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American Betrayal

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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

If the Soviet penetration of Washington, D.C., was so wide and so deep that it functioned like an occupation …
 
If, as a result of that occupation, American statecraft became an extension of Soviet strategy …
 
If the people who caught on – investigators, politicians, defectors – and tried to warn the American public were demonized, ridiculed and destroyed for the good of that occupation and to further that strategy …
 
And if the truth was suppressed by an increasingly complicit Uncle Sam …

Would you feel betrayed?

Now available from St. Martin's Press, American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character

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Oct 23

Written by: Diana West
Wednesday, October 23, 2013 2:45 AM 

From National Review Online today:

Conrad Black has now published three attacks at National Review Online against my book American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character, but I would bet the $4.1 million Black has to pay the U.S. government in fines related to his fraud conviction that he hasn’t read the book.

In his most recent attack — this time against a positive review of American Betrayal by famed Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky and Pavel Stroilov at Breitbart News — Black mocks Bukovsky for, in Black’s telling, imagining that FDR believed that the capitalist and Communist systems were on a path of “convergence.”

“Convergence theory” shows up in more than half a dozen listings in American Betrayal’s index. Nonetheless, Black writes:

Where it [the review] all starts to go horribly wrong is in the sudden metamorphosis of Duranty into Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who, Bukovsky has learned, presumably from whatever unimaginable emanations possessed him in his decades of brave resistance to Communism and in his apparently incomplete convalescence since, sought a “convergence” of Stalinist socialism with American constitutional government.” (Italics added.) 

Before I establish the well-founded points of FDR’s oft-stated belief in “convergence,” I will note for readers that this same exercise — demonstrating the baselessness of an attack on my book (or, in this case, on a positive review of my book) — is, to date, the main mechanism of “debate” about American Betrayal. (See The Rebuttal: Defending American Betrayal from the Book-Burners for the gruesome details.) Distortion, fabrication, sloppiness — these are the hallmarks of “discussion.” While I realize American Betrayal’s findings are shocking (they were to me as I uncovered them), I still rather expected the book to be debated civilly, and not continually mauled. 

I will mention for readers who have only seen the claw marks that Bukovsky and Stroilov, both scholars of Soviet subversion, have called American Betrayal “huge and brilliant.” I will also add — because my detractors never do — that M. Stanton Evans, the celebrated conservative author and foremost expert on the McCarthy era, has called American Betrayal a “long-needed answer to court histories that obscure key facts about our backstage war with Moscow.” Evans has himself written an article about the campaign against my book at CNSNews.com titled “In Defense of Diana West.”

No comment from the commentariat at the larger outlets over this heated clash, however, which is noteworthy in itself. A battle royale is joined over a book with “names” on both sides — not your everyday occurrence — and none of the capital-p pundits says (dares say?) a word about it, not even to write a book review.

But if the reasons for the silence remain somewhat murky, the point about FDR subscribing to the theory that the U.S. and Soviet systems were moving toward each other is clear and traceable to many sources — supporters, administration officials, and political opponents alike. To Cardinal Spellman, senior State Department official Sumner Welles, House Un-American Activities Committee chairman Representative Martin Dies, among others, FDR spoke about convergence — even, as we find in their writings about these discussions, using the same terminology.

“He once said to me that he believed that if the world could remain at peace the following phenomena would probably take place,” Sumner Welles, who knew FDR well, wrote in his 1946 book Where Are We Heading? (quoted in American Betrayal). Roosevelt believed, Welles continued, that “if one took the figure 100 as representing the difference between American democracy and Soviet Communism in 1917, with the United States at 100 and the Soviet Union at 0, American democracy might eventually reach the figure of 60 and the Soviet system might reach the figure of 40. . . . He felt, therefore, even though the internal systems of the two countries could never conceivably become identical, some progress toward approximation had already been made, and that approximation made for a better understanding between the peoples of the two nations. He regarded this trend as making it more likely that no fundamental conflict between the countries need ever become inevitable, provided Soviet Communism had permanently abandoned its doctrine of world revolution.”

That was one dangerously absurd provision — and, not at all incidentally, a key point of Soviet propaganda, as William C. Bullitt, former U.S. ambassador to Moscow, painstakingly argued to FDR (also explained in American Betrayal). This same false provision would underlie all manner of U.S.-USSR interactions for half a century, including “peaceful coexistence,” arms control, “détente,” “perestroika,” etc. In truth, the USSR never abandoned its doctrine of world revolution. FDR, however, believed otherwise — he certainly believed that Stalin had changed, as Bullitt publicly reported in 1948 (also discussed in American Betrayal). Describing a 1943 meeting with FDR in which Bullitt argued that there was no evidence of any such change, that FDR’s continuing course of Soviet appeasement would lead to a Soviet empire in Europe supplanting the Nazi Reich (exactly what happened), Bullitt quoted FDR as replying:

Bill, I don’t dispute your facts, they are accurate. I don’t dispute the logic of your reasoning. I just have a hunch that Stalin is not that kind of a man. Harry says he’s not and that he doesn’t want anything in the world but security for his country, and I think that if I give him everything I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace.

“Harry,” by the way, was Harry Hopkins, whose dossier, American Betrayal explains, contains credible evidence that he was serving Stalin as an agent of influence while simultaneously serving as FDR’s closest adviser during the war. (Black, however, dismisses Hopkins as a foreign-policy non-entity.)

On September 3, 1943, then-archbishop Francis Spellman spent 90 minutes with FDR, later writing an aide-mémoire about their conversation. In it, Spellman recounts the disturbing fact that FDR was already resigned to leave half of Europe to Soviet domination — at a time in the war when Stalin’s Red Army was still inside Russia (also recounted in American Betrayal). What if the war ended before Stalin came into Europe? Why was FDR already assuming the USSR would turn half of Europe into vassal states? Spellman further states Roosevelt’s formula for convergence, including terms identical to those that Sumner Welles related. “The European people will simply have to endure the Russian domination,” Spellman reported FDR saying, “in the hope that in ten or 20 years they will be able to live with the Russians. Finally, he [FDR] hopes, the Russians will get 40 percent of the capitalist regime, the capitalists will retain only 60 percent of their system and so an understanding will be possible.”

As noted in American Betrayal, former representative Martin Dies (D., Texas) discusses Spellman’s contemporaneous 1943 account in Dies’s 1963 memoir, writing, “His aide mémoire is completely in accord with the opinions Roosevelt expressed to me over the years.”  

In his 1998 book Caught Between Roosevelt & Stalin, history professor Dennis J. Dunn traces the impact of FDR’s belief in “convergence” on U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union. (I discuss Dunn’s work in my book as well.) One of Dunn’s main sources is Averell Harriman, who served as an FDR adviser and U.S. ambassador in Moscow. “Harriman explained Roosevelt’s outlook to me in a personal interview in Washington, D.C., on 19 November, 1981.” Dunn writes, noting that Harriman earlier referenced “Roosevelt’s advocacy of convergence” in his own 1975 memoir, and again in a lengthy interview Harriman gave to Encounter magazine in 1981. Dunn adds that Harriman “emphasized the importance of the theory of convergence in explaining Roosevelt’s policies. I found his explanation convincing.”

In short, what Bukovsky and Stroilov were discussing are not “unimaginable emanations” but facts from the historical record.

Shocking? Yes, but no less shocking than other examples of Black’s loose grip on the subject matter, as when he dismisses arch-Soviet spy Alger Hiss altogether.

Black writes: “Alger Hiss had no influence, ceased his incompetent efforts at espionage in the mid Thirties, and did not exchange a word with Roosevelt at Yalta; his only contribution was to recommend, unsuccessfully, that the USSR not have three votes in the United Nations general assembly.” 

And thus we come not full circle, but 180 degrees. National Review, the magazine founded by William F. Buckley, whose moral hero was Whittaker Chambers, is now whitewashing Soviet military-intelligence agent Alger Hiss. Additionally, this magazine, whose founding editors were in part drawn together by their philosophical and political opposition to Roosevelt, may now claim to be the keeper of FDR’s flame.

It’s all rather strange — but what isn’t in this “debate”?

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"A sterling example of penetrating counterintelligence analysis, the kind one seldom sees issuing from intelligence circles, let alone from a private researcher. Diana’s previous books mark her as one who goes far beyond the usual academic policy analysis, to penetrate to the heart of hidden history that seldom makes it to the light of day. Reading The Red Thread prompted me to recall Honoré de Balzac’s observation that there are two histories: the official one, mendacious; and the secret history, shameless, but the real cause of events. Diana West plumbs the depths of Balzac’s secret history in a way that surfaces the realities of an ideological underworld that too many deny and would rather not see exposed. Diana West is a one-person intelligence agency."

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-- Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House, Fox News contributor, and author of numerous bestselling books.

"This fascinating new book by Diana West, a leading expert on the history of American communism, offers intriguing insights into the anti-Trump conspiracy. Ms. West teases out highly interesting, and disturbing, facts about many of the anti-Trump conspiracy players. But more importantly, she lays out a larger framework in which to view the philosophical drivers of many of the conspirators, who fall into the Marxist/globalist/collectivist political camp. This is in direct opposition to the capitalist/nationalist/individualistic political camp led by Donald Trump. Trump was anathema to these individuals because he represented an existential threat to the globalist enterprise, which has been so long in the making." 

-- William Marshall, Senior Investigator, Judicial Watch, and an intelligence analyst and investigator in the government, private, and non-profit sectors for more than 30 years.

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