The Rebuttal: Defending 'American Betrayal' From the Book-Burners

I
have since come to understand the “take-down” of my book and the ad hominem
attacks on my person in terms of a scorched earth policy to preserve and
protect the conventional narrative as promulgated by mainstream academia.

But Frontpage is a
“conservative” site,
I
can hear people say.

This
stopped me, too, at first. Then I realized that the books Radosh cites in his
“take-down” − not to debate my ideas, but to impugn them − are
written by academics from Yale, Harvard and Stanford. That’s liberal academia.
Another source Radosh draws heavily from is a British historian and BBC
documentary-maker whose works appear on PBS. More conventional (read: liberal)
consensus.

My
book threatens that 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 World War II and even Cold War history. Indeed,
the books Radosh cites omit or barely reference this same bibliography
American Betrayal
draws upon.

The
Radosh review, then, is a defense of a conventional, tightly blinkered
historiography – “the court histories that continue to obscure key facts
about our backstage war with Moscow,” as M. Stanton Evans wrote in his
endorsement of
American Betrayal.
But
Radosh’s is in no way not a fair defense. It is not a fair debate. Instead, the
Radosh review misrepresents my work by continually attacking my credibility.
For example, he calls
American Betrayal
“yellow journalism conspiracy theories” all the while failing to inform readers
about my book’s copious source material, which in itself is a rebuke to such
charges. Such is the Radosh m.o., however, in defense of the conventional
narrative. Indeed, a reader of the Radosh “take-down” is led to believe I made
the whole thing up due to my “conspiratorial mindset.” This is a gross and
destructive calumny.

But
it is only the first. That makes what follows anything but a rejoinder in a
traditional battle of ideas. It is instead a detailed defense set forth to
disprove the smears and expose the fabrications and distortions that went into
the 7,000-word “take-down” of
American
Betrayal.

The
rebuttal begins.
[2]

PART ONE

PREFACE

I
will open with an email from Frontpage Magazine editor David Horowitz. I
received this message after I declined Frontpage’s invitation to reply at
Frontpage
to the August 7 Radosh
review of
American Betrayal.
Most
readers don’t realize that the Radosh review is Frontpage’s
second
review of my book. The first, a
positive review by Frontpage writer Mark Tapson,
^{^[3]}was removed from the website by Horowitz
on July 8. I declined Frontpage’s invitation to reply to the Radosh review on
the principle that eliminating one opinion, as Horowitz did, and replacing it
with a more “correct” opinion is no way to conduct a debate. I had and have no
intention of legitimizing such an uncivil action, which, among other things,
makes a mockery of Frontpage’s commitment to free speech.

David
Horowitz has, to date, written two pieces attacking me and
American Betrayal
.
^{^[4]}In the first, he cited the first
reviewer’s alleged lack of expertise as the reason for his decision to take
down the positive review. (In the second, Horowitz writes: “She should not have
written this book.”) As an example of the first reviewer’s inexpertise,
Horowitz wrote, the reviewer “readily
conceded he was not familiar with
the sources and could not properly assess such crucial matters as her claim
that Soviet agents had gotten the United States to ship fissionable uranium to
Stalin via Lend-Lease.”

As an aside, the word “fissionable”
doesn’t appear in
American Betrayal’s
discussions of uranium. I mention this to flag a consistent pattern of
misrepresentation or distortion that is evident in the Radosh review and
follow-up pieces in which critics overstate a fact as stated in
American Betrayal
and criticize their
own exaggeration.

That said, uranium shipments did
indeed go to Stalin during World War II under the Roosevelt administration’s
Lend-Lease program. Among my sources for this shocking fact is one source
“familiar” to all: the United States Congress. I cite “Hearings on the Transfer
of Atomic Material to the Soviet Union During World War II.” As such, this is
quite easy to “properly assess” – if one has read my book.

This
is just one of dozens of false claims about
American
Betrayal
that Radosh and Horowitz and the echo chamber they triggered have
made, some even written by people who admitted they haven’t read it., The
baseless sloganeering against me now includes such falsehoods as: I called
Eisenhower a Communist (false); I claimed the FDR administration was “run” by
Soviet agents (false); that I portrayed Churchill as a Soviet dupe (false);
that I argued for an “entente with Hitler’s army against Stalin” (false).

If
there is a beginning to the lies, gross distortions and outright fabrications
that I now must sort through, it is the editors’ note posted (in full knowledge
of its gross distortion of the facts) over the Radosh review at Frontpage.

Editors’ note: Frontpage offered
Diana West equal space to reply to Professor Radosh’s points below. She
refused.

I
refused to reply
only at Frontpage
–
and the editors know that I refused to reply only
at Frontpage
. In other words, they decided to publish a gross
distortion of the truth to encourage readers of the Radosh review to believe I
am either incapable or uninterested in responding to the charges therein.

Not
true.

Here
is the Horowitz email.

Dear Diana,

Our decision to remove the review of American Betrayal was
not because it offered an incorrect opinion that we wanted to suppress. The
review was removed because the reviewer was as incompetent to provide an
informed assessment of your book as you were to write it.

David

My
task is to disprove this intemperate and, worse, baseless charges against my
competence in handling evidence and evaluating it. This is the basis of the
Radosh-Horowitz critique, and, therefore the basis of the multiple copy-cat
critiques that have been written since, even by people who openly admitted they
had not read my book.
^{^[5]}(I repeat this fact because it is
incredible to me.) This competence issue makes my rebuttal about more than
score-keeping, or tit-for-tat. These widely repeated attacks on me and my book
undermine my integrity as a writer, and thus my livelihood.

My
challenge to readers: Determine for yourselves who is “incompetent.”

There
is something else. The vitriolic intensity of the attacks against me and my
book is harder to analyze, veering into a murkier realm of the psychological.
Nonetheless, this vitriol remains the leading edge of the story.

In
his Frontpage editorial against
American
Betrayal
, Horowitz wrote:

“Neither West nor her supporters have
begun to meet that standard or attempted to answer even one factual claim that
Radosh has made about her book.”

Mind
you, Horowitz was writing
one day
after the Radosh’s 7,000-word “take-down” appeared.

He
continued:

“
I don't have a lot of hope that this will
change because West has already shown herself to be a very angry, very
self-centered and very reckless partisan, with a paranoid streak and a
disposition to think in extreme terms that have only a tenuous and deceptive
relation to the truth.”

Such
vitriol fed the hysteria against
American
Betrayal
, inspiring what I can only describe as ritual denunciations of me
for exhibiting signs of so-called McCarthyism and John Bircherism.

These are buzz terms that are not being
used to shed light and truth but rather to stop debate.

Like
pulling a review off a website.

Stopping
debate is what this Horowitz-Radosh campaign is about.

I
refuse to let them.

RADOSH’S INTRODUCTION

I
will now address the introductory matter in Radosh’s “McCarthy on Steroids” and
identify more than twenty falsehoods.

Editors’
note: Frontpage offered Diana West equal space to reply to Professor Radosh’s
points below. She refused.

1)
FALSE (addressed above).

Radosh:

“Many Americans
at both ends of the political spectrum view history in conspiratorial terms.
The late Senator Joseph McCarthy set the bar very high when he claimed to have
uncovered “a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such
venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, when it is
finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions
of all honest men.” In that famous speech to the Senate on June 14, 1951
,
McCarthy condemned former Chief of Staff of the Army and Secretary of State and
Secretary of Defense as a traitor who made “common cause with Stalin on the
strategy of the war in Europe,” who “took the strategic direction of the war
out of Roosevelt’s hands and – who fought the British desire, shared by
[General] Mark Clark, to advance from Italy into the eastern plains of Europe
ahead of the Russians.”

“Diana West, who
expands the scope of this conspiracy in
American Betrayal
, is McCarthy’s
heiress.

2) FALSE: I don’t “expand”
the scope of any conspiracy.

FACT: My book, which I
began writing in an effort to understand the phenomenon of Islamic influence on
the policy-making chain in the post-9/11 period, examines the phenomenon of
Communist influence on the policy-making chain, a secret intelligence war planned
and directed from Moscow. The “scope” of conspiracy here is Stalin’s (and
Lenin’s before him). It is neither McCarthy’s conspiracy for attempting to
uncover it nor mine for writing about it.

Radosh:

“She argues that
during the New Deal the United States was an
occupied power
, its government
controlled
by Kremlin agents who had infiltrated the Roosevelt administration and
subverted it.” (Emphasis added.)

3) FALSE: The phrase “the United States
was an occupied power” does not appear in
American
Betrayal
. This connotes a state of military occupation that is not under
consideration.

FACT: I argue at length that the
strategic placement of hundreds of agents of Stalin’s influence inside the US
government and other institutions amounted to a “de facto occupation” (p. 114).
Later (p. 193), I write: “The vast and deep extent of Communist penetration,
heretofore denied, had in fact reached a tipping point to become a de facto
Communist occupation of the American center of power.”

3a) FALSE: Further, the
word “controlled” appears on 16 pages in
American
Betrayal
, but is never used to describe the relationship of Kremlin agents
and the US government.
Again, not in my book
. Why isn’t it? The word
doesn’t apply to the influence operations under discussion. By virtue of the
amorphous nature of deception and disinformation, influence operations do not
work in such concrete ways, as Radosh and Horowitz should, but don’t seem to,
understand.

FACT: On almost 50 pages of
American Betrayal
, I reference and
discuss Soviet, Communist, Marxist “influence” and “influence operations.”
There is no discussion of this in the Radosh “take-down.” There is no
explanation of the concept I define as a “de facto occupation” that permitted
Kremlin agents to “influence” the US government. Radosh repeatedly
mischaracterizes the “influence” I write about as “control” throughout his
“take-down.”

Radosh:

“Like McCarthy,
whom
West
believes
got everything correct [sic], she believes a conspiracy
was at work that effectively enabled the Soviets to be the sole victors in
World War II and shape American policies in the postwar world.”

4) FALSE: Read the article
Radosh links to as his “proof” of the categorical statement. Nowhere does my
article say McCarthy “got everything correct [sic].”

FACT: I believe McCarthy
was generally right, however. There was indeed massive, Kremlin-directed
Communist infiltration of the US government that he and other elected officials
from both parties set out to uncover in the 1940s and 1950s (and up to the
1970s). This is a fact and a factor, I argue at great length in
American Betrayal
, that we as a people
have not integrated into the telling of our general history.

Radosh:

“Writing sixty
years later, she claims that the evidence that has come to light in the interim
not only vindicates McCarthy’s claims but goes well beyond anything he
imagined.”

5) FALSE: Evidence has come
to light that vindicates many, many of McCarthy’s claims, but I do not claim
such evidence goes “well beyond anything he imagined.” (In other words, not in
my book.) It may or may not go beyond what McCarthy imagined. I bring this up
not as a matter of semantics but because in the book I do repeatedly emphasize
this notion of “not knowing the half of it” – but, it so happens, not
with regard to Joseph McCarthy.

FACT: I link this notion of
“not knowing the half of it” two or three times to the ex-Communist witnesses
Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley; later to the ex-Socialist writer
Eugene Lyons; also, Gen. Mark Clark, Rep. Martin Dies, and AP executive Kent
Cooper – all as they bear witness to or attempt to understand what is in
fact a larger Soviet-directed infiltration than they can possibly know about. I
seized on this notion from the conclusion of
Spies
by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev,
who wrote:

“It was
no witch hunt that led American counterintelligence officials to investigate
government employees and others with access to sensitive information for
Communist ties . . . but a rational response to the extent to which the
Communist Party had become an appendage of Soviet intelligence. And, as the
documents in Vassiliev’s notebooks make plain, they only knew the half of it.”

Notice that Radosh,
however, for purposes of his “take-down” mentions none of these key figures in
my book. Instead, he falls back on that anti-anti-Communist failsafe, Joseph
McCarthy, abusing the great patriot once more to smear a new attempt to assess
the historical reality of Communist infiltration of the US government.

Radosh
:

“
Throughout
American Betrayal
, West uses the terms
“occupied” and “controlled” to describe the influence the Soviet Union exerted
over U.S. policy through its agents and spies.”

6) FALSE: As noted above
(see #3a), I do not use the word “controlled” in this way.

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