Espionage Act: a muzzle for dissent, says Robert Meeropol

Video in two parts; click through for the second.

Democracy Now interviews Robert Meeropol, the younger of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg’s two sons, who criticizes the forthcoming prosecution of Julian Assange under the same 1917 Espionage Act that resulted in the senseless deaths of his parents.

I say “senseless” because the espionage trial of the Rosenbergs was clearly a show trial, meant to menace US communists and silence them as the McCarthyite hysteria swept over the country. A previously legal and commonplace political viewpoint would eventually be criminalized; a travesty in a country whose citizens pride themselves on their freedom. I also say “senseless” because the real spy in the case–Ethel’s brother, David Greenglass, who worked as a machinist on the “Fat Man” plutonium bomb at Los Alamos and is the source of the secret materials that Ethel and Julius were executed for passing along–testified against his own flesh and blood, and went free. And I also say “senseless” because, ultimately, the materials passed on by Julius Rosenberg to the Soviets were of little worth to them. They already had their own nuclear-weapons program well underway, and the crude drawings of David Greenglass (which carried few technical specifics and were not to scale) were not an infallible recipe for a plutonium bomb. At most, those drawings simply showed them how the Los Alamos scientists had constructed the implosion lenses for the device. Today, in fact, all the information that David Greenglass took down and Julius Rosenberg passed along is readily available to the public in many sources; the best is Richard Rhodes’s book, The Making of the Atomic Bomb.

The Rosenberg boys were adopted shortly before their parents’ execution by Abel Meeropol and his wife. They took their adoptive parents’ surname as protection against the media-driven lynching of anyone unfortunate enough to be related–or simply called Rosenberg. Meeropol is an interesting personage in his own right; he is the author of this song, made famous by Billie Holliday:

An anti-lynching, anti-racist song, the first big hit of its kind, and considered the most influential song of the 20th century. “I wrote ‘Strange Fruit’,” said Meeropol, “because I hate lynching, and I hate injustice, and I hate the people who perpetuate it.” Abel Meeropol was, like the Rosenbergs, a communist, a strong advocate of civil rights, and an anti-fascist. He undoubtedly taught his adopted sons to stand up for what was right, and they do so to this day–denouncing the same senseless hypocrisy that resulted in the deaths of their parents.