Historian Diana West’s new book American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character has caused a stir, and countered many shibboleths on the left and the right. West’s book details the deep roots of communist infiltration that ran through American government in the twentieth century. Her work has encountered a wave of persistent attackers, many of whom attacking her work and comparing her to militant anti-communist Senator Joe McCarthy, while conceding they have not even read the book.
To counter West’s anti-communist crusade, her detractors have gone on a crusade.
The most persistent attack has come from conservative historian and Front Page Mag writer Ron Radosh. He published a scathing review of American Betrayal on Frontpage Magazine, with the headline “McCarthy on Steroids,” called West “McCarthy’s heiress,” and wrote:
West believes got everything correct, 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.
But Radosh did not stop there. He then republished the review on History News Network, a website of professors, by professors, and for professors, reaching out to the ivory tower audience.
And yet that still was not enough for Radosh, as he published yet another article in Pajamas Media, explaining why he wrote the review. He upped the attack and called West’s book a “mythical counter-narrative.” And finally, he wrote an article in American Thinker continuing his relentless assault, concluding that West does a “disservice to truth, history, and to the conservative movement.”
American Thinker published another broadside attack on West’s work written by Clarice Feldman. Feldman claimed that he does not normally write about feuds between authors and writers but that in this case he is doing so “not to attack West whose work I have not read, but to point out the dangers of demagogic writers — everywhere on the political spectrum and the emotional bonds their fans form with them.”
Another American Thinker writer, Ron Capshaw, also chimed in, also having not read the book. He said, “I haven’t read West (I do intend to), but from the scuttlebutt and reviews circulating the internet, it is fairly apparent that she is a reckless historian of the McCarthy school of history.”
West’s book undoubtedly makes bold claims, some of which were highlighted in her series of articles published on Breitbart. For instance, in one article about D-Day she claimed, “The two most ardent boosters of the Normandy invasion were Stalin and Harry Hopkins.” Hopkins was a top, and perhaps closest advisor for President Franklin Roosevelt, similar to a modern day Valerie Jarrett. She claims that he was “Soviet Agent 19.”
West has not been met with just detractors, as Andrew G. Bostom at Family Security Matters backed up her claims about Hopkins, writing, “Perhaps the most compelling evidence West presents of Hopkins’ traitorous perfidy is conveyed by reproducing a personal and confidential letter FBI Director J. EdgarHoover.”
Hoover wrote to Hopkins and FDR (dated May 7, 1943), and chronicling what followed via revelations from a KGB archive.”
Conservative commentator Robert Stacy McCain wrote of this revelation, “…my head nearly exploded when I saw the evidence against Harry Hopkins: ‘Holy freaking crap! Harry Hopkins ratted out the FBI to the Reds?'”
McCain went on to write that Americans have a “startling ignorance” about the real depths of communist infiltration and that as an “amateur student of Communist subversion,” he was shocked he had never heard these claims before.
You need to buy Diana West’s book, and a lot more books you’ve never read, because there is an entire history that hasn’t been taught to the American people, and you’ll never know the truth if you don’t start teaching yourself.
Ruth King at Ruthfullyyours.com also came to defend West from her legion of attackers.
“Diana West, the author, has stripped the calumnies about Joseph McCarthy, a bogeyman to both leftists and conservatives,” King said.
King wrote that West demonstrates that, “Senate and House investigators of both parties were certainly onto something real in disclosing the penetration of high ranking Soviet Agents and propagandists in all the corridors of power and policy.”
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