That’s a quote from an old Mike Hammer detective book, One Lonely Night, (1951 of course) and it warms the cockles of my heart to know that there were once Americans who hated commies as much as the commies hated them.

I thought of this the other day as I read more news of the horrific Israel-Hamas fighting in Gaza and the support for Palestinians Hamas by the Western Left, because even though it died more then three decades ago the USSR had much to do with creating this situation, as first described by Ion Mihai Pacepa, former head of the Romanian Intelligence agency and the highest rankling defector the West ever got:

I was responsible for giving Arafat about $200,000 in laundered cash every month throughout the 1970s. I also sent two cargo planes to Beirut a week, stuffed with uniforms and supplies. Other Soviet bloc states did much the same….

I was given the KGB’s “personal file” on Arafat. He was an Egyptian bourgeois turned into a devoted Marxist by KGB foreign intelligence. The KGB had trained him at its Balashikha special-ops school east of Moscow and in the mid-1960s decided to groom him as the future PLO leader. First, the KGB destroyed the official records of Arafat’s birth in Cairo, replacing them with fictitious documents saying that he had been born in Jerusalem and was therefore a Palestinian by birth.

The KGB’s disinformation department then went to work on Arafat’s four-page tract called “Falastinuna” (Our Palestine), turning it into a 48-page monthly magazine for the Palestinian terrorist organization al-Fatah. Arafat had headed al-Fatah since 1957. The KGB distributed it throughout the Arab world and in West Germany, which in those days played host to many Palestinian students….

Arafat was an important undercover operative for the KGB. Right after the 1967 Six Day Arab-Israeli war, Moscow got him appointed to chairman of the PLO. Egyptian ruler Gamal Abdel Nasser, a Soviet puppet, proposed the appointment. In 1969 the KGB asked Arafat to declare war on American “imperial-Zionism” during the first summit of the Black Terrorist International, a neo-Fascist pro-Palestine organization financed by the KGB and Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi. It appealed to him so much, Arafat later claimed to have invented the imperial-Zionist battle cry. But in fact, “imperial-Zionism” was a Moscow invention, a modern adaptation of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” and long a favorite tool of Russian intelligence to foment ethnic hatred. The KGB always regarded anti-Semitism plus anti-imperialism as a rich source of anti-Americanism….

In March 1978 I secretly brought Arafat to Bucharest for final instructions on how to behave in Washington. “You simply have to keep on pretending that you’ll break with terrorism and that you’ll recognize Israel — over, and over, and over,” Ceausescu told him for the umpteenth time….

Sounds like what I heard from Arafat to the day he died. Pacepa must have been amused and appalled that the Americans and Israelis, knowing all this, chose to deal with him anyway to their hopeless attempts to craft peace deals with the thug.

But as this article points out, the USSR had more to do with the current problems than just Arafat:

In his 1969 book Beware! Zionism, Yuri Ivanov, the Soviet Union’s leading Zionologist, defined modern Zionism as follows:

“Modern Zionism is the ideology, a ramified system of organisations and the practical politics of the wealthy Jewish bourgeoisie which has closely allied itself with monopoly circles in the USA and other imperialist countries. The main content of Zionism is bellicose chauvinism and anti-communism.”

Soviet leaders said Soviet anti-Zionism was not antisemitic. As proof, they pointed to the fact that several prominent Zionologists were ethnic Jews representing an expert opinion.

Propaganda that lives to this day. And academic theory too:

Adopting the “chauvinism” and “racism” and “terrorist” accusations was an important move for the PLO in appealing to the Western left. And the Protocols accusations appealed to some disparate groups on the far right, as well. And who was it who helped invent – or at least laid the groundwork for – “anti-colonialism” and “postcolonial” theory? Why, those champions of freedom and national autonomy, the Soviets.

More at the link where even the very non-intellectual, unacademic Stalin gets some credit because it was he who pushed the USSR’s versions of “affirmative action” which could then be welded to the anti-colonial movements that USSR cynically supported as part of its Cold War against the West:

These two features – affirmative action and anti-colonialism – enabled the historical conditions for post-colonialism, as well as the theoretical and practical realities that have been simultaneously repressed and appropriated by postcolonial theory.

Incidentally Stalin makes another appearance in this article reviewing a new book by one Sean McMeekin, “Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II,” with some sidelights into the effect on post-war USA shown in the recent movie Oppenheimer. The book is declared to be a bit of polemic in arguing that we should see Stalin as much of a central figure as Hitler in WWII as instigator and manipulator:

The Soviet leader had always been as predatory as Hitler, invading the same number of countries as Nazi Germany in 1939 and 1940, encouraging fascist aggression against the Western democracies while building his own brutal empire under the cover of neutrality.

As such it’s an indirect counter to the book on which the movie was based, American Prometheus, which was written by two long-time journalists from The Nation, a long-time, Far Left magazine that licked the USSR’s boots right up to the day it died, and who could then be relied upon to cast Oppenheimer’s persecutors in as crude and stupid a light as possible. However:

[As] a straightforward text, “Oppenheimer” sheds a lot of that complexity as it builds to its ending, becoming more and more a story of simple martyrdom — in which a flawed genius is unjustly persecuted by “know-nothing, anti-intellectual, xenophobic demagogues,” as Bird, the Oppenheimer co-biographer, wrote for a Times Opinion earlier this summer.

So the point of reading McMeekin’s book is to give early Cold War anti-communism its due. What were all those hawks on about, with their fears about Soviet espionage and the influence of communist sympathizers, their desire to have the bomb as a potential weapon against our then-ally Stalin, their dismissive attitude toward Oppenheimer’s vision of nuclear power as something shared and tamed by international cooperation?

Just this, “Stalin’s War” suggests: They saw Stalin clearly.

Just as Arafat should have been seen and as the entire Palestinian movement should be seen today. It’s amazing how such blindness, resulting from a combination of willful deception on one side and innocent naivety on the other, about the USSR’s machinations, lives with us to this day, in both the brutal reality of Gaza and Israel, and our culture via movies.