The most remarkable, thrilling and also humbling thing has happened. The great Vladimir Bukovsky and his colleague Pavel Stroilov have reviewed American Betrayal and weighed in on the "controversy."

From Breitbart News:

"Why Academics Hate Diana West"

by Vladimir Bukovsky and Pavel Stroilov

Groundbreaking books about the history of communism, such as Robert Conquest's The Great Terror, Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago or Viktor Suvarov'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...

Read More »

The most remarkable thing has happened. Vladimir Bukovsky, one of the founders of the Soviet dissident movement, and Pavel Stroilov have written a remarkable review of American Betrayal with extensive analysis of the series of baseless attacks against the book.

Stay tuned.

Bill de Blasio cut his hair. Did he change his politics? No. Next stop: Little Red City Hall.



This week's syndicated column:

Will New Yorkers elect a new mayor who dedicated himself to the Sandinistas in the 1980s, honeymooned in Cuba in the 1990s (in violation of a U.S. travel ban) and participated in a New York City Council event honoring Zimbabwe’s tyrannous Robert Mugabe in 2002?

Right now, it looks that way. In 1988, Bill de Blasio went to Nicaragua to aid the Marxist, Soviet-supported Sandinistas. He came home, as the New York Times put it, with “a vision of the possibilities of unfettered leftist government.” Today, 25 years later, New York City Public Advocate de Blasio, who remains “very proud” of his radical activities (he has since regretted his Mugabe “mistake”), is the front-runner in New York’s mayoral race. Recent polls show the Democratic nominee with a whopping 40-point margin over Republican candidate Joe Lhota.

That could change if two things...

Read More »

In March 1944, one month after the conclusion of the Yalta Conference, one month and the arrest of Red Army member Alexandr Solzhenitsyn (for writing a joke about Stalin), HMS Arawa (above) carried 1,657 Turkoman Muslims, Soviet citizens, back to the Soviet Union to the Gulag and/or certain death. These men, most of whom had volunteered for the German army to fight Communist rule, were among the millions of Soviet-claimed nationals who would be returned at Stalin's to the Gulag and/or certain death by British and American forces in "Operation Keelhaul."

They and their multiethnic brothers-in-German-arms from the USSR were “a constant reminder,” Nikolai Tolstoy writes, “of the fact that the USSR alone of all the Allies had provided the enemy with thousands of recruits." 

John Batchelor and I discuss the voyage of the Arawa and other vignettes from American Betrayal...

Read More »

AP reports that it's still unclear whether Staff Sgt. Timothy Raymond McGill, 30, of Ramsey, N.J. (above), was one of the three US special forces killed on September 21 by an Afghan security forces member -- a Muslim terrorist like those who seized a Kenya shopping mall -- in Gardez, capital of Paktia in eastern Afghanistan.

As of this posting, ISAF has no details -- no mention -- of the three killings on its website.

In an important piece for The Clarion Project, Clare Lopez sums up a "tough week" for the Muslim Brotherhood in America that included a Justice IG report critical of the way FBI field offices have failed to implement a 2008 FBI policy to cease CAIR outreach, and the way the FBI has failed to enforce it.

Clare Lopez reports also on the reaction of Rep. Frank Wolf, who two years ago requested this IG investigation.

The same day as the DoJ report was released, Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), the influential Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee’s Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies (responsible for the FBI’s budget) fired off a sharply-worded letter to FBI Director James Comey, citing both conflicting guidance coming from the FBI’s Office of Public Affairs (with its emphasis on Muslim “outreach”) as well as “outright violations from several field offices.”

...

Read More »

Palm Beach County employee John Jamason (left) found himself in a local media firestorm after posting about Islam and the Koran on Facebook on 9/11/13. WPTV's Evan Axelbank (right) "broke" the story, stoked by CAIR, which, of course, was founded by members of Hamas, which is a "wing" of the Muslim Brotherhood.

This week's syndicated column

On the 12th anniversary of the 9/11 jihad attacks, John Jamason, of Palm Beach, Fla., posted the following comment on his personal Facebook page:

“Never forget. There is no such thing as radical Islam. All Islam is radical. There may be Muslims who don’t practice their religion, much like others. The Quran is a book that preaches hate.”

Following these comments, a firestorm would consume Jamason for the next week as local media – driven by the Hamas-linked Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and a waffling county administrator – speculated whether Jamason would lose his job as Palm Beach County public information officer or be “disciplined.” For what? Palm Beach County Administrator Robert Weisman spoke of Jamason’s ignorance and hurtfulness, but in reality, Jamason had crossed the red U.S.-CAIR-Islamic-line that specifically absolves Islam from links to radicalism and/or hatred. For that, Jamason had to be punished, or at least feel the heat for a while.

...

Read More »

Part One is here. 

Part Two is here.

Part Three is here.

----

Following its Breitbart debut, The Rebuttal will become available for e-book download and book order from Bravura Books. Watch this space for more information.

In Defense of Diana West http://t.co/fvvQU3NlrN

— Newt Gingrich (@newtgingrich) September 16, 2013

I would like to thank Messrs. Radosh, Horowitz, Black, et al for their role in inspiring M. Stanton Evans, the great American investigative journalist and author and conservative commentator, to write the following essay.

From cnsnews.com:

"In Defense of Diana West"

by M. Stanton Evans

Out of the public eye and far from the daily headlines, a fierce verbal battle is currently being waged about the course of American policy in the long death struggle with Moscow that we call the Cold War. At ground zero of this new dispute is author Diana West, whose recent book, American Betrayal (St....

Read More »

This week's syndicated column

Back in 2004, when a FDNY chief reminded the 9/11 Commission that it was never in “anyone’s consciousness” that the twin towers would fall, he underscored a terrible truth. After 9/11, we entered the Age of the Unthinkable. Seared into our collective consciousness is that the twin towers could and did fall. So could the U.S. Capitol, the Golden Gate Bridge and the Superdome. Our children know that which we as children never before imagined – passenger planes may become guided missiles, and skyscrapers may turn into smoking, twisted rubble. This age of Islamic jihad against the West has indeed expanded our consciousness.

Or has it? Did these previously unthinkable acts of violence and mass murder sharpen our thinking, make us vigilant and more protective of our constitutional liberties under attack?

There was a time when I actually thought this was so. Re-reading my first column written after 9/11 today, one dozen 9/11s later, I find that it forecasts...

Read More »



FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CENTER TO HONOR SYNDICATED COLUMNIST AND AUTHOR DIANA WEST AS 2013 RECIPIENT OF THE MIGHTIER PEN AWARD

WASHINGTON, D.C., SEPTEMBER 12, 2013:  The Center for Security Policy announced today that the 2013 recipient of its Mightier Pen Award will be Diana West, a nationally syndicated columnist and author of The Death of the Grown-up: How America's Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization, co-author of Shariah: The Threat to America, and most recently author of American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character. The award will be presented at a luncheon on November 20th at the Union League Club in New York City.

Diana West's weekly newspaper column is syndicated by Universal Uclick, and appears in over 100 publications nationwide, as well as at her website www.dianawest.net. West also serves as Washington correspondent for...

Read More »

Part One is here.

Part Two is here.

Part Three is here. 

----

Following its Breitbart debut, The Rebuttal became available as a book and e-book.

Air Force historian Eduard Mark, now deceased, wrote a paper in 1998 linking the codename "19" in KGB cable 812 from the Venona archive to Harry Hopkins.

Mark's thesis is discussed on two pages of American Betrayal -- a detail in a 403-page book with 944 endnotes. It is a hallmark of the weird war on American Betrayal that reviewer Ronald Radosh inflated several such details out of all recognition and then attacked them in their exaggerated state. Thus, Hopkins/"19" is called the "linchpin" of my book, which is nonsense as dispatched in Part Two of The Rebuttal.

While it is not the linchpin of my book  -- indeed, I could cut out all reference to it and make the same case --  Hopkins/"19" may be seen as the linchpin of the war on American Betrayal.

Having over-inflated the significance of Hopkins/”19” in my book (two pages) to a point of absurdity, Radosh sets out to take down Hopkins/”19” as a standing argument. This included negating the 1998 Mark research paper that gave rise to Hopkins/"19."

...

Read More »

DW: M. Stanton Evans, co-author with Herbert Romerstein of Stalin's Secret Agents and author of Blacklisted by HIstory, is currently working on a larger piece addressing the spate of attacks on American Betrayal.

In the meantime, he has given me permission to publish the following.

"Harry Hopkins, Diana West and Me" 

by M.Stanton Evans

To understand the attached email exchanges between John Earl Haynes and myself some background information is needed.

There are a lot of details here that amount to “inside baseball.”  It is however precisely from the accumulation of such details that the true history of the Cold War will be, or more accurately should be, written.

By far the major issue in this discussion is whether President Roosevelt’s top adviser, Harry Hopkins, was in back channel communication with the Soviet KGB in the 1940s, and if so for what purpose he would...

Read More »

My 20,000-plus-word-rebuttal to the Frontpage Magazine "take-down" titled "McCarthy on Steroids," has been published in three parts at Breitbart News.

Part One is here.

Part Two is here.

Part Three is here.

My summary of The Rebuttal is at Gates of Vienna here.

Original essays about this extraordinary campaign written by Vladimir Bukovsky, M. Stanton Evans and others, plus the rebuttal in its entirety, are available as a book and e-book at Amazon here.

...

Read More »

Gates of Vienna today reports on a shocking development in the "war" on American Betrayal.

Clare M. Lopez, the excellent Middle East analyst and my Team B II colleague, has been fired for favorably mentioning my book in an essay.

The full post by Baron Bodissey as it appears at Gates of Vienna is below.





The Totalitarian Impulse

As mentioned here Tuesday night, an article by Clare Lopez was published earlier that day at the Gatestone Institute’s website and then immediately removed. Since Ms. Lopez had referred favorably in her article to Diana West’s book American Betrayal, and since Ms. West recently had anathema pronounced against her for that same book, it seemed that there might be a connection between the two events.

And indeed there was. Our suspicions were correct.

I just received this information from a source close to Clare Lopez:

...

Read More »

This week's syndicated column:

I would like to pause for a moment as the United States weighs going to war to make the world safe for President Obama’s “credibility” to note that the Department of Defense announced the deaths of four American soldiers in separate incidents last week in Afghanistan. The Desert Sun in Palm Springs, Calif., reported:

“Staff Sgt. Joshua Bowden, 28, of Villa Rica, Ga., was on a dismounted patrol Saturday, Aug. 31, in Ghazni, Afghanistan, when his unit was attacked by small arms fire. Bowden was stationed at Fort Carson in Colorado and assigned to the 242nd Ordnance Battalion (EOD), 71st Ordnance Group (EOD).

“Sgt. 1st Class Ricardo D. Young, 34, died Wednesday, Aug. 28, from small arms fire in Farah Province, Afghanistan. The Rosston, Ark., native was assigned to the 307th Engineer Battalion (Combat/Airborne), 20th Engineer Brigade, XVIII Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg, N.C.

“Staff Sgt. Michael H. Ollis, 24, also died Wednesday, Aug. 28, in Ghazni...

Read More »

As The Rebuttal nears publication (soon to be an ebook as well), I simply must highlight the most high-larious ad hominem attack on me of all -- even better than National Review's FDR hagiographer questioning my being "house-trained." (Welcome to my world for the past few weeks....)

From The American Thinker:

Blogger and historian Clare Spark notes that West has little background for her research and the unfortunate overconfidence of many Ivy graduates, "I have looked up Diana West's background. She has a B.A. in English from Yale and a prior book that gave her synoptic view of American culture as stuck in adolescent rebellion. That she has the confidence to make grand pronouncements about American culture and then diplomatic history can be attributed both to her Ivy League education and to the rise of the amateur commentator, thanks to far right conspiracy theorists. They are attached to her as to other 'inside dopesters," and the results are frightening for the future of the republic."

...

Read More »

... the Independent reports:

Libya has almost entirely stopped producing oil as the government loses control of much of the country to militia fighters.

Mutinying security men have taken over oil ports on the Mediterranean and are seeking to sell crude oil on the black market. Ali Zeidan, Libya’s Prime Minister, has threatened to “bomb from the air and the sea” any oil tanker trying to pick up the illicit oil from the oil terminal guards, who are mostly former rebels who overthrew Muammar Gaddafi and have been on strike over low pay and alleged government corruption since July.

As world attention focused on the coup in Egypt and the poison gas attack in Syria over the past two months, Libya has plunged unnoticed into its worst political and economic crisis since the defeat of Gaddafi two years ago. Government authority is disintegrating in all parts of the country putting in doubt claims by American, British and French politicians that Nato’s military action in Libya in 2011 was...

Read More »

Yesterday, I noticed something that reminded me of this.

So did Gates of Vienna. Vlad Tepes and Tundra Tabloids noted it, too.

Now, Ruth King at Ruthfully Yours lays it on the line:

I like and admire...

Read More »

This morning, the Gatestone Institute published my Team B II colleague Clare Lopez's latest essay, which juxtaposed the findings of American Betrayal with events in the Middle East to marvelous effect.

It is called "Recognizing the Wrong People."

Maybe it did -- because then they took it down.

That is, I have to wonder: Could the piece possibly have disappeared due to Clare's highly favorable treatment of my book?

Baron Bodissey at Gates of Vienna wonders the same thing.

I don't know the answer.

But it's happened before.

I have asked Nina Rosenwald, president of Gatestone, for more information. Maybe there is some perfectly innocent explanation....

Read More »

John Dietrich is the author of The Morgenthau Plan: Soviet Influence on American Postwar Policy, a book I found invaluable to my research for American Betrayal. I was delighted to come across Dietrich's 5-star review of American Betrayal at its Amazon page, and excerpted it in the book's Editorial Reviews: "Enlightening. I give American Betrayal five stars only because it is not possible to give it six."

Now, while putting finishing touches on "The Rebuttal," I have come across a letter John Dietrich recently wrote to me and posted at his blog.

...

Read More »