Content vs. Process

Most of the discussion of the controversy over Diana West’s book American Betrayal centers around content rather than process.

That is, people discussing the extreme reactions against her work — whether they agree with her or her critics — revisit the historical events themselves, and the inferences that may be drawn from them. Was Normandy really a better option for the Second Front than the Balkans or Italy? Could Britain and the United States have acted differently so that the Soviets would not have been able to overrun Central Europe? Was Eisenhower an inept commander? How many actual agents did Stalin have in place in Washington? etc. etc.

These are arguments about content. They seem to be missing the point about what happened after Diana West published American Betrayal last year. What is significant — and astounding — is what was done to her, as an author, beginning in July 2013. That is, the issue is process.

The first sign of what lay in store for Diana West was the removal of Mark Tapson’s favorable review of her book from FrontPage Mag immediately after it was published on July 8, 2013. Since then, almost no positive reviews have appeared in any prominent venues. The settled consensus in respectable “conservative” circles is overwhelmingly negative.

Other parts of the process were the untold thousands of words penned against her book in the months following the initial broadsides fired by FPM. Dozens and dozens of articles, opinion pieces, and reviews were published condemning the book and vilifying its author, many of them written by people who acknowledged they hadn’t read American Betrayal themselves. Included in those pieces were the following words and phrases, which are just a small sample of the invective aimed in her direction during the weeks after the public attacks on her began:

  • West’s fictions
  • unhinged theories
  • dangerous one dimensional thinking
  • truculent recklessness
  • a right-wing loopy
  • [who had not yet been] house-trained
  • very angry, very self-centered and very reckless partisan
  • organized a kook army
  • unutterable myth-making and jejune dementedness, as they hurl the vitriol of
  • the silly and the deranged
  • she should not have written this book, which betrays a conspiratorial mindset
  • a preposterous book
  • paranoid fantasy
  • conspiracy mongering
  • farrago of lies

In contrast, the vast majority of comments by readers ran in exactly the opposite direction. Whenever another hit-piece appeared, the commenters swarmed to that location to declare their outrage at what was being done to Ms. West. With the exception of a few obvious shills for whatever site hosted the review, the vast majority of the comments ran contrary to the “accepted history”.

Another facet of the process was the inability of Diana West to publish any replies, rebuttals, responses, or defenses of her work in the same outlets that were savaging her. The most recent example was American Thinker, which devoted 12,000 words to a series of negative articles about American Betrayal, but declined to allow the author to publish a reply that corrected the record without claiming the right to edit it for “tone”.

In a similar manner, other reviewers who attempted to publish articles supportive of Diana West’s conclusions found their pieces turned down by the regular venues. On those rare occasions when such articles were published, they were usually buried on the outlet’s website, often without a link from the main page where new work is normally headlined.

The exception to the above is Breitbart, which is to be commended for publishing both sides of the controversy without favoring one or the other. Ms. West was able to publish her work there when no other outfit above the level of this blog would host her defense of her book.

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Another thread of the process might be deduced from personnel changes in various organizations. Some of these may be hard to recognize — we aren’t always aware of it when an author is demoted or an editor is reassigned to a less prestigious desk for allowing positive statements about American Betrayal to see the light of day.

However, one particular public expulsion was blatant: the termination of Clare Lopez as a senior fellow at the Gatestone Institute. On September 3, 2013 Ms. Lopez published an article at Gatestone that referred favorably to American Betrayal as a prelude to a discussion of the recognition of the Soviet Union by the United States in 1933. The article was immediately pulled from the site, but not before it had been sent out to Gatestone’s email list, so that numerous people were aware of it.

The following morning, Gatestone’s editor, Nina Rosenwald, informed Ms. Lopez that she had been terminated from her position as a senior fellow.

Clare Lopez is a defense analyst, a former CIA operations officer, an expert on Iran, and a respected author. Sending her summarily packing from Gatestone was a sign that something momentous was going on.

There was a process underway, one that had far more significance than the content of Ms. Lopez’ disappeared essay.

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Last but not least, consider the sudden disappearance of fellow writers and pundits when one of their colleagues was viciously attacked. Col. Allen B. West, for example, who had called Diana West his friend — and even, jokingly, his “sister” — was conspicuously absent from the ranks of her defenders. The same was true of almost all major figures from the conservative scene. There were some exceptions (notably including Vladimir Bukovsky, M. Stanton Evans, Frank Gaffney, Stacy McCain, David Solway, Edward Cline, John Dietrich, J.R. Nyquist, and Andy Bostom), but generally speaking, prominent conservatives either sat this one out or joined the chorus against American Betrayal.

The most telling example was the author and former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy, who was a co-writer with Diana West on the Team B II Report for the Center for Security Policy. Like Ms. West, he has been a tireless Counterjihad activist, and up until last summer had always been a staunch supporter of her work.

When things turned nasty last August I expected Mr. McCarthy to jump into the fray on his friend’s behalf. After several months went by with no word from him, I realized it wasn’t going to happen. Finally, in December — five months after the first spittle-flecked invective had been flung — he penned an equivocal account of what happened, followed by his (what would have been for me, anyway) humiliating climb-down after being taken to task by Conrad Black for the slight praise he had directed at Diana West.

A few months later, after Andrew McCarthy’s new book came out, he was lavishly fêted by the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

Were these events in any way connected? Your guess is as good as mine.

However, taken together with everything else mentioned above — along with all the other bits and pieces that could be included, but are far too much for this brief essay — they are part of a process.

The process was the occluded but systematic excommunication of Diana West from the higher reaches of conservatism in the United States, all because she wrote a carefully-researched book about how thoroughly the Roosevelt administration had been compromised and influenced by agents of the Soviet Union.

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It is this process, and not the minutiae of the history itself, that preoccupies me, because it demonstrates that something is rotten in the state of American conservatism. Something is dreadfully amiss when the people who have struggled for sixty years against the progressive Left emulate the repressive totalitarian behavior of their adversaries.

I expect that even here, in a post about process and not content, at least 90% of the comments will resume the arguments about Normandy vs. the Balkans and whether President Roosevelt was incapacitated by dementia at Yalta. But, just this once, I urge you to look up from those fascinating details and contemplate what has been done over the past year to Diana West.

This appalling incident was the practicum for those lions of conservatism who would suppress at all costs anyone or anything that questions what they have determined to be the accepted narrative of history.

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

43 thoughts on “Content vs. Process

  1. If only Copernicus hadn’t been so *&%# stubborn, we could still be the center of the solar system.

  2. I’ve read enough and seen and heard enof of Diana’s works to make me utterly believe anything she says as truth ..She is the IMHO the ultimate intellectual doll bringing truth and poignance to our world..

    Hope all’s good and well at Schloss
    Bod guys. Ta ta fer now

  3. It appears to me that the political establishment in America that calls itself conservative is polluted with the very same rottenness and treachery that Diana West has shed some sunlight on.

  4. There is no conservatism in the United States, hence it does not have higher reaches. The question to ask with conservatism is: What does it try to conserve? One who answers this question relative to any name iterated above will realize that that the portfolio of yays answers to “neoconservatism” — which is a vastly different thing than Russell Kirk’s, the early Bill Buckley’s, or for that matter Edmund Burke’s conservatism.

    “Paleoconservatism” is the proper heir to conservatism and it has a small roster of names the most prominent of which is Patrick Buchanan. Alas, the paleos’ Achilles heel is their undifferentiated though mild antisemitism and a general anti-Israel stance with accompanying softenss re: Islam, jihad etc — probably on the the premise that the enemy of my enemy is, etc.

    While the paleos’ enmity to neoconservatism with its Jewish biggies, and to Jewish leftists, is deserved (Dr. Paul Gottfried, a Jew, has written much about it, and not on the side of his ethny), the blindness re: Israel and the failure to acknowledge the valuable Jewish contributions on the Right (not to mention Christianity, science, medicine etc) keeps paleoconservatism in the basement. Would it that it wise up and thrive in the light of day.

    • The case of Diana West and the fight against her on the part of the alleged Right to preserve the reputation and legacy of the putrid, mendacious Leftist FDR, shows that intellectually there is nothing remaining to conserve.

      What we need is a movement of rational people who possess a vision of a representative government, under the Constitution, with the individual rights of all citizens properly defended.

      In contemporary America, this is not a conservative vision, but a radical one. (Radical does not mean violent — it means “at the root”.)

      Today’s Tammy Faye Boehners and David Horowitzes differ from Barry Soetoro and his henchmen in the IRS, the New York Times, and the broadcast news outlets only in the appearance of their foliage: the root is the same, and is ultimately nourished in the same soil.

      What Diana West did by connecting the dots on Soviet penetration in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, and further hinting at its connection to Islamic penetration today, is radical in the sense I mean.

      I hope that she will follow up on her splendid achievement Betrayal with the full volume on Islamic influence which she originally set out to write.

      But what I would really like to see is for her to make it a trilogy, with a WWI-era prequel exploring the financiers of the Bolsheviks, and their continued dealings over the years with Lenin and Stalin — not to mention with the man whom Viktor Suvorov claims these last two characters selected from among the Bavarian beer halls to be their Icebreaker of World Revolution.

    • Thanks for keeping this alive. Your blog is unique, vital and indispensable. Was watching a booktv interview with the almost always luminous Irving Kristol when he said something about how conservatives had to face up to what a great president Roosevelt was. Suppose with all these neocons there is this atavistic need to protect the idols of their socialist youth. But amazing that they would go to such Stalinist lengths.

    • Did the corruption of conservatism begin when former liberals, leftists, communists, etc. started calling themselves conservatives? If so, have they brought with them their corrupt beliefs and maxims instead of discarding them?

    • There is a difference between Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism. They are not the same. Some who support Israel reject the difference to silence dissent and debate. Hopefully you are not one.

  5. I appreciate Baron Bodissey’s attention to this ongoing problem & phenomenon. It really deserves to be more generally discussed — but then, that’s part of the phenomenon, that it’s not.

    I understand the rhetorical effect of the distinction BB makes between content and process; but in many ways, the outrageous sloppiness in treating content errors, indicative of some kind of concerted and willful obfuscation (if not a strange ineptitude), has become part of the process. Then, when Diana West has called meticulous attention to this sloppiness (e.g., in her “Rebuttal”), her detractors compound their original behavior by ignoring her corrections, rather than addressing them. The sheer number and complexity of all their sloppy lapses in content becomes so labyrinthine that her detractors hope the readers’ eyes will glaze over — and they are right.

    • Hesperado —

      I think you are EXACTLY right. The compounded errors of fact, in detail, are part of the process.

      It may or may not have been intentional to get all those facts wrong in the first place. But to deny the author the right to correct the errors, and to refuse to address them when they were pointed out, almost certainly was intentional.

      You must have noticed that after every batch of errors was publicly exposed, they were simply forgotten. Then her detractors moved on to a new set of factual errors, which in turn were ignored. And so on, over and over.

      • The description of DW as “very angry” and “very self-centered” etc. suggest, to me, that any factual concerns ran a far distant second to polemical purpose.

        • True. The wording you quote, together with other bilge from their pens, suggests a polemical purpose of making veiled, but snide, innuendo tarring DW as being shrewish, overly-aggressive, etc.

          Thus, to distract attention from her masterful exposé of mid-20th century treason, these stage magicians of the written word fell back on line of patter that included, among other things, anti-female chauvinist metaphors dating to pre-20th century.

  6. As much as I wish not to enter into stale dialogue with the decadent and futile right or left wing, I cannot help myself when someone who has shone a search light into the murky past of the politically and morally bankrupt. They have given the world what? Infanticide, euthanasia and allowing the mental infirm to marry each other and give them prominence among nations. I read Ms. West book and found to my surprise that it varied little from some information I had already been given over the years by people who had worked and fought in some cases in both world wars. Communism had infiltrated the best of universities, schools and governments. When I started to read “American Betrayal by John Doe Whistle Blower”, I knew that along the line they had won the first round and collapsed the system nicely, thus the biggest financial mess in history or that is what it looks like where I am sitting. The moral decline started before the First World War and if it is not stopped now, will result in the takeover slowly but surely of the Islamic “seed of the devil”, as it was described by an English man who ended up in jail for saying so.

  7. Somebody explain to me what is the right we keep talking about. Is it religious in foundation, or in keeping together what our founding fathers had in mind. The left has many manifestos the right not so much. Hitler was he the extreme right as the media paints the right. There is no question in my mind that the left has won what narrative is spoken and written in the good old USA. The question I again raise is there really a so called right and what is it.

  8. I read Ms. West’s book within days of its appearance, and was astonished by its meticulousness and, thereby, its credibility. I have been appaled at the sequelae. She cracked the lid on a putrid mess, though one suspects she had no inkling of the miasma that would reupt. Would that those who disagree would devote as much care to disproving the hypothesis instead of destroying the hypothesizer. But thanks for your paragraph specifying those individuals who retain credibility, as well as your listing of those who have lost it.

  9. This is very very scary and only proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that something very nasty and yes evil is going on and has been going on for a long long time.
    I am glad through experiences in my own life and those of others, that I trust no-one anymore. I am wary very wary and keep myself to myself. The only comfort I have is sites like these.God bless you and God bless Diana West. A tough cookie if ever there was one.

  10. It is difficult to understand the “conservatives” attack on one of their own. The attack seems to be against Diana, her person, and not the body of work in her book. This is the classical ad hominem attack so favored by the liberals. Her book speaks to the truth in the subject matter and the howling critics cannot stand it. Perhaps the critics are not as conservative as they make themselves out to be.

  11. History. “The Past”. “What difference does it make (now)”. “Settled History” (whazzat?). “Unutterable myth-making”. Blah, blah, blah………………………
    Yes, boys and girls , there MOST DEFINITLY is a point to this “process” herein described–yes indeedy.
    It is the UNWRITTEN history of the POST-1950 (post -McCarthy) world up to the latest Mideast debacle AND beyond that is at stake here .
    This history must NEVER BE WRITTEN!!!!
    This ‘connecting the dots’ that West did so well for the 30’s and 40’s has to be stomped into the mud, denigrated, lied about, covered over, its land sowed with salt and ANYBODY who is defending any sort of dot-connecting has to be DESTROYED, utterly and completely.
    It ain’t about West anymore, and probably never was.
    This is why her book ‘never should have been written’.
    And now she is radioactive and must be ignored.
    The “process” herein described is to see that there is no investigation on: Cold War, Korea, De-colonization, Vietnam, Central American Re-communization, and the BIG ONE–Islamization everywhere.
    According to West, that’s where it all began in the first place.

  12. Content vs Process
    OR Content, Content, Content and the process is to squelch the truth.

    The critics dare not go after the real truths Diana uncovered. Why? They would lose. What do I mean? Here is an example:

    pages 211 -214:

    George Earle, former Democratic governor of Pennsylvania uncovers the truth of the massacre/execution of 6,000 Polish officers by the Soviets in 1939 (Katyn Forest Massacre). He is told by the New York Times that if he tries to bring the evidence to FDR it will be a “career ender”. Earle gives the evidence to FDR and FDR tells him “I am absolutely convinced the Russians didn’t do this”. Earle was then immediately sent to be the head of the Samoan Defense Group. Everyone knows today that the Soviets indeed massacred these innocent Polish heroes.

    page 138:

    George C Marshall, later Truman’s Secretary of State, and confidant of FDR: “Hopkins job with the president was to represent the Russian interests. My job was to represent the American interests”. I have read that so many times and wonder why Diana’s critics can not even remotely begin to explain this treason.

    page 196 – 201:

    William Bullitt, FDR’s ambassador to France 1936-1940 totally figures out Soviet intentions in a remarkable way. He lays out in detail exactly what the USSR and Stalin are up to and FDR says, “I don’t dispute your facts. They are accurate. I don’t dispute the logic of your reasoning. I just have a hunch that Stalin is not that kind of man. Harry (Hopkins) says he’s not and that he doesn’t want anything in the world but security for his country and I think that if I give him everything I possibly can and ask nothing in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace”.

    How can anyone defend FDR after saying such an incredibly naïve and dangerous thing as that?

    So, to 2034 and our present infiltration by the ‘religion of peace’:

    Imagine 20 years from now a person high up in the Obama administration who says in his biography: “Valerie Jarrett’s job with the president was to represent the worldwide Muslim interests. My job was to represent American interests”.

    Would any reader of this blog be surprised at such a revelation?

    To me that is the point of her book. Anyone listening?

    • Remember how McCain et al. came down like a tone of bricks on Bachmann et al. for daring to suggest that agents of Islam were already working within our government.

    • And those are not exactly new revelations, I’ve read them elsewhere, so what exactly is all the fuss about Diana West’s book again? She joins the dots and draws rather obvious conclusions from such data? Yes, and …???

      • I had read many titles on related topics before ever hearing of hers.

        A number of them even contained multiple jaw-dropping revelations, per book, that don’t make it into the standard history books.

        But hers gives a different impression, by putting multiple, jaw-dropping revelations into virtually each chapter, and showing chains of reasoning that reference additional sources which confirm or tend to confirm the original revelations, plus followup to show how hard the Establishment tried to conceal these things.

        Then topping it off with examples of how the much-vaunted Truman continued the hush-hush policy. Then how his successor from the other party, Eisenhower, dittoed Truman.

        Even going into it with a lot of prior knowledge of the type you mention, I was still floored by her presentation.

        I found American Betrayal impossible to put down but, also, in many places, stirring up negative emotions (against its antagonists) so strong that it took time for the emotions to subside before I could continue reading.

    • Yes, and it’s not merely a parallelism of naivete, but also of ideology: the same Leftism that tended to gloss over the danger of Communism (when it was not positively enamored of it) has in the meanwhile percolated into the bloodstream of the West’s sociopolitical culture in our time in the form of the dominant and mainstream PC MC that defends Islam and most Muslims (other than the Tiny Minority of Extremists).

      It’s not an exact correspondence, in that PC MC has additional conceits involving a deformed anthropology about “the Other” joined at the hip to a deranged hypertrophy of civilizational self-criticism; and insofar as numerous non-Leftists buy into this mass neurosis.

    • The fate of George Earle is indeed frightening. What is missing from your quote of page 211-214 of Diana West’s book is that Earle accepted Roosevelt’s right as President to publicly and formally reject the conclusion of Earle’s report on Katyn, understanding the political sensitivities of blaming the wartime ally, but asked Roosevelt if he objected to Earle publishing the report as his private findings. Roosevelt’s response was swift and brutal: banishment to American Samoa under military gag for the duration of the war.

      • Ah yes…in the land of the free. Why not just dump him in with the Japanese-Americans in their internment camps? Or would that have been too kind?

  13. With R. broaching the name John McCain, I remembered a headline I saw yesterday:

    “ISIS cites John McCain as a key factor in their success.”

    The Taliban and the Banderovtsiy fascists in Ukraine also have John McCain to thank for their success.

    There is deep madness in the neocon persuasion, having to do with Empire, Exceptionalism, seeing a potential American in every Muz pedophile goatkeeper, khat-chewer and other manner of barbarian, and so on.

    Pushing America into avoidable wars — with Russia, soon? — is a specialty with these people. Another offshoot of that is tranferring trillions of taxpayers’ money to the military-industrial complex and private contractors “rebuilding” — in vain — barbarians’ countries we have destroyed. And finally, the symmetrical principle of Invade them Over There, Invite them Over Here.

  14. Quite, so, Baron. If only the so-called experts had confined themselves to discussing whether the assertions made by DW were true, or whether her arguments were valid, but no. Instead, they engage in an ad hominem campaign against the author of a book they don’t approve of – a clear case of “Let’s shoot the messenger!”

    Now, it’s beyond dispute that they have done this. As Hesperado has already pointed out, their error-strewn “reviews” are there for all to see. (It is somewhat amusing to see the authors claim to be “experts” who we should all regard as sober, capable men.)

    We could take what they have done and stop there, dismissing them as irrational and spiteful people, and recognise that they have no more credibility from this day forward. But the question of motive is an interesting one. We can all see what they have done and how they have chosen to conduct themselves – but why would anyone choose to behave in such an appallingly irrational manner?

    There certainly seem to be some people around who are trying to protect the “official” version of events regarding the war. On the face of it, this is puzzling, because anyone who spends any time at all studying that period soon realizes that the straightforward, black and white narrative we have all been taught doesn’t even come close to explaining what happened. Trying to preserve the official, straightforward version of events in the face of readily available facts seems to be an exercise in futility.

    Perhaps the way to go here is to think about what exactly would unravel, should the official version of events regarding the war be exposed as lies and propaganda?

    • Now, if one takes that approach, this whole episode becomes just one more way to discover the truth about the world we’re all living in. We are all aware by now that there is something seriously wrong with our societies. And just like any sick patient, if you prod the sore spot then you’ll get a response. So the attacks on Diana West are instructive, because the visible response to her book allows us to identify an underlying problem within our own societies, specifically in this case with certain individuals who like to be thought of as a learned elite.

      One recalls Horowitz’s comment that if Diana West’s work is taken seriously, then his life’s work would all be for naught; this together with people like Ann Coulter remaining silent throughout does suggest that there are people out there who have built careers based on the alleged “right” and “left” political divide – they have written books, they give speeches, make TV appearances, and generally earn very good money indeed – and they don’t want to jeopardize their income, so they won’t support anyone who undermines the traditional political narrative.

      The question remains though – are the assertions made by Diana West true? Is the traditional “right” and “left” political divide even meaningful? Was it ever? Is it not the case that both “sides” are as bad as one another, and the whole political process in our societies, the selection of “candidates”, supposedly “free” elections, the whole nine yards, is tainted throughout by the catastrophic moral failure of both “sides”?

      • “This is very very scary and only proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that something very nasty and yes evil is going on and has been going on for a long long time. I am glad through experiences in my own life and those of others, that I trust no-one anymore. I am wary very wary and keep myself to myself. The only comfort I have is sites like these.God bless you and God bless Diana West. A tough cookie if ever there was one.” – Anna.

        If one abandons the “right” and “left” political divide, and sees it as nothing but a smokescreen designed to obscure the truth about the political elite, then what is there to see? Many people know from their own personal experiences that evil is a real and active force in this world. And if the traditional political divide unravels, then the evidence points to an evil force that inspires the elites in our societies.

        The elite don’t want to be exposed for what they really are, and people like Allan West know first hand just how utterly ruthless they can be, which perhaps explains his reluctance to speak out about the way Diana West has been attacked. She has been targeted by a bunch of pseudo-intellectuals writing harsh words about her on websites. How much farther would the elite go to silence someone like Allan West? They’d have to go after him personally. I believe West has a good idea how far they could go, and how far they would go.

        I personally agree with Anna, there is a vast and evil network operating throughout the world, not necessarily as a unified organization, but these people have shown by their actions that they have the same agenda: power, destruction, control. The higher up the traditional power structures one goes, the more likely one is to find an agent of evil.

  15. As far as content is concerned, both AB itself as well as DW’s rebuttals and responses to large hit pieces are impeccable. No way is the Neocon opposition going to win a fair debate. But as to the process and the silence of so many, there is a possibility that there are some prominent conservatives who feel they need as wide as possible support for their agenda, be it running for public office (Allen West?) or building some kind of organization or movement that requires wide-spread conservative support, or they just want to keep selling their books (Ann Coulter?). Don’t alienate either Neo’s or Paleo’s, so stay on the sidelines. And a few have special problems such as Mark Steyn’s longtime friendship with Conrad Black and his deep-pocket lawsuit with Hockey Stick Mann. Yet there are people like Andy Bostom and Frank Gaffney who apparently don’t care about Neocon approval – the truth is more important; good for them! To me a big mystery is Andy McCarthy who has been a thorough fact-checker in the past. Except both he and Ron Radosh are columnists at PJ Media, does that mean anything? Roger Simon? Silent. Bill Whittle? Nothing. Sad.

  16. “There is deep madness in the neocon persuasion, having to do with Empire, Exceptionalism, seeing a potential American in every Muz pedophile goatkeeper, khat-chewer and other manner of barbarian, and so on.”

    Yes indeed. Is it too much to hope, I wonder, that at least some of these neocons are learning after the U.S. experiences in Iraq and Afganistan? Is there any sign of this?

    • You ask a fascinating question. We may certainly hope that some who arrived at their positions honestly through intellectual inquiry may improve, though I don’t have specific examples to cite from the top of my head.

      I have reached the conclusion, however, that may Neocons have gotten involved with that position by osmosis, by working in a Reagan or Bush or Bush, or even Democrat, Pentagon, federal contractor, or think tank, etc.

      And now, as suggested by J. R. Nyquist, it is becoming increasingly clear some were disciplined movement Leftists, who followed Party orders to ostensibly join the Right, for purposes of infiltrating it.

      To properly “reframe” every issue, it is necessary to be able to issue dezinformatsiya from any angle of the political universe. Thus, every institution should ideally be penetrated with moles. And as the Right increasingly disintegrates, there are more and more camps on the “Right” that need penetrating.

      I must confess that when I first sighted your post, I skimmed it quickly and initially misread your question as:

      “Is it too much to hope… that at least some of these neocons are yearning after the U.S. experiences in Iraq and Afganistan?”

      Which question is more likely to yield a definite “yes” response, at least as it applies to the ringleaders of the Neocon movement: yours, or my misreading of it?

      Mmmmm…

      Further, deponent saith not.

  17. Is There An The Invisible Man

    Diana West has opened a can of worms. Few people are interested in investigating this further. Some powerful people are interested in closing this can as quickly as possible. One commentator remarked, “think about what exactly would unravel, should the official version of events regarding the war be exposed as lies and propaganda?” This could be scary. Diana only scratched the surface of this dilemma. She mentions 500 Soviet agents in the U.S. government. Vasili Mitrokhin lists about 1,000. There are several subjects she deals with only superficially (U.S. POWs, slave labor, engineered famine.) You can only cover so much material in 400 pages.

    Now to the “Invisible Man.” It is quite possible that after careful consideration writers and editors decided that publishing favorable articles about American Betrayal would not be wise. On the other hand it is possible that they produced their work and were quickly contacted by someone who informed them that they had made a mistake (you might call this a conspiracy.) David Horowitz published an article by Mark Tapson favorable to the book. It was quickly withdrawn and the author, a Frontpage staff writer, labeled an “incompetent.” Clare Lopez wrote an article favorably mentioning American Betrayal on the Gatestone site. Apparently, Gatestone’s editor, Nina Rosenwald, was initially impressed with the article. Shortly after that the article was pulled and Clare Lopez was given a pink slip by Gatestone. Andrew McCarthy wrote a somewhat balanced article on the book and was chastised by Conrad Black. He responded by praising Black and asserting that he was misunderstood.

    Diana West’s responses to her critics have been published in Gates of Vienna and Breitbart. Few other publications have covered the controversy. The case of The American Thinker is unique however. It has published several articles dealing with American Betrayal that have been critical. Yet its editor gave what amounted to a refusal to Diana West’s request to respond.

    The problem Diana’s critics have is that their position is untenable. Diana West’s supports believe in “conspiracy theories.” As all informed “experts” know the Communists never conspired. They may have sat around and drank vodka, ate borsch and chatted, but they never conspired. I offer two quotes that sum up the oppositions position. Harvey Klehr speaking for himself and John Haynes: “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.” Conrad Black has written: “There is not one scintilla of acceptable historical evidence that the supposed 500 Soviet agents, ‘many of them operating at the very highest levels of the federal government,’ existed in such numbers or influenced American foreign policy in these most important matters at all, or that any actual policymaker from Roosevelt down thought of anything except the national interest of the United States and the desirability of the reign of democracy within countries and of international law among them.”

    In response I would like to offer The Morgenthau Plan: Soviet Influence on American Postwar Policy. I am not trying to promote the sale of my book. Please get a copy from the interlibrary loan. This book details extensive Soviet influence on American policy. It has footnotes and even a bibliography.

    • What confounds me, as I’m sure it does many, is the vitriolic reaction to Diana’s book. I read it early, before “ReviewGate” commenced, and was thoroughly impressed. After delving into the numerous attack pieces on the book (Conrad Black’s being the most pointless; a mere cut and paste from his obsequious paean to FDR), I decided to read it again.

      What do these people fear? I for one am fascinated by new information and would expect serious scholars to be energized by a well-researched, novel and clearly articulated viewpoint. Alas, not so for Diana West. If I were a cynical sort, I might suggest that the boys don’t like the new girl on the block showing them up.

      I will buy your book and look forward to reading it.

  18. I am a total fan of Diana West and her work.

    What a great article!

    Yes! Content vs Process. And the winner is….the unovercome prejudices, the underlying sympathy, the abject lack of vision…well, yes, in terms of her excommunication.

    But the winner and still Champion is Diana West and her supporters.

    And, that was the other great point of the article by Baron Brodissey. Namely that we, the supporters, get it.

    I tweeted to Diana West that “her supporters are heirs to those who believed W Chambers, while her opponents are heirs to the ‘good guys’ who didn’t.

    Diana West’s allies owed her allegiance, even without necessarily agreeing with her on every point. Not doing that, made the conservative movement the Men’s Club it always says that it is not….

    What W Chambers really understood, what Carl Jung did as well, is just how sick the West is and how it cannot see itself as the originator, the infectious agent, for the world of communism, among the evils we have contributed.

  19. The roots of the ‘process’ needs more vetting. I’ve been around the mountain a few times. I left the democratic party a long time ago when I saw they were being run by socialists. After awhile I drifted to the republican party because they more closely represented my ideals. Infiltration by socialists has been evident for awhile and is becoming more obvious all the time. The same thing seems to be happening to whatever group espouses the basic freedoms and individualism this country was founded on.

    I just finished re-reading Ayn Rand’s ‘We the Living’. From an eye witness to the destructiveness and evil socialism/communism the effects at this point are nowhere near what she witnessed (even that was before Stalin came up to full speed) but the demagoguery and attitudes are here.

    The ‘process’ is the infitration, the ‘agents of influence’ has not ended. I was living oversees when the ‘Soviet Empire’ came to an end. When I got back at the end of the 90’s and searched communism on the internet – the communists have in no way given up on their ‘world revolution’. That is the ‘process’.

  20. This video link to a soliloquy by Charlotte Iserbyt titled “The Miseducation of America Part 1 – Full”. . . was posted in a comment to an unrelated topic on another blog.

    Having some familiarity with Charlotte Thompson Iserbyt’s ‘The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America’ book, the similarity between Charlotte’s coincidental discovery of the Marxist revamp of the American educational system resulting in subsequent attempts to re-educate her then repeat dismissal from positions of influence remind me of Diana West’s situation as it all relates to the same entrenched ‘red’ infiltration.

  21. For a specific point tying the above video link to “Content v. Process”, fast forward to 54:49 to watch Charlotte Iserbyt state the following, under the heading “The Reese Committee Investigation, America’s Lost Hearing”:

    Iserbyte:

    The three thousand pages of the Congressional Investigation of the Reese Committee, investigation of the subversive activities of the tax exempt foundations, I bought the only available copy in the country. Three thousand pages from a really good friend of mine, a wonderful American. He had been offered any amount of money for that twenty years ago by one of the minions of the Tax Exempt Foundations. They did not want that copy to be floating around.
    The research director for those hearings, his name was Norman Dodd. I knew him. And, uh, the conversation that I am going to discuss right now, that he had, with that, uh, president of the Ford Foundation, Roland Gaither [sp?] was off the record in New York City at the Ford Foundation headquarters. Norman Dodd told me, over dinner, in Washington DC in a restaurant in Georgetown, Rowland Gaither said to him, “Mr. Dodd, you know, basically, we at the foundations, we don’t determine the agenda. The agenda has come from directions from the White House”. That was Eisenhower at the time. Right at the peak of the Cold War. “…and that agenda, our instructions are to use our tax exempt status “, your money, folks – “change America so it can be comfortably merged with the Soviet Union.”

    Now, a lot of you may say, well, that never happened. Well, it’s happening right now, folks. It’s happening right now as we speak.

    Iserbyte now begins reading from a booklet titled “Lines of Credit: Ropes of Bondage”:
    “The foundation funded non-bloody revolution. Committee Chairman, Carrol Reese warned fellow Congressmen of a diabolical conspiracy that a certain few foundations were financing the socialist and communist overthrow of the United States.
    After WWI, they tried to get the League of Nations in. There was tremendous opposition to that. And then you had the opposition between then and between WWII you had Lindburgh and a lot of Americans going before the Congress to keep us from going into the UN. They had all sorts of opposition, but they got their way.

    “The Reese Committee learned that the Rockefeller Foundation and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace were, with tax exempt dollars, funding leftist propaganda operations aimed at changing America through the brain, not the battlefield. Patriotism, national sovreignty, individual responsiblity and Christian beliefs were belittled while the concepts of a one world government socialism, collectivism and humanism were deemed essential for peace in the modern age. A clandestine and successful non-bloody revolution had been master minded by some of America’s most powerful and devious men. Men who did not want to be exposed by a Congressional investigating committee. The man chosen by Reese to be the Committee’s Research Director was Norman Dodd, Yale graduate, intellectual and New York investment banker. During this writers frequent visits to Dodd’s retirement home in Virginia, he repeatedly spoke (Dodd) of his conviction that justice demanded that those foundations should be compelled to spend a like amount of dollars to undo the damage they have done to America. And quote: Dodd sent committee questionaires to numerous foundations and as a result of one such request, Joseph E. Johnson of Carnegie endowment for Peace invited Dodd to send a committee staffer to Carnegies headquarters in New York City to examine the minutes of the meetings of the endowment’s trustees. Now this is Carnegie we are talking about-the one I always go after. These minutes have long since been stored away in a warehouse and obviously, Johnson, who was a close friend of former Carnegie president and Soviet spy, Alger Hiss, had no idea what was in them. Don’t forget, Alger Hiss headed up the UN in San Francisco. He was the head of the whole thing, world government. The minutes reveal that in 1910, the Carnegie trustees asked themselves this question: “Is there any way known to man, more effective than war to so alter the life of an entire people?” This is in the minutes. For a year, the trustees sought an effective, peaceful method to alter the life of an entire people but ultimately they concluded that war was the most effective way to change people . (Iserbyte exhibits exasperation) Horrible, WWI, horrible war , made every other war look like nothing. “Consequently, the trustees of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace next asked themselves, “How do we involve the United States in a war? ” And they answered, “We must control the diplomatic machinery of the United States by first gaining control of the State Department. ”
    Now, don’t forget, this is 1910.
    “Norm Dodd said that the trustees minutes reinforced what the Reese Committee uncovered elsewhere about the Carnegie Endowment, that it had already become a powerful policy making force inside the State Department. During those early years of the Carnegie Endowment, war clouds were already forming over Europe and the opportunity for the enactment of their plan was drawing near. History proved that WWI did indeed have an enormous impact on the American people. For the first time in our history, large numbers of wives and mothers had to leave the home to work in war factories thus effectively eroding womens work role as the heart of the family. The sanctity of the family itself was placed in jeopardy. Life in America was so thoroughly changed that according to Norman Dodd, “…the trustees had the brashness to congratulate themselves on the wisdom and validity of their original decision.”
    They sent a controversial message to President Wilson (horrible, listen to this) insisting that the war not be ended too quickly. Carnegie trustee, Cleveland Dodge, one of Wilson’s financial supporters, had direct access to the President, as did Elihu Root, endowment president from 1910 to 1925.
    After the war, the Carnegie Endowment trustees reasoned that if they could get control (here we go) of education in the United States, they would be able to prevent a return to the way of life as it had been prior to the war. And they recruited the Rockefeller Foundation to assist in such a monumental task. According to Dodd, “…they divided the task in parts giving to the Rockefeller Foundation the responsiblity of altering education as it pertains to domestic subjects ( that was the Southern Education Board that they set up) but Carnegie retained the task of altering our education about foreign affairs and international relations” (that would be UNESCO, the UN and all that stuff). “The foundations decided the most effective method of achieving this goal would be to alter American history, so they awarded grants, fellowships and scholarships to those professors and historians who would rewrite American history and promote one worldism, humanism and socialism. By the early thirties, the well laid plans of the foundations trustees had reached fruition. A Reese Committee Staff report concluded,
    1) there had indeed been a non-bloody revolution in America between 1933 and 1936
    2) that a certain few foundations had funded efforts to change the beliefs of the American people through education and propaganda.
    3) these revolutionary changes had been accepted without resistence.
    To demonstrate how thoroughly American opinion had been changed according to the plan for the foundations, we cite the following historical example:
    At the end of WWI, Woodrow Wilson and his shadowy alter ego, Col. Edward M. Haus tried to sell the US Senate and the American people on the idea of the League of Nations. This was, of course, the first concerted international effort towards a one world government. Wilson and Haus failed in their mission but a generation later , after another great war and much reeducation via college international relations clubs, international studies, educational grants and the like, the Senate and the people readily accepted membership in the United Nations. Roosevelt’s foreign policy advisor, Alger Hiss, helped write the UN charter in which the Soviet Union was given three votes in the General Assembly and the United States, only one.”

    She continues with more, but this segment of the video was tying another thread to the tapestry unfolding with Diana West.

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