The Consequences of Departing from the “Accepted History”

A year ago, in July and August of 2013, we were in the early stages of the controversy over Diana West’s book American Betrayal. Ms. West was being subjected by a series of vitriolic attacks by Ronald Radosh, David Horowitz, Conrad Black, and other major luminaries. She had few prominent defenders, and most of those who spoke positively about her book did so after a significant delay, and then even hedged their mild support with caveats and criticisms.

The “Barroom Brawl” continued for another four or five months, and then died out last winter.

Or did it?

Three weeks ago a writer named Jeff Lipkes published a 12,000-word three-part account of the controversy over American Betrayal at American Thinker (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3; Diana West’s email exchange with the editor is here). Mr. Lipkes’ work was yet another attempt by the neoconservative elite to cement Ms. West’s position as a “conspiracist” and “right-wing loopy” from the point of view of the bien-pensants of the “conservative” establishment.

After Part 3 was published, Diana West submitted a letter of response. The editor of American Thinker, J.R. Dunn, insisted that her letter had to meet his requirements in order to be published at AT, and that she must accept his editorial revisions if she wanted it to appear. This was an unusual — if not unprecedented — set of restrictions imposed upon an author who wanted to publish a response to a piece that had attacked her.

J.R. Nyquist has written an extensive account of the American Thinker episode, and I have excerpted major portions of it below. But before we get to that, I’d like readers to think about the larger implications of the ongoing efforts to suppress and discredit Diana West.

Here we are, more than a year after Ronald Radosh and David Horowitz began their campaign to “take down” the book that “should not have been written”. Dozens and dozens of reviews, articles and opinion pieces have been written attacking American Betrayal, many of them by people who have never read the book. Diana West has been shut out of most publications, unable to defend herself in a major venue against the manifold falsehoods, misrepresentations, and name-calling directed at her.

But that’s not enough. One year later, a representative of the establishment’s point of view was assigned the job of writing 12,000 words against her, and she was denied the opportunity to publish an unedited response in the same outlet.

That’s some planet, that Planet X.

What is it about American Betrayal that warrants such an extended and determined effort to suppress it?

Below are excerpts from what J.R. Nyquist has to say on the topic in the second part of “Further Reflections on Diana West’s Critics” :

In the controversy over American Betrayal I am remiss in one respect. I never wrote a proper review of the book. Instead I wrote two versions of a review, and both were rejected by editors. For this I am grateful because in truth I had not invested the time required to properly do the job. I did not fully appreciate the impact of the campaign against American Betrayal, or how effective that campaign had been. For those who have not read the book, it is about the Communist infiltration of the U.S. Government, and the influencing of U.S. policy during the critical years of World War II and its aftermath. The facts reviewed in the book are not entirely new. What was original was the way in which these facts were presented; that is, in order that we might see the big picture with greater clarity. This is Diana West’s special achievement.

This is a book with far-reaching implications. These implications, of course, have yet to be mapped out. For example, we must assume that Soviet agents were not only at work in Washington during World War II. They were also at work in Chungking, Tokyo, Berlin, London and Paris. If the U.S. Government had Communist moles, every other government probably had them. As if to prove my point, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Louis Kilzer wrote a book titled Hitler’s Traitor : Martin Bormann and the Defeat of the Reich (which alleges that Bormann was Stalin’s agent). Here we discover that it wasn’t just a case of Harry Hopkins manipulating Roosevelt. Hitler was manipulated by Bormann, and probably by others we’ll never know about. Many books remain to be written; for example, regarding how Churchill was manipulated, and also de Gaulle. Consider a 1997 article titled How a Soviet mole united Tito and Churchill. Consider, as well, the situation of Charles de Gaulle, as described in the Encyclopedia of Cold War Espionage, Spies, and Secret Operations: “In the late 1950s, and especially since the defection of Anatoli Golitsyn in 1961, strong suspicion surrounded the SDECE of harboring Soviet moles who were close to President Charles de Gaulle after he returned to power in 1958.”

Then there was the Tokyo spy ring, of course. Within that organization, Soviet spy Richard Sorge was credited with saving the Soviet Union in 1941. At the Spy Museum website we read, “The spies [of the Tokyo ring] pursued relationships with senior Japanese politicians, garnering information about Japanese foreign policy.” But as we know, Soviet spies do not merely garner information. Their primary work must have been to influence Japanese policy — as Moscow’s moles in Washington worked to influence American policy. Why did Tokyo fail to make peace with China and solidify a friendship with the United States? It is not an idle question when so many leading Japanese politicians thought the proper strategic direction for Japan was against the Soviet Union. In reminding us that Soviet agents are not merely spies, Mrs. West has laid bare the tragedy of a war that need not have been so costly. And this is why she has been so savagely attacked. This is why her work is called into question.

Everyone knows the role that Hitler and the Japanese militarists played in bringing about World War II. What about the role of Stalin and his agents? With the exception of Viktor Suvorov’s The Chief Culprit and Icebreaker, no major study has appeared exploring the extent to which Moscow may have connived at the crises of 1938 and 1939. On the other hand, we do have John Koster’s Operation Snow, which shows how Soviet spies succeeded in pushing Japan and the United States closer to war in 1941. Is it thinkable? Certainly, it takes us beyond the “accepted history.” But is the idea so implausible that future authors must be struck from civilized discourse as “conspiracy theorists”? Or are such ruminations consistent with what we know about Soviet active measures (i.e., disinformation). Ask yourself the question: Why is someone attacked, going on a year, for discussing the strategic implications of Soviet penetration of the Roosevelt administration? Unless Moscow is recycling Russia’s old strategies from World War II, with an eye to a repeat performance, why would anyone care?

When the second version of my review of Mrs. West’s book was rejected by a reputable conservative publisher, I assumed it was due to the inadequacy of my own writing, so I asked the publisher for a chance to rewrite the review, and give it a more scholarly tone. The publisher was extremely kind, and wrote a reply which was nonetheless troubling. He wrote to dissuade me from any such attempt. He admitted that America was penetrated by the Soviets during World War II. But writing about this went against “accepted history.” In this matter, Mrs. West should not have been so bold. “That our policy-making apparatus was compromised is also clear,” he explained. But “this is so jarring to the lay reader that” the thesis requires a substantial backing up. I was astonished at this. What about Mrs. West’s 900 plus endnotes? Well, it seems that endnotes don’t count if a journalist compiles them. What I want to know is, when and how did we end up in a Kafka novel? Oh yes, we live in a strange world indeed; for if I say the sky is blue, it can only be credited if I am a meteorologist! If “accepted history” is made of such stuff, then “accepted history” is for dolts. This also explains why Radosh’s unscholarly, error-filled, screeds against Mrs. West receive a pass and are given credibility; that is, because he is a historian.

I had assumed that conservatives and anti-Communists would instinctively rally to American Betrayal. In large degree, this did not happen. We see, above, why it did not happen. Of course, a few great names rose to Mrs. West’s defense — like Vladimir Bukovsky and Stanton Evans. We know that both are courageous men. It would’ve been out of character if they had not defended her. Sad to say, this fortitude did not rub off on the “larger” conservative “movement.” It speaks ill of conservatism overall that Radosh’s self-discrediting attacks on Mrs. West were not dismissed out of hand. Instead, these attacks were taken as a warning, translated as follows: “Shut up or we’ll drag your name through the mud too.” And so we find that American conservatives are easily intimidated. Against all reason, Radosh’s bungling attacks on American Betrayal sent a chill through the “movement.” The implication, of course, is that the conservative movement is worthless.

As the publisher had written to me, “I believe Diana is substantially right….” But that does not matter. Someone else now dictates whether a conservative rejects or accepts a book review. What we believe, what is substantially right, must be left to someone with “an authoritative voice.” And how does the would-be ventriloquist of conservatism acquire this mythical status? Of course, no conservative possesses such a voice, so that the problem of departing from “accepted history”becomes insurmountable. We must stay with the Office of War Information, and praise our wartime alliance with Stalin. And we must wait for a ventriloquist from God-knows-where to tell us what nonsense is to follow the current nonsense.

But shouldn’t the decisive point have been that Mrs. West is “substantially right”? And therefore, how are we served by an “accepted history” that is substantially wrong? Shouldn’t this “history” be overthrown? And, further, how did we get saddled with such a history?

Or maybe we should ask how we got saddled with such “conservatives”?

This brings us back to the subject of last Tuesday’s column and Professor Lipkes’s three-part series on West’s book which was published at American Thinker. As postscript to the episode it is worth discussing the “person” of Mr. J.R. Dunn, an editor at American Thinker. This man is typical of our latter-day conservatives in that he is spiritually the opposite of conservative. In last week’s column, without naming names, I singled him out as a “prize pig.” It now appears this description was spot on, especially if we look at Diana West’s correspondence with Dunn at Dianawest.net. Incredibly, Dunn insisted that he could not publish Mrs. West’s reply to Lipkes on American Thinker without first removing her alleged factual errors (which were not errors at all, but intrinsic to her defense). “I find the superciliousness and scarcely veiled insults troubling, and I’m sure that most readers will think the same,” wrote Dunn, who unselfconsciously concluded the paragraph with an offer to rewrite Mrs. West’s defense with the following words: “If you don’t feel up to it, I’ll be happy to handle this myself. I think you will find this works much better. As the old saying goes, honey attracts more flies than vinegar.”

I asked a journalist friend a hypothetical question about a publication that insisted on editing an author’s response to attacks made on the same author’s work. He said, “The publication would be discredited.” In truth, if you read the full correspondence you will see that Dunn attacks West at the same time he is counseling her to accept his editing. Even as he insults her, she cannot say anything in her own defense that is not ruled out of bounds. She noted that Dunn had “no problem” with Radosh and Horowtiz’s calling her names. Then she listed the insults that Dunn (as editor) had allowed to her critics. This list included, “besmirches conservatism,” has a “crackpot thesis,” is “preposterous,” and a “bad conservative,” “cockamamie,” “warped” with “ugly overtones.”

How are we to understand Dunn’s inconsistency? He allowed Radosh and Horowitz to slander West’s reputation. Then, when return fire was imminent, he cried foul. Isn’t his sudden dislike of insults and innuendo a little tardy? Isn’t it a double standard? And then, when Mrs. West corrected Dunn’s factual errors with links and citations, Dunn’s only comeback was to lose his composure: “Okay,” he wrote — “you have insulted everybody involved in this debate. You have insulted Ron Radosh, you have insulted Jeff Lipkes, and now you’re insulting me.” Oh yes, the facts are very insulting — when you’re flat wrong.

I don’t call people names, but Dunn is a special case. It is a fine comedy, indeed, when a man who cannot properly use punctuation tells one of the finest writers of my generation that he can fix her tone; and as his email drips with vinegar, righteously preaches the virtues of honey. I dare say Mr. Dunn attracts plenty of flies without the use of honey. That qualifies him as a very special animal indeed. Since Dunn is an inferior creature occupying a superior position (as editor of a popular webzine), the proper etiquette for him would be a gracious and generous readiness to publish Mrs. West’s response to Jeff Lipkes. In this he would be showing largeness of mind and a confident readiness to let the pigchips fall where they may. If Mrs. West’s tone isn’t right, Mrs. West will be the loser and Professor Lipkes the winner. Yet, as a pig who lacks the confidence of a Napoleon (see George Orwell’s Animal Farm), Dunn knows that Mrs. West’s response would show how a pigheaded editor is ultimately responsible for a vastly unedited 12,000-word slop-bucket that would then stick like piggy-doo-doo on his little piggy snout. In that event the American Thinker would have to be renamed the American Stinker.

In truth, little piggy is Dunn. He wanted to use any pretext to go “wee wee” all the way home without having to publish Mrs. West’s proofs of his piggy-hood. So egregious a blockhead, in his correspondence with a famous writer, he could not even get the name of her book right

Mr. Nyquist’s full essay may be read here.

For links to previous articles about the controversy over American Betrayal, see the Diana West Archives.

42 thoughts on “The Consequences of Departing from the “Accepted History”

  1. I used to have much respect for the articles I have read at ‘American Thinker’, but not any more. In general, what I read from now on I will have the salt shaker at hand so that I can deliver a little aperitif as a preliminary in understanding that what I will read in future should not be taken too literally.

    These attacks against American Betrayal can only mean that Diana West is spot on in her historical assessment and that there are many, what I would term, faux conservatives, who maybe have a lot to lose from the historical implications of her book in maintaining their own faux conservative positions of political influence.

    There is nothing like a Cassandra to set the cats amongst the cowardly pigeons who have the most to fear from the exposure of the TRUTH!

  2. J.R. Nyquist claims that the establishment threat is “Shut up or we’ll drag your name through the mud too.” We have passed that point and are entering some very dangerous territory. If you deviate from the orthodox line you will be destroyed. In this case Clare Lopez lost her position at the Gatestone Institute. Dr. Charles Socarides described the consequences of deviating from the orthodox line on homosexuality: “Those of us who didn’t go along with the political redefinition, were soon silenced at our own professional meetings. Our lectures were canceled inside academe and our research papers turned down in the leading journals.” In other words your career is over. Brandon Eich, Richard Raddon and Scott Eckern all lost their positions as chief executives because of donations they made to an unorthodox cause. Andy Rooney was suspended from his job at CBS in 1990 for making remarks against homosexuals. On the global warming front Lennart Bengtsson has suffered the consequences of deviation. Mark Steyn has been forced to spend an enormous amount to defend himself for his deviant thinking.
    Yet there is more than loss of career or financial damage in being “Paula Deaned.” If your views are unorthodox you might be in need of psychiatric treatment like John Rocker. There are innumerable reeducation camp and sensitivity training counselors. If you construct an outhouse and call it the Obama Library you will be visited by the Department of Justice. Prof. Richard Parncutt even advocates the death penalty for global warming deniers.

    • BTW, Steyn no longer writes for NR, as far as I am able to observe. Sign of the times?

      • As I understand it, Mr. Steyn and NR parted company over the latter’s defense of the former against the lawsuit by Michael Mann about Mr. Steyn’s heresy over the “hockey stick” graph. Mr. Steyn wanted a robust, aggressive defense, while NR’s lawyers wanted to follow every procedural nicety and observe every jot and tittle of jurisprudential practice. Mr. Steyn was, by American standards, impudent and outspoken against the stupidity of one particular judge, which is more the standard practice in Canada.

        NR’s lawyers didn’t like his behavior. After a year, nothing had moved in the case. So he withdrew from the legal umbrella of NR, hired his own lawyers, and proceeded independently — and vigorously.

        • As to this curious American custom of according judges the reverence and status of feudal dukes, the recent news goes:
          “He had sex with a witness in chambers, but judge can’t be sued” http://www.freep.com/article/20140728/NEWS06/307280013/misbehaving-judges-immunity

          There are countless stories like this, from an Oklahoma judge who pleasured himself with a vacum pump while sitting in judgment, to a mental hospital alumna — and a serving judge in Cook County — who assaulted a sheriff’s deputy physically and verbally (“racism,”see?). Not to speak of the very large but unknown number of judges (it’s another “no go” area) who substitute their own opinion and biases instead of the law, when rendering judgments.

          • Belated response, but…

            …having had too many occasions to be present in court (mostly involving domestic violence testimony) I have thought long and hard about why anyone would apply for such a mind-numbing, sadistic job. Less than six months and they’re permanently warped.

            I’d rather work in a toll booth on the Massachusetts Turnpike. Or clean the toilets in any public facility. Or pick up trash in the park with one of those sticks with a sharp end so you can stab the potato chip bags.

            Or beg in the street:that has more inherent dignity and you get your own shopping cart (or plastic bag if you’d rather travel light).

            Sometimes, while stuck there in court and reading a book while I waited to be called I’d ponder the robed one up on the dias and think to myself, “Imagine. That guy up there awoke this morning smiling – at least he did if he didn’t have a hangover. And then he remembered how he was going to spend eight hours today…”

            Hideous “work”.

  3. I read Jeff Lipkes’ three part review a couple of weeks ago and found some evidence of him trying to be balanced in his treatment of the Radosh-West controversy. Particularly in Part 1, but it goes downhill in Part 2 accelerating in Part 3. It is difficult to understand why American Thinker selected Lipkes for the task as he does not seem to possess the necessary historical knowledge to perform any sort of arbitration between what Radosh wrote about Ms West and the book Ms West wrote. Mr Lipkes writes with the patrician confidence of a Michael Burleigh, yet reveals many, many times in ways big and small that he lacks the basis for this confidence.

    Nothing is more certain to engender a lack of respect for someone setting themselves up as lofty intellectual beings than spelling names, the names of important people, wrongly. We have the “Vlastos Army” – the what? Only context allows you to infer he means the Russian forces led by the former Red Army General Andrei Vlasov who fought with the Germans. It’s not a typo: Lipkes is simply unfamiliar with the name, unlike any informed teenager with an interest in WW2. Further along there’s the German resistance figure “von Pappen”. Who? Aah, he means von Papen! Hitler’s Vice-Chancellor in 1933.

    There are more. Initially just merely irksome, Lipkes multiple misspellings of significant historical figures take on an amusingly ironic character when you read the e-mail exchange between Ms West and the editor of American Thinker, Mr Dunn when the latter, who edited Lipkes piece, demands that Ms West submit to his “editing” before her response can be published.

    Lipkes makes some astonishing pronouncements, perhaps the most jaw-dropping in a target-rich environment is:

    “..Hitler was a threat to world peace; Stalin wasn’t.”

    That would be news to Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Rumania, etc, etc. In 1939 when the Soviet Union was ejected from the League of Nations for invading Finland a great proportion of reasonable people throughout the Western world justly feared Stalin was the threat to world peace. Lipkes may be unaware of it, but the whole purpose of the Soviet-run Communist International was to destabilise Western countries and bring about the destruction of “capitalist” regimes. Peaceful intentions not.

    The next best is:

    “At first a second front had priority. Stalin didn’t even care where it was opened: the Balkans would have been fine. “May God bless the enterprise,” the atheist proclaimed, when Roosevelt told him about TORCH.”

    It is the middle sentence which is the shocker and wholly unsupported by any historical records. Where on earth did Lipkes conjure this up from? If the Western Allies had mounted an amphibious invasion of the Balkans instead of Morocco-Algeria in late 1942, Stalin would have been apoplectic with fury and his rampant and ever-present suspicions of his Allies confirmed. No informed person could disagree with the proposition that Stalin cared very much where the Second Front should be. And insisted, vigorously and vehemently, that it be cross-channel into Western Europe. His Defence Minister, Voroshilov, remonstrated with Allied military commanders that the English Channel was not much wider than many Soviet rivers so what was the cause of the delay. Amongst the Politburo Stalin scoffed at trivial scope and strategic value of Torch. His eventual statement to Roosevelt about Torch and God blessing it once it became a fait accompli may have been Stalin’s sense of humour at work.

    In Part 3 there is the following deeply strange analysis by Lipkes:

    “It’s possible that he [Radosh] sees West as having gone some ways down a slippery slope that descends to the claim that FDR knew in advance about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and did nothing; that Hitler had reasonable foreign policy objectives and that the unpleasant features of the Nazi regime were the result of his borrowings from Lenin; that given FDR’s provocations, Germany, like Japan, had no choice but to declare war on the U.S.; that Barbarossa was a preemptive strike that saved Western Civilization in the nick of time; and that America backed the wrong horse in World War II. At the bottom of the slope is the denial of the Holocaust.”

    Denial of the Holocaust!?! How does one, intellectually/conceptually, get to there from believing that Roosevelt knew in advance of the impending Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour (or that Soviet spy Harry Dexter White manipulated US-Japanese tensions so that Japan would attack the US and not the Soviet Union – see Operation Snow)? I get the way this logic works: one believes in a genetic component to human intelligence, therefore one must be a racist, therefore one wants a rigorous eugenics program enacted, therefore one would like to to see all non-whites enslaved or exterminated, therefore one loves Adolf Hitler.

    Finally there is this ugly little stab at Pat Buchanan:

    “It’s hardly fair, though, to lump American Betrayal with Woods’ book — or, for that matter, with Pat Buchannan’s The Unnecessary War and other works it’s kinder to ignore.”

    Why should “The Unnecessary War” be ignored? It is an erudite, well-argued and thought provoking book written by a serious intellectual and public figure. It should be part of high school and university history syllabi. Just because the ADL doesn’t like Buchanan for his views on Israel, which are not hateful or deranged, or remarking upon on the high proportion of US senators and Supreme Court justices who are Jewish, doesn’t mean “The Unnecessary War” is a book to be disdained and disparaged as beyond the pale. Perhaps that’s what lies at the heart of the Radosh-Horowitz attack on Ms West: she’s a Jew who as such they regard as unforgivably having broken ranks with the received wisdom on FDR’s presidency and the merits of the US alliance with Stalin. Maybe those two haven’t completely cauterised the Leftism of their twenties and thirties.

    • I have to admit that I liked a lot about American Thinker, but other things that they have published I have found disquieting. One biggie was an anonymous publication suggesting that Israel pay to relocate West Bank Palestinians to Latin America, because most Arabs in Latin America are Christian (Roman Catholic), well assimilated etc. This with a Palestinian “Embassy” in Palmerya (a section of Bogota), not to mention a mosque or two in Bogota. Granted the Palestinian (and other Muslim) presence here in Colombia is small in comparison to that in Chile, not to mention Venezuela, and that as the article said, the “Bible Bangers” have been active to some effect as well, but the whole article struck me as strange, and disconnected with reality.
      As for Pat Buchanan’s book, well, I did read an article or two of his in Townhall that were taken from the book, about the taking of Poland and Czechoslovakia. Well, one of our Czech refugee family friends had described Hitler’s speech after the Nazi’s moved into Czechoslovakia after the the defensible border area of the Sudetenland had been surrendered (—-so much for Hitler’s “word as a gentleman” to Chamberlain that he would do no such thing), and Pat’s article might as well have been cribbed from that speech. The only departure was that Pat couldn’t even be bothered to get the name of the relevant Czechoslovak president right, he insisted that it was Hacha, when in fact it was Benes. As far as I am concerned, that howler alone was enough to merit complete disrespect for Paddy darling and his little bookie.

  4. I guess I’d better read it first (and I have purchased it) but really I knew all this long ago — it is available in old books at the library and to history buffs, it was known that the government of Roosevelt was over-run with communists, as was Harry Truman’s government. So I don’t know why Diana West is so controversial, unless it’s because she has pulled it together in a big way. I have to go read now.

    • It would be very useful if someone would compile a list of trustworthy history books. Some additional description would help a lot.

      I feel totally unwilling to by history books these days; with some good luck you end up with no worse than entertainment, but too often you waste your money on propaganda.

  5. In regards to these neo-conservatives, Diana West’s bringing out the true nature of these people is the equivalent of the Verona Papers.

    • “Venona” papers.

      I am about 1/4 of the way thru West’s book an am also an amateur history buff of the ETO.

      So far all I have read fills in some *very* big blanks, contradictions and unaswered questions I have had for years (born ’51).

  6. A telling indicator that American Betrayal is digging and taking root – meaning those who purchase it are investing time reading it – is the fact that, after a year (plus), one can’t pick it up used on Amazon at a sharply discounted rate. Typically, with a general readership book on politics and history (and published by a mid-level publisher), by now, one should be able to buy it used for around $4 to $7, plus shipping.

    American Betrayal is still priced high for an Amazon third party book.

    • I’m not selling my copy – if someone saw my notes and marginalia I’d be arrested.

      • Maybe why, considering, there are few used copies. (Do not know about the remainder market. Too early? Not for most books a year past their release.) All those citizen margin notes would be a veritable history and commentary on our times!

        Will Ron put his copy on the secondary market? Does anyone know which used bookstore he dumps his discards at?

  7. “Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose”

    Kate at smalldeadanimals.com likes to use the above to highlight hypocrisy when she sees it. I have read Diana West’s book and read her critics. I taker her side and am befuddled by the motive behind her critics. I believe that these former leftists like D Horowitz and R Radosh are being defensive. Why? Well, because their parents and friends were huge FDR fans and now become complicit traitors if West is correct. That is a bridge Ms. West is not allowed to cross.

    Diana also compares the Communist infiltration to the Muslim infiltration today and here is the important point. I am 67 years old and began reading Human Events and National Review in the 1960’s when I was in the US Army. Since then of course we have many more conservative and right wing sources to read but back then there was very little.

    Let’s jump forward to today. We have many respected right wing publications, right wing/libertarian blogs and even television shows. Here’s the point:

    How many of these are scared out of their minds and tell the truth about Islam? How many run stories every day that are factual and informative? How many are trying to uncover the Muslim infiltration of our news networks, government agencies, NGO’s, educational establishment, etc.? VERY FEW, VERY FEW

    Mostly its specialty blogs with thousands (not millions) of readers a day. The major newspapers are hopeless. The networks with the exception of Fox News won’t run anything against Islam.:

    Gates of Vienna ( including Takuan Seiyo, Fjordman, Dr.. David Wood and many more)
    Caroline Glick
    The Iconoclast
    Jihad Watch
    New Atlas Shrugged
    Andrew Bostom
    Sultan Knish
    Small Dead Animals
    Pat Condell
    Glenn Beck

    I don’t mean to exclude other blogs ( I just wanted 10 names) so please help me here for others I missed, but the point is I ‘ll bet not more than 1% of the US population has ever heard of no less read even one of these except Glenn Beck. How can you educate people when there so few voices with limited funds and narrow readership. I love the above blogs and admire the courage of its editors and owners, but even they would concede, I believe, that they wish tens of millions read their blogs instead of thousands on a daily basis.

    I have been a faithful reader of The American Spectator for over 40 years and because I have donated to them I have attended their yearly gala. Yet even they only dance around Islam. It’s like no one can touch Islam just as Diana West can’t touch the Communist infiltration of the US and especially the infiltration of the Roosevelt administration.

    Takuan Seiyo and others on this blog can explain how hopeless and ignorant we are and how the West is committing suicide, but why is there such fear of exposing Islam for what it is. Well, we have been infiltrated and the left is in bed with Islam but won’t come out and say it. It isn’t just here. It’s all over the world.

    So what’s my point. We are being infiltrated now just as we were being infiltrated back in the 1930’s and 1940’s and there are so few that know it and if they do know it even fewer of these people will say it out loud.

    • Vlad Tepes.
      Be careful of Beck.
      The archives of View from the Right — the best source, imo.

      • And I hardly ever read AmSpec anymore and have thrown out all my old copies of NR, dating back to the 1980’s — both are infiltrated with liberalism.

    • @JGIII

      American Spectator is a strange animal indeded, and I have not read it nearly enough to opine conclusively — but it’s enough for me to open the Web page and do a 30-sec. scan to see that ALL the most important issues are missing, not only Islam. Suicide-by-Migra is missing, American blacks crazed with power and racism and praying on whitey are missing, the destruction and further perils of feminist gyneocracy are missing, the social implications of racial and gender genomic differences are missing, the insanity of America’s international politics and warfare is missing, and so on. What you get is milquetoast Hurrah-for-Imperial Neocon-America from the likes of Ben Stein, or Jed Babbin, or Washington insider (maybe) punditry from Emmett Tyrell.

      The really-Leftoinsane Devin Burghart (background here http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2010/10/21/who-wrote-the-naacp-racist-tea-party-report/ ) quotes the AS in his hyperbolic condemnation of “Robert Vandervoort and White Nationalism.” Vandevoort is the Exec. Director of ProEnglish and a friend of Counterjihad and of American Renaissance (as am I, a half-Jew). That alone, in Comrade Burghart’s opinion (and other commies’, e.g. http://www.forwardprogressives.com/once-again-cpac-2014-welcomes-white-nationalists/) merits that he (and I by extrapolation) be assigned to the same bin where cavort Adolf, Himmler, David Duke and William Luther Pierce.

      But back to Comrade Burghart’s quote http://www.irehr.org/issue-areas/race-racism-and-white-nationalism/399-what-about-bob?-robert-vandervoort-and-white-nationalism :
      “American Spectator, a decidedly conservative periodical weighed in with the comment that “if Vandervoort indeed organized events for an American Renaissance affiliate … he should explicitly and publicly renounce his old associates; that is a crowd that no one should touch with a ten foot pole.”

      The American Spectator is not alone in its weirdness. We all know about NR, the Weekly Standard is probably more deluded than NR, and one of the particular biases of The American Conservative was expressed wittily by Larry Auster pbuh (he deserves it, not the pedophile brigand) who renamed it The Palestinian Conservative.

      One is left to surf alone on the Web, using only ones’ compass of reason. There are several safe harbors such as GoV, AR, VDare, Zero Hedge, each specializing in a different aspect of the comprehensive Gotterdammerung . But there are fake harbors of Neoconism such as AS, TAC, WS, NR and so on, and there are sharp coral reefs masquerading as harbors, such as the crypto-Nazi Occidental Dissent and Occidental Observer, Libertarfian fantasies such as Reason.com, not to speak of the siren call of such Business Inc. organs as the WSJ.

  8. Though I remain puzzled by the bile spewed upon Diane West for writing this book, and certainly lost appreciation for Horowitz and all those who circled the wagons, protecting something of which we can only guess the contents, I still have some appreciation for Jeff Lipkes for interviewing Jared Taylor, founder of American renaissance, and doing so without the usual slander Taylor encounters from those who don’t necessarily share his views.

    http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/04/every_man_his_own_commissar_jared_taylor_and_the_politics_of_race.html

    This begs the question, someone who is brave enough to invite someone who breaks all taboos on race-related issues to present his views to a new audience, should be brave enough to allow for a review of Diane West without any bias, and allow her to publish a rebuttal.

    The testicular fortitude to give one of my personal heroes, Jared Taylor, an audience at the American Thinker, but afraid to touch upon the issues West unveiled.

    Interesting..
    The race taboo finally found worthy competition at the American Thinker.

  9. It is also instructive to read Nyquist’s earlier defense of Diana West:

    http://www.jrnyquist.com/in-defense-of-diana-west.html

    A sample:

    West asks, “Who stole history?” As the Devil’s Advocate, I ask, “Who stole conservatism?” And who betrayed America? “The phrase ‘betrayal of the nation’ has an archaic quality to most of us,” wrote West, “the word ‘betrayal’ itself is an act of exaggeration somehow inappropriate to any set of circumstances….” And so, when the conservative movement is betrayed and divided by doubt and acrimony, what does Mr. Horowitz say? She started it! And besides, he assures us:  “I don’t attack people on the Right.” Of course you do, Mr. Horowitz. And here you are caught red-handed. But then, it doesn’t matter because thieves are in charge of everything, and liars have become the guardians of truth. They have the big names. They have the money. To call this a “betrayal” is, they aver, a gross exaggeration. There are no betrayals. There are only “disagreements.” Snowden disagreed with the NSA. That is all. Alger Hiss merely disagreed with Whittaker Chambers. Don’t we believe in healthy debate? After all, it’s a free country (for a little while longer). But in all of this we have deprived ourselves of the word “betrayal” by previously eliminating from our lexicon the corollary words “traitor” and “enemy.” Perhaps one day all conservatives will learn, as Mrs. West has learned, that when you are directly attacked by a David Horowitz there is no mistaking what has occurred.  Cold, hard, implacable enmity is at work. Once war is declared, friendly commerce is at an end. Other people might say, “Oh, it’s just a misunderstanding. It’s a simple disagreement.” Even if they pretend to be conservatives, Christians, democrats – the attackers reveal themselves as enemies whose game now consists of further pretense. They pretend to be capitalists and Christians, democrats and freedom-lovers. They pretend to have a debate. They pretend to be scholars.  

  10. Wars need sanctification and heroes. The Enlightenment dead are consequently buried in the hallowed ground of Official History, (Horowitz style).

    Take a step back and consider how the American War of Independence was presented… I hear fifes! Do you hear drums and see a tattered flag? Don’t shoot till you see the whites…

    Truthfully?

    No way… that war about taxes probably wasn’t even necessary…

    http://tinyurl.com/l24kyz8

    Strictures upon the Declaration of the Congress at Philadelphia in a Letter to a Noble Lord, &c.

    by Thomas Hutchinson, former Governor of Massachusetts

    The grievances were slim… (In any case consider today’s tax burden, govt. snooping, etc.). Other forces were at play.

    And whatever they were… probably being the tawdry stuff of money and politics, they needed to be sanctified – all the more so in consideration of so many red-blooded ‘Mericans sacrificing their lives.

    So yes, we can accept that Stalin was devious and wicked, but NEVER that he PLAYED the USA.
    And nothing must ever diminish the ABSOLUTE HORROR of HORRORs, Hitler and the Nazis…

    So official History will accept some Stalinesque meddling, but as the boys fought bravely at the front, so too did the enlightened statist leaders in the rear. Keep it simple and – sancrosanct.

    Deu le vult…. and the popolo likes it too.

    Same goes for the Civil War… You don’t want to take a closer look at Abraham Lincoln… The truth would get in the way of his sanctification.

    Abe the log-splitter / Uncle Joe

    So the Conservative Movement has been overrun by Statists, those who need to sanctify and glorify politicians.

    Into this comes Diane West. To them, the statists, her 800 footnotes are so many spadefuls of earth digging up hallowed ground.

    The State will lead us to Loveliness. We’re special… we’ve been given a discount on the Original Sin. We can push the devil into a pool of holy water without ill effect to either. We bring progress. And we bring it better and quicker. We are the Melting pot, the liberators of the oppressed, the beacon on the hill. We give out awards, the Congressional Medals of Honor, Martin Luther King ribbons.

    Like religion used to, it helps keep the rabble together.

    So Diane West’s book, for all its scholarship, is a re-reading of a sacred (which alos means “settled”) war… Suggesting that millions of lives might’ve been spared had FDR, thirty-first after Saint Washingron had a bit more salt in his Gehirn… that’s more than 800 spadefuls of hallowed ground… that’s a testing ground for Caterpillar bulldozers.

    • The elites are terrified that the common man will figure out that wars are fought to ROB the common man of life, liberty and property – and that the common man will refuse to fight any more wars – and possibly discharge the elites of their life, liberty and property.

  11. The manner in which the Right has dealt with Diana West bears more than a passing resemblance to the stalin-era show trials. Both then and now you have ad hominem attacks against the accused, public denunciations with perhaps just enough factual basis to give them the aura of truth, retaliation against those who come to her defense (e.g., Claire Lopez), insistence on strict adherence to party orthodoxy, and, in the form of Dunn’s offer to edit Ms. West’s response, an attempt to extract a confession from the accused. I’m sure there are many more parallels.

  12. This is all quite horrifying. And it leaves me with a great desire to buy a copy of West’s book and read it in one gulp. Okay, maybe several gulps. Gotta work occasionally. Thanks for opening my eyes.

  13. Accepted History. Settled Science. All the smart people believe it, what’s wrong with you?

  14. Hmm. Ann Barnhardt and others have written extensively about the Communist/Homosexualist infiltration of the Vatican, and there is the same kind of “Those people are CRAAAAAZY!” response when the facts come out.

  15. I seem to recall that back in 2008 (maybe early 2009), Horowitz asserted that Obama was not really a “transformational liberal,” despite his pledge to “fundamentally transform” the country, but a more garden-variety liberal politician. And when people questioned Obama’s qualifications for the highest office in the land, DH opined that running a winning campaign was a convincing demonstration of leadership — never mind that candidates hire people to run their campaigns, and that campaigning is not governing.

    Now his tone could hardly be more different, as he urgently, passionately, frantically tries to wake people up to the reality that there’s a Marxist-communist cabal in the White House, ripping the country apart.

    In other words, he sounds like someone whom others label an unhinged conspiracy theorist. But if it’s rational to say that we’re now experiencing something like a communist coup, why is it so irrational to say (with documentation) that communist agents of a foreign power were influencing our government at the time we were allied with that foreign power?

  16. This sequence needs an edit to fix a logical leap:

    . . . In other words, he sounds like someone whom others label an unhinged conspiracy theorist.
    If DH considers it rational to assert the startling proposition that we’re now experiencing something like a communist coup, why does he think it’s so irrational to say that communist agents . . . .

  17. “Why is someone attacked, going on a year, for discussing the strategic implications of Soviet penetration of the Roosevelt administration? Unless Moscow is recycling Russia’s old strategies from World War II, with an eye to a repeat performance, why would anyone care?” Perhaps this is closer to the truth than we think?

  18. I have found that the articles at American Thinker vary widely in quality. Some of them are just opinion pieces without much substance to back them up. And some are very good.

    Planet X must be a BIG money donor.

  19. Sorry, but those in criticism of West are in error. A book that will be vindicated by the passage of time and the blood spilled to right the wrongs of those who have waged war on true freedom and liberty, around the globe. She is a true hero, heroine in my world.
    AT has fallen out of my reading and did so about 18 months ago. West is spot and her treatment is nothing more than proof of the dark times we live in.

    • I do agree about West. In reading your comment I realized that I haven’t looked at AT for about a year. I wonder how much of their readership has fallen off.

  20. The conservative detractors of West I think fall into two camps: ex-Communists who are really crypto-Communist subversives but who pretend to be anti-Communist; and conservatives who were never Communist and have always been anti-Communist. The latter are guilty of all the explanations and descriptions West and her few allies have conjectured — ideologically defending a paradigm, unwittingly aiding and abetting the sabotage of the former. The former are engaged in protracted sabotage, in continuity with all the sabotage of Communist yore, but an ingenious form: the anti-Communist crypto-Communist operative. The campaign against West cannot be explained merely by assuming all are the latter. And the saboteurs depend upon our ongoing unwillingness to consider the possibility.

  21. For anyone interested in how a political disease can warp history I recommend the story of the fraudulent book, ” Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arming_America by a bonafide academic historian, Michael Belessiles, and how it was shot to pieces by an amateur historian, Clayton Cramer.

    The book, issued to great media acclaim and winner of the Bancroft Prize was a compendium of false facts and statistics purporting to show that there was little gun ownership in America until the late 19th century. Cramer, simply fact-checking, discredited Bellesiles to such an extent that the latter had to resign from the faculty at Emory University and his Bancroft Prize was revoked. That he had received that prize at all — the highest that a book on American history may get—you can attribute to the prize-givers: the same kind as gave Obama his Peace Prize.

    See Cramer’s shots across a “well-intentioned” Prog professor’s bow, here http://www.claytoncramer.com/popular/BellesilesWrong1.PDF and here http://www.claytoncramer.com/unpublished/ArmingAmericaFraud.pdf. Lucky that Cramer doesn’t have the national profile of Diana West that can be destroyed, makes a living as a computer engineer, lives in a state, Idaho, that’s not the insane asylum that Blue America (i.e. Lefty states) is, and is an active firearms expert. Otherwise, the cackling, pecking crows would be on his doorstep too.

  22. @Takuan Seiyo.
    Thank you for an eye-opening example of leftist taqiyya unmasked, including the (purposefully?) clueless collaboration of the literate elite in rewarding the deception.

  23. Happy to see the lively comments and kind support.
    One of these days, we’ll figure it all out — maybe.
    All best wishes,
    Diana

    • Dear Ms West,

      Reading your e-mail exchange with American Thinker editor Mr Dunn I was struck by this emphatically asserted point (as warranting his demands that you submit to his editing as a pre-requisite to being permitted to respond to Mr Lipkes:

      “First, there are several errors of fact. The statement that Armand Hammer was lobbying on behalf of the Soviets to obtain Lend-Lease aid for the UK “in 1940” is doubtful, to say the least. 1940 was the peak of the Hitler-Stalin pact period (August 1939 – June 1941), when the USSR and Nazi Germany were allied and cooperating vigorously against the British, among others. If the correct year can’t be established, this should go.”

      My recollection of your book in this regard was that Hammer embarked on a lobbying campaign urging the US to provide Lend Lease aid to Britain. (Oddly Lipkes faults your book for failing to mention that Britain was a recipient of Lend Lease aid!) So 1940 was not only the right year, but Dunn and Lipkes were a bit daft for not reading or reading carefully the relevant part of your book. If they had both would have understood the thesis you were advancing.

      Hammer, your book implies (correctly in my view), was in 1940 deep finessing the US on the Soviet Union’s part using Britain as a palatable “initialiser”: once the US public accepted the idea of Lend Lease aid to Britain & France against Germany it would be so much easier to extend it to any adversary of Germany’s.

      Dunn proceeds on the basis that the 1939 German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact was rock-solid, would endure indefinitely and that in 1940 nobody, especially the Soviets, could possibly entertain the notion that Germany might break the Pact and the Soviets might put in place mechanisms to deal with that contingency.

      What is extremely telling in seeing your (and Epstein’s) thesis play out is that the actual Lend Lease legislation didn’t nominate which countries such aid would be restricted to: this was deliberately left to “Executive discretion” so that the President didn’t need the approval of Congress to extend it to the Soviets. In the second half of 1941 it was extremely unlikely that Congress would have supported Lend Lease aid to the Soviet Union and Roosevelt and Hopkins knew it.

  24. On the subject of Soviet infiltration, the following is a lecture by a former KGB agent on how to subvert a country from within. It details the steps required to destabilise a country, and change it in a 20-year process. Highly-recommended…

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gnpCqsXE8g

    At 10:18, the fields, methods and results involved in the subversion process are listed. How many can you recognise, as taking place in your country?? (bearing in mind, that this video was made in 1984…)

  25. It’s interesting to me that whenever I have raised the possibility (actually, probability) that Radosh and Horowitz are now Communist saboteurs (pretending to be anti-Communists), everyone — even those who seem lucidly aware of the dangers and elaborate deceptive tactics of Communist subversion — to a man dismisses the notion as outlandish. It’s as though they have no problem with the idea of Communist subversion in terms of dusty history; but cannot consider it as a present reality.

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