>Victor Rabinowitz, "Of course Julius Rosenberg was guilty. But, you
>don't expect me to say that in public, do you?"
>From a James Weinstein (who met Julius once when they were both in
>the YCL) comment on the case.
What is this obsession about left guilt? 50 years ago, Harold Rosenberg (no relation) wrote an essay titled Couch Liberalism and the Guilty Past:
"Half of Fiedler’s book is devoted to an essay apiece on the Hiss Case, the Rosenberg Case and McCarthy, in each of which it turns out that we intellectuals with our “shorthand” that the people cannot understand aredeeply implicated: the rest of the book consists of literary essays with a strong discovery-of-the-true-America motif.
"When I first read some of the political articles, together with pieces like them by other writers, I must confess (it’s contagious) that I did not grasp what was happening. These slippery arguments that directed. themselves against persons who had been punished by law, that complained about “our” over-fussiness on the subject of civil rights, that while admitting that McCarthy was a crook placed under suspicion those who called him one, seemed to me simply odd. I could not grasp, especially, why these messages appeared under the name of liberalism. I, too, believed that Hiss was guilty, but so had the jury, he was in jail; so why these profound evocations of his perfidy, and of Chambers’ ordeal and triumph, by a “liberal”? Or why a “liberal” indictment of Lattimore to supplement that of the Attorney General’s office? Or an assault on people who, conceding the guilt of the Rosenbergs, opposed their electrocution? It was only after I had noticed that these ideas were appearing in concert that I recognized that a collective person was in the process of formation which named itself “liberal” out of the same default of historical truth that caused the Communist sympathizers to cling to this title.
"Fiedler’s essays blend the new fake-liberal “we” with that of the old fake-liberal fellow traveler to produce a “liberal” who shares the guilt for Stalin’s crimes through the fact alone of having held liberal or radical opinions, /even anti-Communist ones! /For Fiedler /all /liberals are contaminated by the past, if by nothing else than through having spoken the code language of intellectuals.
"Fertilized by Left-wing sophistication and by Freud, Fiedler’s essays are confessions on another plane than autobiography. He has no facts to relate—one does not learn that he ever did anything in politics. The guilt he assumes is that of an essence; he confesses for the guilty “we” without an “I.” His theorizing about American politics derives from .a vision of wrestling stereotypes, Right and Left wing, in which the collective Left sinks under a bad conscience. As one of our new volunteer cultural ambassadors “explaining us” to the Europeans, Fiedler must have done as much as anyone to confirm the belief that everybody in America lives on a billboard...."