I am happy to say that American Betrayal continues to be reviewed, debated and discussed widely. I couldn't have been more pleasantly surprised than when I noticed this charming Twitter pic and profile above -- a soulmate, clearly, but no relation!
The book is also, I gather from Twitter, making the rounds in The Netherlands, and I just posted a new letter in Reader's Corner from Kiev, Ukraine. In December, a letter, also posted in Reader's Corner, came in from St. Petersburg, Russia.
Recently, along with unprecedentedly lavish coverage in The New Criterion's December and January issues, a lengthy essay on American Betrayal by economics professor Steven Kates in Quadrant's (Aus.) January issue, and brand new, related research in Breitbart News by the eminent M. Stanton Evans (expanded upon in Human Events here) titled "McCarthyism by the Numbers," I now find a positive review of my book in the Winter 2013 issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons by John Dale Dunn, M.D., J.D.
Excerpt:
After reading American Betrayal and much of the vituperation generated by neconservative "consensus" historians, I conclude that we cannot ignore what West has demonstrated through evidence and cogent argument...
The book is also treated anew in Quadrant's February issue in an essay about Marxist infiltration in Australian media by Geoffrey Luck here. Given my admiration for the work of Quadrant's editor Keith Windschuttle, this is a happy second occasion.
In fact, I quote Windschuttle in American Betrayal, excerpted below. The following passage helps illuminate a central theme of the book.
The scene is the aftermath of Alger Hiss' sensational sworn public testimony in 1948 denying everything Whittaker Chambers had previously said about him, also in sensational sworn public testimony. The passing reference to Orwell and Koestler's conversation about "neutral fact" is explained elsewhere the book.
From American Betrayal, p. 179:
... Whittaker Chambers, closeted in his Time magazine office in New York City, received a panicky phone call from one of the committee’s chief investigators in Washington.
Are you sure, he asked, "in a voice in which I caught the unmistakable note of desperation,” Chambers would write, “are you sure you are right about Alger Hiss?”
Of course, Chambers reassured him in the course of the jittery call.
“You couldn’t have mistaken him for somebody else?”
“Of course, I haven’t mistaken him,” Chambers said. Later, Chambers wrote, “What stunned me as I stared at my desk, and was to puzzle me for some time to come, was a simple question: ‘How did Alger Hiss, in the face of the facts that we both knew, and under the eyes of some 150 million people, suppose that he could possibly get away with it?’ ”93
It was a good question—if, that is, you were coming from an Enlightenment world of fixed laws, legal and moral, a world where objectivity was magnetic north, a world that was already a dying star. Chambers’s years in the Communist underground notwithstanding, his question came from this fin-de-siècle Retroland. Hiss, meanwhile, was opening brave new territory where facts were juggling balls, truth was strategically expendable, and ideology and raw power set life’s course. Deconstructionists would follow. They had to. A school of systematic thought had to emerge to reflect and enforce the pressures to abort the search for objective truth.
Such a search for objective truth had previously defined Knowledge at least since the ancient Greeks came along, and, as Keith Windschuttle tells it, sought to replace the mythologies other cultures used to affirm their “sense of self-worth and place in the cosmos” with something brand-new: the attempt “to record the truth about the past.”94 This became what Orwell described as “neutral fact,” which, by his observation, ended in 1936 in Spain, and Koestler agreed. Today, the Greek example is forgotten, or dismissed as that of the deadest of white males, and mythologies of self-worth are back in vogue, underscored by the widely shared assumption that truth isn’t “within the historian’s grasp,” as Windshuttle puts it. This is what our children are taught in school, perpetuating this mythology of mythologies. This means, perhaps, we might look back on Alger Hiss and see not just an epic traitor who committed treason but also a pioneer of a shamelsss future. Like an early performance artist, Hiss, sans NEA grant, smeared lies all over naked, defenseless, truth, successfully cutting us all off from the facts, from reality, from our history.
Yes, we are looking at another virtuoso performance—but whoever would have imagined Uncle Sam himself playing in support.
***
Now, for an excerpt from Quadrant's Feburary issue:
In American Betrayal, one of the most important – and terrifying – books published in the last few months, Diana West details the extent of Russian penetration of the U.S. Government from Depression years to today, and its consequent influence on policy and culture.
...
Naturally, West has copped a barrage from the Marxist left in America. She’s been called “deranged”, “right-wing loopy” and “McCarthy’s heiress.” But she hasn’t been making it all up. She documents the allegations impressively, and draws on acknowledged authorities such as M. Stanton Evans’ book on Joseph McCarthy, Blacklisted by History.
The sinking feeling that comes from reading American Betrayal is not due only to the enormity of the treachery by Marxists, fellow travellers and social democrat sympathisers, but the fact that it has been whitewashed, excused and forgotten, while those who stood up to expose the villains have been vilified, lampooned and marginalised.
About that "barrage" -- or, better, disinformation campaign, as Jed Babbin has called it.
This, too, continues to inspire commentary, both public and private.
I remain very fortunate that the essential US counter-jihad site, Gates of Vienna, stepped to the fore and throughout served as the lead chronicler of these serial assaults, as well as ad hoc discussion board.
I belatedly link to a review published at Gates of Vienna last November -- "American Betrayal: A Swedish Perspective" by Marten Gantelius, whose trenchant anaylsis of the language used against me -- "the language of violence," as he called it -- I appreciated way back at the begining (and quote in The Rebuttal, my 22,000-word debunking of every smear, distortion and fabrication).
Recently, Gantelius put together for Gates of Vienna an alarming examination of a shockingly successful campaign to kill a book by a Swedish psychologist. As the introduction to the documents Gantelius assembled puts it, "what happened to Dr. Sjögren reminded him of the cordon sanitaire that was drawn around Diana West and her book American Betrayal. The ideological issue was different, but the methods used were the same. And, in the Swedish case, they were more successful."
I'll say. In the Swedish case, consensus academics at the Swedish Psychological Association were able slander the psychologist and her book, A Child's Right to a Family Life, an examination of the harm done to parent-alienated (mainly fatherless) families -- a red line in high-intensity-feminist Sweden. In the end, her publisher actually withdrew her book. Who knows: This may well have been my detractors' dream -- one of my detractors contacted St. Martin's Press about American Betrayal, and another wrote publicly, "She should not have written this book." Thankfully, nothing like that happened here.
So what exactly did happen and why? Only my detractors know for sure, and, also thankfully, that's something they have to live with, not me. Others speculate. Today, at Ruthfully Yours -- another stalwart defender of American Betrayal -- Max Friedman, a longtime researcher into Communism, has an interesting contribution along those lines, posted here.
More to come, I'm sure. Without doubt, the research behind and ahead of American Betrayal remains a work in progress for many: a remantling of our past -- with facts, not fairy tales. I look forward to it.