The Rebuttal: Defending 'American Betrayal' From the Book-Burners (16 page)

American Betrayal
is crammed with detail: facts, dates, FBI transcripts, Venona cables, recorded
and reported high-level conversations, newspapers, letters, memoirs, decrypts,
books, archives, all building up a case that cannot-indeed, should not-fail to
demand our respectful attention, whether we agree with it or not. Unless, that
is, she and her work are attacked
ad hominem
-"yellow
journalism," "conspiracy thesis," the author of an
"awful" book, an approximate Bircher, "virtually screams."
This, on my reading, is what Ron Radosh in his damning
review
of the book appears to have done.
 

There
is, to be fair, a grey zone involving many of
the items that remain
undecided or contestable, for example, the true identity of KGB Agent 19-but
even a profound discord about methods, evidence and conclusions should not be
expressed in the disagreeably personal terms employed by Radosh, which generate
far more heat than light and do little to advance our historical understanding.
Titling his review
McCarthy on Steroids
-a deliberately insulting implication-Radosh explains that,
although he would not "normally...have agreed to review a book [as
"bizarre"] as this one," he felt the need to challenge it
vigorously because of the "reckless endorsements of its unhinged theories
by a number of conservative individuals and organizations." He charges
that what is new in West's argument "is either overheated, or simply false
and distorted-the sort of truculent recklessness that gives anti-communism a
bad name." In a
follow-up article
, he dismisses West as a denizen of
"crackpot alley," (a term he attributes to James Burnham though, so
far as I can tell, it's actually Bill Buckley's coinage.) The barrage of
execrations continues apace, concluding that West's thinking allows
"anti-anti-communism to have a field day in our culture," a remark
that strikes me as rather overheated and truculently reckless in itself.

Radosh
attempts to explain his
modus operandi
in a follow-up
article
: "When self-proclaimed conservatives echo the
methodology and conspiratorial type thinking of those on the Left...those of us
who want a responsible, sane conservative movement, and a vibrant conservative
intellectual culture, have the responsibility to speak out and to criticize, no
matter what source it comes from." Good enough. But there are two problems
here. One is that of secure designation: for mainstream Republicans, for
instance, the Tea Party would constitute an irresponsible and not quite sane
form of conservatism that needs to be ridiculed and combatted, whereas for many
other thinkers on the right, the Tea Party represents a true, grassroots
conservatism that should be lauded and promoted. Is Diana West a Bircher or a
patriotic and authentic American? From where I stand, I'd opt for the latter,
without the slightest hesitation. But the point is: one must be super-careful
with labels.

The
other problem is that of style, tone and rhetorical strategy. Disputes of an
in-house nature should be carried out in civilized terms. In a review taking
exception to a particular work, vulgar accusations should be avoided,
correction, if necessary, should be courteously offered, and a saving humility
rather than the assumption of a pontifical mantle of infallible authority
should be the order of the day. Otherwise, what should be an urbane debate
between reputable and erudite allies will inevitably degrade into an unseemly
and perilous slugfest-and the only winners are those against whom one should
present a reasonably united front. Such vehemence as Radosh evinces is
unbecoming.

Oddly
enough, amidst all the rumpus and wrangling, the camel in the room is never
mentioned in Radosh's critical purview. In her concluding chapter, West brings
the issue of clandestine subversion and internal betrayal into the present
moment to reveal a structural similarity with an Obama administration that is
virtually peppered with Muslim Brotherhood operatives. "Islam is the
totalitarian threat of today," she warns; "However, because we
continue the ‘deceit and double-speak' we adopted in response to Communism, we
are unable to deal with the new threat-the new Communism of today. We deal with
Islam the same way we dealt with Communism: Having been subverted and
undermined, we apologize and converge." What apparently went under the
radar in the 40s, 50s, and later on is slipping by us today as authorities and
officials in every walk of life strive to minimize and hide the menace that
works to demoralize and defeat us.

In
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napolean
, Marx famously said that history repeats
itself, "first as tragedy, then as farce." Perhaps more cogently, as
we observe Obama and his minions welcoming Islamic agents and Islamic doctrine
into the conduct of both domestic and foreign policy, we might rephrase the
adage as:
History repeats itself, first as Act I of the tragedy, then as Act
II
. This seems to be Diana West's gravamen. It is, in my estimation, far
more compelling than Radosh's partially nuanced but nonetheless troubling
soft-selling of "moderate Islam" in a 2010 article titled
A Message to Conservatives: Is Islam
Really our Enemy?
 

In
any event, these "proceedings" among conservatives at loggerheads
imply a basic question that needs to be addressed. Why would a respected
conservative writer attack a fellow conservative writer with such muscular
rectitude that he opens an enormous crack in the façade of a much beleaguered
movement, inviting its adversaries to exploit the weakness thus exposed? This
is a more serious breach than presumably allowing anti-anti communism to run
amok. What is it in the conservative sensibility that so readily turns against
itself, creating rifts and fissures where there should be a fundamental
unanimity regardless of intrinsic differences? This is not a crack, to
quote
Leonard Cohen, where "the light gets in." It's a
crack where the liberal/left gets in, where the darkness gets in, where the
opposition can wreak immense damage.

For
example, Andrew Sullivan on
The Dish
, reposted in part on
Mother Jones
, can barely suppress his glee,
encouraging the reader to "get a glimpse of the insanity now dominating
what was once a vibrant intellectual culture by reading Ron Radosh's
devastating review of the book." Radosh, a conservative, has been
conscripted by a left/liberal to reinforce the latter's denunciation. Thanks,
Ron, for giving Sullivan (and his cohorts) the key to the city. Indeed,
Sullivan doesn't stop there but cites uber-conservative Conrad Black who, like
Radosh, resorted not to reasoned critique in his "review" of West on
NRO
but to unrestrained aspersion in which not a single one of
West's arguments was addressed. Rather, for Black, Diana West is "a
right-wing loopy" whom we might have hoped had "been
house-trained." A gentleman and a scholar does not speak this way. And in
any case, all Black got for his labors was another of Sullivan's sneering
put-downs: "Sadly, Conrad Black hardly counts." There is one thing
conservatives are surely better at than liberals: self-destruction.

Admittedly,
I am not sufficiently immersed in specific issues pertaining to the period in
question that has aroused such parietal fury to pretend to expertise and arrive
at a historical judgment. The subject constitutes a legitimate area of
discussion between those who have devoted a considerable part of their
scholarly lives to its exploration. My point is that the debate should be
pursued in a professional and respectful way between equals who give one
another the benefit of the doubt-or at least appear to do so. But Radosh has
ignited a firestorm by the incendiary manner he has adopted to refute Diana
West. Naturally, conservatives will continue to disagree with one another over
issues minor and major, and that is as it should be. But it is to be hoped that
our dissensions will be expressed cordially and that conservatives will eschew
hyperbole and invective, hysteria and melodrama, and behave toward one another
with greater restraint and discretion.

David Solway is a Canadian
poet and essayist. He is the author of
The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism, and
Identity
, and is currently working on a sequel,
Living in the Valley of Shmoon. His new book on Jewish and Israeli themes,
Hear,
O Israel!
, was released by Mantua Books.
Solway's Global Warning: Trials of an
Unsettled Science
, was released in June 2012, and his
latest book is
The Boxthorn Tree
,
published in December 2012. 

# # #

Letter to Diana
West

By
John Dietrich

John Dietrich Books

August 28, 2013

Dear Diana,

I hope you have sent Ron Radosh and Conrad Black letters
of appreciation for their critiques of you book. They could not have done more
to discredit your opponents if they had intentionally set out to make them look
foolish. A total cynic would suspect that you paid them. Rather than dealing
with detailed criticism of your work they relied on vitriol. Black calls your
book a "farrago of lies." He calls you and your supporters,
"idiots: pernicious, destructive, fatuous idiots," who suffer from
"myth-making and jejune dementedness." I disagree with Black. If I
call him the "afterbirth of a flatulent pig," would this make my
arguments more convincing?

Both Ronald Radosh and Conrad Black
refer to you as a "right-wing loopy." Radosh condemns your,
"yellow journalism conspiracy theories," your "truculent
recklessness that gives anti-communism a bad name" and your "unhinged
theories." Your judgment is "bizarre on its face, but also
unwarranted by the evidence." Yours is a, "shallow and erroneous
interpretation." He claims your, "counterfactual speculations are not
regarded as realistic possibilities by any reputable historian of the
era," and your "book perpetuates the dangerous one dimensional
thinking of the Wisconsin Senator." You are "McCarthy on
steroids."

This is all very convincing. Radosh
neglected to make the most devastating charge: "West is a poopoo
head." Pardon the sarcasm, but Radosh's accusations are not worthy of an
intelligent discussion of complex issues. 

This criticism of you sounds eerily
familiar. Similar things were said of Senator McCarthy, Elizabeth Bentley and
Whittaker Chambers. You are condemned for believing in conspiracy theories. What
was the Communist infiltration of the U.S. government if not a conspiracy? Radosh
admits that he has no disagreement with you over whether the Roosevelt
administration was infiltrated or whether Soviet dupes were influential in
affecting administration policy. The disagreement lies in your opinion of the
extent of this influence. Your critics claim that you exaggerate the extent of
Communist influence on U.S. policy. However, your critics attempt to minimize
this influence. 

Progressives have come to the
defense of the Rosenbergs, Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White and numerous others. Radosh
claims your allegation that, "Hopkins was an actual Soviet agent . . . is,
in fact, not true." Black called this an "unfounded new
flourish." How do they know this? Loopy right-wingers have accused many
administration officials of being Communists. Many "experts"
disagreed and questioned the sanity of such claims. When the evidence
becomes overwhelming progressives quietly let the matter drop and go to the
defense of the next "progressive." Leftists are experts at deception.
Even obvious Soviet atrocities like the Ukrainian famine and the Katyn Massacre
were denied for years by "progressives." Someone approaching this
subject without bias must conclude that the "loopy right-wingers"
have more credibility than the "experts."

I have read extensively on the
subjects dealt with in your book, yet several items you deal with were entirely
new to me. I had previously accepted the progressive myth that the policy of
"unconditional surrender" had spontaneously popped out of FDR's head
during the Casablanca Conference. As you point out this policy was the product
of a committee which included several influential Soviet agents. One might be
tempted to ask, "What difference at this point does it make?" Well,
although most Communists were removed from government in the early 50's their
progressive comrades remained. Their offspring have captured the commanding
heights of our society. They have almost total control of the media, academia
and the government bureaucracy. From these commanding heights they are
transforming our society. In order to do this they must conceal the part played
by progressives in the massive crimes they were a party to.

People come to the subject of
Communist infiltration of the Roosevelt administration with a bias. I come to
the subject with an inclination to be suspicious of the Roosevelt
administration. After reading your book I realized that I had not been
suspicious enough.

I knew American Communists had a
decisive influence on American policy from the research I had done on my own
book,
The Morgenthau Plan: Soviet Influence on American Postwar Policy
. I
have not examined Lend-Lease and the second front issues to any great extent,
but I am thoroughly familiar with the policy devised for postwar Europe. Here
there is little doubt the Joseph Stalin was the "puppetmaster of American
war policy." Your claim that, “World War II could have been ended years
earlier had Communists working for Moscow not dominated Washington," is
certainly plausible. This would not have required an entente with Hitler’s army
against Stalin, only a sincere message that the U.S. government did not intend
to turn Germany into a potato patch.