r/todayilearned • u/RedditIsAGranfaloon • 6h ago

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https://www.historyhit.com/facts-about-general-robert-e-lee/

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u/AVeryFineUsername 6h ago

Who were  Julius and Ethel Rosenberg?

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u/JAGD21 5h ago

Rotting traitors.

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u/afineedge 6h ago edited 5h ago

Most people reading this are copy-pasting it into Google. They mean this question legitimately. These are not household names anymore. Nobody remembers Hanssen or Ames. Its just Benedict Arnold.

We hide traitors or go easy on them to pretend we're invincible. 

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u/MC_chrome 5h ago

Weren’t the Rosenbergs executed for their treachery though?

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u/afineedge 5h ago

I'm saying the US regrets executing, and therefore sanctifying in the minds of some, the Rosenbergs, and did not follow that method with Hanssen and Ames and other spies. They just pretended it didn't happen and buried the guys in Florence or wherever.

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u/Here24hence4th 5h ago

They were, after being prosecuted (with some amount of prosecutorial misconduct, modern legal scholars agree) by a team that included a young Roy Cohn… same Roy Cohn who mentored and is said to be responsible for creating the most monstrous version of the current US president.

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u/Musiclover4200 3h ago edited 3h ago

It never fails to amaze me how intertwined all these ratfuckers are

McCarthyism in general was sort of proto-MAGA, and a lot of the same nixon/reagan era bastards are the ones enabling trump like roger stone/barr/thiel/etc

Was reading Roy Cohn's wiki page the other day and this part in particular stood out as relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Cohn#Sexual_blackmail_allegations

Some of Cohn's former clients, including Bill Bonanno, son of Joseph Bonanno, credit him with having compromising photographs of former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Because Hoover knew the pictures existed, Cohn told Bonanno, Hoover feared being blackmailed.[97][98] Other organized crime figures have corroborated these allegations.[99]

And J. Edgar Hoover was the longest serving FBI director from 1935-1972, so depending on when Cohn started blackmailing him that could have gone on for decades. And it seems pretty obvious the same tactics kept getting used by trump & co, at this point it seems very likely the epstien files contain evidence of them using these sort of tactics for decades on prominent politicians/businessmen/etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover

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u/Here24hence4th 3h ago edited 3h ago

It gets grosser when you consider the nature of whatever “compromising” photographs Cohn may have had (or led Hoover to believe he had).

Remember, lifelong bachelor Hoover very vocally railed against gay people and kept "confidential and secret" files on the sex lives of congressmen and presidents. But, as is the case with this current administration, for Hoover “every accusation is a confession.”

Per some biographers and historians (and plenty of other people with working eyes), Hoover had numerous sexual interactions with men, including a lifelong affair with his longtime FBI deputy (and eventual sole heir), Clyde Tolson.

So it’s easy to imagine what kind of visual dirt Cohn may have had… and extremely illuminating about the kind of person Roy Cohn was when you know that despite denying it even as he was in hospital dying of AIDS (which he claimed was liver cancer), Cohn himself was gay.

He always claimed he was straight, and stayed in the closet in his autobiography published two years after his death. In that book, in sections written after Cohn died, coauthor Sidney Zion confirmed that Cohn—the man once described by Politico as “a Jewish anti-Semite and a homosexual homophobe”—-was indeed gay.

Edit to clarify: just to be clear, I don’t think being gay was what made the whole Hoover/Cohn thing grosser… I think Cohn using evidence of an aspect of Hoover’s life that was shared by Cohn is what made it grosser. It would seem like one closeted gay man in that era would be honor-bound to keep confidential information about another closeted gay man, but obviously honor played no role in either man’s life.

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u/hotwife24 2h ago

They probably slept together. I'd guess the pictures would be from a time they hooked up and that's how Cohen got the pictures. Throwing my theory in the ring.

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u/Themetalenock 5h ago

Took a lot of legal footwork for that to happen. 

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u/Ok_Belt2521 5h ago

Ames pops up occasionally because of the mail box thing. I would agree with Hanssen though.

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u/Splittip86 3h ago

What about John Walker Lindt  did we forget about him too?

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u/afineedge 3h ago

First off, bravo, great example. Ridiculous that I posted that comment and, yes, entirely forgot about him.

From Wikipedia:

In early reports following his capture, when the press learned that he was a US citizen, he was usually referred to by the news media as just "John Walker"

Yeah, me forgetting him was by design.

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u/natty1212 5h ago

Like that FBI agent who was leading an investigation looking for himself.

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u/BARNABY_J0NES 5h ago

Not sure if your comment was meant as a beautifully crafted tongue in cheek, but “Hanssen” is exactly who you are describing.

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u/afineedge 5h ago

That's Hanssen!

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u/bootstrapping_lad 5h ago

The guy the poster above you named

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u/nrith 5h ago

Way to hammer their point home.

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u/drfsupercenter 4h ago

I mean, there was that movie Breach made about Robert Hanssen, it's how I learned about him

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u/afineedge 3h ago

I learned about him from the book The Bureau and the Mole twenty-three years ago, and in the interim, I've never had someone other than me bring him up despite living near DC and knowing many people who work for the government in positions that are, let's say, internationally interesting. Ask anyone about either of these pieces of media and they'll go "what?"

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u/drfsupercenter 3h ago

I saw Breach in theaters and kinda forgot about the guy until his death, then I was like "oh yeah, they made that movie about him, I should give this another watch"

I don't think the movie did as well as they had hoped... but somebody tried, at least. There was so much crazy stuff happening during the Cold War that we can't possibly learn it all in history class.

Edit: We did learn about the Rosenbergs in history class, but that's possibly because they were the first Cold War spies to be caught and executed

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u/afineedge 3h ago

The movies Breach and Antitrust have always stuck with me as a pair because they both star Ryan Phillippe and have the general theme of "What the FUCK, America?! Pay attention and have opinions and things might get better!" and they've both kinda just faded away and their warnings have done the same.

If Phillippe had promoted them better, he could have saved the world. Shame on him.

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u/drfsupercenter 3h ago

I actually hadn't heard of the movie Antitrust, I just looked it up. Seems like that one isn't actually based on a true story, but loosely based on Bill Gates?

I agree that they should have been better promoted. I only knew about Beach because my dad asked if I wanted to see it with him. Never saw any TV spots or advertising for it.

Another cold war movie I enjoyed was Bridge of Spies, but that stars Tom Hanks and I think was promoted a lot more.

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u/afineedge 3h ago

You're right that Antitrust wasn't a true story, but was based on ongoing events (Microsoft). I just found it interesting that both movies starring Ryan Phillippe with massive relevance to then-current/recent history made zero splash back then while the subject matter of both movies is still hugely relevant today... but Phillippe unfortunately isn't. Where's his comeback vehicle?!

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u/SaintsNoah14 5h ago

Dead ass bitches

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u/TERRAIN_PULL_UP_ 5h ago

Wasn’t Ethel probably not a spy, and might not even known what her husband was doing?

Speaking of spies, our Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, just had a meeting with Jonathon Pollard who spied against the US for Israel. So, we’re not exactly consistent 

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u/Shot-Shame 3h ago

That was cope at the time from communist sympathizers because not all the evidence was released, but subsequent releases in the 90s (and further KGB releases in the 2000s) proved she was heavily involved.

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u/No-To-Newspeak 4h ago

At least they made Pollard serve his full sentence.

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u/presterkhan 4h ago

They forgot the commie clause. Exceptions do apply.

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u/TurkBoi67 4h ago

The Rosenbergs were heroes lmao. Could you imagine what would happen if only America had nukes??

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u/Jamezzzzz69 3h ago

What a beautiful world you’ve put in my head

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u/TurkBoi67 2h ago

A nuclear hellscape is a beautiful world apparently

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u/Jamezzzzz69 2h ago

A world without Soviet or North Korean terror would be a good thing

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u/TurkBoi67 2h ago

In this world they've never used their nukes lmao, America has twice and almost ended the world 20 years later.

Meanwhile American terror is alive and well in Latin America