The Death of the Grown-Up | Diana West > Blog Archive - Obama's Kids: Stooping to New Presidential Lows

"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

This week's syndicated column:

Not one of the 23 executive orders that President Obama signed -- flanked by schoolchildren whom none of us want to see murdered and before an audience that included relatives of murdered schoolchildren -- would have prevented the massacre at Sandy Hook.

Did the main idea of the sentence above come through -- that the president's latest orders would not have stopped the heavily armed monster who entered a Connecticut school last month and killed 20 children and six adults? Or was your brain overwhelmed by anxiety signals arising from the imagery of vulnerable youngsters?

The overwhelming imagery is no accident. It's emotional manipulation, and I've never seen a more lowdown exercise of it than the White House's "gun violence" event this week. What President Obama put the nation through was the propaganda equivalent of a slasher movie, a disgustingly crude attempt to jam our emotional buttons and frighten us into surrendering more of our rights to live free of centralized government surveillance and control.

Such pandering, of course, fails to address the cultural factors -- godlessness, fatherlessness, a pornographically violent "entertainment"-media complex -- that drive this most transgressive form of violence. Postmodern developments all, they help us see why, for example, well-armed settlers opening up the West didn't ever shoot up the village school.

Here's what I call "Obama's Choice": Do Americans want happy, live children or some old constitutional provision? Do members of Congress -- the president's main target along with the Constitution -- want an "'A' grade from the gun lobby," as he put it, or to give parents "peace of mind when they drop their child off for first grade"? Gazing into the shiny button-eyes of the four children on stage, America heard the president say: "If there is even one thing we can do to reduce this violence, if there's even one life that can be saved, then we've got an obligation to try."

Yes, yes, yes, we reply. Yes, Mr. President, go ahead and sign the executive orders that put in place what amounts to a national database of kooks as defined by federal bureaucrats who consider conservative beliefs and military personnel to be crazy automatically. Yes, empower and encourage our doctors to add to that registry innocent patients who have committed no crime but who, like returning veterans, may have sought counseling. (Meanwhile, continue to permit confidentiality laws to silence attorneys with knowledge of clients' actual criminality.) Outlaw the sale of high-powered guns and ammunition -- equalizers in the face of home invaders, terrorists, drug gangs and, yes, a democratic government turned tyrannical. And tell me again why the Department of Homeland Security -- emphasis on "homeland" -- acquired more than 1 billion rounds of ammunition (including hundreds of thousands of hollow-point bullets) last year? And why did DHS order an additional 200,000 hollow-point bullets in December? What possible domestic threat requires a stockpile like that?

But I am looking away from the hearts and bunnies at the White House. I am supposed to be concentrating on the letters from little ones who, in the wake of Sandy Hook, President Obama said, asked him to take such measures. As the president put it: "On the letter that Julia wrote me, she said, 'I know that laws have to be passed by Congress, but I beg you to try very hard.'"

There was a burst of laughter, perhaps unexpected, given that the president was winding up for a solemn pledge. "Julia, I will try very hard," Obama continued, taking up his gauntlet against enemy-Congress on behalf of Julia and her four brothers and sisters. As the president also told us she wrote: "I know I would not be able to bear the thought of losing any of them."

Nor would any of us -- the normal human reaction. What is now a disgraceful part of American history is the spectacle of a president harnessing this normal human reaction to drive his own power grab. This makes his calculation far worse than President Jimmy Carter's famous invocation in 1980 of his 13-year-old daughter, Amy, as his moral goad against nuclear weaponry in a debate with Ronald Reagan. Thirty years ago, Americans in the debate audience burst into laughter, too. In those days, however, derision over the president's emotional pandering stuck. This time around, the derision in the room seemed aimed at Congress.

Obama went on. "But she's right. The most important changes we can make depend on congressional action. ... Get them on the record. ... Ask them what's more important, doing whatever it takes to get an 'A' grade from the gun lobby that funds their campaigns, or giving parents some peace of mind when they drop their child off for first grade."

Outside the claustrophobic White House bubble -- definitely not a gun-free zone -- Americans are as concerned as the president with protecting their children. Even more so, I think, since schools attended by the president's daughters and other children of privilege are protected by armed guards. Why one solution for elites and one solution for everyone else? Famously, Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association has asked this same question -- and been crucified for doing so by media stars and politicians whose children also attend well-guarded schools.

The NRA produced a commercial to ask this question that the media not only refuse to ask but gnash their teeth over: "Are the president's kids more important than yours? Then why is he 'skeptical' about putting armed security in our schools when his kids are protected by armed guards at their schools?"

White House spokesman Jay Carney decried the NRA for using the president's children as "pawns in a political fight," even on the very day the president was using all of our children as pawns in his war on the Constitution. Carney went on, projecting outrage: "But to go so far as to make the safety of the president's children the subject of an attack ad is repugnant and cowardly."

The NRA wasn't attacking the "safety of the president's children." The NRA, in fact, called for a similar level of safety for everyone's children.

The president's problem is that would leave the Constitution intact.