Like the ghost in Hamlet, David Greenglass, whose death at 94 was reported last week, reminds us of things past. You ask, the death who?

You would have to be a truly old geezer to have followed in real time the epic espionage case — that transfixed America 60 years ago and culminated in sending the husband-and-wife team of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair in June 1953, in part for testimony by Greenglass, testimony that he later claimed had been false. And, Oh yes, Julius an Ethel were his sister and brother-in-law.

For his part in the conspiracy — stealing atomic data documents he had pilfered from the super-secret Manhattan Project in New Mexico, which he passed on to the Rosenbergs, committed Marxist ideologues, who in turn passed them on to the Soviet Union — Greenglass served 10 years of his 15-year sentence in a federal prison, where he was reviled by fellow inmates as a snitch, a traitor and a particularly odious kind of stool pigeon, a view shared by the public at large.

Upon his release in 1960, he went on to live in obscure anonymity. Though he died in July, his family did not announce his death. The New York Times learned of it earlier last week in a call to the nursing home where he had lived, as he had done since his release from prison, under an assumed name. The Rosenbergs’ trial was indeed the trial of the century — think O.J. Simpson on ideological steroids, where issues like the “alienation of the working classes from their means of production” and a “balanced nuclear deterrent” between the two powers were brought up.

The execution of the Rosenbergs, who left two young sons behind, came against the backdrop of anti-communist hysteria in America, a nation that in the early 1950s — and for several decades subsequent to that — was gripped by an obsession, bordering on paranoia, with communists, domestic and foreign, seemingly out to subvert the “American way” at home and to harm its interests abroad.

In the US itself, thousands of writers, academics, filmmakers, journalists, intellectuals and even diplomats lost their jobs and good names after being hounded by Joe McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee on suspicion of harbouring communist sentiments. Black-listed by the committee, their lives were ruined. Today, as we look back on this terror — for terror it was — we wonder how the American constitution was subverted so crudely, so facilely, so brazenly ­— all in the name of frightening phantom communists.

Meanwhile, outside the US, the boys from Langley fought the good fight in the Cold War, overthrowing governments in countries as far apart as Iran in 1953 and Chile in 1973 and Guatemala in 1954 and the Congo in 1960 — all because it was believed, improbably, that they were headed by dangerous communists. And in the fight against the “dirty commies” all is fair in love and war, even where your practices degrade your professed principles. Henry Kissinger summed it all up. “There is no reason”, he said in a much quoted observation, as he directed the CIA to move in on Chile in 1973, “why any country should be allowed to go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people”.

Now that the communist menace is history the US has redefined its obsession, calling it the ‘war on terror’ — a war directed at Muslims, whether of the domestic or foreign variety, a war that has followed an eerily similar trajectory as that waged on communists earlier. Sadly, the policymakers who are waging this war do not understand Islam or Muslims. They are what Jacob Burkhardt, the Swiss cultural historian, called in 1889 “le terribles simplificateurs” — folks ignorant of the diverse cultural, historical and political experiences of different Muslim societies around the world.

But the US believes it is not only doing the right thing, but it is doing Muslims a favour. It is Allan Ladd, the noble gunfighter in Shane (1953), arriving in a frontier valley where the bad guys are threatening peoples’ lives. The locals know he is there to free them. He does. He brings with him his arsenal of shock and awe. He kills the thugs and brings peace to the valley. Everybody is grateful. And we stay for the credits.

Heck, no. In fact, It is more like The Oxbow Incident (1943), another iconic Western, with Henry Fonda and Dana Andrews, about how a posse is formed to catch a cattle thief who was suspected of having killed one Lawrence Kinkaid, a local rancher. In the bush, they stumble upon a young, soft-spoken man (Andrews), whom they accuse of the alleged murder and, then and there, lynch him from the nearest tree. Back in town, they are confronted by the reality of what they had done — Kinkaid is alive and the man who attempted to kill him is in custody. (Westerns, perhaps more so than other types of cinematic art, have been adept at defining the inward preoccupations of the American soul.)

Does the American government now regret its Cold War excesses? Does America accept limitations on projecting its obsessions on the rest of the world? Does the American justice system recognise the rush to judgement in the execution of the Rosenbergs more than 60 years ago? Or has it not grown with its job as a big power?

Fawaz Turki is a journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.