There’s a lengthy piece in today’s Guardian that, none too subtly, attempts to draw comparisons between the climate in today’s America and the McCarthy era. Among the highlights:

A description by that well-known Sovietophile, Vichy boulevardier and ‘philosopher’, Jean-Paul Sartre, of the execution of the Rosenbergs as:

“A legal lynching that has covered a whole nation in blood”.

Hmmm, Sartre. Could that be the same Sartre that said Khruschev’s denunciation of Stalin’s crimes should be kept secret lest it “discourage” the working class?

And then there’s this:

“Investigations and revelations since the end of the cold war have revealed that Julius Rosenberg probably did pass secrets to the Soviet Union, although nothing remotely as serious as those relating to the atomic bomb.”

Curiously, the article does not cite, for example, comments such as this (from papers summarized by former Soviet spy Vasili Mitrokhin):

“…David Greenglass was recruited through a group of S&T agents run by Julius Rosenberg (codenamed successively ANTENNA and LIBERAL…The members of the Rosenberg ring, who included his wife Ethel…were producing so many classified documents to be photographed …that the New York residency was running short of film. The residency reported that Rosenberg was receiving so much intelligence from his agents that he was finding it difficult to cope. “We are afraid of putting LIBERAL out of action with overwork.”