The Rebuttal: Defending 'American Betrayal' From the Book-Burners (28 page)

VLADIMIR BUKOVSKY AND PAVEL STROILOV

Why
Academics Hate Diana West

By Vladimir Bukovsky and Pavel Stroilov

Posted on
www.Breitbart.com

Diana
West, 
American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character
.

St.
Martin’s Press; Hardcover; 403 pages; $26.99.

Groundbreaking books about
the history of communism, such as Robert Conquest’s
The Great Terror
,
Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s
Gulag Archipelago
or Viktor Suvorov’s
Ice-Breaker
,
are never written by “professional” historians. Indeed, historians typically
meet those books with remarkable hostility. Yet, non-academic history books
certainly have their advantages. For one thing, they are readable. More often
than not, they are better researched, too. Above all, they are intellectually
honest, free from the unspoken taboos of the academic world, and from
allegiances to theories and to colleagues that tie the hands of many an
academic. Where a professional historian pursues an academic career, the
amateur seeks after the truth. Ignorant of taboos, the amateur can follow the
trail of evidence to wherever it leads, and discovers things which, according
to the academic conventional wisdom, are best left untouched and unsaid.

That is what Diana West does
in
American Betrayal
. By her own admission, she started that book with
no intention of writing much about the Cold War. She started not as a
historian, but a simple mortal puzzled and disturbed by the obvious question:
how on earth could this great civilization of ours have degraded into such a
hypocritical nonsense as political correctness? Having written her previous
book about the death of the civilization of grown-ups, now Mrs. West, in her
own words, attempts a
post mortem
– only to discover unmistakable
signs of a murder. She digs deeper, “tracing references and footnotes backward
along a well-mapped historical route that has simply fallen into disuse”, as
she puts it - and discovers the true history of the 20
^th
century, the
history of communist crimes against humanity, to which so many in the Western
Establishment were accomplices and collaborators; and then a massive cover-up
of those crimes, which infested our entire public life with a culture of
hypocrisy and double standards.

It is this search for the
causes of our moral crisis that brings her as far back in history as 1930s,
when the Great Famine was artificially organized by the Soviets to force the
peasants into collective farms, and the Western media consciously helped Stalin
to cover up that mass murder. She cites a fascinating account by a repentant
journalist who had been present at the meeting of Moscow press corps with the
Soviet chief censor, Umansky, to work out a “formula of denial”, after one
reckless correspondent reported the news of the famine in 1933. After “much
bargaining in the spirit of gentlemanly give-and-take”, the “formula” was
agreed, wherefrom the Western journalists and the Soviet censor proceeded to
party with vodka and luxurious snacks until early hours in the morning. The
next day, it was infamous Walter Duranty who took the lead in attacking the
famine report as an incompetent and biased “big scare story”, and then
explaining: “There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation, but there
is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition”.

“
To understand this episode
,” Mrs. West comments, “
is
to understand the extent to which Orwell’s ‘Newspeak’ had its birth in the
pages of the free press as much as in the totalitarian censor’s office. […]
Looking back over more than three-quarters of a century of Big Lies to follow,
this initial instance, this first time, demands a level of scrutiny and
reflection it doesn’t ordinarily receive, not having been recognized as the
Original Sin that would ultimately corrupt us all. It was as if society
suddenly became incapable of making the most elementary if vital connections
between facts and conclusions, logic and judgment, ideas and implications, and
truth and morality.
”

By that time, she discovers,
the likes of Duranty were not only the opinion-makers in the West, but also the
decision-makers. Thus, the architects of the ‘New Deal’, including FDR himself,
consciously intended it as the beginning of socialism in America. That,
according to their designs, would open a way to a gradual convergence with
Stalinist Soviet Union under a future socialist world government. In a way,
that convergence had already begun, as the Roosevelt Administration was full of
Soviet agents of influence, including Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, and
crucially, Harry Hopkins – FDR’s
alter ego
, his ‘personal foreign
secretary’, and the most powerful man in the then White House.

In the face of those proven
facts, most of them now recognized even by academics, Mrs. West asks some bold
but legitimate questions. Did all these people (the glorious FDR
administration) really conduct the Second World War in the interests of Western
democracies, or was it in the interests of Comrade Stalin? Having declared that
war to defend the freedom of Poland, the Western democracies ended it by
surrendering Poland and a dozen of other nations to a totalitarian empire worse
than Hitler’s. Was that really a victory? Above all, was that outcome
inevitable, or did it, to a greater or lesser extent, result from the work of
the Soviet agents of influence in the positions of power in the West?

Having researched the
mountains of evidence, she persuasively demonstrates:

·
     
How
the most important strategic decisions of the WWII, such as effectively
abandoning the Italian front to concentrate forces for the invasion of
Normandy, were taken because Stalin demanded them. Against the counsel of
Churchill and military commanders on the ground, the pro-Soviet FDR
administration rejected such sensible alternatives as advancing from Italy to
Balkans and Eastern Europe, which might have limited the Red Army’s advance to
the West.

·
     
How
every attempt by anti-Nazi underground in Germany to secure Allied support for
their plots to overthrow the Nazi regime was thwarted by Soviet agents in
Washington – because the German conspirators were anti-communist as well
as anti-Nazi. So another opportunity to destroy the Nazi regime and win the war
without letting Stalin conquer half of Europe was lost.

·
     
how
the notorious Yalta division of Europe, surrendering half the continent to
Stalin, was accepted by the pro-Soviet FDR administration without any serious
attempt to find an alternative solution. In effect, the US simply went along
with the Sovietisation of Eastern Europe in breach of Yalta Agreement, and
betrayed the allied democratic governments of East European states.

·
     
How
thousands of American POWs “liberated” by Soviets from the Nazis were simply
abandoned to rot in the Gulag as hostages to Stalin, in the vain hope of
preserving good relations with Moscow after the war.

Conversely, our own research
in Soviet secret archives has led us to very similar conclusions about FDR and
his administration. For example, here is a couple of quotations from
transcripts of FDR’s conversations with Stalin while Churchill was away. At
Tehran Conference:

Roosevelt
says it would be better not to mention
India when talking to Churchill, because he, Roosevelt, knows that Churchill
has no thoughts concerning India. Churchill plans to postpone the solution of
this problem till the end of the war.

Com[rade] Stalin
says that India is a sore point for
Churchill.

Roosevelt
agrees. However, he says, Britain will
have to do something about India. He, Roosevelt, hopes to discuss the problem
of India with Marshal Stalin one day. He finds the parliamentary system of
government to be unsuitable for India and it would be better to create
something like the Soviet system in India, beginning from the bottom rather
than from the top. Perhaps, that would be the system of Soviets.

Com. Stalin
answers that to begin from the bottom
would mean taking the revolutionary path. There are a lot of various
nationalities and cultures in India. But there are no forces or groups capable
of taking power in the country.

(Russian state archive of social and political history
(RGASPI), fund 558, inv. 11, file 235, pp. 8-12)

And this one occurred on
FDR’s arrival in Yalta two years later:

Roosevelt
says that now, after he had seen the
senseless destruction Germans caused in Crimea, he would like to liquidate
twice as many Germans as he wished before. It is absolutely necessary to
liquidate 50 thousand German-Prussian officers.

(RGASPI, fund 558, inv. 11, file 234, pp. 3-7)

Mrs. West has proven her
point without access to secret archives, on the basis of published sources
alone. She would have found this much more difficult if she tried to continue
her narrative much beyond the Second World War. Scandalously, most secret
archives of that period remain classified to this day, and very few historians
ever complain about that. It required some extraordinary efforts on our part to
smuggle some of those archives out of Russia and make them available to the Western
public. Of course, our efforts were attacked furiously by the very same
academics who now attack
American Betrayal
, using exactly the same
expressions
.
It is their job to suppress any truth about the Cold War.
However, despite all their efforts, we now know that the so-called Cold War was
never particularly cold on the Soviet side and never much of a war on the
Western side:

·
     
How
the ‘consensus’ of Western Establishment had accepted socialism as the
inevitable future of the world, and ‘convergence’ with the Soviet system as the
only alternative to the Cold War.

·
     
How
Western leaders developed their ‘détente’ with the Soviets secretly,
treacherously, through KGB channels, as a means to achieve that ‘convergence’;

·
     
How
all Western policy throughout the Cold War was aimed to preserve ‘stability’ of
the Evil Empire and not to achieve its destruction;

·
     
Finally,
how all Western governments sided with the last Soviet leader against his
people, and secretly worked with Comrade Gorbachev in the last desperate attempt
to save his regime and his empire. Ever at Gorby’s service, they did everything
in their power to prevent unification of Germany, de-communisation of Eastern
Europe, collapse of the Soviet Union, and finally – alas, successfully
– a Nuremberg-style trial of communism.

That treacherous
Establishment is still there. We are still governed by a nomenklatura of
collaborationists, Petains and Quislings of the Cold War. Mrs. West has reached
that conclusion merely by examining the first chapters of this sad story. Sure
enough, there are mountains of other and more recent evidence to support her
conclusions. But of course, whatever the evidence, the ‘consensus’ will never
plead guilty. Rather, they will try and usurp the judicial seat.

As Mrs. West rightly points
out, the moment the free world
recognized
the evil empire of Communism
as a country we could make deals with, even alliances with (be that even in
such desperate circumstances as the Second World War) – that moment was
“a Faustian turning point”. By the very nature of the Soviet system, the
history of ‘East-West relations’ could only be a history of deals with the
devil, with all the unfortunate consequences such deals had always been reputed
to entail. From Yalta to Malta, all those summit-meetings were cannibal feasts
of the same kind as Western journalists’ party with a Soviet censor in 1933
Moscow. Therefore, if some 80 years later we find the Western Establishment to
be utterly corrupt, we should know what has corrupted them.

* * *

The Left have learnt a lot
since the times of Duranty and Agitprop. They no longer try to argue with such
books as Mrs. West’s. They no longer try to sue us for libel in the courts of
law. They quietly assassinate such books well in advance, by confidential
e-mails to publishers and editors. In rare cases when that does not work and
the book is out, they simply ignore it and wait for another crisis in the
Middle East, or the release of the next series of the latest blockbuster, or
mid-term elections, to distract the public attention from everything else. They
simply let the dangerous revelations sink in the massive flood of information
that overwhelms today’s readers.

Fortunately, this did not
happen with
American Betrayal
. The Left held their nerve all right; but
- perhaps unexpectedly for Mrs. West – her book greatly offended certain
‘conservative’ academics as well. It emerged that, in her “reckless” quest for
the truth, she broke a number of taboos recognized across the academic world,
Left to Right. She attacked certain cows that are sacred across the political
spectrum; gentlemanly ‘formulas of denial’ long agreed between academics of all
colors; certain ‘common values of mankind’, to use Comrade Gorbachev’s favorite
phrase. Her facts (it has been reluctantly admitted) are of course correct, but
her awful conclusions contradict “the consensus of every historian of the war”.
The “consensus” is that Soviet agents of influence had no real influence, that
FDR was a great patriot and war leader, and that Stalin’s occupation of half of
the world was the best possible outcome of the war. On these points, it has
emerged, the ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ academics have no disagreements. All
their disagreements are about how exactly to explain away the facts that do not
fit into their “consensus”, and how exactly to suppress dissent.