Educators Must Help Defeat the New Racist and Imperialist 'Red Scare'

By Derek R. Ford

Originally published on PESA Agora

Introduction: Racism and imperialism unite ‘both sides of the aisle’

Responding to criticism of the political system of the newly-independent Tanzania, the great African teacher, revolutionary, and theorist Julius Nyerere responded, observing ‘the United States is also a one-party state, but with typical American extravagance, they have two of them.’ He was and is right. Rhetorical differences and popular presentation aside, the two ruling-class parties effectively function as a dictatorship domestically and globally. For concrete and contemporary evidence, look no further than the New McCarthyism and Red Scare promoted by media outlets and politicians on ‘both sides of the aisle,’ from Fox News and Marco Rubio to The New York Times and Chuck Schumer.

On August 5, The New York Times released a report that, in essence, boldly and baselessly suggests groups and other organisations advocating for peace with China are part of an international conspiracy by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Despite the absence of any substantive proof, politicians are already using it as ammunition in their broader ‘new McCarthyism’ agenda, which could potentially have devastating consequences for the globe. Fortunately, a variety of institutions and networks are already mobilising against it by building a fight-back movement in which education plays a key role, and you can too.

Their presentation opens with the racist logic guiding their investigation as they try to discredit the multitude of spontaneous global actions against anti-Asian racism in 2021. They narrate a single action in London where a scuffle broke out, they contend, after activists with No Cold War (one of the event’s organisers) ‘attacked activists supporting the democracy movement in Hong Kong.’ They offer only two words to back up this narrative: ‘witnesses said.’

No Cold War is dedicated to promoting peaceful relations between the US and China, organising in-person and virtual events to advance the global peace movement. Having spoken on their panels and attended others, I can confirm they are educational, generative and productive intellectually and politically. They include a range of perspectives, given they are working toward peace. This principle is unacceptable for the Times and the New McCarthyites, however, as the journalists ‘reveal’ that No Cold War is merely ‘part of a lavishly funded influence campaign that defends China and pushes its propaganda.’ So too, it seems, is any group advocating for peace.

The investigators construct an international conspiracy centred on Neville Roy Singham, a millionaire sympathetic to peace and socialism who donates his millions to left-wing non-profits who, in turn, help finance very active and crucial anti-war, anti-racist, and anti-imperialist organisations. This is where the most dangerous suggestion emerges, one upon which pro-war forces quickly seized: that groups receiving funding from Singham could be agents of the Chinese Communist Party and thus in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).

These suggestions are completely unfounded. The only ‘evidence’ presented are statements made by a handful of former employees and members of some organisations partly funded and supported directly or indirectly by Singham, including the Nkrumah School, the media outlet New Frame, and the Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party in South Africa. Then, of course, there is the fact that Singham supported Hugo Chávez, has relationships with some of the million members of the Chinese Communist Party, is pictured at a CCP meeting (excuse me, ‘propaganda forum’) taking notes in a book ‘adorned with a red hammer and sickle.’ And I almost forgot the nail in the hammer: a plaque of Xi Jinping hanging in Singham’s office.

Fox News and other right-wing outlets and politicians are at the helm of the bandwagon as well. For years they promoted propaganda alleging China is influencing US schools and universities as a method of attacking freedom of inquiry and speech in the US, including in my state of Indiana. In August 2021, Indiana’s Attorney General Todd Rokita (whom most Hoosiers don’t support) threatened to investigate the Confucius Institute at a small college, Valparaiso University, saying it operates ‘to spread propaganda and circulate the mantra of the CCP at both the university and in several K-12 schools in Indiana.’ The University closed the Institute but, importantly, maintained Rokita was lying about its function, which is to promote cross-cultural understanding and dialogue. Unfortunately, almost all such institutes have shuttered.

Old or new, ‘McCarthyism’ is reality, not hyperbole

On August 9, Senator Marco Rubio officially called on the Department of Justice to investigate a range of progressive organisations in the US for violating FARA and acting as unregistered Chinese agents. Rubio’s evidence? The Times ‘investigation.’ Rubio includes but adds to the groups smeared in the Times article. The strategy is to discredit anti-war groups, grassroots movement hubs, and anti-imperialist and anti-racist organisations as CCP operatives, thereby silencing opposition to their foreign policy strategy, part of which includes funding separatist movements in places like Hong Kong. In their opening, the Times journalists neglect to mention that most people in that region of China actually oppose the ‘freedom movement,’ partly because of its political character, exemplified by its leaders such as Joshua Wong, a close collaborator of Rubio, who led the charge to nominate Wong for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Rubio’s letter to the Biden Administration’s Attorney General names nine entities, including the anti-war group Code Pink, the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, and The People’s Forum, amongst others. This list will likely expand to include numerous others who either didn’t respond to the journalists’ red-baiting or who maintain some connection to the groups identified.

Already serious, it could potentially be devastating. I don’t know a peace or social justice activist, let alone an anti-imperialist or anti-racist revolutionary organisation, with a substantial base, membership, or level of activity, that isn’t somehow related to one of these organisations and networks. The People’s Forum should be of particular concern for educators, as it is the most active and pedagogically innovative popular education institute in the US. Academic journals and publishers work with them to host events and book launches, and a range of professors, including myself, teach classes for them (without getting a paycheck, let alone a ‘lavish’ one, I should add).

There are several continuities between the anti-communist and anti-Black witch-hunts of the 1940s-50s and the new McCarthyism. In both cases, the same ruling-class parties united as outlets like The New York Times recklessly promoted their campaign, slandering heroic Black figures like W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston, Hughes and Paul Robeson. Newspaper headlines alone facilitated this work, such as the 1949 Times headline calling Robeson a ‘Black Stalin’ who “Suffered ‘Delusions of Grandeur.”’ This continued with the Civil Rights Era and was a major factor stalling its militancy and has again resurfaced. They never apologised for their role in spreading such racist propaganda.

Imperialism and white supremacy: More than and predating McCarthy

Labeling this wide historical period and its complex political configurations as ‘McCarthyism’ is useful in speaking popularly, but educators should note it can be misleading. The anti-Black and anti-communist/radical crusade preceded Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Historian Gerald Horne cogently locates the foundations of contemporary racist US capitalism in the imbrication of white supremacy and anti-communism insofar as it

‘is undergirded by the fact that slave property was expropriated without compensation.… [O]ne of the largest uncompensated expropriations before 1917 took place in this nation: African-Americans are living reminders of lost fortunes.’

Similarly, Charisse Burden-Stelly’s concept of modern US racial capitalism specifically designates a ‘political economy constituting war and militarism, imperialist accumulation, expropriation by domination and labour superexploitation.’ Like Horne, the system ‘is rooted in the imbrication of anti-Blackness and antiradicalism.’

History proves their theses correct. For one example, take Benjamin J. Davis, the first Black communist ever elected to public office in the US. He served as a New York City Councilman from 1943 until 1949, when he and other Communist Party leaders were arrested under the Smith Act. In Davis’ set of ‘autobiographical notes’ penned while captive in an apartheid federal prison in Terre Haute, an hour’s drive from where I’m writing, the Black Party leader recounts how, following the end of the US’s alliance with the Soviet Union, ‘the pro-fascist, Negro-hating forces which had been held in check during the war, began to break loose.’ The Republicans, Democrats, FBI, and other state elements sat idly by as racist attacks, including a mass lynching in Atlanta by the Klan, intensified.

Communists, on the other hand, responded immediately, with the Party’s Black leadership uniting and mobilising broad sectors of society. It was only then that the state responded, and not to the racist lynching but to those fighting them. In other words, while the US state passively accepted racist and fascist groups in the US, they turned to active repression when Black people and their supporters and comrades fought back.

The 1949 conviction and imprisonment of Davis and other Party leaders for violating the anti-communist Smith Act was an example of this repression. The US imprisoned and suppressed hundreds of communist leaders and fellow travelers, with countless others driven underground, blacklisted, and deported.

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It was not only their organising that threatened the state; it was also their ideology. Thus, prison administrators prevented the publication of Davis’s book for a decade after he was released. Physically and ideologically repressing communism was part of a project to exterminate the revolutionary, internationalist, and Black Liberation movements and traditions just as a new wave of US imperialist aggression was kicking into high gear.

Decolonisation and anti-colonialist struggle: A matter of survival, not academic fodder

This leads to one other glaring connection between the Red Scare of today and then, one that demonstrates the historical and ideological continuity of racist US imperialism, helps define the current conjuncture, and might convince academics we don’t need new words and more language but action: the US war against the Korean national liberation and socialist struggle.

Seventy years ago, on July 27, the resistance of the Korean masses forced the US to sign an armistice agreement, ceasing the US’s horrendous violence against the peninsula. Despite their military might, new chemical and biological weapons, and bombs that even the Air Force admits inflicted ‘greater damage than German and Japanese cities firebombed during World War II,’ they couldn’t defeat the freedom fighters in the Korean People’s Army (many of whom were from the south).

Before the armistice signing on February 2, Trinidadian-born Black communist Claudia Jones, who at 37 years of age was a high-ranking Party member and leading organiser and theorist, stood before Judge Edward J. Dimrock in a New York courtroom along with a dozen other Party leaders They were all convicted of several charges, including conspiring to overthrow the US government. The pre-sentencing statement is generally used to plea for leniency, but, as a revolutionary communist, Jones saw another opportunity to agitate and raise consciousness.

Jones opened by making it clear it wasn’t meant for the Judge or the state. No, Jones addressed the real power in the world: the global revolutionary movement. ‘If what I say here,’ she began, ‘serves even one whit to further dedicate growing millions of Americans to fight for peace and to repel the fascist drive on free speech and thought in our country, I shall consider my rising to speak worthwhile indeed.’

Overall, this and other trials that persecuted communists and progressives weren’t about specific articles or actions, although, as Denise Lynn notes, in 1947, J. Edgar Hoover directed the FBI to surveil ‘her every speech, radio interview, mention in the Daily Worker, and all of her written work as well as party functions she attended or hosted.’

The prosecution, Jones highlighted, introduced her articles as evidence but did not read them; actually, they could not read them aloud because, in the first place, doing so would affirm ‘that Negro women can think and speak and write!’

Jones then called attention to the second piece of evidence they could not read: her historic speech delivered at an International Women’s Day rally and published in Political Affairs under the title ‘Women in the Struggle for Peace and Security’ in March 1950, the same year the state obtained her deportation order.

In that speech, delivered months before the ‘barbaric’ war against Korea, as she called it, Jones proposed that ‘a fundamental condition for rallying the masses of American women into the peace camp is to free them from the influence of the agents of imperialism’ by linking them with the new phenomenon of a global anti-imperialist women’s movement spanning 80 countries. This would ‘inspire the growing struggles of American women and heighten their consciousness of the need for militant united-front campaigns around the burning demands of the day.’ Thus, the prosecution could not read it aloud because

‘it urges American mothers, Negro women and white, to emulate the peace struggles of their anti-fascist sisters in Latin America, in the new European democracies, in the Soviet Union, in Asia and Africa to end the bestial Korean war … to reject the militarist threat to embroil us in a war with China, so that their children should not suffer the fate of the Korean babies murdered by napalm bombs of B-29s, or the fate of Hiroshima.’

How terrifyingly presciently Jones’s words resonate with us here today, 70 years on. We face ongoing imperialist aggression against the Korean people and their struggle for peace, national liberation, and reunification, the ramping up of US militarism as they prepare for a war against China, and the accompanying ‘Red Scare’ to produce consent, silence dissent and inhibit solidarity efforts.

The US is a … Pacific power?

The US’s ‘Pivot to Asia’ dates at least back to 1898 when they waged a war against and occupied the Philippine Republic, but its current iteration emerged in November 2011, when then-President Barack Obama told the Australian Parliament ‘The United States is a Pacific power, and we are here to stay.’ That month, his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, published an article in Foreign Policy (the unofficial organ of the US State Department) articulating the US’s new line, that first and foremost entailed ‘a substantially increased investment – diplomatic, economic, strategic and otherwise – in the Asia-Pacific region.’

We all know what Clinton meant by ‘otherwise,’ as did the Chinese people, government, and governing Party. For some context, recall that this came out one month earlier Clinton erupted in joy during a CBS interview after hearing of African revolutionary Muammar Gaddafi’s brutal assassination by reactionary forces (whose campaign was based on disproven propaganda and racism against migrant workers from the southern part of the continent). ‘We came, we saw, he died,’ she said laughingly after destroying an independent African nation and its widely popular government.

As the US was waging dozens of wars, occupations, covert military operations, and more, China followed the CCP’s line of a ‘peaceful rise.’ They did so as long as they could, and when it was clear the US wasn’t stopping, both China and Russia finally stood up to the US.

Especially since the election of Xi Jinping to the position of General Secretary of the CCP, China has made a sharp shift to the left and now, after decades, finally offers an alternative pole for the world order so the people of the world can finally be freed from the colonial rule of the US through military occupations and other mechanisms like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. This is why the Belt and Road initiative is critical to formerly colonised states, and why it is falsely labeled ‘colonialist’ by ruling-class figures from Steve Bannon to Clinton.

What would you do then? Do it now! Resisting intimidation is the path to victory

Rubio ended his letter to the DOJ by proclaiming: ‘The CCP is our greatest adversary, and we cannot allow it to abuse our open system to promote its malign influence any longer.’ The threat of war is not rhetoric. The Department of Defence’s new military doctrine is explicitly guided by ‘Great Power Rivalry, a euphemism for an all-out war to recolonise and redivide China.

As US imperialist occupations expand, as they continue conducting military exercises in the South China Sea, China remains remarkably restrained. Can you imagine what the US would do if, say, China sent nuclear-armed submarines to the shores of California, patrolled the Atlantic waters off the coast of New York City, or stationed military bases throughout Mexico and Canada?

It is irrelevant wherever one stands on China, its political system, or any issue or policy. In terms of internationalist solidarity, the least that educators in the imperialist core can do is restrain our government. Even if one of your colleagues supports US imperialism, however, they will hopefully at least stand against attempts to intimidate and silence opposition and free speech. As the petition against the New McCarthyism states:

‘This attack isn’t only on the left but against everyone who exercises their free speech and democratic rights. We must firmly resist this racist, anti-communist witch hunt and remain committed to building an international peace movement. In the face of adversity, we say NO to xenophobic witch hunts and YES to peace.’

Read, sign and, share the petition now. Don’t be intimidated. The heroic freedom fighters we teach and write about, the ones we admire, never gave in despite their extraordinary oppression and unthinkable suffering.

For those of us committed to ending white supremacy, capitalism, imperialism, or at the very least, to protecting the freedom of speech and dissent, one small thing to do now is to talk with everyone about it, to sign this petition and affirm that you won’t be silenced or intimidated. Let’s follow the words and deeds of Jones, not Marco Rubio.

Our enemies aren’t in Russia or China, North Korea or Cuba. They are right here in the US, from the Pentagon and Wall Street to the cops who routinely murder and harass the exploited and oppressed. What the police do here, the US military does across the globe. Together, we can defeat them.

Full Citation Information:

Ford, D. R. (2023). Educators must help defeat the new racist and imperialist ‘Red Scare.’ PESA Agora. https://pesaagora.com/columns/educators-must-help-defeat-the-new-racist-and-imperialist-red-scare/

The Rosenbergs: Traitors or Heroes?

By Stephen Millies

Republished from Struggle La Lucha.

In his funeral eulogy for Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, W.E.B. Du Bois declared, “They died because they would not lie.” The Rosenbergs were burned to death in the electric chair by the U.S. government on Juneteenth 1953.

Du Bois, the legendary Black scholar, also arranged the adoption of the Rosenbergs’ two young children, Michael and Robert. The Jewish orphans were adopted by Anne Meeropol and Abel Meeropol. Abel wrote “Strange Fruit,” a song about lynching that Billie Holiday made famous. 

The Rosenbergs were blamed for the Soviet Union being able to develop an atomic bomb. Their frame-up and execution for espionage during the Korean War was the peak of the anti-communist witch hunt in the United States. 

The ruling class was in a frenzy because of the Chinese Revolution. The Soviet Union’s ability to defend itself against the Pentagon’s nukes made the banksters even more mad.

The FBI and corporate media insisted the Soviets “stole the secret” of the atom bomb. The real secret was revealed when the U.S. dropped an atom bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, on Aug. 6, 1945. By incinerating 100,000 people, including 30,000 Korean slave laborers, the Pentagon showed it was possible to develop nuclear weapons.

Showing it was what made it knowable. Some of the scientists involved in the Manhattan Project — the code name for the U.S. atom bomb project — gave the Soviets five years to match the U.S. effort. 

The rub wouldn’t be in the theoretical work. U.S. scientists knew the Soviet Union had capable physicists.

Among them was Lev Landau, who would win the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1962. Even before the Bolshevik Revolution, the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev had devised the periodic table of the elements.

U.S. scientists thought the Soviets would have difficulty in making extremely pure chemicals and seals to lock in corrosive gases. Because of socialist economic planning, the Soviet Union was able to concentrate its efforts and explode a nuclear device on Aug. 29, 1949. It took four years, not five, to produce.

Decades of lies

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover immediately set out to nab the “communist spies” that smuggled secrets. How else could those “stupid people” in the Soviet Union have produced nuclear weapons? 

U.S. schoolchildren were taught their country was the land of great inventors like Thomas Edison. Newspapers told their readers that only the U.S. could have built the bomb.

Thirty years later, President Ronald Reagan said there wasn’t a Russian word for freedom. (There is. It’s svoboda.) 

So U.S. capitalists were astonished when the Soviet Union sent the first artificial satellite into space on Nov. 7, 1957 — the 40th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.

Claims that the Sputnik satellite was the result of spying fell flat. The Pentagon wasn’t able to launch its own satellite until months later, on Jan. 31, 1958.

It would have been much more difficult to execute the Rosenbergs after Sputnik. It shattered the bigoted conception that 150 different nationalities in the Soviet Union couldn’t do science.

Today another big lie is being told. The People’s Republic of China is being blamed for the COVID-19 pandemic.

With no evidence, the media and even comedians like Jon Stewart are claiming the coronavirus “leaked” from a Wuhan laboratory. This is a blood libel similar to blaming Jewish people for plagues in medieval Europe or the racist myth that immigrants bring diseases to the U.S.

Building a frame-up

The FBI framed the Rosenbergs and a co-defendant, Morton Sobell, by connecting dots and forging evidence. At the end of World War II, the Communist Party in the United States had around 75,000 members, according to the University of Washington’s “Mapping Social Movements” project, including thousands of Black members. They fought racism and built unions.  

Over 10,000 party members were members of the U.S. armed forces. Some party members had government jobs, including the electrical engineer Julius Rosenberg, who was employed at Fort Monmouth army base in New Jersey.

The Manhattan Project had 130,000 employees. U.S. army counterintelligence agents constantly spied on them. 

Even J. Robert Oppenheimer, considered to be the father of the atomic bomb, was a suspect. The army hesitated appointing Oppenheimer to lead the Manhattan Project’s Los Alamos laboratory because of his left-wing associations before the war.

Yet with thousands of U.S. Army and FBI agents prowling around, nobody claimed to have found any spy rings until after the Soviets exploded their bomb.

Julius Rosenberg was fired from his civilian job with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in January 1945 as a suspected communist. (He actually resigned his membership in 1942.) But Julius wasn’t arrested until July 1950.

At the time there were still around 40,000 Communist Party members. Hundreds of thousands of people had worked with the CP or the Young Communist League.

That was a big talent pool for Hoover and his FBI agents to construct a frame-up by matching people with left-wing backgrounds. They found out that Julius Rosenberg’s brother-in-law David Greenglass, an ex-YCL member, had worked as a machinist at Los Alamos. 

Presto! The “Rosenberg spy ring” was invented.

Under threat of the death penalty, David Greenglass told prosecutors whatever they wanted. His lying testimony sent his sister Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair. It took five jolts of electricity to kill her.

Show trial

The Rosenbergs and Morton Sobell were convicted in a show trial. Although at the time a quarter of New York City’s population was Jewish, not a single Jewish juror was chosen.

One of the federal prosecutors was Roy Cohn, who had illegal “ex parte” conversations with presiding Judge Irving Kaufman in which Cohn urged the death penalty. After serving as Senator Joe McCarthy’s sidekick, Cohn became a lawyer and mentor for Donald Trump.

The evidence was flimsy. David Greenglass produced three crude sketches. One looked like a pie chart. A baby carriage couldn’t have been made from them, much less an atomic bomb.

Greenglass said his spy contact was Harry Gold, a chemist and pathological liar who admitted that he “lied for a period of 16 years.” Gold also claimed to be a courier for Klaus Fuchs, a scientist at Los Alamos.

Fuchs confessed he was a spy to a Scotland Yard detective and was jailed in Britain. Fuchs identified Gold as his contact from a picture.  

Fuchs’ statement and identification of Gold is questionable. Fuchs never confronted Gold in a U.S. court and thus couldn’t be cross-examined. It’s striking that the convictions of Greenglass, Gold and Fuchs would have been impossible without their confessions.

The FBI even suspected future Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman, who had been Fuchs’ roommate at Los Alamos. FBI agents changed their mind only because Feynman was completely non-political.

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Morton Sobell was indicted because he was a schoolmate of Julius Rosenberg at New York’s City College and a former YCL member. The only witness against Sobell was Max Elitcher, who claimed vaguely to have seen Sobell visit Julius Rosenberg while carrying a container that could have had film in it. 

He then said he had no idea what was in the container, yet Sobell was sentenced to 30 years in prison.  He served 17, including five years at Alcatraz.

The prosecution stressed that Sobell and his family went to Mexico after David Greenglass was arrested. If Sobell was such a master spy, wouldn’t the Soviets have tried to help him escape?

Instead Mexican secret police kidnapped Sobell and turned him over to FBI agents at the border.

A key piece of evidence was forged. A hotel card from the Albuquerque Hilton was introduced to prove Harry Gold was in town to meet David Greenglass on June 3, 1945.

Miriam and Walter Schneir were authors of “Invitation to an Inquest,” a detailed exposé of the Rosnberg-Sobell case. They looked at copies of the card. It had different date stamps on the front and back despite Gold having checked in and out on the same day. 

When the Schneirs sought to examine the original card, the FBI told them that the evidence was destroyed, even though J. Edgar Hoover called the Rosenberg case “the crime of the century.”

Smearing the dead

Millions of people around the world rallied around the Rosenbergs. They saw parallels between their frame-up and the anti-Jewish persecution of French army officer Alfred Dreyfus decades before.

The American Jewish Committee, which represents the small section of the Jewish Community that’s capitalist, didn’t think so. Writing in the AJC’s Commentary magazine, historian Lucy Dawidowicz endorsed the Rosenbergs’ execution. 

Today when Jewish youth join marches supporting Palestinian liberation, Commentary magazine supports bombing and starving Gaza.

The publication of “Invitation to an Inquest” in 1965 sparked new interest in the Rosenberg and Sobell cases. The U.S. deep state counterattacked, particularly after the overthrow of the Soviet Union.

The FBI and CIA say they have proof that the Rosenbergs and Sobell were guilty. They point to the “Venona Project,” which consists of allegedly deciphered messages between Soviet agents in the U.S. and their Moscow headquarters. The documents claim to show that the Rosenbergs, Sobell and dozens of other people in the U.S. were Soviet agents.

Why should anybody believe U.S. spy agencies? These are the folks that told the world that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

Even if the Venona papers are genuine, the rub is matching code names with individuals.  One of the alleged code names for Julius Rosenberg was “liberal.” Does that sound like a name for an accused communist super-spy? 

The code name linked to Morton Sobell described him as having a wooden leg, which he didn’t have. There was no code name for Ethel Rosenberg.

The Venona Project smeared a series of liberals who couldn’t defend themselves since they were dead. That was the case of the economist Harry Dexter White, who worked in the U.S. Treasury Department.

The deep state and the ultra-right use the Venona papers to support Joe McCarthy’s phony charge that President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration was filled with communists.

The documents have also been used to rehabilitate Elizabeth Bentley’s tarnished reputation. The professional liar gave dishonest testimony against the Rosenbergs, defendants in other trials and before a series of congressional witch-hunting committees.

Typical of the so-called “red spy queen” was her claim to have given the secret date of the Normandy landings to the Soviets. Actually, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower informed the Soviets of when D-Day would occur. He did so because he wanted them to launch an offensive and prevent German troops from being withdrawn from the Eastern Front.

Never forget the Rosenbergs

“I consider your crime worse than murder,” declared Judge Kaufman when he sentenced the Rosenbergs to the electric chair  

Worse than the killers of the 14-year-old Emmett Till? The two racists who tortured the Black youth to death got off scot-free. 

Gen. Douglas MacArthur wanted to drop dozens of atom bombs on Korea and China. Judge Kaufman blamed the Rosenbergs for the U.S. not being able to do so.

Former Secretary of State Dean Rusk wrote in his memoirs that the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs wanted President John F. Kennedy to approve a plan to launch nuclear first strikes against the socialist countries.

The whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg revealed that the Pentagon plan would have killed 600 million people. 

What if the Rosenbergs and Morton Sobell had helped the Soviets build an atom bomb? It was only because the Soviet Union — and later the People’s Republic of China and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea — were able to develop a deterrent to the Pentagon’s arsenal of atomic and hydrogen bombs that a nuclear holocaust was averted. 

But the Rosenbergs and Sobell didn’t have the ability to penetrate the Manhattan Project. The FBI wanted them to finger dozens of liberals to back up Joe McCarthy’s fantastic claim of “20 years of treason” under the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. 

The courage of Ethel Rosenberg, Julius Rosenberg and Morton Sobell prevented this nightmare.

Ethel Rosenberg was electrocuted for supposedly typing reports. She was arrested almost a month after Julius Rosenberg was jailed to put pressure on him to lie.

David Greenglass later admitted he lied about Ethel Rosenberg’s typing. Justice demands that Ethel Rosenberg be given a presidential pardon.

When Morton Sobell was 91 years old, he was badgered by New York Times reporter Sam Harris into saying he and Julius Rosenberg offered information to the Soviets. It was from their jobs as electrical engineers, not from the Manhattan Project.

Twenty-seven million Soviet people died defeating Hitler. Yet during World War II both Britain and the United States refused to share new anti-aircraft weapons and radar with the Soviets.

If Morton Sobell and Julius Rosenberg did indeed help the Soviets, it wasn’t espionage to help a gallant ally. It was whistleblowing, like Daniel Ellsberg did when he released the Pentagon Papers or the truth-telling by Chelsea Manning about U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The best way to honor the Rosenbergs is to fight even harder to free Mumia Abu-Jamal, Leonard Peltier, Ruchell Cinque Magee, Sundiata Acoli, Mutulu Shakur and dozens of other political prisoners.

One way to do so is to donate to the Rosenberg Fund for Children, which helps the children of political prisoners, at RFC.org.

From Stolen Land to Riches: US Neo-Colonialism in South Korea

By Riley Bove

The history behind the division of Korea into the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea) and the Republic of Korea (ROK, or South Korea) is a complicated matter that crosses many spheres. The history between the US and Korea dates back to the Joseon Dynasty when American missionaries introduced Christianity to the peninsula through mission trips and the building of orphanages. When the Japanese colonized the Korean peninsula at the turn of the 20th century, it led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, the enslavement of Korean people, as well as the violent suppression of culture, language, and national sovereignty. After World War II and the defeat of Japanese colonialism, and the liberation of Korea, the US enacted both military and governmental control in the southern half of the peninsula. The Korean War was one of many conflicts during which US imperialism acted through proxies to contest the global struggle for socialism and national liberation through the US’s “containment policy.”

The point of this article is to explore the ways in which the US has enacted imperialism and neocolonialism on the Korean Peninsula since its division in the post-WWII era and into the present day. While much attention is paid to the devastation the US caused--and continues to cause--in the DPRK, this article focuses more on the divisive and exploitative role its played in the ROK.

The history of the exploitation of the Korean peninsula dates back to the colonization of Korea by Japan in 1910. By the 20th century, the Korean peninsula had already come under the Japanese sphere of influence and under the militarized gaze of the Meiji government. By 1910, Korea was fully under Japanese colonial rule. American missionaries had already been in contact with the Korean peninsula, starting the 1880s, spreading the evangelical faith throughout and beginning the connection between Korea and the West.  Japan had set its imperialist sights on conquering the rest of the Pacific by 1940. From 1910 to 1945, Korea was subjected to a brutal 35-year-long colonization by the Japanese. For example, Korean women experienced sexual subjugation under Japanese rule. In her essay, “The Korean “Comfort Women’: Movement For Redress,” Sarah Soh Chunghee states that, “Japan began drafting Korean women in full force from around 1937 when its army invaded China and the soldiers raped and murdered tens of thousands of Chinese women in Nanjing” (1228). While occupying Korea, Japan forced women into sexual slavery and men, women, and children were murdered by the Japanese as they moved to fight the indigenous resistance  movements that emerged.

By the end of WWII, the liberation of Korea was underway as revolutionaries swept the Japanese imperialists from the peninsula. Both the Soviet Union and the US consolidated to rebuild the peninsula after the liberation movement. The Soviets helped the north establish a workers-led state and reclaim the land previously owned by landlords. There were preparations to have a “People’s Republic” in Korea that was of, by, and for Koreans. However, this never came to fruition. Anna Louise Strong, in her report for the CIA, writes that: “When the Americans landed in Korea, the Koreans had already a de facto government. A "People's Republic" had been declared a day earlier by a congress of Koreans themselves. General John R. Hodge, commander of the U. S. armed forces, dissolved this "People's Republic," and drove most of its members underground.”  Strong details how, between the liberation of Korea and the creation of the state of South Korea, a people’s democracy was already established in the south. However, the American forces overthrew the de facto government and established a US-backed puppet military dictatorship. The north established their own government without any assistance from foreign powers, while in the south, the Americans maintained their iron grip which has continued into the present day.

After the American “intervention” and toppling of the de facto “People’s Republic of Korea” government, the American imperialists  implanted a pro-US ally, Syngman Rhee, in order to govern the southern half of the peninsula. Rhee was a Western educated Korean who had anti-Japanese credentials but was fully in the pocket of Washington and Wall Street. Once Syngman Rhee was in power, he imposed his oppressive crackdown of all dissidence. In their essay, “Organizing Dissent against Authoritarianism,” Park Mi states that, “Even a moderate dissident became equated as a procommunist and pro-North Korean activity that was deemed to be prosecuted under the National Security Law” (263). The National Security Act (NSA) became the justification for repressive actions of the Rhee regime, including massacres that totaled in the hundreds of thousands. Park also details that, “Military confrontation with North Korea was used as an excuse to justify violations of human rights and the suppression of political dissidents” (263). The geopolitical landscape of a divided Korea was used by the South Korean-US government as a justification for the suppression of the people’s right to self-determination. At the same time in the United States, during the 1950s, McCarthyism reigned over the political landscape of post-war America. McCarthyism was defined as a “Second Red Scare”, a time of anti-communist setiment and political repression, in which the entire organized left was almost incapacited, with its leaders jailed or driven underground, and anyone who had any pro-communist or even pro-peace sentiments “blacklisted.” In the ROK, the Rhee regime enacted its own McCarthyism era under the NSA in order to snuff out and executed thousands of suspected communists.

After the Rhee administration was overthrown in the 1961 coup d’etat, Park Chung-hee rose to power and declared martial law under the Yushin Constitution, which allowed Park to openly violate civil liberties and assume total control of the government. Under his regime, worker unions and other types of mass organizing were suppressed and thousands of union members and organizers were brutally murdered. They faced sexual assault and rape as well as other forms of police violence. Student organizers, as well as organizations deemed to be Marxist oriented, were brutally suppressed under the Park regime.

Park was assassinated in 1979 and another pro-US dictator, Chun Doo-hwan, took power. Political and civil tension culminated in the Gwangju Massacre in 1980 in which 2,000 people, including student-led activist groups and anti-government demonstrators, were murdered by the military and governmental forces. Chun remained in power until 1988. Leading up to the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, the Chun government attempted to make the city more “presentable”. Park Mi writes that, “the Chun government introduced a ‘beautification of the environment’ bill, which was designed to eliminate slums and unregistered street vendors” (278). The Chun government had attempted to gentrify the city, leaving the poor and working class citizens in poverty and forced many into homelessness. All while this was happening, the US government, from Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan, actively supported and endorsed the brutal regimes. In the 1980s, the US sent a massive influx of capital to South Korea, and it was only during this time that the GDP of the South overtook that of the North.

At the end of WWII, the country had been transformed into one of the poorest countries in the world. The Korean War, which spanned from 1950 to 1953, economically devastated the entirety of the Korean peninsula. The US military and other allied forces fire-bombed and destroyed 22 of the 24 cities in the northern half. Thousands of people died in the war and hundreds of thousands of children become orphaned and displaced during and after the war. While the US fought under the flag of the UN, this was nothing more than a fig leaf for US imperialism. In one of the most infamous massacres to happen during the Korean war, a US cavalry regiment had opened fire on a crowd of South Korean refugees, murdering 150-300 of them. It would be known as the No Gun Ri massacre. Many years after, the US military attempted to whitewash the massacre and it still hasn’t been held accountable in its role of murdering civilians.

In her book, “From Orphan to Adoptee,” Soo-jin Pate critically analyzes the rise of militarized humanitarianism and the birth of transnational adoptions of Korean children after the Korean War. Pate writes that, “However, its location—its close proximity to the Soviet Union—made Korea extremely important to the United States” (24). Pate describes that even though the mountainous landscape of the Korean peninsula did not offer any crucial resources to the United States that they couldn’t get elsewhere, the close proximity to the Soviet Union made the Korean peninsula an important geopolitical area. This is true, but it is also important to acknowledge that Korea was and is targeted because the DPRK’s social and economic system remains antithetical to capitalism and imperialism.

Pate also writes about the conditions of post-war South Korea for orphans: “In addition, 100,000 children were left without homes and separated from their families so that by the end of the war, over 40,000 orphans resided in orphanages” (30). The devastation of the Korean war left children without parents and the orphanages that already existed were overfilled. Missionaries, both Catholic and Protestant, along with American NGOs or non-governmental organizations, built more orphanages and provided materials for food and other necessities. Under the backdrop of the US military occupation and the Korean War, this type of humanitarianism became militarized. Pate also echoes this sentiment: “Militarism and humanitarianism became conflated through programs such as Armed Forces Assistance to Korea and Korean Civil Assistance Command, which produced what I call militarized humanitarianism” (34). Also under this backdrop of militarized humanitarianism, NGOs such as Holt International became frontrunners in the transnational adoptions of Korean orphans. With this, American families flocked to adopt children under the guise of “saving”. This type of savior complex often drove the NGOs like Holt International to be one of the most profitable companies in adoption of children. By contrast, orphans in the DPRK remained in the country, and the government provided them with excellent shelter, education, health care, and other resources. In the DPRK, war orphans were something like national heroes.

Images of “cold, hungry, and threadbare” children filling their stomachs with food donated by American and other Western countries inflated the image of the US military and others as saviors to war-torn children. A lot of these Korean orphans were exploited by public relations in the military in order to further conflate this trope. Images of children smiling and interacting with American servicemen became the poster for militarized humanitarianism. American media campaigns started to funnel money and editorials, describing the orphans as “victims of communism.”

With this mass campaign, American NGOs and other organizations donated immense resources. The influx of media attention and campaigns became the driving force of Korean adoptions. Pate describes the conditions of adoptions as follows: “The geopolitics of the Cold War and the discourse of Cold War Orientalism created a particular set of conditions that made the bodies of Korean children highly desirable” (87). She also writes that, “These children were highly desirable because they were perceived as exotic and cute and because they were perhaps the least threatening group of Asians that the United States had ever encountered” (87). Because of the anti-communist sentiment that plagued American society and Cold War politics, this made Korean children highly sought after for international adoption

 Korean children were seen as non-threatening because many of them were extremely young—infants and toddlers—so assimilation into American society would be easier than it would be with older children. Orientalism also played a part in the tropes of Korean children being more submissive towards assimilation tactics and being perceived as non-enemies. The fetishization of Korean girls had to do with similar orientalist tropes of East Asian women as docile and hyper-feminized. Pate describes the phenomenon this way: “the Oriental doll connotes femininity, exoticness, delicateness, silence, and docility, these very descriptions become assigned to the Korean female orphan” (94). This commodification of Korean women, in other words, relied on the racist, misogynistic, and imperialist view of Korean women as “doll-like”. As Pate writes, the interaction of Korean women with US military servicemen was used as a bargaining chip and to help maintain friendly relations between the US and South Korea.

Korean women and young female orphans were often forcibly recruited into sex work for the US military. These types of “camptowns” became a hotbed of sexual assault and rape. This form of exploitation towards Korean women echoes the brutal sexual violence that was forced upon Korean women by Japanese imperialists during the colonization of Korea and WWII. Soojin Pate wrote that, “the United States adopted a ‘boys will be boys’ policy toward camptown prostitution in South Korea. They were able to justify this policy by linking military prostitution to issues of national security. Citing a 1965 study on troop–community relations conducted by the Eighth U.S. Army” (58). The US military, as Pate argues, adopted a more “turning a blind eye” policy toward camptown and military prostitution. Sexual exploitation as US imperialism had evolved into the misogynistic sex industry.

Park Chung-hee had encouraged this sort of sexual exploitation as it fueled the South Korean economy. The Cold War era had turned South Korea into a neoliberal and capitalist hotspot. Even after the partial revitalization of the South Korean economy in the 1960s, political and inequitable economic woes dominated the geopolitical landscape of South Korea for decades. With the birth of neoliberalism in the 1980s and 1990s, South Korea’s economy was boosted by technological companies, such as Samsung and Hyundai, primarily trading with its neo-colonial ally, the United States. Social issues such as high rates of suicide have been a consequence of the overbearing demands of production with little to no compensation for the workers themselves. As J. Sul wrote in an article for Anti-Imperialism.org, “I cannot state all the suicidal cases here, but note well that the suicide rate in South Korea is in the top among the OECD nations” (Sul). Toward the beginning of the 2000s, anti-American sentiment began in full swing in South Korea as two events, the 2002 Yangju highway incident where two Korean schoolgirls were fatally killed by a US military vehicle and the murder of Yun Geum-i in 1992 where a bartender was murdered by a US military private. These two events brought up the question of the USFK’s (United States Forces Korea) continued presence in Korea.

These are just some of the ways that US imperialism and neocolonialism manifest on the Korean Peninsula, and why the US’s presence in South Korea is detrimental and has only led to the division and exploitation of the ROK. However, the puppet regimes had also committed violence and murder with the full support of its neo-colonial ally. The US military occupation of South Korea remains the primary obstacle to peace and reunification of our homeland.  The United States needs to end its military occupation in South Korea and dismantle all of its military bases and facilities, paying reparations to all the peoples of Korea.

“For a colonized people: the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity.”

― Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1960)

Riley Bove (Seungyoon Park) is a student at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and an organizer with the ANSWER Coalition in Indianapolis.

References

Fanon, Franz. Les damnés de la terre. A verba futuroruM, 2016

Soh, Chunghee Sarah. “The Korean ‘Comfort Women’: Movement for Redress.” Asian Survey, vol. 36, no. 12, 1996, pp. 1226–1240., www.jstor.org/stable/2645577.

Moon, Katharine H. S. “South Korea-U.S. Relations.” Asian Perspective, vol. 28, no. 4, 2004, pp. 39–61. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/42704478.   

Pate, SooJin. From Orphan to Adoptee: US Empire and Genealogies of Korean Adoption. U of Minnesota Press, 2014.

Strong, Anna Louise. In North Korea: First Eye-Witness Report. Prism Key Press, 2011.

Sul, J. “Neoliberalism in South Korea: Financial Crisis, Fascism, and the Rise of Precarious Work.” Anti-Imperialism.org, 1 July 2015, https://anti-imperialism.org/2015/01/12/neoliberalism-in-south-korea-financial-crisis-fascism-and-the-rise-of-precarious-work/.

Mi, P. (2005). Organizing dissent against authoritarianism: The South Korean student movement in the 1980s. Korea Journal. 45. 261-288.