First things first, the living taking precedence over those long dead, I have an enormous amount of respect for the work of Michael and Robert Meeropol, especially concerning capital punishment and the survivors of those executed. State murder is one of the greatest venues of governmental injustice wherever it's found and one of the pillars that prop up every fascist and dictatorial government in the world. I have the greatest respect for their work on that issue.
I respect their facing the fact that their father, Julius Rosenberg, was a spy for the Soviet Union during WWII, though I'm not versed enough in the recently revealed details to know if all of their conclusions are correct or are not. I also believe that the execution of their parents was a travesty after an abysmally illegitimate trial with both the prosecutor and judge open to political influences that should constitute some of the most serious of possible crimes. I don't know what to think of Ethel Rosenberg except that she, like her husband, should never have been executed. With what is known about the political character of their trial, their convictions would have been thrown out in any justice system that deserves to be called that. I think Greenglass was a rat, at the very least.
That said, after it was revealed by Morton Sobell that Julius Rosenberg and he were spies and other sources corroborated that, I was enraged at the industry dedicated to maintaining the lie that the Rosenbergs were entirely innocent of the charge which has been a feature of the left for my entire life. As with the effort to turn the "MIAs" in the Vietnam war into a vulgarly political and profit making venture, I would imagine that some rump branch of that industry is still up and running and probably collecting money from those true believers who hold that long extinguished torch. Trading in the dead Rosenbergs has been quite the thing. It is a big deal that "the left" got that one wrong, it discredits the points about the horrible trial, the political interference in the judicial arm of government and, most seriously, against the death penalty. I would like to know if having to admit that their father was the spy he was convicted of being has had a negative effect on the most important work the Meeropol brothers are involved in, it shouldn't but I would suspect it might.
I certainly don't hold people involved in their legal defense responsible for that, in so far as I know it. It's their job to represent their clients, it is their job to protest the unjust and corrupt trial and their judicially sanctioned murder. They have that right, their children did and do. Other people unconnected to them and the case, not so much.
----------
Let me break this to you, political dissidence is an inevitably disadvantaged position. Opposing those with entrenched or even just established power is a matter of David and Goliath and David is going to need more than three pebbles and a sling to take down The Man. Frequently, David is more likely to find himself in one than wielding one. That is especially the case for us who are opposed to the corporate state which the mass media serves and, most discouragingly of all, in this post literate age of electronic mass media. Electronic mass media will always serve the corporate establishment unless they are forced to serve the public interest instead. That was what the history of the incompletely successful public service regime of the 1920s through 1970s proved. But I talked about that last week. One thing you can always count on with the corporate media is that they will use everything they can to destroy even their mildest of possible opponents. You can take another example from history, the effort to destroy the Clintons while he was in office. One scandal after another was cooked up out of the skimpiest of ingredients and when those weren't available the media made it up out of nothing on the basis of "it is being said". I would like people to consider what Brack Obama learned from being a witness to the war against the Clintons and what that might have contributed to his aggravating political impotence and willingness to sell out his most devoted supporters. And what that also will teach future Democratic politicians. And what even we non-politicians must conclude from it. What went for Bill and Hillary goes so much more for the real dissidents, the real left.
The use of the Rosenberg case by the right to paint the entire left with supporting Soviet espionage was certainly not useful to the left. The fundraising and propaganda use of them, long dead, didn't have any beneficial effects that I'm aware of. The rehashing of it into the past decade, when it was clear that their defense against the most serious charges was a lie, certainly didn't do us any good. That seems to be waning as those who had an illegitimate stake in them die off. But there are other causes célèbres that have potential to do even more damage if we hand the means of discrediting the left to a media that is already out to destroy us and our political possibilities.
Another piece of bad news I've got for you is that the majority of the American People are not true believing members of the left and they are far more than able to vote in our complete adversaries. Or what has the past forty-five years been about, anyway. The news isn't all bad, though. They are with the real left on a number of issues, especially on those which have a real, practical ability to improve their lives, the lives of those close to them and, by extension their country. But there are a number of issues on which they are anything from skeptical about to being definitely opposed to. One of the things they will be most opposed to is the favoring of a foreign government over that of the United States. They get to vote on the government here, they don't get to elsewhere and they know in many countries no one gets a real choice in the government they get. If they can disapprove of the choice of the American People, they can really disapprove of the "choice" in other countries. The activities of "the left" in the past, especially such fixtures in "the left" as the Communist Party which has been discredited as a puppet of the Soviet government, will stick to us unless we specifically and effectively unstick it. It is that sticky stuff I sense being applied in the Snowden-Greenwald cult. And the story which is being sold by that cult is entirely more implausible than the one sold by the Rosenberg industry. The Chinese and Russian governments whose respect for privacy and fair play we are being required to trust more than that of the Obama administration, are about as unworthy of trust as any governments which have ever existed. They have combined the worst of one-party dictatorships with the worst of corporate despotism, they are engaged in as close to the total suppression of dissidents as any countries in the world are. Any narrative that depends on their not squeezing the complete contents of Snowden's laptops out of him is not credible, the assertion that Snowden is not either a massive idiot or an independent espiaonage agent on the make is not sustainable. His exposure will not take decades, the fall of the Soviet bloc and freedom of information acts being passed. The Snowden-Greenwald narrative is not credible on its face and not many seem to be questioning it very much.
That is only why I believe this is about as dangerous a situation for the real left as we've faced in more than 60 years. The real left is disadvantaged by those things resulting from our opposition to an entrenched, corporate establishment with a total ability to control the media. And when I say the left is endangered by being suckered by this cult, I mean that our issues are in danger of never being made law and put into effect. One of those is the real, effective civilian control of intelligence agencies, the police and the military, for only that thing most germane to the topic of this post. We're already failing quite sufficiently to make political change. We don't need to have a couple of libertarians and their deluded supporters loading as we are falling.
No comments:
Post a Comment