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"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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Oct
18
Written by:
Diana West
Thursday, October 18, 2007 10:27 AM
Back from New Haven where I spoke at a Master's tea to a pleasantly attentive group which--following my D of the G presentation about what happens when an infantilized society that PC-censors itself meets an expansionist Islam that demands such censorship as a point of law--surprised me. Where I expected to hear the undergraduates tell me that, say, Islam wasn't all bad, that I had oversimplified, what emerged instead was a consensus that the West wasn't all good, that I had oversimplified.
As the Yale Daily News later put it, "Some students said West blamed Americans for censoring themselves in thought but ignored the censorship she exploys in her own speech by concentrating only on the positive aspects of Western civilization."
As I pondered this--actually wrote this week's column on the topic--it occurred to me that for these students, liberty, equality before the law, freedom of conscience, and the like, don't symbolize the West. These privileged youths may enjoy all these things from their elegant digs at the center of Western influence, but they resolutely fail to associate such marvels with Western influence.
So, cultural relativism is alive and well on campus--what else is new? Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind is 20 years old, and cultural relativism had been with us for some time before that. I picked up the book again recently, and homed in on the part about the contemporary moral virtue of "openness."
Bloom wrote of students who couldn't defend their opinion, who instead pointed out other opinions and other cultures: "What right, they ask, do I or anyone else have to say one is better than the others?" He offered as an example a question he posed "to confute them and make them think." Such as: "If you had been a British administrator in India, would you have let the natives under your governance burn the widow at the funeral of a man who had died?" The students, Bloom wrote, would remain silent or reply that the British shouldn't have been there in the first place.
The polar opposite point of view was robustly and famously expressed by Sir Charles James Napier, a real life British administrator of India in the early 19th century. As the British writer Douglas Murray related recently in The Spectator magazine, Sir Charles had a very different reaction on being confronted by this same Hindu practice of suttee--burning a widow alive at her husband's funeral.
"When confronted with Hindu demands for a lifting of the ban on suttee," Murray writes, "the general famously replied: ‘You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: When men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.’ "
Murray brought this British stalwart into an essay avowing the superiority of Western values, a proposition he later helped defend, along with Ibn Warraq (whose invaluable new book, Defending the West, is now available), at a recent public debate in London. Shockingly enough, it wasn't just campus relativism a la Yale that Murray trotted out dear old Sir Charles for salutary contrast.
As Murray wrote: "At a school in east London recently, a student perfectly calmly expressed his opinion to me — and in front of his principal — that girls who did not cover themselves in 7th-century desert-garb would be raped."
Obviously, such a student isn't masochistically (and mechanically) agonizing over the supposed evils of the West; he is brazenly advocating the bona fide evils of the East.
Murray continued: "It was salutary to speak with his headteacher afterwards as he boasted of the broad range of opinions at his school."
And therein lies the cultural relativism--the infinite openness to everything, including violent assault.
The story went on: "Advocating the rape of fellow pupils strikes me as an unwelcome addition to the debate. But the principal’s desperate values-equality was an expression of a dying trend. In the face of one particular demographic which seems not at all afraid of being branded ‘culturally imperialist’, the West’s inability to assert the superiority of its values is beginning to look not so much coy as selfish."
Advocating the rape of fellow pupils is no addition to the debate, of course; it is evidence that the debate has come to halt and the thugs are winning. And the West's inability to defend its values isn't coy or selfish but just plain suicidal.
Maybe, if our Yalies just study the defects of the West hard enough, soon they will have just as "broad a range of opinons" as they have in English schools....
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