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Discussed in this essay: Ethel Rosenberg: An American Tragedy, by Anne Sebba. St. Martins Press, 2021. 320 pages.

For more than 40 years, it was axiomatic on the left that Julius and Ethel Rosenbergthe Jewish couple famously executed on June 19th, 1953, as spies who turned the designs for the atom bomb over to the Sovietswere innocent victims, scapegoats of the McCarthy era. In the decades after their execution, one could be certain that each June, an article would appear in the pages of this magazine that picked apart the governments case by pointing to apparent absurdities in the charges leveled against the Rosenbergs ring: What kind of spies showed up at each others doors using their real names? Could something as silly as a jaggedly cut Jell-O box really have been a sign by which Soviet spies recognized each other? Could a drawing by Ethels brother David Greenglass, who had no postsecondary education, actually have enabled the Soviets to manufacture their own bomb? The lefts consensusclinched by book-length treatments of the case like Walter and Miriam Schneirs 1966 study Invitation to an Inquestwas that the Rosenbergs were framed, killed not for espionage but because they were Jews and, despite their unwavering denial, committed Communists.

This theory came crashing down in 1995 when newly released Soviet files, known as the Venona transcripts, demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that Julius was not only a spy, but the head of a ring of mainly Jewish comrades, including David. But if the transcripts confirmed Juliuss guilt, they showed that Ethels role was limited to knowledge of the espionage ring and recommending her sister-in-law Ruth for the role of typistthus undermining the narrative advanced by the state in Ethels conviction. A few years later, Juliuss Soviet handler, Aleksander Feklisov, affirmed that Ethel knew about Juliuss work but was not a spy herself. She had nothing to do with thisshe was completely innocent, he said. David eventually admitted that his testimony that Ethel had typed up the notes he provided on the Manhattan Projectwhich led to her convictionwas made only to protect himself and his wife.

At the time of the case, those who believed Ethel wasnt guilty of the charges brought against her wondered: Why would the devoted mother of two young children, knowing she was innocent, remain silent on penalty of death, leaving her children orphans? The question persists today, and Anne Sebbas recent biography, Ethel Rosenberg: An American Tragedy, attempts to answer it. Sebbas book rounds out the portrait of the martyr, revealing her to be both a product of her times and a rebel against them: a devoted housewife who had left her artistic hopes and work life behind to devote her days to motherhood, a political militant, the scorned daughter of a family that preferred her brotherand, in the end, a victim of mass hysteria induced by the ambient anti-communism of her era, and heightened by her violation of social norms surrounding the appearance and conduct of women. Sebbas carefully considered accountone of the few treatments of the case to focus on Ethelis fair and sympathetic without falling into the trap of hagiography. By detailing the contours of Ethels life, the book helps us understand the flesh-and-blood woman who would be transformed into a political symbol. But in failing to deeply read Ethels own politics, it falls short of providing a compelling explanation of her infamous silence.

Ethel Rosenberg, born Ethel Greenglass in 1915, was a product of Manhattans largely Jewish Lower East Side. From a young age, she sang, acted, and dreamed of a life in the arts. (Her high school classmates elected her class actress.) But while she was talented enough to sing in a professional choir, the reality of life as a poor Jew forced her to find office work as a way to support herself and her family. It was there that she discovered the left-wing politics that would become her dominant interest. Sebba describes how she led a strike at her workplace that resulted in her firing from her position, a job restored to her by the newly established National Labor Relations Board, which allowed workers to organize in unions without fear of retribution. She soon became one of what Sebba estimates were 3,000 Communists on the Lower East Side, probably the largest concentration of Party members in the US. In 1939, she signed a petition to put the Communist candidate for City Council, Peter V. Cacchione, on the ballota fact that would later be used against her at trial. (Hard as it is to believe now, Cacchione, leader of the Communist Party in Brooklyn, was eventually elected in 1941 and then re-elected twice.)

Ethel met Julius, a City College student, in December 1936, and by all accounts theirs was a story of shared love and activism. Ethel gave birth to the couples first child, Michael, in 1943, and the second, Robby, in 1947; in Sebbas portrayal, her dedication to her sons was as whole-hearted as her devotion to her husband and her politics. Michael was a difficult child, and Ethel studied all the available sources in an attempt to find the best way to help him. (Sebba notes that she continued her subscription to Parents magazine even while imprisoned and awaiting trial, when she had little chance of ever spending time alone with her boys again.) The Rosenbergs struggled financially, as Julius ran a series of failed businesses, yet Ethel remained a stay-at-home mother, abandoning her lingering dreams of making it on the stage. At the same time, she deepened her political organizing, which became inseparable from her marriage; for example, the couple together campaigned for Communist Party candidates and supported the Spanish Republicans. As Sebba writes, [A]lthough communism theoretically championed the equality of the sexes, it was not theory that interested Ethel. From now on she . . . turned instead, in her single-minded way, to political activism and Julius.

This all came to a crashing end on July 17th, 1950, when Julius was arrested. In the weeks after her husband was taken into custody, Ethel was called to testify before a grand jury, but refused to answer their questions. In August, after a particularly bruising day of questioning, she was met at the courthouse by two FBI agents who arrested her for violation of the Espionage Act of 1917. Government officials involved in the case would later admit in private that Ethel was arrested, and then tried and sentenced, primarily as a means of pressuring Julius to talk.

Though both Rosenbergs were vilified in the press, Ethel was cast in an especially negative lightoften for reasons irrelevant to the issues of the case. Her unprepossessing appearance was, as Sebba shows, often held against her, with journalists describing her as wearing the tired uniform of the clerk or stenographera dark wool skirt, a whitewash blouse and a white wool sweater, as having a dish-face complexion, and as slightly dumpy. Even her hair was critiqued; one journalist wrote that she failed to make the best of her naturally curly dark hair. Her bob is neither long nor short and it needs shaping. Her calm demeanor at the couples trial was taken by some as proof that it was Ethel who was the real brains behind the spy ring.

Though the judge and the prosecuting attorneyswho included Roy Cohnwere also Jews, there was an undercurrent of Jew=communist in the trial and the reaction to it. As Sebba points out, it was no coincidence that, at a time when 25% of New Yorks population was Jewish, the jury contained not a single Jew. The Rosenbergs were poorly defended by their attorneys, who had no experience with criminal trials nearly as grave as this one, and who, in an effort to soften the court towards the defendants, did little to push back against testimony to which they could have objected. Pressed on their politics, both Julius and Ethel took the Fifth Amendment, which was their right. But at that time, the height of the Cold War, their silence was viewed as at best an obfuscation, and at worst an admission that they had chosen the side of the enemy. It took the jury an afternoon and morning of deliberations to find them guilty, and Judge Irving Saypol, in sentencing them to death, blamed them for the deaths of Americans in Korea and the looming threat of a Soviet bomb.

Legal and personal appeals followed, as well as an international campaign in the Rosenbergs defense. (Sebba tells us that the American Communist Party shied away from the case so as not to be tainted with the charge of espionage.) Despite all thisand despite evidence that Ethel was never the governments real targetPresident Eisenhower refused to grant clemency, fearing that granting Ethel a reprieve would encourage other housewives to turn to espionage. A last-ditch effort by the couples lawyers to delay the execution, which had been scheduled on the Sabbath, only resulted in the hour being moved up. Julius was executed first, then Ethel. The Rosenbergs had entered history.

In the end, there is no way to understand Ethels conductor Juliussexcept through the lens of their political stance: their fidelity to Communism and the Soviet Union. While Sebba recognizes this dimension, she doesnt get to what was at the heart of their actions. Appreciating this commitment, and taking account of the specific period during which the spy ring was active and the trial occurred, is essential to comprehending how these two peopledevoted spouses, dedicated and loving parentsgave their lives so stoically for their cause.

Juliuss political allegianceswhich Ethel clearly sharedwere formed by the fact that he was a spy during World War II, when the US and the USSR were allies in the battle against fascism. (This fact has often been held up as evidence that the trial and sentence were iniquitous, since whatever was turned over to the Soviets was technically turned over to allies.) Long before D-Day in June 1944, Communists (and many others) around the world had called for the establishment of a second front. In Europe, only the Red Army and the various resistance movements were actively fighting the Nazis. Anything that could be done to assist Stalins army was a blow against fascism, and that meant there was no higher calling for a Communist than to be a comrade in arms with the Soviet soldiers who fought at Stalingrad, Leningrad, and Kursk, or with the Communist-led partisans fighting and dying in France, Yugoslavia, and Greece. Feklisov wrote in his memoirs of Juliuss almost obsessive love for the Soviet Union, describing how he cherished being considered as brave as the partisans who fought behind Nazi lines. Julius further demonstrated his ideological motivations by never asking for payment, and only ever grudgingly accepting small sums from the Soviets, despite his familys dire financial straits. As his espionage unfolded in the final years of the war, he understood himself to be at one with the fighters in Europe, risking his freedom and his life much as Titos Communist guerillas did by fighting the Nazis in Yugoslavia and Zhukovs armies did as they fought their way across Europe.

Ethel was equally committed to the Soviet Union as a beacon of both workers rights and antifascism. While it seems certain that had she broken under pressure she would have survived, as her brother did, cooperating with the prosecution would have meant denying everything she and Julius had fought for and believed in. Even more, it would have been a betrayal of the fight against fascism. Julius himself made this manichean choice clear, writing about the trial in a 1952 letter from prison to Ethel: If we are able to contribute something in the the great fight for peace and against fascism and I believe that we have already made an important contribution to aid in this fight, then we have turned the tables on the prosecution and have advanced the cause of justice and freedom.

The Rosenbergs have long been cast as either nefarious villains or superhuman heroes. Both views obscure the truth: They were passionate ideologues, inspired and constrained by the politics of their particular moment. We honor them best by understanding who they were in all their humanity. Even as it fails to fully plumb the depths of the Rosenbergs devotion to their politics, by illuminating the couples choices and the historical backdrop against which they made them, Sebbas Ethel Rosenberg takes us a long way along the road to that comprehension.

Originally posted here:
The Overlooked Loyalties of Ethel Rosenberg - Jewish Currents

On a cool, tropical morning in the tumultuous year of 1931, the American poet Langston Hughes woke up snugly and confusedly on the inside of a large clay drainage pipe. The pipe, his home for the previous night, was one of a series of large pipes that sat estranged on the side of a mountainous road somewhere in rural Haiti, perhaps to later be placed under roads to drain the overflowing streams that flood under the weight of violent storms with their heavy rains. But at this moment they remained underutilized in the applied field of water redistribution and instead became a source of warmth for the poet whose bus had run out of gas the night before.

At this moment in time, the 29-year-old poet faced an uncertain future he was relatively well-known in literary circles but was in no way famous; he was consistently winning literary prizes but was in no way rich; well-endowed with inspiration, yet destitute of financial stability. That he made it this far was impressive enough, considering the overwhelming odds against him as a working-class Black man in America, but despite it all, he went on to establish himself as one of the most celebrated poets of the 20th century.

In his childhood, Langston Hughes lived a volatile life, his father left behind the family and the unbearable racism of America for Mexico; his mother traveled incessantly to find work, he lived in and out of poverty often with his grandmother as he moved from Missouri to Kansas, from Kansas to Illinois, from Illinois to Ohio, all before graduating high school. But it was his time in Cleveland, while attending Central High School between 1916 and 1920, when his passion for poetry developed most rapidly and thoroughly. Ethel Weimers second-year English course taught him the works of Amy Lowell, Edgar Lee Masters, Vachel Lindsay, and, most impactfully to the young Mr. Hughes, Carl Sandburg. Although I had read of Carl Sandburg before . . . I didnt really know him until Miss Weimer. . . . Then I began to try to write like Carl Sandburg (Hughes 1993). The young poet was also fervently engaged in extracurricular activities and often wore a sweater that proved this; it was covered in club pins. He was on the track team, served as a lieutenant in the schools military training corps, edited the yearbook, served as class president, occasionally made the monthly honor roll, and wrote many of his early poems for the schools magazine, the Belfry Owl.

Moving between overpriced kitchenette apartments, Hughes witnessed the harsh realities of the segregated geography and racist economy. But he also encountered the fleeting cultural beauty that blossomed. Clevelands Central High School, a Victorian Gothic building on Central Avenue (since destroyed), hosted a diverse community of European immigrants from Poland, Russia, Italy, and also served a growing Black community. This made for a hotbed of radical ideas. His classmates lent him The Gadfly, introduced him to the Liberator, and took him to hear Eugene Debs speak. They knew that it was wrong that Debs was locked up, they knew that Lenin sent a shockwave from Russia to the slums of Woodlawn Avenue, and when the Russian Revolution broke out, our school almost held a celebration (Hughes 2002, 49).

The years after graduation, like much of his life, involved a seamless continuation of movement, never finding a firm residence for more than a year, floating from one place or job to the next, but always with his sights set on his true passion: writing. From 1925 to 1930 his career picked up: he won poetry contests; published his first two books, The Weary Blues and Fine Clothes to the Jew; graduated from Lincoln University; was taken up by a wealthy patron of the arts, Mrs. Mason; and published his first novel, Not without Laughter. During the economically depressed year of 1931, Hughes traveled to Cuba and Haiti and began writing for the radical press.

I went to Haiti to get away from my troubles, he wrote honestly about his trip. Hed just spent Christmas with his mother in Cleveland and intended to take a bus to Key West. Fortunately for Hughes he met a fellow poet named Zell Ingram, a disenchanted student at the Cleveland School of Art who, conveniently for Hughes, was desperate to quit his classes and travel. They took Ingrams mothers car, both with $300 in their pocket, down to the coast. After the turbulent break with his patron, Mrs. Mason, he thought it necessary to sit in the sun awhile and think. . . . So in Haiti I began to puzzle out how I, a Negro, could make a living in America from writing (Hughes 1993).

In the sun, he began writing for the communist magazine New Masses, a bastion for what lead editor Mike Gold called proletarian literature. In its pages, Hughes warned poetically of an insurmountable foe in Havana, a pirate called THE NATIONAL CITY BANK. He wrote of Haiti as a world of black people without shoes who catch hell, a country with a deteriorating Citadel, rusting while the planes of the United States Marines hum daily overhead. By the middle of their trip, Hughes and Ingram grew tired. At this point Zell, who had never traveled before outside the confines of the U.S.A., said he wished he had stayed home in Cleveland.

Hughes returned wearily to New York where he had little time to decompress before going on a tour of the South. In 1931 thered been twelve known lynchings in the South, of which Hughes was painfully aware during his voyage. He wrote two poems about one of the most pressing conflicts of 1931, the Scottsboro case. BLACK BOYS IN A SOUTHERN JAIL. / WORLD, TURN PALE! Hughes wrote. Nine young Black men were accused of raping two white women on a freight train traveling through Alabama, and their arrest almost led to a lynching. The prosecution played out through years of court cases and appeals led by the Communist Party and the NAACP, which eventually resulted in most of the nine defendants being released. The next year he wrote a short play and four poems on the case called Scottsboro, Limited.

In keeping with his momentum of ceaseless travel, in the summer of 1932 the inquisitive Hughes sailed to the land of John Reeds Ten Days That Shook the World, the land where race prejudice was reported taboo, the land of the Soviets. He was accompanied by twenty-two young Black Americans to make a Soviet-led film on race relations in the U.S. A third of his autobiography, I Wonder as I Wander ([1956] 1993), focuses on his impactful time spent in the socialist country. However, the reflections stay relatively indifferent, devoid of any strong opinions due to Americas censorship and blacklists of the 1950s.

Noticeably absent from his autobiography, for example, are his poems that speak highly of Lenin and revolution. Some of his most politically charged works have been censored from collections of his poetry; works like One More S in the U.S.A. [to make it Soviet] and Ballads of Lenin might be conveniently omitted from an innocent collection of his wide assemblage of poems.

But he nonetheless spoke honestly of the hospitable treatment of himself and his crewmates in the USSR, who were always introduced as representatives of the great Negro people. On the streets queuing up for newspapers, for cigarettes, or soft drinks, often folks in the line would say, Let the Negro comrade go forward. If you demurred, they would insist, Please! Visitor to the front. Even as the movie fell apart, he noted that hed never been paid such a high rate or lived in such comfort: All of us were being paid regularly, wined and dined overmuch. . . . I had never stayed in such hotels in my own country since, as a rule, Negroes were not then permitted to do so. Besides, I had never had enough money for such fine living in America (Hughes 1993).

His adventures eventually landed him humbly back in Ohio, residing with his distant cousins in Oberlin to care for his sick mother. Hed never been to the small town located not far west of Cleveland. He knew few things about the town other than that his distant cousins lived there, and that his grandmother, Mary Patterson Langston who was married to Sheridan Leary who died fighting with John Brown was the first Black woman to attend Oberlin College.

On his return to Ohio, Hughes engaged with the local theater scene. In the Fairfax neighborhood of Clevelands east side is the still standing Karamu House, the oldest African American theater in the United States, opened in 1915. Most of Hughes plays were developed and performed at the theater, which premiered many of his works throughout the 1930s. In 1936 and 1937 alone, Karamu House put on a stream of plays almost as quickly as Hughes could write them. This included his farce, Little Ham, a comedy titled Joy to My Soul, and a historical drama about Haiti called Troubled Island.

Perhaps itching to travel again, Hughes ventured in summer 1937 back to Europe, first to Paris for the International Writers Congress where he enjoyed a venturesome excursion that included a memorable gala and the attendance of a motorcycle race with the famous photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, whom hed briefly lived with in Mexico then to Spain where he finished the year reporting on the brutal civil war for the Baltimore Afro-American. Some of the men in the International Brigades had told me they came to Spain to help keep war and fascism from spreading. War and fascisma great many people at home in America seemed to think those words were just a left-wing slogan. But of course it wasnt just a slogan to Hughes or those who fought unremittingly against fascism in Spain. Endless years of moving and traveling, Hughes wondered what the future held for him, Europe, and the world:

Would the world really end?

Not my world, I said to myself. My world will not end.

But worldsentire nations and civilizationsdo end. In the snowy night in the shadows of the old houses of Montmartre, I repeated to myself, My world wont end.

But how could I be so sure? I dont know.

For a moment I wondered. (Hughes 1993)

In the paranoia and anti-communism of the 1950s, Hughes was interrogated in March 1953 by Roy Cohn at an executive session of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. He refused to name names, but, under the threat of being blacklisted and seeing his career ruined, renounced his radical views but not before educating the committee members on what it meant to be an African American in America. The results of which led to a decade of relative political neutrality in his work, earning him criticisms from all sides, but keeping his career and passport intact something many other communists had been deprived of.

Nonetheless, Langston Hughes lived a zealous life as a traveler and a poet, an activist and an artist. His communist politics developed from his early years in Cleveland to the USSR to Spain and everywhere in between. His work was torn violently by the hostilities of historical revisionism during the Cold War, the ruptures visible and unsustainable. One side of him was canonized, the other suppressed by anti-communism and cynicism. His work was effectively censored, stripped of its revolutionary foundations, and muffled of its political radicalism. But the two can be rejoined. Like the moments separating a brief strike of lightning and its booming roll of thunder, we wait patiently to hear its roll and remember that the two are intertwined. His revolutionary works sit waiting to be compounded, to strike with a lively force a new generation of proletarian artists who can revive the totality of Langston Hughes and bring about the O mighty roll of the Revolution.

SourcesLangston Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander, Hill and Wang, (1956) 1993. epub.Langston Hughes, The Big Sea, vol. 13 of The Collected Works of Langston Hughes. Columbia, University of Missouri Press, 2002.

Images: Top, photo by Gordon Parks, Wikipedia (Public Domain); Hughes in 1928, Wikipedia (public domain); Scottsboro defendants, Wikipedia (fair use); Republican forces in Spanish Civil War, Wikipedia (CCO).

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Langston Hughes: Progressive poet and wanderer Communist Party USA - Communist Party USA

DRESDEN, Germany First vaccine opponents attacked the police. Then a group of them chatted online about killing the governor. And one day an angry crowd beating drums and carrying torches showed up outside the house of the health minister of the eastern state of Saxony.

The minister, Petra Kpping, had just gotten home when her phone rang. It was a neighbor and he sounded afraid. When Ms. Kpping peered out of her window into the dark, she saw several dozen faces across the street, flickering in the torchlight.

They came to intimidate and threaten me, she recalled in an interview. I had just come home and was alone. Ive been in politics for 30 years, but I have never seen anything like this. There is a new quality to this.

The crowd was swiftly dispersed by the police, but the incident in December represented a turning point in a country where the SA, Hitlers paramilitary organization, was notorious not just for showing up at the homes of political rivals with torches and drums, but for attacking and even murdering them.

It was the clearest indication yet that a protest movement against Covid measures that has mobilized tens of thousands in cities and villages across the country was increasingly merging with the far right, each finding new purpose and energy and further radicalizing the other.

The dynamic is much the same whether in Germany or Canada, and the protests in various countries have echoes of one another. On the streets of Dresden one recent Monday, the signs and slogans were nearly identical to those on the streets of Ottawa: Freedom, Democracy and The Great Resist.

In Germany, at least, the merging of the movements has taken an increasingly sinister turn, with a specter of violence that is alarming security agencies. Since December, the threats have only intensified.

Last month the far-right Alternative for Germany party called for another protest outside of Ms. Kppings home. (The police stopped it.) Hospital staff in Dresden, the Saxon capital, have been attacked. A second governor has received death threats. And when the police raided the homes of nine people who had debated ways to kill Michael Kretschmer, the governor of Saxony, on the messenger service Telegram, they discovered weapons and bomb-making ingredients like gunpowder and sulfur.

As the pandemic enters its third year, Germany is emerging from another long winter of high case numbers that are now slowly receding. While the government is preparing to lift restrictions, Chancellor Olaf Scholz is determined to turn a general vaccine mandate into law ahead of the next fall.

The debate about Covid restrictions has energized a far-right scene that thrives on a sense of crisis and apocalypse.

Germanys far right, which in recent years used anger over an influx of refugees and Europes debt crisis to recruit, has seized on the virus as its latest cause.

If the issue is different, the messaging of those organizing the protests is eerily familiar: The state is failing, democracy is subverted by shady globalists and the people are urged to resist.

Now as then, what began with demonstrations against government policy has become personal. The number of verbal and physical attacks on politicians tripled last year to 4,458, according to federal police statistics. It is no longer just regional and local politicians who are targeted. The federal health minister and the chancellors chief crisis manager on the pandemic are among a growing group of officials requiring police protection.

Two and a half years after a regional politician who defended Germanys refugee policy was shot dead on his front porch by a neo-Nazi, security agencies worry that far-right militants want to use the pandemic to unleash another wave of political violence.

Violent resistance to democratic rules is now a frequent demand in the anti-corona protests, Dirk-Martin Christian, domestic intelligence chief of the state of Saxony, said in an email interview. The routine assertion that we live in a dictatorship and under an emergency regime that must be eliminated, and against which public resistance is legitimate, is evidence of the progressive radicalization of this movement.

There is an increasing willingness to use violence in the context of the protests, Mr. Christian added, noting the fantasies of murder targeting Mr. Kretschmer, the Saxon governor, and the SA-style procession outside Ms. Kppings house.

The radicalization of protesters against Covid measures is most visible in the former Communist East, where far-right extremists now dominate the organization of the protests and control the information and disinformation on popular Telegram channels associated with the movement.

Saxony, the most populous eastern state, has a long history of far-right protests, starting with the annual neo-Nazi marches on the anniversary of the Dresden bombing in 1945.

March 4, 2022, 6:06 a.m. ET

In 2014, the anti-Muslim Pegida movement short for Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West was founded there, then spread to other cities. For years its supporters marched on Monday nights, like the protesters who brought down Communism a quarter century earlier.

We are the people, the slogan associated with Pegida marches, is now popular at the coronavirus protests on Monday nights too.

The parallels are worrying, officials say, because prolonged street protests have proven to be powerful incubators of far-right violence.

Regular protests have the effect of giving extremists the feeling that public opinion is with them and that the time to act is now, said Michael Nattke, a former neo-Nazi who left the scene and has been doing anti-extremism work for the last two decades. It creates its own dynamic.

For intelligence officials, too, its no longer a question of if, but when.

We are very concerned about the possible radicalization of individual perpetrators, said Mr. Christian of the Saxon intelligence service.

One concern is that far-right extremists are tapping into the frustrations and fears of ordinary citizens who march alongside them every week. That regular proximity erodes boundaries.

Something is becoming normalized that mustnt be normalized, said Ms. Kpping, the health minister. Its worrying that you cant distinguish anymore who is on the streets because of vaccines and Covid restrictions and who is already radicalized.

On a recent Monday night in Dresden, eleven different protest walks, which had been advertised on Telegram, snaked their way through different parts of the city before coalescing into one march with some 3,000 people. Some carried candles, like the peaceful protesters who marched against the Berlin Wall in 1989. Others waved the flag of the Free Saxons, a new party that is so far right it considers the Alternative for Germany party establishment.

New Zealands Covid reckoning. For much of the past two years, the coronavirus was a phantom presence in New Zealand. Now, the island nation is being hit by a major outbreak of the Omicron variant, with the virus spreading at an extremely fast rate.

N.F.L. drops protocols. The league and the players union agreed to suspend all Covid-19 protocols, effective immediately. The N.F.L., which is not in season, is the first of the major professional sports leagues in the United States to halt its coronavirus-related policies

In the crowd was Betina Schmidt, a 57-year-old accountant in a red woolly hat. Ms. Schmidt said she was not just protesting government plans for a general vaccine mandate but also a broader conspiracy by powerful globalists to destroy the German nation.

Until a few years ago she voted for the Greens. Now I know they are not green, they are totalitarian, Ms. Schmidt said. What they want has nothing to do with the environment. They want the destruction of Germany.

She stopped watching news on the public broadcaster last summer and is now getting most of her information on Telegram. Like many others here, Ms. Schmidt cited The Great Reset, a book by Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum in Davos, which Ms. Schmidt says reads like a script for how a group of powerful globalists plan to destroy the German nation and create a mishmash of people that can be led easily.

I didnt believe it either six months ago, she added.

Matthias Phlmann, the author of Right-Wing Esotericism, a book about the fusion of far-right conspiracy theories with alternative views, said such theories were spreading fast and well beyond the milieu of people traditionally open to far-right ideas.

These conspiracy theories are powerful accelerators of radicalization, he said. If you believe someone wants to erase you, that you live in a dictatorship, violence is justified.

Germanys federal intelligence service, which is known as the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, recently created a new category for dangerous conspiracy theorists dubbed delegitimization of the state. It has also set up a special organization tasked with monitoring some 600 channels on Telegram associated with the protest movement.

Security agencies have been caught off guard before. Asked in September in Parliament whether there was a concrete danger coming from the pandemic protest movement, the government denied this, saying only that some protesters showed signs of radicalization and a greater readiness to commit violence.

Ten days later an employee of a gas station was shot dead by a customer after the employee asked him to put on a mask. The attacker had been a regular at the protest marches.

They have been very slow to understand the risk, said Mr. Nattke, who regularly meets with officials about the far-right threat and says he has been warning them for months. It wasnt really until the torchlight procession outside Petra Kppings house that they took it seriously.

In Dresden, the group that fantasized about killing the Saxon governor, and is now under investigation for plotting terrorism, was first discovered by journalists. Now Mr. Christians office has its own team of half a dozen Telegram watchers, who scroll through hatred and disinformation to identify serious threats.

Its frightening how many people are following these calls for mobilization, Mr. Christian said. The erosion of the political center has already begun.

Christopher F. Schuetze contributed reporting.

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In Germany, Threats Grow as Far Right and Pandemic Protestors Merge - The New York Times

Republished: Tribune writer's story still an true to Ukrainian people's thirst for religious freedom

EDITORS NOTE:In 2001, South Bend Tribune reporter Joseph Dits joined a Niles bike builder on a bicycle tour of Seventh-day Adventists churches in Ukraine. They heard stories of religious oppression under communism and saw churches reborn after they gained freedom in 1991.

Here is that story again, republished as it ran on July 9, 2001. It is a snapshot in time. Since then, religious freedom has shifted to some degree, especially in certain parts of Ukraine. But this story is still true to what Ukrainians suffered under communism, plus the religious rebirth they started to experience in their first decade of freedom. It's also true to the enduring generosity of the people.

In 2001, news media spelled the capital Kiev. Today, of course, it is known as Kyiv.

KIEV, Ukraine We rolled out of inky black croplands that look like the Midwest. On the edge of the nation's capital, Kiev, our bikes began to swish and dance around countless puddles on a muddy road into the town of Borispol.

Ukrainians navigated their way on foot and in boxy Ladas, the four-door jalopies made in neighboring Russia.

Rain-soaked foliage almost hid the small homes of concrete, but not the boring, Soviet-era apartment high-rises that flood the nation and that badly need new concrete, new tile, new everything.

Our tires nudged into the garden gate of a Seventh-day Adventist church. It was lunch, and the church folk had been expecting us for a couple of months.

Five cyclists from South Bend, Niles and Buchanan and six other Americans had just begun a weeklong tour of Adventist churches in this former Soviet nation. The generosity of the people humbled us. But so did the price they've paid for their faith. It was easy to find people who've spent years in jail for practicing Christianity. Neither the growth of churches we witnessed nor the tour itself was possible 10 years ago, when communism held its final grip.

The beaming pastor in Borispol showed us his unfinished church building. Exposed bricks held up a roof over a dusty floor cluttered with boards. He's struggling to raise $10,000 to finish the $35,000 project.

The fee for our tour brought a few hundred dollars to that cause. It was time to thank us. Cloth-covered tables were plastered with red borscht, bread, potatoes, salad, sweet rolls and fruit drinks in colorful mugs and plates. We snapped pictures. This surpassed our simple expectations. Then church women brought more goodies cabbage rolls, cabbage pancakes, strawberries and sweet, doughy desserts filled with fruit and cheese.

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Our tummies packed, they led us into the lower-level room that they used for worship and seated us on one side. Church members glowed at us from their seats. More than 5,000 miles and a mountain of riches divided our cultures, and all of that had been reduced to a few feet. As one Ukrainian woman said, "We are brothers and sisters."

They gave each of us a hand-painted wooden container or candlestick.

Such feasts and gifts repeated themselves throughout the tour breakfast, lunch, dinner. We all wished we had something small to give back. In fact, we often laughed while trying to get our translators to explain: "We are not worthy!"

We could have expected divine care on this fund-raising trip. We were ambassadors from the land of milk and honey on a first-ever tour. But, as I found traveling to people's homes after the tour, Ukrainians love having visitors, and they express this by cooking.

Doug Fattic assembled the mid-June trip when he wasn't building or painting bikes out of his Niles home or serving on the finance committee of the Adventist church in Niles.

He worked with Adventist church leaders in Ukraine.

The fee helped to raise money for the churches and for a project to give bikes to pastors. Many of the nation's 500-plus Adventist clergy can't afford cars, yet they have to minister to small communities that are 3 to 15 miles from where they live. So far, the project has gathered 350 bikes, 250 of which were bought from a bike factory in Ukraine, Fattic said. Much of his financial help $30,000 recently comes from his camping buddy, Debbie McKee of the "Little Debbie" snack cakes.

I was among two non-Adventists in the group. I'm Catholic. I came because I love to cycle and see out-of-the-way countries. I knew Fattic from years of cycling with him in a club.

Even the American Adventists were touched by the Ukrainians' devout faith and penchant for prayer throughout the day. Maybe it's the old truth about converts being the most fervent Christians; new religious freedom has drawn thousands of newcomers to the faith.

Or maybe it's because the Ukrainians' faith has endured bloodshed and anguish. Nazis murdered an estimated 700,000 Jews here in World War II, almost half of the Jewish population, and Soviet leaders killed, tortured or imprisoned thousands more for religious reasons.

About 140 years ago, a Catholic priest wrote the melody to fit a poem, "Ukraine Has Not Perished," which the Parliament chose as the national anthem in 1992. It begins:

"Ukraine has not perished, neither her glory, nor her freedom,

Upon us, fellow Ukrainians, fate shall smile once more.

Our enemies will vanish, like dew in the morning sun,

And we, too, shall dwell, brothers, in a free land of our own."

Growing up, the Rev. Michael Skrypkar used to climb into the mountains with other youths so they could escape the eyes and ears of the KGB and learn about their faith. When he turned 19, the army called, and, like all men his age, he was required to enlist. It was 1978. He refused to work on Saturdays, the Sabbath, which Adventists reserve for worship and rest. The army quickly found out and sent him to prison for three years.

The food was terrible, but Skrypkar prayed with many other men who were behind bars for their faith. He said he became a "good friend" to, and converted, a man who'd spent 15 years in prison for killing 31 allegedly corrupt policemen.

Now Skrypkar serves as pastor for the church in Belaya Tserkov, which means "White Church."

In a general sense, his heritage reminds me of the dual life Ukraine had to live under communist atheism. Skrypkar's brown hair and brown eyes, his rounded cheeks and jaw line reveal a Romanian ancestry. He speaks Romanian and enjoys the native food and music at home. But his passport says he's Ukrainian because he's from Chernivtsi, a Ukrainian town on the southwest border, which originally was a part of Romania.

He doesn't seem to mind. Many residents of western Ukraine have a split or mixed heritage because various parts of the area had belonged to neighboring countries.

It's more painfully ironic how communism tried to force atheism on a country that, in fact, had such a rich religious history.

Ukrainian churches go back to the 10th century. Ukraine was the first Eastern region to receive the Christian rites from Constantinople that shaped the Orthodox churches, the most prevalent of the Christian denominations in Ukraine and Russia today.

Kiev's medieval Pecherska Lavra, the "Monastery of the Caves," is a color- and gold-splashed assortment of Orthodox churches and buildings that was the site of many cultural firsts, among them the printing of the first Ukrainian dictionary. The western city of Lviv holds more medieval churches than you can see in one day, including Roman Catholic, Byzantine Catholic, Ukrainian Orthodox and Russian Orthodox.

Communists took direct control of the Russian Orthodox church during their reign and outlawed all other faiths.

Adventists recall how they'd knock out the wall between two apartments to hold Sabbath in secret, and how KGB members would appear at the services. Officials tolerated services but cracked down when the faithful began to teach their children.

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One of our translators, Svitlana Kryshtalska, recalls what happened to children who were found going to church: "Teachers would …gather the whole school and would start shaming you before the whole school audience that you believe in God and are visiting churches," she said. "God was a myth, and the communists were doing everything in order to make people consider it as something ridiculous. …Such things happened a lot of times. But, thank God, it never happened to me."

Kryshtalska, now in her 20s, said her father used to paint icons in Orthodox churches, but he never told her what he did for a living until she was 13 or 14 old enough to keep it a secret. She knows of another man who went to prison for 10 years for doing the same. Yet another was jailed for baptizing too many people.

Every typewriter had to be registered with the government so that, if religious material or counter-propaganda arose, officials could track down the author. Many Christians typed church papers inside closets, where they could muffle the clicking of their keys.

Youths used to go to a wooded camp and building called Bucha on the outskirts of Kiev to learn about communism. Adventists have turned it into an institute of higher education. Our group joined 300 or more young Adventist adults who gathered there in Sabbath suits and dresses for a conference of music, Bible school discussions and talk of church trips and evangelism.

Church buildings are still coming out of their shackles. The government had turned many of them into warehouses and, in one case, a museum to atheism.

There aren't enough old churches to meet the demands of growing denominations. Adventist numbers have tripled from about 20,000 over the past decade. Now there are more than 800 Adventist congregations throughout Ukraine, plus about 375 prayer groups that aren't large enough to be considered congregations, said the Rev. Vladimir Krupsky, president of the Adventist church in Ukraine.

The Adventists are erecting 15 to 18 church buildings in each of the eight conferences in the country, Krupsky said. Four out of the eight churches we visited were still being built. Tour organizers, no doubt, wanted us to see this for fund-raising purposes. But I saw many churches of other denominations being built, too.

Not all of this is for evangelizing. Adventists also talked about meals and clothing they provide for the needy.

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Ukrainians can build a church for the price of a high-end sport utility vehicle in the United States.

The pastor in Pereyaslav-Khmelnitsky sold his car to raise money for his church building. It couldn't have been a fancy car; pastors typically make less than $50 a month. Church members bought an unfinished house, and, little by little, they have installed what they can as collections trickle in from the members' also-meager incomes.

Their unfinished building is made of a white, concrete brick. Brick is cheaper and easier to come by than wood. The floor is still dirt, walls and ceiling are missing, but the garden outside is full. The side building has a garage, a small gathering room and a second story for storage that you reach by ladder.

The congregations we met borrowed money from relatively wealthy neighbors. Many people don't trust banks, one young pastor told me, because they have been known to close unexpectedly.

The churches tend to hire a handful of men with versatile building skills who are the ones who slap the cement, pound the nails, run the wiring and do everything else.

The Rev. Krupsky relaxed at his home with Doug Fattic and me to reflect on the tour we'd finished and the prospects for another tour next year. As Adventist president, Krupsky told Fattic that the bike tour would have been unimaginable seven years ago, at least for Krupsky. He and others were still shaking off years of thinking in the old Soviet way. Had Fattic come then, Krupsky said, he would have returned to the United States and warned others, "Never go there, never do business with those people."

The Ukrainians on our trip delighted in our 300-mile adventure, whether they were following in our three support vehicles or riding alongside us on their own bikes. Touring dozens of kilometers a day on a bike was common to us, totally new to them.

They and the pastors we visited took their cues from the Rev. Yuri Kusmenko, the fussy and clever man who masterminded our course. A lean man with raw Ukrainian cheekbones, Kusmenko oversees all of the Adventist pastors in Ukraine. He drove one of the two vans and watched the cyclists like a worried shepherd.

His intensity paid off. Rarely were we off schedule, and when we were, it wasn't by much. Pastors at several churches asked us to forgive their imperfections, whatever those were.

The Ukrainians overcame limitations with ingenuity.

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Take the bad water pressure that plagues the entire nation. Hot water is pumped to some homes, although it often fails or stops at a certain hour. One family's water stopped completely after 10 p.m. Water is expensive, so if you don't live in a high-rise, chances are that you have a pit toilet.

But our hosts built showers just for us. These consisted of two wood-frame stalls wrapped in wood or black plastic. Volunteers climbed a ladder to dump buckets of heated water into a barrel, from which the water flowed into shower heads. In Kaniv, youth group volunteers ran water from the heat of a fire up to the church's second floor, where it flowed from a tank down a long tube to the showers.

Ingenious or hospitable? We had brought sleeping mats and sleeping bags but never got to use them as the faithful cleared room in their churches for beds or mattresses, sent us to a hotel or to members' homes.

Not all is broken. City markets thrive without long lines for food. All of the highways and country roads we rode were paved. City streets are free of litter. Kiev is building a new, modern train station. The city's subways are not only full of art; they help many of the 5 million citizens get around with great efficiency.

Dignity lives in Ukraine, too. Village houses may be small, but they are immaculate and brightly painted. Many live in Soviet-built high-rise apartment buildings, hundreds of which fill Kiev's skyline. From the outside, they shock the eye like old public housing in Chicago. Front steps have holes big enough to catch a child's foot. Poorly lit hallways look like dungeons. Elevators chug along like old cars.

But open the door to someone's home and you find tidiness and warm-colored paint, wallpaper, carpets, lacy curtains and perhaps a book of worship.

Like stepping from hell into heaven.

Follow Outdoor Adventures columnist Joseph Dits on Facebook at SBTOutdoorAdventures. Contact him at 574-235-6158 or jdits@sbtinfo.com.

Read more from the original source:
We saw Ukraine churches reborn after communist oppression in this 2001 bike trip - South Bend Tribune

Though Frank Sinatra had more conservative political leanings toward the end of his life, the celebrity was initially liberal enough to pick up suspicion from the FBI. John Wayne was a staunch conservative who disagreed with Sinatras politics. After Wayne made comments about Sinatras ties to John F. Kennedy and a Communist filmmaker, the two men nearly got into a physical altercation.

In the 1940s, Sinatra openly supported various antiracist, antifascist, and internationalist causes. He also served as a board member for the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions (ICCASP). According toJacobin Mag, the ICCASP was a group of influential figures such as Duke Ellington, Albert Einstein, and Eleanor Roosevelt who supported causes like free speech, racial equality and, after the end of World War II, campaigns against the atomic bomb.

Given the national mood during the Red Scare, Sinatras political leanings garnered attention from the FBI. While they compiled a file on the singer that primarily dealt with his alleged mob ties, they also focused on his leftist beliefs.

By contrast, Wayne was a prominent Hollywood conservative. Per theWashington Post, he belonged to the John Birch Society, a right-wing, anti-communism group. He also supported the House Un-American Activities Committee, which kept an eye on Sinatras politics.

Sinatra irritated Wayne in the 1960s when he hired Alfred Maltz, a blacklisted Communist filmmaker, to write a screenplay forThe Execution of Private Slovik. Sinatra worked with Maltz in the 1945 short filmThe House I Live In. The film shows Sinatra decrying anti-semitism and promoting tolerance.

Per theSaturday Evening Post, Wayne responded bitterly when a reporter asked him what he thought of the collaboration.

I dont think my opinion is too important, he said. Why dont you ask Sinatras crony, whos going to run our country for the next few years, what he thinks of it?

With crony, Wayne was referring to Kennedy, who Sinatra publicly supported. The outcry against Maltz was strong enough that Sinatra fired him and canceled the project. Shortly after, Sinatra and Wayne were at the same Hollywood benefit show. Sinatra stalked off the stage when Wayne took the microphone.

What the hell did you walk away from me for? Wayne later asked Sinatra.

Well, you cried, Sinatra said. You blasted off your mouth.

Per theLA Times, witnesses at the benefit said that the two men nearly got into a physical altercation over the comments.

Despite witness accounts that Sinatra tried to square off against Wayne, the actor denied the altercation.

There was no trouble at all, he said just after the benefit. I like Frank. Frank was the backbone of the entertainment that evening. In fact, he kept the show going.

Still, he recounted the tense moment for the Saturday Evening Post in 1962. In this version of the story, however, the disagreement ended calmly.

Duke, were friends, and well probably do pictures together, Wayne explained that Sinatra said. Lets forget the whole thing.

Ultimately, though, the moment did not permanently mar Sinatra and Waynes relationship.

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Read more:
Frank Sinatra and John Wayne Nearly Came to Blows Over Sinatra 'Crony' JFK and Communism - Showbiz Cheat Sheet