Codename: Liberal New York City honors a monster.
New York’s city council has taken it upon itself to posthumously honor Ethel Rosenberg, a Soviet spy who helped, in her modest way, the worldwide Communist enterprise to murder some 100 million people.
Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer was joined by three city-council members earlier this week in issuing proclamations honoring Rosenberg for “demonstrating great bravery.” They also affirmed their belief — in spite of heavy evidence to the contrary — that she was wrongfully executed for her role in the Soviet spy ring dedicated to stealing information about the U.S. atomic-bomb program in order to give Stalin et al. another weapon in their battery of terror.
Daniel Dromm, who for his sins is a Democrat representing Queens on the city council, said: “A lot of hysteria was created around anti-Communism and how we had to defend our country, and these two” — note that two — people were traitors, and we rushed to judgment and they were executed.”
There is practically no one left defending the innocence of Julius Rosenberg — even his children have admitted that he was a traitor and a spy. The only people who doubt the guilt of his wife, Ethel, are those with a very strong ideological resistance to the facts of the case. Among other things, we have the word of Nikita Khrushchev, who writes in his memoirs of the help the Rosenbergs, plural, provided in the Soviet nuclear-weapons program; we have the communications of the Soviet spymaster to whom they answered, who in his missives to Moscow describes Ethel as an operative; we have the Venona papers, the declassified Soviet archives in which that same handler, Aleksandr Feklisov, writes of Ethel’s role in recommending new espionage recruits, etc. Yes, there are instances of conflicting testimony in the case, as there are in every mugging, and Ethel’s brother, who had originally omitted any mention of his sister’s role in the spy ring, changed his testimony when his wife told a different story. None of this is enough — not nearly — to outweigh the plain archival evidence in Soviet records.