With journalistic skills honed over decades, skepticism toward received opinion, a graceful literary style, and considerable courage, Diana West has been contributing to the preservation of America’s heritage of liberty against its enemies, foreign and domestic. She’s been doing this by defending American philosophy, culture, and history—and common sense—in essays, books and, lately, videos.
Her contribution, unfortunately, is not as widely known as its high literary quality would lead one to predict. The Left have mainly ignored her, but false friends on the Right have vilified her, arrogating to themselves the right to determine how far the defense of liberty may go and whose sacred cows may not be blasphemed along the way.
In the words of ex-Communist journalist and novelist Arthur Koestler (1905-1983), West detects a red thread of continuity between his era and ours:
. . . [R]ecounting his experience as a German Communist in the 1930s, [Arthur] Koestler is nonetheless describing the post-Communist, postmodern, post-9/11 American condition. It is the sinister overhaul of language and thought . . . that he personally engaged in, and that was and is the primary tool of Marxist and Islamic subversion. “Not only our thinking, but also our vocabulary was reconditioned,” he explains. “Certain words were taboo.” Certain other words became telltales by which to identify dissenters or enemies. Literary, artistic, and musical tastes, he writes, were “similarly reconditioned” to support the renunciation of independent thought and logic necessary to submit to ideology.[1]
Sounds familiar? She calls for a “cultural reexamination” of the process by which Americans were force-fed one “blue pill” of lies after another and, for the most part, they swallowed them willingly, casting into outer darkness those who spit them out and sought the “red pill” of unpleasant truth.[2]
There’s no need to rehash here the seven-year-old controversy over her indispensable American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character. She’s done that unanswerably in The Rebuttal: Defending American Betrayal from the Book-Burners, a painstaking defense of her thesis of Communist subversion. Spirited and scholarly defenses of West penned by her tribe of expert, passionate, and fearless fans, including M. Stanton Evans and Vladimir Bukovsky, fill more than half of The Rebuttal.[3]
If the treachery has a birthday, she’s determined it to have been November 16, 1933, nine months after Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated. That was the day FDR recognized Stalin’s tyranny. In return, Stalin promised not to try to overthrow the US government, an enterprise in which he was already engaged through the Communist Party USA. West has documented the many forms that Stalin’s con took.
And the American lives it cost. To paraphrase West on the betrayal’s impact: the rats helped prolong World War II by years while supplying Moscow with stolen nuclear technology, thereby limiting the American response to the Red invasion of South Korea.
The great show Truman made of rounding up Communists under the Smith Act diverted attention from the matter of hundreds of personnel security risks that populated multiple DC bureaucracies. They moved around a lot and “lost” files, if that’s what it took to cover their tracks.
Exposing this nest of vipers would cast the previous administration (in which Truman had served) in an intolerably bad light. It would also undermine popular confidence in the post-war settlement that awarded half of Europe to Stalin’s regime (whose war criminals were not tried at Nuremberg). This worried patriots decades before Joe McCarthy became that era’s Donald Trump. It occurred under the nose of the sainted FDR. For establishment-beholden academics, that’s a third rail, a red line they will not cross (or let anyone else cross with impunity).
What triggered West’s enemies on the right was her cumulative case that Harry Hopkins—America’s “shadow president” who for most of FDR’s reign occupied the White House’s Blue Suite (“The Lincoln Bedroom”)—was perhaps more than coincidentally pro-Soviet. But FDR took offense at any aspersion cast in Harry’s direction. Readers of American Betrayal, especially chapter 7, can assess West’s case for themselves, which is documented to the hilt.
That case does not hang on whether Harry the Hop (or Laurence Duggan) was the Soviet asset referred to in a Venona cable as “Agent 19”! That’s for grand academic poohbahs to go to the mat over. There are bigger fish to fry, and West’s skillet is wide enough to fry them.
The issue continues to be—polemically driven academic misdirection to the contrary notwithstanding—the degree of governmental penetration that Soviet assets achieved in the ‘thirties and ‘forties and the foot-dragging, smears, and self-righteous indignation that greeted attempts to expose that infiltration. The scandal was not only about stealing secrets. It was also about influencing governmental policy.
Forensically, as there’s been no surrebuttal, The Rebuttal stands.
West’s scope of interests is not limited to Communism, which she pursues in The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy. It extends to America’s decline, explored in The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization, which preceded American Betrayal by a few years.[4]
What I’ve recently learned to my delight, but not surprise, is what a perceptive a film reviewer she is. I consider myself an anti-Communist in good standing but, as though the target of a Jedi mind trick, I fell asleep at the switch while watching Mr. Jones.
The film’s ostensibly about Gareth Jones, the Welsh journalist who exposed to the world the Stalin-engineered famine in the Ukraine (1932-1933), which many journalists and governments ignored or denied. (The Holodomor’s death toll rivaled, if not exceeded, that of the Shoah.)
For two hours on a lazy Sunday afternoon, I let the film’s “production values” (cast, costume, locations, sets, etc.), references to seminal events, rendering of historical figures wash over me. What I sensed, but suppressed awareness of, were anachronisms and fabrications of conversations, defects West alerted me to, to my mortification. It was the kind of movie that once moved a learned friend of mine to say (about Elizabeth) “the less you know about history, the more you’ll enjoy it.”
Instead of stealing West’s thunder, I’ll send you to her Patreon platform where you can join me as a subscriber. There you can watch her demolish, engagingly and with clarity, that flick’s credibility in a video, Did Nellie Ohr Write Mr. Jones?
(Yes, that Nellie Ohr. West analyzes Ohr’s upbeat take on Soviet collectivization in The Red Thread.[5]).
If the video whets your appetite for more, visit DianaWest.net. Many other videos await you on YouTube.
American conservatism’s conscience gets the last word:
We are the victims of so many cons. As tools of deception, they do immense damage when the media confer on them the status of conventional wisdom, even if they are eventually debunked years or generations later. The Terror Famine isn’t a famine. Stalin is our Uncle Joe. “McCarthyism” is worse than communism. Communism is democracy in a hurry. Mao, Castro, Ho Chi Minh are “agrarian reformers.” Andropov loves jazz. Reagan is a war-monger. Nuclear winter is coming. Global warming is here. Islam is peace. Since 2016, these cons have come fast and thick. The Russians “hacked” the DNC. Seth Rich died in a robbery “gone bad.” Trump “colluded” with Russia. Putin hates Hillary. James Comey is a “straight arrow.” Trump supporters are “Russian bots.” Congressional oversight is Putinism. Mueller must be protected . . . .
The anti-Trump conspiracy is not about Democrats and Republicans. It is not about the ebb and flow of political power, lawfully and peacefully transferred. It is about globalists and nationalists, just as the president says. They are locked in the old and continuous Communist/anti-Communist struggle, and fighting to the end, whether we, the anti-Communists, recognize it or not.
I pray we recognize it.[6]
Notes
[1] Diana West, American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2013, 351. Emphasis in the original.
[2] Ibid., 353. Those not familiar with the “red pill/blue pill” meme of The Matrix might consult this Wikipedia article.
[3] West’s calumniators are “academics from Yale, Harvard and Stanford. That’s liberal academia. . . . My book threatens that [liberal] consensus with arguments that are densely and meticulously documented. My sources are listed in 944 endnotes that draw from a bibliography that conventional historians consistently ignore. Specifically, I draw from the vast bibliography of Soviet espionage and infiltration that conventional historians ignore when writing about World War II and even Cold War history.” Diana West, The Rebuttal: Defending American Betrayal from the Book-Burners, Washington, DC: Bravura Books, 2013, 9-10
[4] “Chucking up maturity for eternal youth may have created the culture of perpetual adolescence, but it should now become apparent that this isn’t the same thing as achieving cultural longevity. The question is, what if it turns out that forever young is fatal?” “It should be clear that the civilization that forever dodges maturity will never live to a ripe old age.” Diana West, The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007, xiv, 217.
[5] See “The ‘Excitement’ of Stalin’s Russia,” in Diana West, The Red Thread, Washington, DC: The Center for Security Policy, 2019, Chapter 3.
[6] Ibid., 103-104. Emphasis in the original.