convicted of were done on behalf of the Stalin regime in the 1940s, well after his infamous show trials were not only known in the West, they were supported by the Communist Party that Julius Rosenberg and, as I recall, Ethel Rosenberg belonged to, many a Communist and "lefty" signed petitions of support for Stalin's show trials conducted by people who made Kaufman's conduct of the trial look like justice. If the Rosenbergs had been put on trial in their idea of a worker's paradise and been totally and even obviously innocent, they'd have been convicted - if there were even a trial, which isn't anything like certain - and shot or tortured to death to get them to give up names. It would have probably been part of a program to set off a pogrom which, in fact, Stalin was starting against Jews during the very years that the Rosenbergs were on trial.
The repeated use of the 5th Amendment by the Rosenbergs during their questioning and trial is an even sharper contrast to "justice" under the dictator Julius worked for along with, certainly Ethel Rosenberg's brother and, I wouldn't be surprised, she did. I doubt the things that would have happened right under her nose would not have been known to her.
As to the claim that Judge Irving Kaufman was corrupt, that is certainly open to debate. I think he conducted this trail badly and I believe he had career motives in doing that. Though, as it happened, that worked against his greatest desire, to be appointed to the Supreme Court.
I will note that, appointed to his seat by Truman and after the Rosenberg case he was nominated by President Kennedy to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and confirmed by the Democratically controlled Senate in 1961. He was hardly a hard right winger. Some of his decisions are seen as progressive.
He was the trial judge in the case that led to the decision in Irving Berlin et al. v. E.C. Publications, Inc, that established the right of MAD magazine and others to create parodies of pop songs.
He was part of the three-judge panel that prevented the Nixon administration from deporting John Lennon, highly critical of the government for using the law to try to silence criticism of it.
He helped establish the right of those tortured elsewhere to sue in American courts in the Filártiga v. Peña-Irala case.
He greatly expanded the right to plead innocent by reason of insanity in the case, United States v. Freeman, which probably saved more than a few lives.
I can't say that I greatly admire Irving Kaufman, but the charge that he was corrupt is probably an exaggeration. They certainly didn't think so in the Kennedy administration and the Senate in 1961. I doubt I'd have liked him but as judges go, he was far from the worst.
The idea that the Rosenbergs were victims of antisemitism is ludicrous, considering both Kaufman and Cohn were Jewish and especially considering the fact that Julius Rosenberg was certainly guilty of the crime he was convicted of and Ethel certainly didn't help herself by refusing to testify honestly as to what she knew. As I said, considering who it was they and their close associates were supporting, Stalin, I'm not inclined to feel all that sorry for them. Though, as I said, neither of them should have been executed. And there were lots of other people put to death in 1953, none of whom should have been executed, none of whom I would imagine, the Left Forum poured over decades after they were killed by the state. And lots since then. Lots of them still on death row, some estimates as high as 4% of those are totally innocent. I'd rather concentrate on preventing their executions than rehashing the old lies of the old left about those two.
Update 2: The accusation that I fail to care, sufficiently, for the execution of a "commie woman" is funny because I'm absolutely certain that the hero of the Communist Party of the United States during those years, Stalin, killed hundreds and hundreds of times more Communists than were executed in the United States, many of them as Stalin liquidated just about all of his surviving fellow revolutionaries in those show trials that so many heroes of the Communist friendly left supported with their signatures on those petitions I mention above. We've been through that, too, as I pointed out the poseur of the Red Scare era, Lillian Hellman and her boyfriend, Daschel Hammett did. I don't have any respect for people who made excuses for democidalist killers in the same league with Hitler and Mao. They are the moral equal of the supporters of Hitler.
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