May 1, 2017 05:17 AM
(This post was last modified: May 1, 2017 06:31 AM by C C.)
PART ONE: The horrible irony
Since there were even Soviet Jews who found it difficult to believe that the Stalin regime was antisemitic and practicing mass-murder... Then their concurrent counterparts in America (only those who were communists) might be forgiven for refusing to likewise believe the "rumors". Some issuing hosannas to Josef and the USSR right up until the mid 1950s.
McCarthyism and the Second Red Scare
http://americanhistory.oxfordre.com/view...329175-e-6
EXCERPT: [...] 1956, [...] Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev officially acknowledged what many American Communists had refused to believe: that Stalin had been responsible for the death of millions in forced labor camps and in executions of political rivals. After these revelations, the CPUSA [American Communist Party] faded into insignificance.
As the historian Ellen Schrecker has observed, American Communists were neither devils nor saints. The party’s secretiveness, its authoritarian internal structure, and the loyalty of its leaders to the Kremlin were fundamental flaws that help explain why and how it was demonized. On the other hand, most American Communists were idealists attracted by the party’s militance against various forms of social injustice. The party was a dynamic part of the broader Left that in the 1930s and 1940s advanced the causes of labor, minority rights, and feminism.
Stalin and antisemitism: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalin_and_antisemitism
Jews in Radical Politics
http://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/...-politics/
EXCERPT: [...] So it was, during these years of communism’s resurgence, that the Jewish component surfaced even more vividly than it had a decade earlier, in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution. By now, New York accounted for about one-fifth of the party’s national membership, and that one-fifth was predominantly Jewish. All the senior editors of the Daily Worker were Jews. If the party failed to make headway in the ILGWU or the Amalgamated (well immunized by the events of the 1920s), it successfully infiltrated white-collar unions, with their extensive Jewish membership of teachers, social workers, office workers, government employees, and retail clerks. It organized a special section to penetrate Jewish community centers, Jewish federations, national Jewish organizations. The West Coast office of the American Jewish Congress was almost entirely compromised by fellow travelers. At the annual conference of the Federation of Jewish Social Welfare Agencies in 1932, the much-respected chairman, Jacob Billikopf, was nearly unseated in favor of a hard-core Communist. In 1934, radicals in the Jewish Social Workers Association defected to form the Association of Practitioners in Jewish Social Agencies–a Communist front.
Communism in the United States
https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/com...ted-states
EXCERPT: [...] Many of these younger radicals aligned themselves with communism during the Great Depression and World War II, the heyday of both the Communist Party and Jewish women’s involvement in its work. The party swelled from just under ten thousand members in 1929 to about forty thousand in 1936 and to eighty-three thousand in 1943. Female membership expanded from about 15 percent in the early 1930s to 30 or 40 percent at the end of the decade and to about 46 percent in 1943. CP historians estimate, moreover, that almost half of the party’s membership was Jewish in the 1930s and 1940s, and that approximately 100,000 Jews passed through the party in those decades of high member turnover. It seems safe to say, then, that Jewish women were one of the CP’s largest sectors during the Depression and war years; and for each who was a “card-carrying” communist, there were several who took part in party-led mass organizations but did not belong to the party itself.
Why couldn’t Soviet Jews see the dictator--who died 60 years ago--for the anti-Semitic murderer that he was?
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and...ins-purges
EXCERPT: Stalin’s increasingly hysterical rants against “Jewish nationalists” in the years following the creation of Israel in 1948—passed the Kesselmans by. When the Pravda story appeared on Jan. 13, 1953, the couple had little sense of being in the midst of a fevered anti-Semitic campaign that abruptly ended with the dictator’s death two months later.
“It didn’t seem like another Beilis,” said Robert, referring to the 1913 trial of a Kiev Jew, Mendel Beilis, who was falsely accused of murdering a young Ukrainian boy before being acquitted in one of the last trials based on the notorious “blood libel” to reach a courtroom. “I thought it was going to be like the 1937 purge, when Jews were not particularly singled out.”
Robert paused to gather his thoughts. “Also, you have to remember that Jews were strongly represented in the medical profession,” he added, “so I thought that the Jewish origins of the majority of the accused was just a reflection of our disproportionate numbers.”
***
Other historical and psychological associations helped to delay the realization among Jews like the Kesselmans that anti-Semitism was becoming state doctrine in the Soviet Union. To begin with, Stalin’s coterie included a fair number of Jews. Among them were Lev Mekhlis, the editor of Pravda, and Solomon Milshtein, who, in his capacity as the boss of the Soviet railway system, oversaw the mass deportation of hundreds of thousands of prisoners to the gulags. And with memories of World War II still fresh, many Jews still believed that Stalin was their savior. In their minds, anti-Semitism was a dogma rooted in racist pseudoscience, indelibly linked to the Nazi atrocities. The notion that it might adapt to Soviet conditions seemed unthinkable.
PART TWO: The spies
No matter how many movie and television caricatures of McCarthy-like characters were dispensed over the decades to rightfully mock that extremist brand of witch-hunting... Unfortunately it can't change the history of there actually having been a plethora of card-carriers who did betray secrets to their adopted Motherland.
Espionage and the Manhattan Project
https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-p...ionage.htm
EXCERPT: David Greenglass was an Army machinist, and in the summer of 1944 he was briefly assigned to Oak Ridge. After a few weeks, he was transferred to Los Alamos, where he worked on implosion as a member of the Special Engineering Detachment. Using his wife Ruth as the conduit, Greenglass soon began funneling information regarding the atomic bomb to his brother-in-law, Julius Rosenberg, who then turned it over to Soviet intelligence. As Greenglass later explained, "I was young, stupid, and immature, but I was a good Communist."
Theodore Hall
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Hall
EXCERPT: Theodore Alvin Hall was an American physicist and an atomic spy for the Soviet Union, who, during his work on US efforts to develop the first and second atomic bombs during World War II (the Manhattan Project), gave a detailed description of the "Fat Man" plutonium bomb, and of several processes for purifying plutonium, to Soviet intelligence. His brother, Edward Hall, was a rocket scientist who worked on ICBMs for the United States government.
Morris Cohen
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_Cohen_(spy)
EXCERPT: Morris Cohen, also known in Britain by his alias Peter Kroger, was an 20th-Century American convicted of espionage for the Soviet Union. His wife Lona was also an agent. Morris Cohen was born in Harlem, New York. His father came from an area near Kiev in present-day Ukraine. His mother came from Vilnius in present-day Lithuania.
Case closed: The Rosenbergs were Soviet spies
http://www.latimes.com/la-oe-radosh17-20...story.html
EXCERPT: It was a stunning admission; Sobell, now 91 years old, had adamantly maintained his innocence for more than half a century. After his comments were published, even the Rosenbergs' children, Robert and Michael Meeropol, were left with little hope to hang on to -- and this week, in comments unlike any they've made previously, the brothers acknowledged having reached the difficult conclusion that their father was, indeed, a spy. "I don't have any reason to doubt Morty," Michael Meeropol told Sam Roberts of the New York Times.
With these latest events, the end has arrived for the legions of the American left wing that have argued relentlessly for more than half a century that the Rosenbergs were victims, framed by a hostile, fear-mongering U.S. government. Since the couple's trial, the left has portrayed them as martyrs for civil liberties, righteous dissenters whose chief crime was to express their constitutionally protected political beliefs. In the end, the left has argued, the two communists were put to death not for spying but for their unpopular opinions, at a time when the Truman and Eisenhower administrations were seeking to stem opposition to their anti-Soviet foreign policy during the Cold War.
- - - - - - -
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg: "There is a consensus among historians that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were guilty, but their trial was marred by clear judicial and legal improprieties and they should not have been executed. Distilling this consensus, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz wrote that the Rosenbergs were 'guilty – and framed'."
Verona Project
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venona_project
EXCERPT: During the 37-year duration of the Venona project, the Signal Intelligence Service obtained approximately 3,000 Soviet messages (only some of which were ever decrypted); the Signal-Intelligence yield included discovery of the Cambridge Five espionage ring in the UK and Soviet espionage of the Manhattan Project in the U.S. The Venona project remained secret for more than fifteen years after it concluded, and some of the decoded Soviet messages were not declassified and published until 1995.
PART 3: The roots of neoconservatism or "Descended from the road less followed" (the anti-Stalinist branch)
Neoconservatism
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoconservatism
EXCERPT: The term "neoconservative" refers to those who made the ideological journey from the anti-Stalinist Left to the camp of American conservatism. Neoconservatives typically advocate the promotion of democracy and American national interest in international affairs, including by means of military force and are known for espousing disdain for communism and for political radicalism. The movement had its intellectual roots in the Jewish monthly review magazine "Commentary," published by the American Jewish Committee. They spoke out against the New Left and in that way helped define the movement. C. Bradley Thompson, a professor at Clemson University, claims that most influential neoconservatives refer explicitly to the theoretical ideas in the philosophy of Leo Strauss (1899–1973), though in doing so they may draw upon meaning that Strauss himself did not endorse. [...] Many neoconservatives had been Jewish intellectuals in New York City during the 1930s. They were on the political left but strongly opposed Stalinism; some were Trotskyists. During the Cold War they continued to oppose Stalinism and to endorse democracy. The great majority became liberal Democrats.
The New York Intellectuals
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_...ellectuals
The Neoconservative Movement is Trotskyism
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2013/01/22/...rotskyism/
EXCERPT: Legal scholar Michael Lind pointed out some years ago that, “Most neoconservative defense intellectuals have their roots on the left, not the right. They are products of the influential Jewish-American sector of the Trotskyist movement of the 1930s and 1940s, which morphed into anti-communist liberalism between the 1950s and 1970s and finally into a kind of militaristic and imperial right with no precedents in American culture or political history.”
Philo-Semitic scholars Stephen Halper of Cambridge University and Jonathan Clarke of the CATO Institute agree that the neoconservative agendas “have taken American international relations on an unfortunate detour,” which is another way of saying that this revolutionary movement is not what the Founding Fathers signed up for, who all maintained that the United States would serve the American people best by not entangling herself in alliances with foreign entities.
As soon as the Israel Lobby came along, as soon as the neoconservative movement began to shape U.S. foreign policy, as soon as Israel began to dictate to the U.S. what ought to be done in the Middle East, America was universally hated by the Muslim world. Moreover, former secretary of defense Robert Gates made it clear to the United States that the Israelis do not and should not have a monopoly on the American interests in the Middle East. For that, he was chastised by neoconservative Elliott Abrams. In that sense, the neoconservative movement as a political and intellectual movement represents a fifth column in the United States in that it subtly and deceptively seeks to undermine what the Founding Fathers have stood for and replace it with what the Founding Fathers would have considered horrible foreign policies—policies which have contributed to the demise of the respect America once had.
Since there were even Soviet Jews who found it difficult to believe that the Stalin regime was antisemitic and practicing mass-murder... Then their concurrent counterparts in America (only those who were communists) might be forgiven for refusing to likewise believe the "rumors". Some issuing hosannas to Josef and the USSR right up until the mid 1950s.
McCarthyism and the Second Red Scare
http://americanhistory.oxfordre.com/view...329175-e-6
EXCERPT: [...] 1956, [...] Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev officially acknowledged what many American Communists had refused to believe: that Stalin had been responsible for the death of millions in forced labor camps and in executions of political rivals. After these revelations, the CPUSA [American Communist Party] faded into insignificance.
As the historian Ellen Schrecker has observed, American Communists were neither devils nor saints. The party’s secretiveness, its authoritarian internal structure, and the loyalty of its leaders to the Kremlin were fundamental flaws that help explain why and how it was demonized. On the other hand, most American Communists were idealists attracted by the party’s militance against various forms of social injustice. The party was a dynamic part of the broader Left that in the 1930s and 1940s advanced the causes of labor, minority rights, and feminism.
Stalin and antisemitism: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalin_and_antisemitism
Jews in Radical Politics
http://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/...-politics/
EXCERPT: [...] So it was, during these years of communism’s resurgence, that the Jewish component surfaced even more vividly than it had a decade earlier, in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution. By now, New York accounted for about one-fifth of the party’s national membership, and that one-fifth was predominantly Jewish. All the senior editors of the Daily Worker were Jews. If the party failed to make headway in the ILGWU or the Amalgamated (well immunized by the events of the 1920s), it successfully infiltrated white-collar unions, with their extensive Jewish membership of teachers, social workers, office workers, government employees, and retail clerks. It organized a special section to penetrate Jewish community centers, Jewish federations, national Jewish organizations. The West Coast office of the American Jewish Congress was almost entirely compromised by fellow travelers. At the annual conference of the Federation of Jewish Social Welfare Agencies in 1932, the much-respected chairman, Jacob Billikopf, was nearly unseated in favor of a hard-core Communist. In 1934, radicals in the Jewish Social Workers Association defected to form the Association of Practitioners in Jewish Social Agencies–a Communist front.
Communism in the United States
https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/com...ted-states
EXCERPT: [...] Many of these younger radicals aligned themselves with communism during the Great Depression and World War II, the heyday of both the Communist Party and Jewish women’s involvement in its work. The party swelled from just under ten thousand members in 1929 to about forty thousand in 1936 and to eighty-three thousand in 1943. Female membership expanded from about 15 percent in the early 1930s to 30 or 40 percent at the end of the decade and to about 46 percent in 1943. CP historians estimate, moreover, that almost half of the party’s membership was Jewish in the 1930s and 1940s, and that approximately 100,000 Jews passed through the party in those decades of high member turnover. It seems safe to say, then, that Jewish women were one of the CP’s largest sectors during the Depression and war years; and for each who was a “card-carrying” communist, there were several who took part in party-led mass organizations but did not belong to the party itself.
Why couldn’t Soviet Jews see the dictator--who died 60 years ago--for the anti-Semitic murderer that he was?
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and...ins-purges
EXCERPT: Stalin’s increasingly hysterical rants against “Jewish nationalists” in the years following the creation of Israel in 1948—passed the Kesselmans by. When the Pravda story appeared on Jan. 13, 1953, the couple had little sense of being in the midst of a fevered anti-Semitic campaign that abruptly ended with the dictator’s death two months later.
“It didn’t seem like another Beilis,” said Robert, referring to the 1913 trial of a Kiev Jew, Mendel Beilis, who was falsely accused of murdering a young Ukrainian boy before being acquitted in one of the last trials based on the notorious “blood libel” to reach a courtroom. “I thought it was going to be like the 1937 purge, when Jews were not particularly singled out.”
Robert paused to gather his thoughts. “Also, you have to remember that Jews were strongly represented in the medical profession,” he added, “so I thought that the Jewish origins of the majority of the accused was just a reflection of our disproportionate numbers.”
***
Other historical and psychological associations helped to delay the realization among Jews like the Kesselmans that anti-Semitism was becoming state doctrine in the Soviet Union. To begin with, Stalin’s coterie included a fair number of Jews. Among them were Lev Mekhlis, the editor of Pravda, and Solomon Milshtein, who, in his capacity as the boss of the Soviet railway system, oversaw the mass deportation of hundreds of thousands of prisoners to the gulags. And with memories of World War II still fresh, many Jews still believed that Stalin was their savior. In their minds, anti-Semitism was a dogma rooted in racist pseudoscience, indelibly linked to the Nazi atrocities. The notion that it might adapt to Soviet conditions seemed unthinkable.
PART TWO: The spies
No matter how many movie and television caricatures of McCarthy-like characters were dispensed over the decades to rightfully mock that extremist brand of witch-hunting... Unfortunately it can't change the history of there actually having been a plethora of card-carriers who did betray secrets to their adopted Motherland.
Espionage and the Manhattan Project
https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-p...ionage.htm
EXCERPT: David Greenglass was an Army machinist, and in the summer of 1944 he was briefly assigned to Oak Ridge. After a few weeks, he was transferred to Los Alamos, where he worked on implosion as a member of the Special Engineering Detachment. Using his wife Ruth as the conduit, Greenglass soon began funneling information regarding the atomic bomb to his brother-in-law, Julius Rosenberg, who then turned it over to Soviet intelligence. As Greenglass later explained, "I was young, stupid, and immature, but I was a good Communist."
Theodore Hall
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Hall
EXCERPT: Theodore Alvin Hall was an American physicist and an atomic spy for the Soviet Union, who, during his work on US efforts to develop the first and second atomic bombs during World War II (the Manhattan Project), gave a detailed description of the "Fat Man" plutonium bomb, and of several processes for purifying plutonium, to Soviet intelligence. His brother, Edward Hall, was a rocket scientist who worked on ICBMs for the United States government.
Morris Cohen
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_Cohen_(spy)
EXCERPT: Morris Cohen, also known in Britain by his alias Peter Kroger, was an 20th-Century American convicted of espionage for the Soviet Union. His wife Lona was also an agent. Morris Cohen was born in Harlem, New York. His father came from an area near Kiev in present-day Ukraine. His mother came from Vilnius in present-day Lithuania.
Case closed: The Rosenbergs were Soviet spies
http://www.latimes.com/la-oe-radosh17-20...story.html
EXCERPT: It was a stunning admission; Sobell, now 91 years old, had adamantly maintained his innocence for more than half a century. After his comments were published, even the Rosenbergs' children, Robert and Michael Meeropol, were left with little hope to hang on to -- and this week, in comments unlike any they've made previously, the brothers acknowledged having reached the difficult conclusion that their father was, indeed, a spy. "I don't have any reason to doubt Morty," Michael Meeropol told Sam Roberts of the New York Times.
With these latest events, the end has arrived for the legions of the American left wing that have argued relentlessly for more than half a century that the Rosenbergs were victims, framed by a hostile, fear-mongering U.S. government. Since the couple's trial, the left has portrayed them as martyrs for civil liberties, righteous dissenters whose chief crime was to express their constitutionally protected political beliefs. In the end, the left has argued, the two communists were put to death not for spying but for their unpopular opinions, at a time when the Truman and Eisenhower administrations were seeking to stem opposition to their anti-Soviet foreign policy during the Cold War.
- - - - - - -
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg: "There is a consensus among historians that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were guilty, but their trial was marred by clear judicial and legal improprieties and they should not have been executed. Distilling this consensus, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz wrote that the Rosenbergs were 'guilty – and framed'."
Verona Project
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venona_project
EXCERPT: During the 37-year duration of the Venona project, the Signal Intelligence Service obtained approximately 3,000 Soviet messages (only some of which were ever decrypted); the Signal-Intelligence yield included discovery of the Cambridge Five espionage ring in the UK and Soviet espionage of the Manhattan Project in the U.S. The Venona project remained secret for more than fifteen years after it concluded, and some of the decoded Soviet messages were not declassified and published until 1995.
PART 3: The roots of neoconservatism or "Descended from the road less followed" (the anti-Stalinist branch)
Neoconservatism
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoconservatism
EXCERPT: The term "neoconservative" refers to those who made the ideological journey from the anti-Stalinist Left to the camp of American conservatism. Neoconservatives typically advocate the promotion of democracy and American national interest in international affairs, including by means of military force and are known for espousing disdain for communism and for political radicalism. The movement had its intellectual roots in the Jewish monthly review magazine "Commentary," published by the American Jewish Committee. They spoke out against the New Left and in that way helped define the movement. C. Bradley Thompson, a professor at Clemson University, claims that most influential neoconservatives refer explicitly to the theoretical ideas in the philosophy of Leo Strauss (1899–1973), though in doing so they may draw upon meaning that Strauss himself did not endorse. [...] Many neoconservatives had been Jewish intellectuals in New York City during the 1930s. They were on the political left but strongly opposed Stalinism; some were Trotskyists. During the Cold War they continued to oppose Stalinism and to endorse democracy. The great majority became liberal Democrats.
The New York Intellectuals
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_...ellectuals
The Neoconservative Movement is Trotskyism
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2013/01/22/...rotskyism/
EXCERPT: Legal scholar Michael Lind pointed out some years ago that, “Most neoconservative defense intellectuals have their roots on the left, not the right. They are products of the influential Jewish-American sector of the Trotskyist movement of the 1930s and 1940s, which morphed into anti-communist liberalism between the 1950s and 1970s and finally into a kind of militaristic and imperial right with no precedents in American culture or political history.”
Philo-Semitic scholars Stephen Halper of Cambridge University and Jonathan Clarke of the CATO Institute agree that the neoconservative agendas “have taken American international relations on an unfortunate detour,” which is another way of saying that this revolutionary movement is not what the Founding Fathers signed up for, who all maintained that the United States would serve the American people best by not entangling herself in alliances with foreign entities.
As soon as the Israel Lobby came along, as soon as the neoconservative movement began to shape U.S. foreign policy, as soon as Israel began to dictate to the U.S. what ought to be done in the Middle East, America was universally hated by the Muslim world. Moreover, former secretary of defense Robert Gates made it clear to the United States that the Israelis do not and should not have a monopoly on the American interests in the Middle East. For that, he was chastised by neoconservative Elliott Abrams. In that sense, the neoconservative movement as a political and intellectual movement represents a fifth column in the United States in that it subtly and deceptively seeks to undermine what the Founding Fathers have stood for and replace it with what the Founding Fathers would have considered horrible foreign policies—policies which have contributed to the demise of the respect America once had.
