The Rebuttal: Defending 'American Betrayal' From the Book-Burners (29 page)

So, while the Left applied
their usual tactics of silent censorship, the less advanced ‘conservative
academics’ have only reached the mediocre Agitprop level, and responded with a
Soviet-style propaganda campaign against Mrs. West and her book. In the best
traditions of those campaigns, most of the eminent critics attacked the book
without ever reading it, and some of them even admitted this. Come to think of
it, one hardly needs to read a book in order to accompany any mention of it
with a garland of epithets such as “awful”, “embarrassingly kooky”, “poorly
conceived”, “ill-informed”, “conspiracy-mongering”, “preposterous”,
“incompetent”, and “dishonest”, and to insult the author in similarly intelligent
expressions, including positive assertions that Mrs. West is insane (pity
Professor Lunz is no longer with us). This is all the ‘conservative academics’
did, all they could do, and all they needed to do. Just look at their
headlines:

·
     
McCarthy on Steroids;

·
     
Diana West vs. History

·
     
Why I Wrote a Take-Down of Diana West’s
Awful Book;

·
     
Diana West’s Attempt to Respond;

·
     
Diana West Down Crackpot Alley;

·
     
Diana West Invents a New Conspiracy; etc.,
etc.

Amazingly and alarmingly, it
was the Frontpage Magazine who published the
Pravda-
style leader which
triggered that campaign, and provided a catalogue of smears and insults for
endless repetition by other members of the consensus. No doubt a highly
distinguished ‘conservative historian’ called Professor Radosh wrote a lengthy
review of
American Betrayal
,
headlined (with remarkable wit, good
taste, and academic courtesy, if we may say so)
McCarthy on Steroids
.
There, the Learned Professor dismissed the author as Sen. “McCarthy’s heiress”
and the book as a “yellow journalism conspiracy theory” not really deserving
the honour of his eminent critique. In his infinite generosity, however, the
Learned Professor reluctantly agrees to provide some, and picks several specific
points from
American Betrayal
to accuse Mrs. West of dishonesty and
incompetence.

For anyone who has read both
Mrs. West’s book and the Professor’s review, however, it is the review that is
dishonest and incompetent. The Professor’s trick is to pick a couple of minor
points from the book, invent a few more points of his own which he falsely
attributes to the book, declare all those points to be “the pillars of West’s
conspiracy theory”, and then to ‘disprove’ them with all academic solemnity. Unable
to argue with the book itself, he instead argues with his own misrepresentation
of the book.

He starts with Harry Hopkins,
FDR’s
alter ego
and the most important Soviet agent in his
administration. The fact that Hopkins was a Soviet agent has been known for a
long time (though perhaps not as widely known as it deserves to be). Mrs. West
simply brought together the mountain of evidence already available. That
includes the testimony of Oleg Gordievsky, a very high-ranking and very
reliable KGB defector. That includes the statement of George Marshall, the
wartime US Army’s Chief of Staff and Hopkins’s friend, who told his official
biographer: “Hopkins’s job with the president was to represent the Russian
interests. My job was to represent the American interests.” That includes the
episode documented in the Mitrokhin archive about Hopkins tipping off the
Soviets about the FBI surveillance of certain Soviet spies; and so on, and so
forth. There are several chapters in the book devoted to the evidence of Hopkins’s
treason. In addition to all that, in one paragraph Mrs. West mentions the
suspicions, expressed by some, that the mysterious Soviet agent identified in
Venona cables only as ‘Agent 19’ was none other than Hopkins.

And here is what is supposed
to be a fair summary from Professor Radosh: “
A key assertion for West is
that FDR’s closest advisor, Harry Hopkins, was actually the Soviet agent known
in the Venona decrypts as ‘Agent 19’
”. In the next thousand words, the
Professor endeavours to prove that Agent 19 was in fact another man, and then
hastily concludes that Hopkins therefore was not a Soviet agent, and therefore
Mrs. West’s book is rubbish.

Whoever ‘Agent
19’ in fact was, it appears to have escaped the scholarly attention that the
very codename ‘Agent 19’ suggests that there might have been more than one
Soviet agent in wartime Washington. Hopkins still might have been one of them,
and a lot of other evidence suggests that he was. But even if he was not, the
difference between an agent and a fellow-traveller is hardly significant for
Mrs. West’s argument. She is writing not about cloaks and daggers, but about
the moral corruption of the Western world, resulting from complicity of the
likes of Hopkins in Stalin’s crimes, and the subsequent cover-up of that
complicity by the likes of Radosh. How does it matter whether this particular
Hopkins was in fact recruited by the Soviets or simply acted as a Soviet agent
by his own choice? The difference is no greater than between a ‘liberal’
academic liar and a ‘conservative’ one.

Next,
Professor Radosh takes objection to Mrs. West’s point about the massive
military supplies to the Soviets under the ‘land lease’ program, administered
by Hopkins. Mrs. West cites evidence that those supplies were given a priority
even over urgent needs of US troops on the grounds, and that this policy
contributed to such major catastrophes of WWII as the defeat on Philippines and
the fall of Singapore. Rather sensibly, she links this with the evidence of
Hopkins’s treason. Among other things, she cites interesting evidence that
under the cover of ‘lend lease’, Hopkins secretly supplied the Soviets with top
secret technology, including details of the Manhattan Project and sensitive
atomic materials such as uranium and heavy water.

In response, the Learned
Professor solemnly proves that the uranium was in fact Uranium-238, not
Uranium-235, and therefore did not help the Soviets to make the nuclear bomb;
that the first Soviet nuclear bomb was only made in 1949; and that it was made
of plutonium. Ergo, all the ‘land-lease’ supplies to the Soviets were perfectly
kosher and in the national interest.

With equal honesty, Professor
Radosh then conclusively disproves several amusing historical anecdotes which
he falsely attributes to Mrs. West’s book. Towards the end, however, he has
another trick to play. Mixed into his list of alleged factual inaccuracies
(which are not really in the book), we suddenly find Mrs. West’s alleged
opinions about the merits or motives of FDR’s decisions to invade Normandy, not
to work with German anti-Nazi underground, or to go along with Sovietisation of
Eastern Europe. Not only does the Learned Professor distort the substance of
those opinions, he also treats them as if they were factual inaccuracies; and
then purports to ‘disprove’ them by citing the conventional opinions of people
such as Averill Harriman, whom he describes as “a stalwart anti-Communist”.

Having thus demonstrated that
Mrs. West’s conclusions contradict the academic consensus, Professor Radosh
evidently considers this to be the end of the matter. The rest of his review is
just a copy-paste of his usual comments on anything new anybody said or wrote
about the Cold War in recent years (or at least, anything without a
satisfactory number of Radosh quotations). As per usual, this book is another
“yellow journalism conspiracy theory”, it is McCarthyist, there is nothing
really new in it, and academics know best.

This ‘review’, with all its
hatred and lies, comes at no surprise to those of us who have had the
misfortune of hearing about Professor Radosh before. What is disquieting is the
sight of the ‘conservative’ crowd rushing into that campaign on sheer herd
instinct, not only without reading the book, but apparently even without
reading the Radosh review.

After all, its dishonesty is
crying out to be noticed. It is dishonest to use meaningless labels in a
debate. It is dishonest to attack anything whatsoever as ‘McCarthyist’. It is
dishonest to attack anything as a ‘conspiracy theory’. So long as there are
conspiracies in the world, a conspiracy theory may be perfectly true. It is a
conspiracy theory that Al Qaeda organised the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and yet,
it happens to be true. It was a conspiracy theory that the Nazi leaders plotted
aggressive wars and genocide, but it was proven, and the conspirators went to
the gallows. Unlike ‘academic consensus’, conspiracy is a concept with a clear
definition; so much so that prosecutors can prove conspiracy theories beyond
reasonable doubt in court. Moreover, the criminal law concepts of conspiracy
and complicity are not very far apart. Almost anything we say about communist
crimes against humanity can be attacked as a conspiracy theory – and, as
a rule, is attacked in these terms by Radosh & Co.

It is high time to stop
dismissing things as conspiracy theories or accepting things as being
consistent with the academic consensus. Some of us here are talking about truth
and lies. And this, perhaps, is precisely what annoys the academics, whose
monopoly on writing history depend upon the half-truths of the ‘consensus’.

* * *

There is another danger in
attacking books without reading them. Aimed at the fake Radosh version of
American
Betrayal,
the criticism obviously missed its target. Better still, the
campaign has been a perfect illustration of the very point of the book (in
Diana West’s original version): that ‘the consensus’ about the Cold War is
false and corrupt. It is a product of the great cover-up. It was the same
consensus who first denied the facts about the Soviet crimes and Western
complicity, then reluctantly admitted the facts but explained them away, and
has never permitted any honest conclusions or even an honest debate.

It used to be a consensus
that there was no famine in the Soviet Union, just a mortality from diseases
due to malnutrition. It used to be a consensus that Mr. and Mrs. Rosenberg were
innocent victims of ‘McCarthyism’, convicted by so many conspiracy theorists.
Unless we are confusing him with some other pre-eminent historian, Professor
Radosh’s own claim to fame is that he first attacked the Rosenbergs judgement
in pretty similar terms to his review of
American Betrayal
, but then
considered the evidence, changed his mind, and wrote a book persuasively
re-arguing the prosecution case some 30 years after the verdict. There was a
time, too, when the innocence of Alger Hiss was as much of a consensus as the
innocence of Harry Hopkins. It is the same consensus which cultivated the myths
about the struggle of ‘hawks’ and ‘doves’ in the Politburo, and indignantly
dismissed any suggestion that the Soviet Union might one day collapse. Instead,
the consensus prescribed to place all our hopes into Comrade Gorbachev and his
forthcoming renewal of socialism. It is the same consensus which misinformed
the most disastrous decisions of the Cold War - responsible, perhaps, for
millions of deaths. In any other walk of life (say, medicine), incompetence at
a much smaller scale would cause those ‘specialists’ not only to be
disqualified, but to be sued in courts for the rest of their lives. Pity this
never happens to historians.

It is in the nature of a
totalitarian regime to try and corrupt not only its own society, but anybody
within its reach. This is how they conquer the world. Communism has corrupted
greater men than a few arrogant academics. Indeed, the academics turned out to
be one of the easier targets. As ‘Sovietologists’ and ‘Kremlinologists’, their
position depended on their ability to travel to Moscow, and therefore, on KGB’s
good will. Having now mutated into ‘Cold War historians’, they are dependant on
having such limited access to secret archives as Moscow would choose to grant
them. As academics, they are committed to their own theories, true or false. As
a ‘community’, they are bound together with their corrupt colleagues, and have
to defend their collective monopoly against intruders. It is for a very long
time that they have been no more than a self-serving
nomenklatura,
caring nothing about the truth, but only about their own elevated positions.
Like politicians. Like the media. Like the rest of the modern world.

American Betrayal
is a book about the origins of that
corruption. No wonder it has been so popular with thousands of readers who are
sick to death of today’s world with all its hypocrisy and lies, and long for an
explanation of our moral crisis. Mrs. West sought an answer and found it. As a
civilization, we have gone through a major moral disaster. We have been
accomplices to mass murders. Moreover, we then tried to cover them up and to
live on as if nothing happened. Without a reckoning, without so much as facing
the truth about our history, we shall never recover:

“We condemn the German population of the police state from
looking the other way from and doing nothing about the Jewish annihilation
under way in Nazi concentration camps; we never ask to question ourselves
living large in the free world and looking the other way from and saying
nothing about ethnic, political, class and religious annihilation under way in
Soviet concentration camps. This split vision derives from the triumph of
Communism’s unceasing world revolution against “traditional” morality,
objective morality, the morality of fixed standards by which men navigate, or
at least perceive the shoals of evil and treacherous behaviors. Such morality
tells us there is no separating the idea from its toll. This is the lesson we
have erased from our slate.”