Red herrings - A review of American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character by...

The New Criterion ^ | December 3, 2013 | Andrew C. McCarthy

[neverdem]

Red herrings - A review of American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character by Diana West

Stumbling into a barroom brawl was the last thing I’d intended. Lined up on one side: sculptors of a hagiography that is now conventional wisdom crow about a noble conquest over totalitarian dictators. The other side bellows: “Nonsense! In defeating one monster, your heroes merely helped create another, sullying us with their atrocities and burdening us for decades with a global security nightmare.” The first side spews that its critics are deranged, defamatory conspiracy-mongers. The critics fire back that these “court historians” are in denial; their heroes did not really “win” the war, they just helped a different set of anti-American savages win—in the process striking a deal with the devil that blurred the lines between good and evil, rendering the world more dangerous and our nation more vulnerable.

To readers of American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character, this heated debate will sound familiar. American Betrayal is the bestselling author and syndicated columnist Diana West’s cri de coeur against Anglo-American collusion with Stalin’s hideous Soviet Union in the war that vanquished Hitler’s hideous Nazi Germany. The controversy swirling around the book exposes a chasm on the political Right: on one side, admirers of Franklin Roosevelt’s World War II leadership; on the other, detractors who blame FDR’s indifference to Communism (and, particularly, Communist infiltration of the U.S. government) for the rise of what Ronald Reagan dubbed “the evil empire.” The resulting acrimony is what put me in the mind of the aforementioned brawl I wandered into twenty years ago, involving a different, albeit related, episode: the Central Intelligence Agency’s collusion with the Afghan mujahideen, which hastened the Soviet death throes...

[Eagles6]

Save for further study. Thanks never dem, this looks really good.

[pluvmantelo]

Thanks for posting this. It’s heartening to see Mr. McCarthy speak the truth as sees it, regardless of heavy pressure to join the anti-West bandwagon.

[gattaca]

bfl

[Vehmgericht]

A great deal of effort was made to enlist support for Ronald Radosh’s criticism of Diana West. Her opponents even enlisted Harvey Klehr, a respected Soviet expert, to make the absurd claim: “In our more than twenty years of archivally based research on Soviet espionage in America, we have uncovered ample documentation of Soviet intelligence obtaining American technical, military, and diplomatic information but very little indicating successful policy manipulation.” See The Morgenthau Plan: Soviet Influence on American Postwar Policy.

[sphinx]

bttt

[afsnco]

Yet more evidence of what a slime FDR was. Joe McCarthy was right. Our government was thoroughly penetrated and compromised by Soviet agents.

[gaijin]

Bfl

[gaijin]

Bfl