
FINALLY -- IN AUDIOBOOK!
ALSO AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK
"It is not simply a good book about history. It is one of those books which makes history. ... "
-- Vladimir Bukovsky, co-founder of the Soviet dissident movement and author of Judgment in Moscow, and Pavel Stroilov, author of Behind the Desert Storm.
"Diana West is distinguished from almost all political commentators because she seeks less to defend ideas and proposals than to investigate and understand what happens and what has happened. This gives her modest and unpretentious books and articles the status of true scientific inquiry, shifting the debate from the field of liking and disliking to being and non-being."
-- Olavo de Carvalho
If you're looking for something to read, this is the most dazzling, mind-warping book I have read in a long time. It has been criticized by the folks at Front Page, but they don't quite get what Ms. West has set out to do and accomplished. I have a whole library of books on communism, but -- "Witness" excepted -- this may be the best.
-- Jack Cashill, author of Deconstructing Obama: The Lives, Loves and Letters of America's First Postmodern President and First Strike: TWA Flight 800 and the Attack on America
"Every once in a while, something happens that turns a whole structure of preconceived ideas upside down, shattering tales and narratives long taken for granted, destroying prejudice, clearing space for new understanding to grow. Diana West's latest book, American Betrayal, is such an event."
-- Henrik Raeder Clausen, Europe News
West's lesson to Americans: Reality can't be redacted, buried, fabricated, falsified, or omitted. Her book is eloquent proof of it.
-- Edward Cline, Family Security Matters
"I have read it, and agree wholeheartedly."
-- Angelo Codevilla, Professor Emeritus of International Relations at Boston Unversity, and fellow of the Claremont Institute.
Enlightening. I give American Betrayal five stars only because it is not possible to give it six.
-- John Dietrich, formerly of the Defense Intelligence Agency and author of The Morgenthau Plan: Soviet Influence on American Postwar Policy.
After reading American Betrayal and much of the vituperation generated by neoconservative "consensus" historians, I conclude that we cannot ignore what West has demonstrated through evidence and cogent argument.
-- John Dale Dunn, M.D., J.D., Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons
"A brilliantly researched and argued book."
-- Edward Jay Epstein, author of Deception: The Invisible War between the KGB and the CIA, The Annals 0f Unsolved Crime
"This explosive book is a long-needed answer to court histories that continue to obscure key facts about our backstage war with Moscow. Must-reading for serious students of security issues and Cold War deceptions, both foreign and domestic."
-- M. Stanton Evans, author of Stalin's Secret Agents and Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies
Her task is ambitious; her sweep of crucial but too-little-known facts of history is impressive; and her arguments are eloquent and witty. ... American Betrayal is one of those books that will change the way many of us see the world.
-- Susan Freis Falknor, Blue Ridge Forum
"American Betrayal is absolutely required reading. Essential. You're sleepwalking without it."
-- Chris Farrell, director of investigations research, Judicial Watch
"Diana West wrote a brilliant book called American Betrayal, which I recommend to everybody ... It is a seminal work that will grow in importance."
-- Newt Gingrich, former House Speaker
"This is a must read for any serious student of history and anyone working to understand the Marxist counter-state in America."
-- John Guandolo, president, Understanding the Threat, former FBI special agent
It is myth, or a series of myths, concerning WW2 that Diana West is aiming to replace with history in 2013’s American Betrayal.
If West’s startling revisionism is anywhere near the historical truth, the book is what Nietzsche wished his writings to be, dynamite.
-- Mark Gullick, British Intelligence
“What Diana West has done is to dynamite her way through several miles of bedrock. On the other side of the tunnel there is a vista of a new past. Of course folks are baffled. Few people have the capacity to take this in. Her book is among the most well documented I have ever read. It is written in an unusual style viewed from the perspective of the historian—but it probably couldn’t have been done any other way.”
-- Lars Hedegaard, historian, journalist, founder, Danish Free Press Society
The polemics against your Betrayal have a familiar smell: The masters of the guild get angry when someone less worthy than they are ventures into the orchard in which only they are privileged to harvest. The harvest the outsider brought in, they ritually burn.
-- Hans Jansen, former professor of Islamic Thought, University of Utrecht
No book has ever frightened me as much as American Betrayal. ... [West] patiently builds a story outlining a network of subversion so bizarrely immense that to write it down will seem too fantastic to anyone without the book’s detailed breadth and depth. It all adds up to a story so disturbing that it has changed my attitude to almost everything I think about how the world actually is. ... By the time you put the book down, you have a very different view of America’s war aims and strategies. The core question is, did the USA follow a strategy that served its own best interests, or Stalin’s? And it’s not that it was Stalin’s that is so compelling, since you knew that had to be the answer, but the evidence in detail that West provides that makes this a book you cannot ignore.
-- Steven Kates, RMIT (Australia) Associate Professor of Economics, Quadrant
"Diana West's new book rewrites WWII and Cold War history not by disclosing secrets, but by illuminating facts that have been hidden in plain sight for decades. Furthermore, she integrates intelligence and political history in ways never done before."
-- Jeffrey Norwitz, former professor of counterterrorism, Naval War College
[American Betrayal is] the most important anti-Communist book of our time ... a book that can open people's eyes to the historical roots of our present malaise ... full of insights, factual corroboration, and psychological nuance.
-- J.R. Nyquist, author, Origins of the Fourth World War
Although I know [Christopher] Andrew well, and have met [Oleg] Gordievsky twice, I now doubt their characterization of Hopkins -- also embraced by Radosh and the scholarly community. I now support West's conclusions after rereading KGB: The Inside Story account 23 years later [relevant passages cited in American Betrayal]. It does not ring true that Hopkins was an innocent dupe dedicated solely to defeating the Nazis. Hopkins comes over in history as crafty, secretive and no one's fool, hardly the personality traits of a naïve fellow traveler. And his fingerprints are on the large majority of pro-Soviet policies implemented by the Roosevelt administration. West deserves respect for cutting through the dross that obscures the evidence about Hopkins, and for screaming from the rooftops that the U.S. was the victim of a successful Soviet intelligence operation.
-- Bernie Reeves, founder of The Raleigh Spy Conference, American Thinker
Diana West’s American Betrayal — a remarkable, novel-like work of sorely needed historical re-analysis — is punctuated by the Cassandra-like quality of “multi-temporal” awareness. ... But West, although passionate and direct, is able to convey her profoundly disturbing, multi-temporal narrative with cool brilliance, conjoining meticulous research, innovative assessment, evocative prose, and wit.
-- Andrew G. Bostom, PJ Media
Do not be dissuaded by the controversy that has erupted around this book which, if you insist on complete accuracy, would be characterized as a disinformation campaign.
-- Jed Babbin, The American Spectator
In American Betrayal, Ms. West's well-established reputation for attacking "sacred cows" remains intact. The resulting beneficiaries are the readers, especially those who can deal with the truth.
-- Wes Vernon, Renew America
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By Diana West on
Wednesday, July 29, 2015 6:40 AM

Venona intercepts indicate that Soviet GRU officer/State Department official Alger Hiss was awarded the USSR Order of the Red Star (above) after the Yalta conference.
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Readers of the often-perverse National Review will have noticed that FDR biographer and convicted felon Conrad Black has opened an extended firefight with Angelo Codevilla over Codevilla's review-essay in the Claremont Review of Books about Henry Kissinger's recent book.
Codevilla notes:
My review’s one and only reference to Conrad Black was to quote his praise of Kissinger’s book: “brilliantly conceived and executed . . . even by Henry Kissinger’s very high standards.”...
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By Diana West on
Tuesday, July 28, 2015 4:06 AM

As the majority-European-minority-African experiment that made America disappears into a Third World maelstrom of population-replacement and culture-eradication, the question, as we approach 2016, is whether there remains enough patriotism -- love of country that is also openly declarable -- to try to save it.
There is, alas, little good news. Yes, Trump, the man with the mouth who has at least blurted out the all-important message about borders, illegal aliens and sovereignty, has been surging on that message. This is evidence of rebellion in the land, and rebellion is good. It comes from a vestigial survival instinct; also from the bitter life experience...
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By Diana West on
Monday, July 27, 2015 3:53 AM

Hillary for Iowa Photo
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The pulse rises on reading Breitbart's rundown of the Central-Americanization of Virginia, but the pulse really rises on reading that Trump may be pro-amnesty! Even the Washington Post headline -- Reach of the Day -- pales a little, although it is pretty good:
"During Iowa campaigning, Clinton confronts enthusiasm gap."
The Enthusiasm Gap -- makes...
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By Diana West on
Sunday, July 26, 2015 6:49 AM
As I have learned, and particularly since the publication of American Betrayal, history is far too important to be left to professional historians content (ordered?) to trudge along the familiar groove of false narrative (until roused to any-means-necessary search-and-destroy missions against those who venture off-road in search of buried truth).
This is a matter of more than academic import. It is of much wider concern than to students or buffs. History is, should be, the guidestar of our conduct as a nation.The fact that we founder so dangerously today is directly related to the continuous loop of falsehood and misunderstanding about exactly how we got this way.
Take the 1940s international war aid program for anti-Axis powers known as Lend Lease. This program, which passed into law in 1941,...
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By Diana West on
Sunday, July 19, 2015 5:41 AM
Watch the video (click "Read More" below).
Read Sharyl Attkisson's Fact Check.
Donald Trump has absolutely nothing to apologize for, even before we turn our attention to all of the noxiously fake concern currently being avowed by the Establishment-Political-Media-Complex for the plight of the American POW as exemplified by Sen. John McCain -- who himself has done more than anyone to cover up the plight of American POWs who did not return home!
In other words, where was all of this now-pained, -etched, and -so-serious concern for POWs then?
Nowhere. It just wasn't a useful mechanism of the political agenda. Today, that agenda is to Get Trump, and by any means necessary. Even by making and blowing things up, drenching them in crocodile tears, hoisting an American flag over the steaming mess, and saying Trump, the candidate leading the way on a real border, immigration control, and maybe even survival as a nation, "crossed the line" and, thus, according to the Establishment-Political-Media-Complex, is out.
...
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By Diana West on
Saturday, July 18, 2015 9:46 AM

Another American serviceman, U.S. Navy Petty Officer Randall Smith, has died of wounds inflicted by jihad-killer Mohammad Abdulazeez, bringing the Ramadan 2015 death toll in Tennessee to five.
America mourns.
America also despairs. No one in power, no one with authority, no one with ratings, has the honesty and courage to link the killer to his religious faith, Islam. This seemingly unbreachable wall between cause and effect, between fact and conclusion, has created psychological, political and also spiritual chaos in the land.
In the place of reality -- or, rather, to obstruct reality -- we see yet another round of "interfaith" rituals,...
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By Diana West on
Thursday, July 16, 2015 4:49 AM

Kudos to CBS's Major Garrett for asking Obama a piercing question about Iran's four American captives -- bonus: CNN's Dana Bash calls it "disrespectful!
From CBS:
Transcription of exchange between CBS News Chief White House Correspondent Major Garrett and President Obama over Iranian hostages.
Major Garrett: As you well know, there are four Americans in Iran - three held on trumped up charges according to your administration, one, whereabouts unknown. Can you tell the country, sir, why you are content, with all of the fanfare around this [nuclear] deal, to leave the conscience of this nation, the strength of this nation, unaccounted...
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By Diana West on
Monday, July 13, 2015 12:38 PM
 
As the Morally Elite purge purportedly sinful symbols and statuary -- surely prepatory for the upcoming main "live" event (please don't say I didn't warn you) -- I suggest they widen their scope of destruction.
Having moved on from the purge of the Confederate battle flag -- that was soooo easy -- the Morally Elite have turned their sights to the more concretely monumental problems of statuary, schools, streets, etc., that commemorate, for example, the heroic life of Robert E. Lee.
As many have reminded us, including the NYT's David Brooks, Lee held slaves -- 196 human beings that he "inherited" from his father-in-law. Lee abhored slavery but defended the institution...
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By Diana West on
Monday, July 13, 2015 4:43 AM

Czech and US soldiers patrolling Parwan, Afghanistan, 2014, for no good reason. They are still there.
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There is no mission. There is no strategy. But 13,000 US and NATO troops are still risking their lives and limbs every day in Afghanistan. Even worse, as the Military.com story excerpted below makes clear, these forces are operating in a war zones under rules of conduct befitting a peacetime police force. Bonus: in one example reported below, when the going gets tough, there is no Afghan support.
From Military.com:
"New Mission Brings New Rules for Patrols in Afghanistan":
PARWAN, Afghanistan — American Marines and Georgian soldiers waited outside the mud-brick compound about a mile north of Bagram Air Field as their interpreter...
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By Diana West on
Wednesday, July 08, 2015 11:41 AM

No doubt, another letter to another editor of another journal about another knock-out game on American Betrayal is just the thing for the summertime hammock, particularly since this one, bonus, also manhandles Stalin's Secret Agents by the late M. Stanton Evans and the late Herbert Romerstein.
This time around, I am writing to the academic journal Intelligence and National Security(hence, the academic style and European punctuation). In fall of...
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By Diana West on
Saturday, July 04, 2015 10:13 AM

If July 4, 1776, is our Independence Day, March 11, 1941, is our Interdependence Day.
A revolutionary thing happened on the way to World War II. It was called "Lend Lease." This was the legislation, approved on March 11, 1941, by which the neutral USA began to supply aid to countries at war with Hitler. It was spun by President Roosevelt and Democrats in Congress as a means of keeping America out of World War II, although it was recognized by many Republicans at the time as a war bill.
But that's not all. Lend Lease granted extraordinary powers to the executive. Indeed, it transferred war-making power from the Congress, where the Constitution placed it, to the president, where it has pretty much remained ever since.
There was something else that was revolutionary about the bill -- something revolutionary in a deeply ideological way:
From American Betrayal,...
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By Diana West on
Saturday, June 27, 2015 3:24 PM
H/T Blazing Cat Fur
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By Diana West on
Monday, June 22, 2015 4:04 AM

It is not too many centurions, particularly 100-year-old-plus writers, whose vision of the world is as relevant today as it was when first shared with the public over half a century ago. It is this vision of Orwell, the X-ray view through the cant, platitudes and lies to that ugliest of human drives, the lust for powers absolute, that still distinguishes the British writer, born 112 years ago this week on June 25, 1903. He was only 46 when he died on January 21, 1950. It is his frightening acuity that keeps him not only in the pantheon but even within the orbit of contemporary consciousness.
This is testament not only to Orwell's talents, but to the unhappy state of the human race. The totalitarian drive, cloaked in cant, platitudes and lies, is more vigorous than ever before, which explains why it is that Orwell's Cassandra cries resonate to this day. Frankly, how much better to live in a world...
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By Diana West on
Sunday, June 21, 2015 6:35 AM

About this illustration: A non-exhaustive Internet search indicates that the illustration (above) may well be the cover of a 1960 comic book for Catholic schools published by the Catechetical Guild. Whatever it is, the cartoon beautifully captures a conventional fallacy regarding the Cold War: namely, that while "domino"-nations fell to Communism the world over, the good ship USA remained secure, fighting off the external foe. Even if the USA is headed toward the "Red Iceberg" in the picture, Uncle Sam and the republic are still the same as ever. Sure, a single Hiss or a pair of Rosenbergs might pop up from time to time, but, systemically speaking, Communist subversion, Communist influence, are what happened Over There. Not here. Never here.
American Betrayal, of...
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By Diana West on
Saturday, June 13, 2015 8:36 AM

Some years ago, Jeff Nyquist was witness to the perfect confluence of operational illusion and under-the-table-reality. He captured the moment thus:
As a former British MP once said within my hearing; “Reagan and Thatcher saved the West from socialism.” But a former Russian GRU colonel, sitting across the table, whispered in my ear, “But America is the Marxist paradise.”
These two sentences fit the crux of American Betrayal. There is the false narrative of ideological victory in the Cold War expressed here by the British MP. To this day, the narrative plays on,...
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By Diana West on
Wednesday, June 10, 2015 9:17 AM

Read the rest here.
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By Diana West on
Tuesday, June 09, 2015 7:37 AM

Looking back, I can think of no better way to describe June 9, 1954 than as a demonic day of creation.
On this day 61 years ago, the simplest, most enduring Big Lie about Sen. Joseph McCarthy was created on the floor of the US Senate. It began in a question that still quavers disembodied:
"Have you left no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"
The speaker, later seen brushing tears away, was US Army counsel Joseph Welch (above left). The loss of "decency" Welch decried allegedly came about when Sen. McCarthy supposedly exposed a young lawyer in Welch's Boston firm named Frederick G. Fisher as a past member of the National Lawyers Guild, which Attorney General Herbert Brownell had in 1953 described as the "legal mouthpiece" of the Communist Party in the United States.
I say "allegedly" and "supposedly" because the person who had already exposed Fisher...
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By Diana West on
Sunday, June 07, 2015 6:30 AM
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The New York Times Magazine has published an in-depth report by Adrian Chen on Russian disinformatzyia in the Internet Age. The piece opens a window on the extremely dark and widespread use of well-paid Internet "trolls" who use social media and online outlets (and even non-virtual art exhibits) to wreak havoc not only on public opinion, but on reality itself, both inside and outside Russia, very much including here in the USA.
One troll-goal in Russia, according to a Russian anti-corruption activist, is to drive bona fide political debate away from "trolled" Internet forums. “The point is to spoil [the Internet], to create the atmosphere of hate, to make it so stinky that normal people won’t want to touch it,”
I confess this observation about the trolls' mission rang a bell with me personally. The cabal against American Betrayal -- "trolls" from here on out -- has so many times attacked American Betrayal by falsifying the contents of the book that they have created a discernible pattern of deception that many have compared to a Soviet-style "disinformation campaign."
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By Diana West on
Saturday, June 06, 2015 9:12 AM

June 5, 1944: Gen. Mark Clark arrives in Rome, the first European capital liberated from the Axis.
From American Betrayal, Chapter Nine:
The decision to abandon Italy as an expanding, leading front at the end of 1943 made very little sense—unless, cynically, the true objective was to ensure that Central and Eastern Europe remained open for Soviet invasion. Then again, maybe that’s putting things too crudely, too harshly. Let me rephrase: The advantages to enlarging upon Anglo-American gains in Italy were obvious. There was no good strategic objective to be served by virtually abandoning this theater. Not because I say so. The top U.S. commander of strategic bombing in Europe, Gen. Carl Spaatz, said so,...
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By Diana West on
Saturday, June 06, 2015 9:08 AM

You might call American Betrayal one long, sustained, unyielding assault on "the conventional wisdom" -- i.e., the fake history we are reared on and shaped by.
Thus, it hits the beaches of Normandy, too.
A D-Day excerpt for June 6, 2015.
From American Betrayal, Chapter Nine:
It’s impossible to overestimate the centrality of D-day in Americans’ sense of ourselves, in our understanding of our role in the world, in a national nostalgia for a made-in-USA...
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By Diana West on
Friday, June 05, 2015 10:36 AM

There is something not a little surreal about announcing that I have published yet another rebuttal to yet another attack against American Betrayal -- but, surreal or not, such is the case. More surrealism: I am again publishing my rebuttal at Breitbart News, not the outlet that mounted the attack because the outlet-- in this case, National Review -- turned it down.
Who would ever have imagined that the "disinformation campaign," as Jed Babbin called it, or the "mugging," as the late, great M. Stanton...
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By Diana West on
Wednesday, June 03, 2015 1:10 AM

Big Brother is watching ... I mean, FDR Four Freedoms Park
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Longtime reader Robert Strauss wrote in on May 31:
There are the beginnings of a new trope out there. Call it a pivot, if you will:
"Eleanor Clift Defends Hillary, Compares to FDR": “If she’s elected, she would probably be the richest president ever, But is this a liability? I look back at FDR, I mean, he was very wealthy. He did a lot of great things for the little people.”
Another example: "Matt Bai: Hillary Clinton isn’t like the rest of us? Good!"
From a photo caption: "President Franklin...
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By Diana West on
Monday, June 01, 2015 8:45 AM

CNN reports that Dan Pfeffer, "longtime top aide to President Obama," is joining CNN as a contributor. Since I was for a time a CNN contributor, this marks the first another time an Obamabot has followed, sort of, in my footsteps.
Not that he won't halt right there, of course. Pfeiffer has interested me, however, since he was a point man at the 2011 White House unveiling of Prez Obama's online longform art project. See "Let Them Eat Birth Certificates."
Pfeiffer was also on former Rep. Cliff Stearns' (R-FL) case in 2012 when the member of Congress had the temerity to mention Sheriff Joe Arpaio's quite compelling evidence that the online longform birth certificate was in fact a forgery, which is a very mean word for "art project." See "Silence of the Lapdogs."
...
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By Diana West on
Thursday, May 28, 2015 6:09 AM

"Should one point out," Solzhenitsyn asked, "that from ancient times a decline of courage has been considered the beginning of the end?"
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1989, 2005, 2015.
These are the years in which the West was tested, the years in which the principles, standards and laws from which modern Western civilization uniquely emerged were challenged. These were the years when those charged and even sworn to defend these principles, standards and laws panicked, flinched and surrendered.
Our first test came in 1989 when, after the 1988 publication of The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie, the mullahs in Iran led by Ayatollah Khomeini issued their "fatwa," or death sentence, against the celebrated author, a British citizen with a wide Western literary following, including in the US, for the Islamic crime of blasphemy against Islam.
Instead of Britain and the US and other Western...
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By Diana West on
Wednesday, May 27, 2015 9:39 AM

Below is the syndicated column I wrote to mark the tenth anniversary of 9/11, also adapted from this speech (28:00). From Westergaard, to Wilks, to Fawstin: The artist holds a mirror to the Islamized West and it flinches.
Having passed the 10th anniversary of 9/11, I can now say with certainty that something major was missing from all of the ceremonies, the symbolism and the media coverage. It was something that not only captures the meaning of the attacks themselves, but better defines our response to them than any other single thing. It is the face of the age itself, and it is not Osama bin Laden's.
I refer to the most familiar of the 12 Danish Muhammad cartoons, the one by Kurt Westergaard. I always think of this world-famous drawing as "Bomb-head Muhammad," for the lit bomb that serves...
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By Diana West on
Saturday, May 23, 2015 9:32 AM
With thanks to Vlad Tepes, my Friday chat with Sam Sorbo about my latest piece at Breitbart about what is missing (as usual) from the Iraq War debate.
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By Diana West on
Tuesday, May 19, 2015 6:08 AM

The Iraq debate that has erupted three, seven, eight, twelve years too late may end up disproving the old adage, "Better late than never." Why? Too many glaring omissions from the conversation.
Let's start with Numero Uno: Islam.
Once again, Islam is not part of the discussion.
This omission, as readers of the website know, is nothing new in discourse about American wars in the Islamic world. Many's the time over the past dozen years when I attended Washington confabs where the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan were discussed at length by experts, military officers and elected officials, but Islam was not even mentioned -- and certainly not as as a cultural-legal-political-religious roadblock against the US policy of "nation-building" through "hearts and minds" "counterinsurgency." This is a failed policy, as we have seen.
Or have we? I think not.
So long as the discussion of Islam -- its collectivist...
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By Diana West on
Monday, May 18, 2015 4:02 AM

Red-Blue election map from Wikipedia
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Earlier this month, Rep. Louie Gohmert (TX-01) released the following statement on the ‘Jade Helm 15’ exercises the federal government plans to stage in Texas and other states:
Over the past few weeks, my office has been inundated with calls referring to the Jade Helm 15 military exercise scheduled to take place between July 15 and September 15, 2015. This military practice has some concerned that the U.S. Army is preparing for modern-day martial law.
Certainly, I can understand these concerns. When leaders within the current administration believe that major threats to the country include those who support the Constitution, are military veterans, or even ‘cling to guns or religion,’ patriotic Americans have reason to be concerned. We have seen people working in this administration use their government positions to persecute people with conservative beliefs in God, country, and notions such as honor and self-reliance. Because of the contempt and antipathy for the true patriots or even Christian saints persecuted for their Christian beliefs, it is no surprise that those who have experienced or noticed such persecution are legitimately suspicious.
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By Diana West on
Sunday, May 17, 2015 5:12 AM

From Memoirs of a Dissident Publisher by Alfred Regnery:
As for the association with Bill Buckley, it has been greatly rewarding. Our friendship has had its ups and downs, as seems often the case in the rather difficult relationship between author and publisher, but we published with great success another of his books, McCarthy and His Enemies, which he wrote with Brent Bozell [holds up to this day as an excellent study -- dw]. And we are still on good terms. Buckley was probably more sensitive to criticism in those days than he has since become, and was quick to fire off letters in reply to his critics, some of which I tried, without success, to induce him to tone down. When I sent a copy of God and Man at Yale to T.S. Eliiot, I was disappointed that he did not think it was suitable for publication in England by Faber & Faber, but was gratified to have him say, in his letter of reply, "Thank you ... for sending me Mr. Buckley's book, which interested me very much. While I thought that he made one or two serious mistakes of strategy, I am glad to hear that it has attracted much attention." Buckley, however, was incensed, and in a letter to me commented, "I am astounded and disappointed by the superficiality of T.S. Eliot's remarks about my book." I had expected him to be pleased that Eliot had read the book at all and taken the time to say something about it, but Buckley was a young man then, and his first book was, quite properly, a matter of the utmost seriousness...
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By Diana West on
Saturday, May 16, 2015 5:17 AM
The aftershocks of World War II continue to make headlines. Seven decades after the fact, the president of the Czech Republic considers it an "act of bravery" to mention on Russian radio the role played by the Gen. Vlasov's WWII-era Russian defector army, still considered traitors in Putin's Russia, in liberating Prague 70 years ago this month. No mention, however, that days later, the US turned the Vlasov Movement over to Stalin to certain death or the Gulag in the shameful Allied crime of forced repatriation known as Operation Keelhaul.
Now, the AP reports on more reverberations:
BELGRADE, Serbia -- A Belgrade court on Thursday quashed the treason conviction of Gen. Draza Mihailovic for his collaboration with Nazis during World War II, politically rehabilitating...
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By Diana West on
Friday, May 15, 2015 12:16 PM

Anti-Red Gen. Andrey Vlasov, whose Russian Army of Liberation liberated Prague
Every May it comes around: valedictories to "victory" in the "good" war, as if World War II were all and only about defeating the totalitarian monster Hitler.
That's the two-dimensional visions of the war that is decked in bunting, marked by parades, endlessly featured in books, movies and miniseries.
But there was another war.
This other war was the Soviet war of deception, corruption and subversion waged from Moscow against the US and GB. While FDR and Churchill embraced "Uncle Joe" Stalin as their indispensable ally against their common enemy Hitler, "Uncle Joe" Stalin was all the while secretly waging a covert war against them, his putative allies, FDR and Churchill, directing...
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By Diana West on
Thursday, May 14, 2015 7:20 AM

This excellent table charting Muslim immigration since 9/11 -- an ever-expanding demographic for sharia -- is by Daniel Horowitz of Conservative Review.
"How many people in this country," he asks, "are aware of the fact that immigration from Islamic countries has doubled since 9/11?"
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By Diana West on
Wednesday, May 13, 2015 4:42 AM

A New Yorker essay by David K. Shipler titled "Pamela Geller and the Anti-Islam Movement" opens thus:
The winning cartoon in the contest to draw the Prophet Muhammad, early this month in Garland, Texas, which two gunmen attacked, depicts a fierce Prophet waving a scimitar and saying, “You can’t draw me!” The artist, whose hand and pencil are visible, replies from outside the frame, “That’s why I draw you.”
Note: This word-picture is the only "picture" New Yorker readers get. The prize-winning political cartoon by Bosch Fawstin (above) is nowhere to be found -- surely an extra irony for a magazine whose existence depends in large part on the thousands of social and political cartoons it has published through the decades. Come to think of it, Fawstin's sharp cartoon-commentary on Islam's death-penalty prohibition on drawing (also critiquing, even factually discussing) Mohammed...
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By Diana West on
Monday, May 11, 2015 9:02 AM
Founder of Arabs for Israel Nonie Darwish, who tells her fascinating story of being the ex-Muslim daughter of a celebrated Egyptian "shahid" in Now They Call Me Infidel, offers a thought-provoking insight (above) on the impact she sees Islam -- specifically Islamic terrorism -- having on Americans.
Terrorism in the Islamic world, she explains, is a tool that is used at every level of government and in the family, too, as a "legal tool" of sharia enforcement. Such terror-violence, in other words, is perfectly normal in Islamic society, and is in accord with Islamic law. People, including "moderate" Muslims, have long been desensitized to such terrorism and accept it.
However, she says:
I am noticing that America is starting to feel that terrorism is normal -- we get excited, we see the torture,...
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By Diana West on
Sunday, May 10, 2015 7:33 AM

Cartoon by Bosch Fawstin
Fox News' Jeanine Pirro opened her last show with a pro-free-speech, anti-sharia stemwinder that Mediaite aptly described in a headline as "Sharia Law Is Coming for Your Free Speech." The summary concluded:
Pirro did add that she thought Geller’s event, which was attacked by two gunmen last weekend, was probably a `dumb move,' which is pretty much what all the critics of it are saying.
Out of the mouths of Mediaite. With that "dumb move" dismissal, Pirro entered the left-to-right media mainstream, which has overwhelmingly thrown its support to the totalitarian sharia principles that some, including conservatives such as Pirro, also disavow.
Pirro then interviewed Pamela...
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By Diana West on
Sunday, May 10, 2015 6:44 AM
With thanks to Ken Sikorski at Tundra Tabloids (no link -- TT is currently switching servers).
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By Diana West on
Thursday, May 07, 2015 1:02 PM

The winning cartoon by Bosch Fawstin
Listening to Laura Ingraham's interview with Pamela Geller, I made some notes on their lines of argument. Geller, obviously, is for the cartoon contest as an exercise of the American right to speech free from Islamic dictates; Ingraham supports Geller's right to free speech but opposes the contest, nonetheless, as not "helpful."
Geller opens by taking exception to Ingraham's earlier comment calling the cartoon contest needlessly provocative. Geller argues that, on the contrary, it is murdering cartoonists that is needlessly provocative, and then says something about the importance of not surrendering to violent sharia enforcement. Once established, she says, we...
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By Diana West on
Thursday, May 07, 2015 6:43 AM
Kudos to Tom Trento's United West for this critically important series of man-on-the-street interviews with Muslims attending the recent "Stand with the Prophet" convention in Garland, Texas. It is no spoiler to reveal that on being asked to condemn the Islamic blasphemy law, not a single Muslim interviewed would do so. It really has to be seen to be believed.
Islamic blasphemy law is Ground Zero in the clash between Islam and the West. It is also the mechanism of Islam's totalitarian command over its folllowers.
Islamic blasphemy law is also wholly and utterly at odds -- no, at war -- with Western standards, Western norms, regarding life on earth as an individual with God-given rights and protected liberties. Such rights and liberties include, of course, the right to free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of conscience. This is where we in the West are "coming from" -- the sharia-enforcing media excepted...
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By Diana West on
Wednesday, May 06, 2015 3:31 AM

Let's talk about the Garland, Texas, attack by enforcers of Islamic law. Not the physical attack by two Muslim enforcers of Islamic law, but rather the figurative, hardly less virulent attacks by mainly Christian enforcers of Islamic law on cartoon contest organizer Pamela Geller, free speech activist and head of American Freedom Defense Initiative. Judging by the intensity of these ongoing attacks, Geller, a person of exceptional courage, is also extremely effective.
As with all things jihad, the physical attack on Geller's day-long Mohammed cartoon event, which temporarily secured a small piece of the public square where Americans who so desired could exercise their speech free from Islamic law, followed patterns as old as Islam and as current as the latest news cycles all over the globe. For this reason, it is hard to imagine anyone was shocked...
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By Diana West on
Tuesday, May 05, 2015 11:49 AM

For 70 years now, anniversaries of the end of the Second World War in Europe -- the "Good War" -- have neglected to reckon with another milestone: the approximate anniversary of Operation Keelhaul, the Allied operation that forcibly repatriated literally millions of people, Soviet-claimed anti-Communists in the Western war zones at war's end, to Stalin's Gulag or the firing squad.
You've never heard of such a thing? You are not alone.
From American Betrayal, pp. 232-236:
In contemporary terms, “repatriation” was a policy of reverse “ethnic cleansing” that scrubbed Western Europe of displaced or captured Russians and other nationals claimed by the Soviet regime....
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By Diana West on
Tuesday, May 05, 2015 8:33 AM

Following another recent jihadist effort (thankfully thwarted) to destroy a Christian church in France, the essayist Fjordman commented:
"The differences between the Middle East and Europe are growing smaller every day."
Following another jihadist attack (thankfully, only jihadists were killed) on a Texas gathering of courageous artists and other defenders of free speech, it seems that the differences between Europe and the US are getting smaller every day.
The catalyst on both continents, Old World and New, is the same. It is Islam. To put our shared plight as succinctly as possible (borrowing from Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders), the more Islam there is in a society, the less freedom there is.
Now for the reality check.
When a group of people peacefully gathering for an afternoon to discuss or protest or otherwise exercise their lawful rights to free speech...
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By Diana West on
Saturday, May 02, 2015 7:58 AM
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The AP's Edward Kennedy, who believed news of the end of World War II belonged to the world, not the Soviet propaganda department.
Almost exactly seventy years ago this week, Allied military censors prevented the Associated Press's Wes Gallagher from filing a story, one week before VE-Day, reporting that American and British armies, sweeping across northern Europe into Germany in the spring of 1945, "could have easily taken Berlin before the Russians did so in May 1945 but for some reason were not allowed to do so." (The same thing went for Vienna and Prague.)
Here is the story and its ramifications, as discussed in American Betrayal, pp 322-326:
So wrote the distinguished...
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By Diana West on
Friday, May 01, 2015 7:41 AM
Every Friday morn at about 9:15, the phone rings: time for the Sam Sorbo Show!
Here, with thanks to Ken Sikorski, is our latest conversation about "Who Is to Blame?" and Geert Wilders.
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By Diana West on
Thursday, April 30, 2015 6:28 AM

Yale men at the Yale Fence
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A new book, The Prime of Life by Steven Mintz, a professor at University of Texas, has come out this spring from Harvard University Press. It comes to my attention because often when it is mentioned, so is The Death of the Grown-Up -- as in today's review in the British paper The Guardian. The review bills The Prime of Life as "the defense of the kidult generation," which, of course, The Death of the Grown-Up cuttingly critiques.
...
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By Diana West on
Tuesday, April 28, 2015 5:21 AM

The Blame Game is not a game. It is serious business, particularly at this point of implosion. We still have the capabilities to think and speak and even act, but they should no longer be regarded as an open-ended proposition.
At this perhaps precious moment, then, it is important not to waste the opportunity to assess blame (and, best case scenario, regroup) in yet another aerobic exercise of venting at the Left (self-congratulation). Especially not when we -- our side, not the Left -- are to blame.
I refer to ... everything.
That's right. Whatever it is, it's not really Obama's fault, the DNC's fault, Al Sharpton's fault, even (gasp) the media's fault, etc. Not entirely, to be sure. After all, like Tiggers, Obamas do what Obamas do best. The DNC, Sharpton, the media do what they do best. The Right Wing, however, fails to do what it should do best -- fails to behave according the...
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By Diana West on
Saturday, April 18, 2015 11:07 AM

Believe it or not, another attack on American Betrayal -- the fifth sixth* such attack on me and my book at National Review Online, which started on the high road back in 2013 by questioning whether I was "house-trained."
[*I just noticed that NRO forgot to include its infamous "house-trained" attack in its queue of "Related" stories.]
And now?
For new readers, a note of explanation. I am once again compelled to respond to attacks as distinguished from normal, even critical reviews. After, by my count, 21 --...
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By Diana West on
Monday, April 13, 2015 4:43 PM

Once upon a time in 1970, fewer than 1 in 21 residents in the USA was foreign-born.
Now we approach a ratio more like 1 in 7, or even 1 in 6, or even higher.
What kind of "nation" is that? No nation. No wonder the social engineers implementing this deographic war on our nation have effectively erased our borders.
Breitbart reports:
Unless Congress moves to limit current legal immigration rates, the U.S. will add at least 10 million more legal immigrants over the next decade — more than the combined populations of seven major cities, according to GOP staffers on the Senate’s Immigration subcommittee.
"Unless Congress moves," say hellow ("hola") to 10-plus million new legal immigrants in the near...
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By Diana West on
Friday, April 10, 2015 4:40 AM

I titled this post "The Statue of Lars Vilks" although no such statue exists -- not in Lars Vilks' native Sweden or anywhere else.
I wanted to see what the words looked like; if, in black and white, they provide the formula for a society conceived in liberty and dedicated to preserving it.
Such a society might well commission a statue to honor this "mild-mannered, friendly and polite professor of art history," as Fjordman describes the 68-year-old cartoonist who so believes in freedom of speech that he never stops exercising it -- no matter how many threats, assaults, and attacks on his life he must endure. These attacks come not from other believers in liberty, of course, but from believers in Islam.
Prime ministers and presidents who also believe in liberty would honor Vilks -- just as they would have already honored Geert Wilders of the Netherlands and Lars Hedegaard of Denmark and Elisabeth...
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By Diana West on
Wednesday, April 08, 2015 5:33 AM

Spring is here and I just ordered the lovely bird book above.
Why not? I love garden birds -- and I also love (in a different way) Soviet agents. It turns out that author Henry Hill Collins, Jr. was an ornithologist and a Soviet agent! With his BA from Princeton '26 and MA from Harvard '27, Collins was also an American blueblood whose line went so far back it hit the Magna Carta.
What a truly epic disagrace, then, that Collins was also a core member of the key Communist cell known as the Ware Group. This was the Washington cell of Americans loyal to Stalin's regime organized by Harold "Hal"...
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