>The Harold Rosenberg essay... has a different (or another, I'll re-read it) point than
>TW states. Unless I'm mixing it up with another Harold Rosenberg
>piece, isn't it a polemic against the cold war liberal attack on the
>socialist left, in toto, by lit critter Leslie Fiedler, as being, as a
>whole with no significant exceptions, examples,
>naive or cold bloodedly complicit with the crimes of Stalinism? Hold
>on, 'sez Rosenberg, what about the Trotskyists, libertarian and
>democratic socialists and anarchists?
It's worth re-reading. Rosenberg makes exactly the point that MP says he does but he also frames it with the argument I emphasized about the cold war liberals emulating the Stalinist falsification of history. The punch line of the first three, framing paragraphs is: "If the Soviets have purloined our nuclear know-how, we have evened the score by mastering her technique of the fission and fusion of memory." Rosenberg identifies the fabricated confession as the medium that manages to implicate everyone but the right-wing thugs who, in the couch liberal reworking of history, turn out to have been "right for the wrong reasons". "In the political confession, however, the genuine 'I' of the confessor is not the interest of either the accused or his prosecutor. The defendent must give away a past larger than the one he actually possesses. The verdict is pronounced not against him personally but against a collection of individuals who constitute a single 'we'."
It is in the _context_ of precisely the falsification of history through the medium of political confession that makes a statement like, "Of course Julius Rosenberg was guilty. But, you don't expect me to say that in public, do you?" defensible, even if not intellectually courageous. Julius Rosenberg's guilt wasn't an issue for Harold Rosenberg -- he assumed it. But for him that guilt didn't mitigate the injustice of a death sentence that was meted out not for the crimes that the Rosenbergs were convicted of but to the monsters that they were portrayed as by the press and the state.
The Sandwichman