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June
20, 2003
"What We Need
to Do is Speak Out"
The
Son of the Rosenbergs Reflects on the Tenor of the Times 50 Years
After His Parents' Execution
By ROBERT MEEROPOL
Editors' Note: Robert Meeropol was 6 years old when his parents,
Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, were executed in 1953. He has dedicated
his life to activism, helping to found the Rosenberg Fund for
Children in 1990 to aid the children of activists who have been
targeted for their dissent. He is also the author of the recent
book An
Execution in the Family, published by St. Martin's Press.
Here, Robert described his thoughts on the 50th anniversary of
his parents' execution. This interview originally ran in The Socialist Worker.
WHAT COMPARISONS to the 1950s would
you draw from today?
IT'S AN unfortunate reality that 2003
reminds me of 1953 in so many ways. We don't have the Korean
War. We have the war on terror--Afghanistan, Iraq, whoever's
next. In some ways, the war on terror has replaced the Cold War.
The specifics of who we were opposing in the Cold War is analogous
to whatever particular countries we're trying to confuse with
the war on terror today.
Instead of J. Edgar Hoover, we have John
Ashcroft. Instead of the McCarran and the Smith Acts, we have
the USA PATRIOT Act and USA PATRIOT Act II. The most frightening
aspect is the way that public support is mobilized by terrorizing
people. In the 1950s, people were scared of a nuclear holocaust,
and they were convinced that the Russians were going to drop
the bomb on us. And American soldiers were dying at the rate
of 1,000 a month in Korea. All of this came together to justify
what happened to my parents.
Today, in the wake of the September 11
attack, where thousands of people were killed, people are being
terrorized with fear that it's going to happen again--with various
levels of alerts, with concerns about weapons of mass destruction
held by rogue states, when in reality, we're the country that
has the most weapons of mass destruction and uses them most frequently.
All of these parallels are there. But
I think we have to go beyond dwelling on the negative parallels.
We have to look back and say that all these terrible things happened
in the 1950s, but we came through it and bounced back from it.
Why did that happen? And then we have to apply those lessons
to today. I'm more interested in how we can come through this
period that I'm in, than in bemoaning how terrible it is.
From my personal experience of the 1950s,
the groups that hung together--that created communities of support
and prevented complete isolation on the part of politically active
left-wing people--served an extremely important service. A lot
of the institutions that survived, things as trivial as left-wing
summer camps, served as incubators for a new generation of activists.
In the 1960s, when we had a rebirth of
activism, there was a strong component of people who had survived
the 1950s, who were able to have a disproportionate positive
impact, compared to their numbers. What that tells me today is
that what we need to do is speak out, not run and hide--and we
need to stick together. We need to support institutions that
create progressive cohesion. As the 50th anniversary approaches,
we're trying to show the parallels--both good and bad--and trying
to have a positive influence on our progressive people's survival
in general, and on building movement for the future.
DESCRIBE THE activism around the struggle
to save your parents.
MY PARENTS' case has an interesting history
of activism that people don't know that well. First, to put it
in perspective, between 1948 and 1953--between the reelection
of Harry Truman and the Montgomery Bus Boycott--the movement
to save my parents was the largest mass public movement on the
American left. It involved tens of thousands, possibly even several
hundreds of thousands of people--a big movement happening in
the heart of the McCarthy period.
The history of the organization of that
movement is largely lost. For instance, most people will be shocked
to learn that if you read all the newspapers when my parents'
trial took place in March 1951, you would find not one newspapers
making a peep about the fact that these people might have been
framed--not left, right or center. There was silence on the left
and a chorus of condemnation in the center and the right.
That didn't come until late in the summer
of 1951, when William Reuben published a series of articles in
the National Guardian called "The Rosenberg Case: An American
Dreyfus Affair?" Reuben looked through the trial transcript,
reviewed all the evidence and concluded that something was fishy.
The Guardian was an independent left
paper, not a communist paper. It published this, and the Communist
Party (CP) paper hadn't published anything. Shortly after the
publication of the series in the Guardian, several people--against
the explicit wishes of the American CP--formed the National Committee
to Secure Justice in the Rosenberg Case. A lot of them had been
close to the party, or were ex-party people, but they didn't
have the support of the party.
Later, the CP decided to throw its weight
behind the international effort to save my parents' lives. At
that point, the movement exploded internationally. That's when
it really became big news. From my perspective, this forced the
movement to secure justice in the Rosenberg case to be a broad
coalition of many groups, because they didn't have that core
of support from a big institution to begin with. And that ultimately
became one of its principal strengths.
HOW DID the U.S. government use your
parents as an example for the rest of the left?
IF YOU look at the actual charge against
my parents--conspiracy to commit espionage--and you read the
indictment, the words "atomic bomb" are never mentioned.
The actual charge against my parents and the evidence presented
in court was much vaguer.
Seeing two poor, anonymous people from
the Lower East Side--not big names or big-time organizers, just
ordinary rank-and-file CP members being charged with the theft
of the world's greatest secret--people on the left knew that
something was wrong. They saw the charges as an attempt to tell
everybody on the left: "Look, we used to get you with perjury
charges, or we used to throw you out of your job, but now we're
going to pin even bigger things on you. If you don't tow the
line, we're not just going to send you to jail for five years
for perjury, we're going to kill you."
That's what this was all about--to strike
fear in the heart of the American left. It succeeded to a degree.
But I think it served a more potent political purpose--and that
was to convince the American public in general that left-wingers
were really agents of a foreign power. They weren't engaged in
legitimate dissent, but illegitimate dissent. Communists were
spies, and leftists in general tended to be communists, and it
was mushed together.
And because of that, none of them should
have any rights, because they weren't just dissenting--they were
agents of a foreign power. And my parents' case "proved"
that. From the ruling class' point of view, that was the most
important lesson of the Rosenberg case.
YOU ARE, of course, a longtime opponent
of the death penalty. What do you have to say about the shift
in public opinion that has resulted from recent abolitionist
successes?
IT'S A sign that we've made incredible
progress in the anti-capital punishment movement that the Bush
administration has not been making such a big deal about killing
people. In the fall of 2001, I was fearful that we were going
to have a new wave of capital conspiracy cases. My parents' case
was a capital conspiracy case--they received capital punishment
after only being convicted of conspiracy. That's extremely unusual;
it's almost always is a murder case.
Zacharias Massoui has been charged with
conspiracy and he's facing capital punishment. So he's the first
capital conspiracy case in this country since my parents. I thought
there were going to be a whole slew of them, but instead, the
Bush administration seems to be intent on dealing with these
people extra-judicially--in other words, having military trials
outside of the U.S., removing people beyond the justice system,
putting people in Guantanamo Bay, and who knows what they're
doing to people in other countries.
Why do they have to do that? Why not
bring them to the U.S. where they can have big show trials and
get executions. I think it's because they'd have a very difficult
time doing it in the current climate. And that's a testament
to the power of the anti-capital punishment movement and the
shift that's taken place. From a practical point of view, the
real shift that has taken place is because more and more of the
public have come to realize that innocent people have been executed
and will be executed given the imperfect nature of our system.
The practical truth that people in Illinois
demonstrated is that because of the corrupt and imperfect nature
of the system--because of the political nature of executions--it's
inevitable that innocent people will be executed. Once people
saw that, the tide began to turn. I think it's still turning.
I remain optimistic about the ultimate abolition of capital punishment
in the U.S.
That said, there's a rear-guard action
being fought by the proponents of capital punishment who are
trying to figure out ways to save it---maybe we'll tinker with
it a little bit, we won't execute juveniles, retarded people,
maybe we'll institute a special category of capital punishment
for those whose crimes are worse than murder, like mass terror.
All these things are designed to protect the core of capital
punishment. But the very fact that they're doing this shows that
they're on the defensive.
WHAT ROLE does activism play in your
life?
MY ENTIRE life has been infused with
activism, and part of the reason for that is the community that
rallied to my support after my parents' executions. The people
who raised us, they became my heroes. They all put themselves
on the line for my benefit and to make this country a better
place, at a very difficult political time in the McCarthy period.
It only felt natural for me to follow
in their footsteps, because my childhood experience told me that
that was a positive thing. So it seemed only natural that I would
get involved in antiwar work, civil rights, and ultimately the
effort to reopen my parents' case in the 1970s. Finally, I started
the Rosenberg Fund for Children in 1990, which is dedicated to
providing for the educational and emotional needs of the children
of targeted activists in this country. We look for people who
are being attacked for their activism today, and if they have
children, we help their children--in the same way that I was
helped when I was a child.
People who used to do civil disobedience
at the School of the Americas used to get a $50 fine, and they'd
come back the next year again. All of a sudden, people doing
the exact same thing are being sentenced to nine months in prison.
There are an increasing number of cases where people doing relatively
symbolic acts of protest are really having the book thrown at
them. We're seeing the fallout from that.
Today's Features
Elaine
Cassel
Bush Plays the Racial Profiling Card:
It's a Smokescreen
Brian
Cloughley
Punch-and-Judy in the West Wing:
The Powell-Rice Show
David Lindorff
What's Next?
Mark
Jacobs
A Serious Conversation: a Former Foreign Service Officer on Diplomacy
in the Age of Bush
Alfredo
Castro
Bloodbath in Colombia: The Army and the Death Squads
Saul
Landau
Lying, Flag Waving and Redefining
Conservative Values
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars
Web Log, 6/19
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