On December 7, 1941, FBI agent William Sullivan had been wearing earphones and was monitoring a meeting of Milwaukee communists, picked up by a hidden FBI microphone, when the gathering learned that Pearl Harbor had been bombed. Sullivan would later recall that the communists whooped with jubilation, calming only when their leader, Josephine Nordstrand, pronounced solemnly: “This is the greatest opportunity we’ve ever had. At last we’re in. The Japs did what we weren’t able to do, get America into the war. Now our job is to penetrate all the patriotic organizations. By doing that, we’re going to gain the respectability we’ve never had.”
Nordstrand’s prediction was soon fulfilled. Communists were accepted in war-relief organizations, in the regular Army, and of course in OSS. Respectability increased even more after 1943, when Stalin dissolved the Communist International (Comintern), which convinced many that the communists had given up their goal of world conquest. In fact, control of fronts and foreign communist parties was simply transferred to the International Department of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, but Westerners did not know this then. There was some awareness of subversion, but few saw the Soviets as an espionage threat. The U.S- Soviet alliance seemed so vital to the vanquishing of Hitler that, when American officials were warned of communist spies by informants like Whittaker Chambers, or Soviet- intelligence defectors like Walter Krivitsky, the possibility was discounted or ignored.
(from Wedge: From Pearl Harbor to 9/11: How the Secret War between the FBI and CIA Has Endangered National Security by Mark Riebling)
Josephine Nordstrand was my maternal grandmother. She died when I was very young, so most of what I know about her life as a second-tier leader in the CPUSA, which she left in the 1960s, is from perusing her FBI file, obtained under a FOIA request. It runs to over 1,000 pages. Students of history will note from the wiretap quote that it seems to have been permissible in the 1940s, at least for the enemies of imperialism, to use racist slurs in appropriate context.
I couldn’t help thinking about Grandma Josephine’s wiretapped exhortations when I read the indispensable Olivia Reingold’s recent piece about American progressive support for Iran. At a meeting of anti-war activists in Chicago yesterday, Iran’s bombing of Israel was announced, and
[the] crowd immediately began chanting, “Hands off Iran.”
A woman in a hot pink gas mask, wielding a matching neon cane and dressed in a “Protect Trans Kids” t-shirt, throws her fist in the air. Nearby, a service poodle is taking a nap under the chair of his owner, who is wearing a leather harness over his t-shirt. Then the group that has joined here from cities across America—Seattle, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles—cheers and claps in celebration.
. . . Earlier that day, before news of the attack broke, at a “breakout session” on “the anti-war movement,” Shabbir Rizvi, an organizer with Anti-War Committee Chicago, taught participants how to chant “death to Israel” and “death to America” in Farsi.
“Marg bar Israel,” he chanted, leading a group of about 80 attendees along with him. A man draped in a Soviet flag bearing a gold hammer and sickle clapped his hands.
A man in a full black denim outfit shouted out behind his N95—“Can we get a ‘marg bar America’?”
“We can get a ‘marg bar America,’ ” Rizvi replied.
Then Rizvi raised his hand in the air, leading the crowd like a conductor.
“Marg bar America,” they cheered.
I was also reminded of the young activist Calla Walsh, who was breathlessly profiled in the New York Times a few years ago (“Ms. Walsh, a 16-year-old high school junior, has many of the attributes of Generation Z: She likes to refer to people (like the president) as ‘bestie.’ She occasionally gets called away from political events to babysit her little brother. She is slightly in the doghouse, parent-wise, for getting a C+ in precalculus”), and more recently indicted for vandalizing the New Hampshire offices of Israel-based defense contractor Elbit Systems.
Walsh recently schooled her followers on the righteousness of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s persecution of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement that arose in response to the beating death of Mahsa Amini for wearing a hijab incorrectly:
Is this simply a case of strange bedfellows, or something more? While my grandmother was happy to make a devil’s bargain in order to infiltrate the Great Satan, even she might have believed that trampling on the human rights of millions of oppressed women was not a fair exchange for destroying America. As a secular Jewish Communist, her feelings about Israel were ambivalent at best, though one of her cousins made aliyah in the 1950s — only to return to America a short time later, fed up with the pirating of the airwaves by Palestinian advocates who kept up a 24/7 stream of: “We’re going to kill you all. We’re going to push you into the sea” (an early version of “From the river to the sea”).
My own mother, Josephine’s daughter, was for the most part willfully ignorant of the full extent of her mother’s political engagement. Josephine spent long periods of time away from the family while engaged in revolutionary activities — even, according to her FBI file, going to Spain in the late 1930s — but my mother explained to me that she was no bomb-throwing radical, just a true believer in the promises of American democracy who might have been innocently mistaken about the ways to achieve them. My mother also told me that Josephine joined the CPUSA because, as a young woman, she was “skinny” and “very Jewish-looking” and thus “had a hard time meeting boys.” These attributes perhaps turned into advantages when amongst other Communist youth.
I more or less rejected my mother’s apologia when I got hold of Grandma’s FBI file. But perhaps she wasn’t entirely wrong.
Since October 7th, the protests against Israel and America in the west have been disproportionately led by young women:
I can’t help but wonder if the attraction young women in the west seem to feel for zero-sum Middle Eastern geopolitics is a kind of sexual dodge. By now we’ve all seen the data about Gen Z women and men diverging politically across the developed world:
If the political beliefs of young men and women diverge so much that they repel each other, we can anticipate a certain worsening of sexual tension and frustration. Unchecked online porn use by young men has also led to alarming sexual practices that are dangerous and degrading to women. It’s small wonder that some young women are choosing to get off the relentless carousel of demeaning hook-up culture through transmasculinity or radical politics.
Even the recent popularity of the so-called “Hot Houthi Pirate,” Rashid Al Haddad, underscores the sexual neuroticism of pro-Palestinian women in the west: while the Houthi slogan may be the bone-chilling "God Is the Greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, A Curse Upon the Jews, Victory to Islam,” Al Haddad looks as sexually threatening as the lead singer of a boy band. The Houthis may be capable of destroying shipping with short-range ballistic missiles, but in internet-mediated progressive spaces they code as cute anime boys.
Maybe Grandma Josephine just wanted to meet boys. And maybe Gen Z progressive women are looking for sexual excitement, but of a kind that’s only threatening to the anonymous, faceless hordes of women in far-distant lands who get beaten, raped, or killed for wearing their hijabs incorrectly. The great trust that groups like Queers for Palestine put in the basic goodness of terrorists seems to indicate such a disconnect.
The devil has certainly succeeded beyond his wildest dreams in capitalizing on Eve's stupidity in modern times.
Those ideology gap graphs were super interesting! I'd not seen anything like that before.