Fifty years ago, in 1964, a Korean War veteran, electrical magazine editor, and self-taught expert on Communism named John Stormer published None Dare Call it Treason. It eventually sold 7 million copies.
The premise of the book was fairly simple: there are high-ranking people in America that are in fact the enemies of America and as a movement do everything in their power to sabotage our battle against totalitarianism. Yet, nobody is willing to identify these people for what they are: Traitors. And no one will call what these traitors are doing for what it is: Treason.
That is no longer true, thanks to David Horowitz and his new book The Great Betrayal, Volume III of The Black Book of the American Left. “Treason as a moral rather than a legal issue is not difficult to define,” he writes. “Treason is when your country is at war and you want the other side to win.”
In an article written and posted on September 11, 2001, Horowitz threw down the gauntlet:
Americans are unwilling to recognize that much of the world hates us, and will continue to hate us because we are prosperous, democratic and free. Today’s tragedies must be a wake up call. It’s time to remember that the first duty of government is to provide for the common defense. …
It’s time for those on the political left to rethink their alliances with anti-American radicals at home and abroad. It’s time for the President to identify the monsters who planned the day of infamy, and then to carry out a massive military strike against them and any government who sponsored these acts. In sum, it is time for a new sobriety in America about what is at stake in the political battles with those who condemn America as an ‘oppressor’ nation and the ‘root cause’ of the attacks on itself. It is time for Americans who love this country to stand up in her defense.
The attitude he was referring to came into clear view a few weeks later, on November 7, 2001, when Bill Clinton gave a speech at Georgetown University that, Horowitz writes, “ranks as one of the most disgraceful utterances to pass the lips of a former American president. Without any acknowledgment of his own responsibilities as commander-in-chief, Clinton joined America’s enemies in attempting to transfer the blame for the atrocities to his country. ‘Those of us who come from various European lineages are not blameless,’ he explained, reflecting sentiments made familiar by American appeasers since the [Communist-controlled Henry] Wallace campaign of 1948.”
The view that America is the bad guy of the world is what drove the radical Left (including Clinton and the majority of the Democrats) to dismantle America’s military and intelligence defenses in the pre-9/11 era.
In light of these unprecedented attacks, did the Democrats rise to the challenge? Of course not. They pretended to be hawkish patriots for two years – including voting to destroy the enemy regime of Saddam Hussein which we now know did, in fact, have Weapons of Mass Destruction and connections to Al Qaeda – but, as Horowitz recounts:
The global protesters failed to stop the British and American military effort or save Saddam’s regime, which fell six weeks after the initial assault. This victory put an end to the filling of mass graves by the regime; it shut down the torture chambers and closed the prison that Saddam had built for four to twelve-year-olds whose parents had earned his disapproval. But Saddam’s forces were not entirely defeated. They regrouped to fight a rearguard guerilla campaign against the American “occupiers.” At the same time, the organizers of the anti-war protests continued their efforts, this time in the arena of electoral politics. Their activists marched into the Democratic presidential primary campaigns to support the candidacies of anti-war Democrats Dennis Kucinich and Howard Dean.
The enormous resources in money and manpower that the activists mobilized against the war transformed the campaign of an obscure governor of Vermont into the Democratic frontrunner. Dean condemned America’s war in Iraq; he hinted that as president he would make peace at the earliest possible opportunity and withdraw American forces from the Gulf. Electoral politics thus became the left’s rearguard attempt to produce the result their pre-war protests had failed to achieve: an American defeat in Iraq.
Thus it began, in June of 2003, that the Democrats realized that their false patriotism endangered their standing with the America-hating base of the Democratic Party and (with the notable exceptions of Joe Lieberman and Dick Gephardt) turned on the war nearly all of them voted for. Without hesitating, they stabbed the troops they sent into battle in the back. “You can’t tell a 19-year old, who is risking his young life in Fallujah and is surrounded by terrorists who want to kill him, that he shouldn’t be there in the first place; that he’s with the ‘bad guys,’ the aggressors, the occupiers who have no moral right to be in Iraq,” Horowitz wrote in 2008. “You can’t do that and not threaten his morale, encourage his enemies, deprive him of allies and put him in danger. And that is exactly what the Democrats have done – and all the Democrats have done – for five years of America’s war to deny the terrorists victory in Iraq.”
The defining moment that proved whose side the Democrats were on came in 2007, when President Bush, recognizing the errors made, shifted to a Counterinsurgency plan referred to as “The Surge.” The plan was a dramatic success, accomplishing its twin goals of breaking the back of the various Islamist insurrections and creating an unprecedented atmosphere of security for the Iraqi people. But the Democrats were desperate to undermine our military, shown most infamously when General David Petraeus was preparing to testify to Congress on the progress made. A Democratic Senator told Politico, “No one wants to call [Petraeus] a liar on national TV… the expectation is that the outside groups will do this for us.” And within a few days, the Democrats’ activist arm, MoveOn.org, published a full-page advertisement in the New York Times under the blaring headline: “General Petraeus or General Betray us? Cooking the books for the White House.” In fact, the Times gave MoveOn.org a 64% discount to run the smear. The Democrats knew what they were saying wasn’t true. We now know this thanks to Robert Gates in his memoir Duty. In a meeting between Secretary of Defense Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, President Obama and other administration officials on October 26, 2009, “Hillary told the president that her opposition to the surge in Iraq had been political because she was facing him in the Iowa primary. She went on to say, ‘The Iraq surge worked.’ The President conceded vaguely that opposition to the Iraq surge had been political. To hear the two of them making these admissions, and in front of me, was as surprising as it was dismaying.”
Our troops triumphed regardless, so that once Obama came to power, he needed a way to undo these achievements without making it obvious. He did so by sabotaging the Status of Forces negotiations, orchestrating parliamentary obstacles where there previously had been none. As the great Fouad Ajami wrote in the Wall Street Journal before his untimely passing, “Obama’s rush for the exit and [then-Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al] Maliki’s autocratic rule ensured that much hard-won progress would not last.” America’s security position is the worst it has been in generations, and the bloodbath we see today is the fruit of the Democrats’ betrayal.
Fifty years ago, John Stormer wrote:
There is much to be done if America is to block communist domination of the world. Much of the work is up to you. First, you must educate yourself. Determine that the facts in this book are true. Then, alert and educate others. Stay informed – and start to act. Join with others who are already well-organized for the battle against communism.
In a slightly different form, these words could have fit nicely in The Great Betrayal. Horowitz is a veteran of the ideological wars against both the Communists and the Jihad. He knows what he’s talking about.