
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, January 29, 2014 8:54 AM

The Washington Post's Walter Pincus has extracted some other items of interest from Robert Gates' book, Duty (noted earlier here). These include the forgotten fact that the Bush administration discussed withdrawing the "surge" in Iraq even as it was getting underway, much as the Obama administration would do more emphatically vis a vis Afghanistan. (Similarly, a withdrawal date from Iraq was set by Bush.)
Also this:
Another Gates disclosure provides another lesson: information about Syria building in 2005 what turned out to be a North Korean-designed nuclear reactor capable of producing plutonium during the Bush administration.
Though the United States considered Syria a high-priority intelligence target, it was Israel that supplied the compelling evidence in spring 2007 about its nuclear activities. Gates, a former CIA director, said this represented “a significant failure on...
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By Diana West on
Friday, January 24, 2014 2:34 PM

This week's syndicated column
Two Iraqi men in their 20s have been convicted of a bloody sex crime in Colorado that left the victim, a woman in her 50s, in need of immediate surgery and a colostomy bag. Three other Iraqi men, also in their 20s,were convicted on lesser charges as accessories.
Four points set this case apart. First, there is its brutality: Law enforcement officers describe the July 2012 assault as "rare" and "horrific" and "one of the worst in Colorado history." Second, all of these men once assisted U.S. military forces in Iraq as informants and interpreters. Third, every one of them received permanent residency status in the U.S., due in part to efforts made by U.S. military members on their behalf. Fourth, this extraordinary case and the ties that bind it to the U.S. military and the war in Iraq have received little coverage.
Most of what the public knows...
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By Diana West on
Tuesday, January 21, 2014 2:40 PM

At Breitbart News today -- the 64th anniversay of the conviction of Alger Hiss, by the way -- M. Stanton Evans has published a brand new article, "`McCarthyism by the Numbers." Besides laying to rest the canard that Sen. Joseph McCarthy's investigations only netted a "few small fry," it concretely strengthens the defense of American Betrayal against all those tired, postmodern, juju-charges of "McCarthyism."
Which isn't to say, of course, that I don't take "McCarthy's heiress" as a compliment.
"`McCARTHYISM' BY THE NUMBERS"
by M. Stanton Evans
The orchestrated attack on Diana West’s important book, American Betrayal, has been brutal and unseemly, but in one respect at...
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By Diana West on
Monday, January 20, 2014 9:30 AM
 
In 2012, five Iraqi men in their 20s were arrested on charges in Colorado related to the extremely bloody rape and assault of a woman, who has been variously described as elderly or middle-aged. It was a sex crime so violent law enforcement describe it as "rare" and "horrific" and "one of the worst in Colorado history."
Finally, the last defendant in the crime now comes to trial. His name is Jasim Ramadon, above in orange. A decade ago, Jasim, known as "Steve-O," helped US troops i.d. Saddam loyalists, including his father.
UPDATE: Jasim Ramadon has been convicted on multiple counts of sexual assault.
As the disturbing realization...
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By Diana West on
Sunday, January 19, 2014 3:01 PM

After endorsing the gubernatorial run of conservative California Assemblyman Tim Donnelly, a Tea Party favorite who opposes illegal immigration, actress Maria Conchita Alonso "abruptly" left the cast of a San Francisco play this week.
From the local CBS story:
The actress was to perform next month at the Brava Theater Center in San Francisco’s Mission District in a Spanish-language version of “The Vagina Monologues,” scheduled for a run from February 14th through 17th. The show is being produced by none other than Eliana Lopez, wife of San Francisco Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi.
“We really cannot have her in the show, unfortunately,” Lopez told KPIX 5. She said Alonso abruptly resigned from the cast on Friday, given the backlash on the immigration issue.
“Of course she has the right to say whatever she wants. But we’re in the middle of the Mission. Doing what...
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By Diana West on
Sunday, January 19, 2014 3:51 AM

One of my favorite sites, Tundra Tabloids, is currently under a massive DDOS assault launched by enemies of free speech. No worries. After armoring up, TT will be back online.
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By Diana West on
Saturday, January 18, 2014 7:42 AM

I've been mulling how -- or even whether -- to mark the appearance of six entries on American Betrayal in the January 2014 issue of The New Criterion. The issue contains an essay by editor Roger Kimball and five letters, all devoted to my book, or, rather, to Andrew C. McCarthy's review of American Betrayal, which appeared in the December 2013 issue.
Why so much ink? The answer is simple. Andy McCarthy, the celebrated former federal prosecutor, noted author and commentator, had the temerity to write positive things about my book in his December review. Like a clanging bell to Pavlov's dog, this review drove Ronald Radosh and Conrad Black to churn out letters to the editor explaining to McCarthy the error of his ways. By my count, this becomes the fifth, maybe even the sixth piece by Radosh, and the fourth or fifth by Black. Harvey Klehr and John Haynes also write in general protest. I...
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By Diana West on
Friday, January 17, 2014 2:21 PM

All I can say is that it's been way too long since Tom Stone has published a guest-blog here.
"Regarding Michael O’Sullivan’s review of Lone Survivor in the January 10, 2014 Washington Post, Weekend Section."
by Tom Stone
I don’t know if Mr. O’Sullivan has ever been in the military, let alone in combat. Let us not get into an argument over whether we should go to war, for whatever reason, this movie is not about that. War is a terrible thing, has been for thousands of years, an unavoidable consequence of man’s ignorance, of man’s inhumanity to man.
War is in our genes and will never cease. I dare anyone to argue that.
I have seen war in Vietnam, and like my father and my father-in-law in WWII, and my son in Iraq and Afghanistan, experienced the worst...
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By Diana West on
Friday, January 17, 2014 7:21 AM

March 1940 NKVD memo by Beria, released by Russia in 2010, proposing mass execution of thousands of Polish POWs. Signed approval by Stalin, K. Voroshilov, V. Molotov, and A. Mikoyan. Signatures in left margin are M. Kalinin and L. Kaganovich. Soviet guilt for this massacre was known to US and GB beginning in 1943, but Allies joined Stalin's conspiracy of silence.
This week's syndicated column
The power of history to speak to us depends on our ability to hear it. When we are deaf to its secrets, or too confused or conditioned to decipher them, we miss the opportunity to be empowered by them. We thus fail to overcome the propaganda our own government, like the dictatorships we revile, has all too often deceived us with.
I am struck by this aura of static around a sensational new discovery. Researcher and author...
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By Diana West on
Wednesday, January 15, 2014 9:01 AM

RLN.fm, a news site described to me as "Russian libertarian" (yes, you read right), has included me among 20 "important American conservatives." I tossed the site's Russian-language write-up into Google Translate to learn this recognition comes due to American Betrayal.
It is wonderful to see how far and wide American Betrayal has already traveled -- as far as Australia, where a positive review is now the top featured article online in the January 2014 issue of Quadrant, edited by Keith Windshuttle, and now even to Russia. I recently learned that a Polish-language translation of American...
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By Diana West on
Friday, January 10, 2014 4:30 AM

DVIDS photo by Lance Cpl. Jason Morrison of Marines patrolling Sangin, 2012
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Excuse me while I defend President Obama.
This doesn’t happen often, if ever at all. But this Robert Gates story, whipping through Washington like wildfire, feels like smoke in our eyes.
It all started with an article by Bob Woodward in the Washington Post about the former secretary of defense’s new memoir, “Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War.” Gates, Woodward writes, had concluded “by early 2010 (that) the president ‘doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the war (in Afghanistan) to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out.’”
Getting out: my one, undoubtedly accidental, convergence with Obama. But I digress.
Woodward continues: “Leveling one of the more serious charges that a defense secretary could make against a commander in chief sending forces into combat, Gates...
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By Diana West on
Wednesday, January 08, 2014 6:26 PM

An interesting new review of American Betrayal from the January 2014 issue of the Australian journal Quadrant, edited by Keith Windshuttle.
"America, the Big Dumb Ox"
by Steven Kates
I have long known Robert Conquest’s three laws of politics, of which the third had always been something of a mystery. One and two I have seen for myself, but the third remained unclear:
1. Everyone is conservative about what they know best.
2. Any organisation not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
3. The simplest way to explain the behaviour of any bureaucratic organisation...
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By Diana West on
Thursday, January 02, 2014 5:50 PM

This week's syndicated column
The reporting on China’s commemoration of the 120th birthday of Mao Zedong all seemed to come from the same angle. Festivities were “understated” (Associated Press). Events were “scaled back” (Reuters). The following headline, which ran on the Fox News website over the AP story, is typical: “China marks Mao’s 120th birthday with low-key celebrations.” The story opens: “China’s leaders bowed three times before a statue of Mao Zedong on the 120th anniversary of his birth Thursday in carefully controlled celebrations that also sought to uphold the market-style reforms that he would have opposed.”
Forget for now the “market-style reforms.” Only three times? How “muted”! That, by the way, was the word CNN used to describe the occasion.
But there’s something wrong with this media picture. Imagine if, on Adolf Hitler’s upcoming 125th birthday, German Chancellor Angela...
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By Diana West on
Tuesday, December 31, 2013 7:35 AM

Another "politically incorrect" book by another enervated member of the Western intelligentsia about that winning strategy for civilizational destruction known as "muticulturalism" -- Trojan horse for Islamization, among other Western nation-killers -- has again prompted a "heated" response in the media. The book is L'Identité Malheureuse, the writer is Alain Finkielkraut, and it is a pair of journalists from the German publication Spiegel who are hot and bothered.
The questions alone suffice to convey the "interview."
SPIEGEL: Mr. Finkielkraut, are you unhappy with today's France?
SPIEGEL: Why is that? Post-national and multicultural sounds rather promising.
SPIEGEL: Aren't you giving in here to the right-wingers' fears of demise? ...
Note: Even with the post-nation upon them, citizens who lament the evident loss are "right-wingers" harboring "fears"...
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By Diana West on
Tuesday, December 31, 2013 4:20 AM

Lenin and Stalin: The ultimate masters of terror and deception
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One of the more difficult tasks for the layman is evaluating the salvos over the worth/worthlessness of one defector or another as they whiz by. Was that heat or light and then it's gone.
Of course, evaluating defectors in and of itself is also one of the more difficult tasks for intelligence experts and professionals. What about when one defector weighs in about another? After an interview with Romanian defector and DIsinformation author Ion Mihail Pacepa sharply dismissing Soviet defector and New Lies for Old author Anatoliy Golitsyn appeared at WND.com this week, I put out some feelers and received the following response from Jeff Nyquist, which I found of great interest. Nyquist is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Inter-American Institute and author of Origins of the Fourth World War....
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By Diana West on
Monday, December 30, 2013 2:34 PM
This is a fascinating piece of 1952 footage featuring former US Ambassador to Poland Arthur Bliss Lane discussing a Big Lie put over by the Soviets in 1943 concerning their 1940 massacre of thousands of Poles in what is known as the Katyn Forest Massacre.
I'm not sure the facts come through clearly in this short exchange, but the basic outline of events is as follows. The Germans uncovered mass graves containing thousands of Polish officers in Katyn Forest near Smolensk in April 1943. The Soviets blamed the Germans for the massacre. The Germans blamed the Soviets. The Soviets -- our bosom allies led by "Uncle Joe" Stalin and appeased at all costs by FDR and Churchill -- were, in fact, guilty. The US and British governments under FDR and Churchill not only accepted this Soviet Lie, they amplified, supported and perpetuated it, and for most of the next decade -- even in the face of overwhleming evidence to the contrary. I discuss this notorious cover-up and its deep implications at length in American Betrayal,...
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By Diana West on
Sunday, December 29, 2013 4:58 AM

Sgt. 1st Class Frank Limtiaco, left, exults as 1st Battalion, 294th Infantry Regiment, Guam Army National Guard leaves Afghanistan on December 28. (U.S. Army National Guard photo by Sgt. Eddie Siguenza/Released)
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The latest National Intelligence Estimate, the Washington Post reports, conveys the glaringly, painfully, tediously obvious: That "gains" in Afghanistan, repetitiously labeled "fragile and reversible" by the vaunted, disgraced, then vaunted again David Petraeus for years, "are likely to have been significantly eroded by 2017, even if Washington leaves behind a few thousand troops and continues bankrolling the impoverished nation, according to officials familiar with the report." (Emphasis added.)
Bring them all home, yesterday. The sooner this...
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By Diana West on
Thursday, December 26, 2013 7:14 PM

In the interest of tying up some loose ends, here are a few updates before the new year.
Principle, what principle?
Remember how 2013 began with much ado over Al Gore’s unseemly $500 million sale of Current TV network to Al Jazeera, aka “the Muslim Brotherhood channel”? Even anything-for-a-buck Time Warner Cable saw fit to drop the Qatar-owned “news” organization from its package. Well, TWC this month announced that, yes, it will be bringing Al Jazeera America into 55 million American homes after all. “Financial terms weren’t disclosed,” USA Today reported.
The Few. The Proud. The Gender-Normed.
Remember how, with a stroke of their pens, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin E. Dempsey decreed that no battlefield mission or military role would be off-limits to women? Call it the Equal Rights Amendment by executive fiat. But hold on about “equal.” As Elaine Donnelly’s Center for Military Readiness has reported, “gender-norming” is the Pentagon’s idea of “equal.”
...
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By Diana West on
Tuesday, December 24, 2013 7:08 AM

My syndicated column:
It’s been weeks now, more than a month in some places, but it is all about to come to an end.
“It” is the soundtrack of the season – Christmas carols. From mall to shining mall, these carols sync American life in a rare shared cultural experience that lasts exactly as long as the holiday shopping season itself. Most of the widely – OK, incessantly – played songs are secular in content: “White Christmas,” “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,” “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” and more. But their glory days run according to the holiday calendar. They vanish from audio range as soon as Christmas Day is over and the sales begin.
Many will say good riddance, having been Frostied, Rudolphed and Silver-Belled to a tinseled pulp by year’s end. But I will confess to regret on seeing many of the great voices of American popular song once again retired to seasonal oblivion. I refer...
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By Diana West on
Friday, December 20, 2013 5:17 AM
This week's syndicated column
Feeling soaked after the gushers of drenching hagiography that crashed over the world on the death of the Nelson Mandela, I have been trying to reconcile what I know with what we are supposed to believe.
For example, I know Mandela was a founder of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the combat wing of the African National Congress, which was closely allied with the South African Communist Party. Starting in 1961, MK carried out hundreds of bombings, including of civilian targets. When Mandela was sentenced to life in prison in 1964, I know his crime was sabotage and related charges – not political opposition to apartheid, as we are supposed to believe, at least if those comparisons to symbols of non-violence, from Martin Luther King to, yes, Jesus Christ, are to stick.
Another founder of MK was Ronnie Kasrils, a Soviet-trained, South African Communist agent and militant, who, decades later, would serve President Mandela and then President Thabo Mbeki (also...
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By Diana West on
Sunday, December 15, 2013 9:48 AM
Michael Goodwin of the New York Post, a former colleague on the old Lou Dobbs shows at CNN, has a column out today interpreting Obama's unseemly behavior at Mandela's funeral. He writes:
But the “selfie” episode also symbolizes the greater global calamity of Western decline. With British prime minister David Cameron playing the role of Obama’s giggling wingman, the “look at me” moment confirms we have unserious leaders in a dangerously serious time.
To say the very least.
Goodwin continues, lambasting Obama & Cameron as empty suits.
Obama and Cameron were posing as world leaders. They will never be confused with FDR and Churchill. The fratboys stand in stark contrast to the days when the “special relationship” meant two great leaders uniting two great countries in the fight for freedom.
Here is the AP photo that runs in the Post illustrating Goodwin's point:
...
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By Diana West on
Friday, December 13, 2013 6:34 AM
I am reposting a couple of columns below from 2009, written at a time before the Obama "surge" in Afghanistan, based on Bush's "surge" in Iraq, was in full swing.
I have long argued that the Bush surge failed (explanation in three parts here). The Obama surge has failed, too, and for the same basic reason that has nothing to do with leaving Iraq "too soon," or, I deeply hope, "leaving Afghanistan" in 2014. It is vital to stress that these failures are not due to the bravery and sacrifice and skill of our military forces. These forces have resolutely fufilled their impossible missions, to say the very least. The failures lie in war-planning and political strategy, ignorance and fecklessness, at the highest levels of the Bush and Obama White Houses, in the Pentagon, and in the Congress that failed to check them.
(To such ignorance and fecklessness we may also add an epic show of institutional callousness.)
...
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By Diana West on
Friday, December 13, 2013 5:34 AM
From the Wash Times.
The setting: House Foreign Affairs Committee.
The Issue: Afghanistan and the transition to fewer U.S. troops post-2014.
The witnesses: James F. Dobbins, State's special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan; Donald Sampler, assistant to the administrator, U.S. Agency for International Development, which provides civilian foreign aid; and Michael Dumont, deputy assistant secretary of defense for Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia.
The questions: How much is the US budget on Afghanistan, and how many Americans have been killed and wounded in the last 12 months?
None of the witnesses knew the answers.
Rowan Scarborough reports:
According to the Pentagon's fiscal 2013 budget, it is spending about $88 billion this year to wage the war in Afghanistan. The State Department...
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By Diana West on
Monday, December 09, 2013 7:13 AM
... I will be speaking and signing books on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings.
On Tuesday, December 10:
Location: Skirball Cultural Center
2701 North Sepulveda Blvd. Los Angeles CA 90049
M. Stanton Evans and Sebastian Gorka will be joining in via Skype.
Admission: $15.00
Parking: Free (on site)
To register and for more information call the AFA office at: 310-444-3085
On Wednesday, December 11:
A dinner followed by a book-signing.
More information here.
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By Diana West on
Sunday, December 08, 2013 3:08 AM
"If he wants to make a lot of money advising Huawei, that's his prerogative," Wolf told the AP. "But he shouldn't be on a critical advisory board that provides intelligence advice on foreign investments in our country."
Once again, thank you, Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA). The story below is a coloring book example of influence -- Chinese Communist influence -- in the US intelligence chain: a paid consultant of a Chinese tech company who is also (until recently) an advisor to US intelligence regarding foreign investment in the US. That this conflict of interest ( a nice phrase for it) did not strike the intelligence establishment as a concern (another nice word) is, of course, the biggest problem of all.
From the AP:
WASHINGTON -- A longtime adviser to the U.S. Director of National Intelligence has resigned after the government learned he has worked since 2010 as a paid consultant for Huawei Technologies Ltd., the Chinese technology company the U.S. has condemned as an espionage...
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By Diana West on
Friday, December 06, 2013 11:36 AM
The following open letter to Pope Francis was written today by Geert Wilders, the leader of the PVV (Partij voor de Vrijheid, Party for Freedom) in the Netherlands.
Your Holiness,
In your recent exhortation Evangelii Gaudium (Paragraphs 247-248) you draw the world’s attention to the indebtedness of Christianity to the Jews and their faith. The exhortation also contains a sharp condemnation of the terrible persecutions which the Jews have endured from Christians in the past.
Your words are words which might inspire many.
Unfortunately, they are in sharp contrast to the expressions of hatred which were voiced last October by the spiritual leader of Sunni Islam, Ahmad Al-Tayeb, the Grand Imam of the Al-Azhar Institute in Cairo.
During an interview, aired on Egyptian television on October 25, Grand Imam Ahmad Al-Tayeb reaffirmed the relevance of Koranic verse 5:82, which states that of all people the Christians are closest to the Muslims, while the Jews...
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By Diana West on
Friday, December 06, 2013 4:16 AM
This week's syndicated column
An extraordinary thing happened in Washington, D.C., this week. Appearing before a House Judiciary subcommittee, several constitutional scholars forthrightly and unmistakably outlined the leading danger to the survival of our constitutional republic: the usurpation of powers by President Barack Hussein Obama.
This wasn’t just me, a non-lawyer, perplexed by how out-of-whack constitutional checks and balances have become and, in particular, how enfeebled the legislative branch is. This wasn’t even Mark Levin, a constitutional lawyer himself, explaining to his radio audience that we are living in “post-constitutional” times.
This was, for starters, Jonathan Turley, a liberal Georgetown law professor, who, noting that he once voted for Obama, nonetheless warned America that the concentration of executive branch powers, having accelerated under George W. Bush, is approaching a crisis under Obama. “The problem with what the president is doing...
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By Diana West on
Tuesday, December 03, 2013 4:36 PM

A little birdie tells me that the upcoming Christmas Books feature at the American Spectator will include American Betrayal on my friend Jed Babbin's list. Babbin, a noted author and commentator, is also former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense, and long familiar to readers of the Spectator, Human Events and National Review.
Jed writes:
Last and certainly not least, American Betrayal by Diana West documents Soviet penetration of the U.S government during World War II and the parallels today to how the “free world” is reacting to Islam. Do not be dissuaded by the controversy that has erupted around the book which, if you insist on complete accuracy, would be characterized...
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By Diana West on
Saturday, November 30, 2013 12:49 PM
A fascinating account from October 28, 2013 of a libel trial in Denmark by Dispatch International editor Lars Hedegaard:
Danish Journalist Jørgen Dragsdahl was a KGB agent
With Friday’s acquittal of history professor Bent Jensen for libel, the Danish Superior Court put an end to a seven-year court battle. Jensen was unanimously and comprehensively exonerated and the court determined that he was ”justified” in calling Jørgen Dragsdahl a KGB agent. Dragsdahl (photo above) was also the man behind the Social Democratic Party’s anti-NATO course during the 1980s. It remains to be seen if the party will take this blow to its reputation lying down.
Here we see the curtain drawn back on the identity of an agent of Soviet influence, a "spy" whose mission under consideration is not the theft of secrets but rather influence on policy -- the topic under consideration in American Betrayal.
It took Professor Bent Jensen (75) – an acknowledged expert on Soviet and Cold War history – seven...
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By Diana West on
Friday, November 29, 2013 9:05 AM
What a publishing coup for the editors at Breitbart News when Vladimir Bukovsky chose to offer them the first chapter of his 1993 book, Judgment in Moscow, for publication for the first time in English. Published in other languages including French (Judgment a Moscou,1995), Random House acquired the book in the 1990s, but, as Bukovsky lays out below, the deal became contingent on deep, transformative revisions he simply refused to make.
As Bukovsky explains, Random House honcho Jason Epstein was determined to shape Bukovsky's remarkable manuscript based on a trove of ultra-secret Soviet documents to fit the conventional wisdom ... the consensus ... the court history of the Cold War -- never mind the evidence as laid out in these stunning documents themselves. Something else Epstein was determined to root out of the manuscript: Bukovsky's interpretation of events, which posits that...
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By Diana West on
Thursday, November 28, 2013 6:52 PM
Note: It is a great pleasure, as always, to publish an original essay by the accomplished Canadian writer, poet, and critic David Solway.
"Is American Racist?"
Oprah Bravely Names the Hatred Roiling the American Body Politic
by David Solway
The United States, as many informed celebrities, experts and political figures would have us believe, is without doubt an impenitently racist nation. Most recently, for example, the divine Oprah told the BBC that the “disrespect” which many Americans feel for Barack Obama has to do with the fact that he is African American. Of course, Obama is not African American, he is half-white, so he is at least as Caucasian American as anything else that he might conceivably be. But this is a mere triviality—he is, after all, what we have come to call a “racialized person.” The skepticism with which many Americans have come to regard Obama plainly has nothing to do with his incompetence, his frivolity, his bald-face lying, his betrayal of America’s...
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By Diana West on
Thursday, November 28, 2013 6:10 PM

This week's syndicated column
When Thanksgiving 2013 is over, will Americans remember it as the holiday when the Obama administration body-snatched their friends and family and turned them into Obamacare robots?
Maybe it happened to your own loved ones. Maybe Cousin Sue brought her favorite cranberry Jell-O mayonnaise salad, but when she opened her mouth, she sounded like Jay Carney on a roll. As for Uncle Al, there’s a reason he kept asking “Have you thought about signing up for health insurance on the new marketplace?” every time it was your turn at Scrabble.
BarackObama.com told them to.
Turning Thanksgiving into Obamacaring was clearly the Big-Brotherly goal of a disturbing project launched by the president’s campaign website, now known as Organization for Change, or OFA. Entitled “Health Care for the Holidays,” this OFA spinoff provides a “sign-up checklist” to take along to grandmother’s house (bring W-2s and paystubs along with those sweet potatoes). It offers “conversation tips” that include such icebreakers as, “When do you plan on signing up?”
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By Diana West on
Wednesday, November 27, 2013 2:37 PM

After positively reviewing American Betrayal at Breitbart News at the end of September, Vladimir Bukovsky and Pavel Stroilov found themselves subject to a flurry of attacks. They have now responded, not in kind but rather to explain why "a more intelligent debate" over the issues raised in American Betrayal is urgently needed despite what they call "the vehement campaign against the book."
From Breitbart News:
"West's American Betrayal Will Make History"
by Vladimir Bukovsky...
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By Diana West on
Wednesday, November 27, 2013 2:53 AM
I forgot to post my most recent column on the disastrous US-Afghan agreement. Since writing it, the loya jirga has approved the agreement, Hamid Karzai has nixed it, and now the Obama administration is trying to get some other Afghan government official to sign it. Meanwhile, a new draft Afghan penal code restores death by stoning for adultery. More making the world safe for sharia -- courtesy Uncle Sucker.
My most recent column
Now that U.S. and Afghan negotiators have agreed on terms of a seemingly open-ended – if reduced – U.S. military presence in Afghanistan, Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the Obama administration alike breathlessly await the verdict of the world’s greatest deliberative body.
No, not the U.S....
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By Diana West on
Monday, November 25, 2013 6:36 AM
Happiness is an Iranian diplomat
---
Today, Andrew Bostom notes for the record: "Nuke Deal Ignores Iran's Genocidal Islamic Jew-Hatred." Quite. He proceeds to fill in these gaping holes in both the deal itself and, almost worse, in its schematic reporting with a historical/religious overview of the past half-millenium of theocratic Shiite rule. This was interupted by 54 years rule of by Pahlavis, father and son, whose Western-oriented and secularizing regime (1925-1979) would be overthrown by Ayatollah Khomeini, the inspiration of Iran's current leader, Rohani.
Bostom writes:
The so-called “Khomeini revolution,” which in 1979 deposed the secular, Western-oriented regime of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, was in reality a mere return...
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By Diana West on
Sunday, November 24, 2013 7:52 AM

Gates of Vienna has published an important declaration from Geert Wilders
Let us raise a flag of truth and liberation
by Geert Wilders
Nine years ago this month, in November 2004, policemen wearing bullet proof vests and carrying machine guns picked me up at my home and drove me to a safe place. This happened two days after the filmmaker and Islam-critic Theo van Gogh was murdered by an Islamic assassin in broad daylight on an Amsterdam street. The police brought me to safety because Islamic criminals had threatened to kill me, too. Because I, too, spoke the truth about Islam, the biggest threat to our freedom and our civilization.
Since that ominous date, nine years ago, I have been forced to live under constant police protection. I have lived in army barracks, prisons and safe houses. The threats continue to this day and have deprived me of my privacy and my freedom.
...
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By Diana West on
Friday, November 22, 2013 3:25 AM

On Wednesday, November 20, I received the Mightier Pen Award from Frank Gaffney and the Center for Security Policy at the Union League Club in Manhattan. It was a truly spectacular event. As I noted in my remarks, in early September when Frank announced the award, which is dedicated to the doctrine of peace through strength, it came not only as a great honor, but also as a welcome missile shield against continuing attacks on me and American Betrayal. I can't thank Frank and CSP enough for their unwavering support and friendship throughout, and now, for this unforgettable celebration.
It was, of course, a career high point to be introduced by the great M. Stanton Evans.
Video of Stan's introduction and my remarks below.
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By Diana West on
Thursday, November 21, 2013 3:17 AM

Anybody home?
--
How's this for a measure of how far our republic has fallen?
The Kerry-Karzai agreement for continued -- no, cesaseless -- American woe and waste in Afghanistan must past muster with the "loya jirga," the assembly of 3,000 tribal "elders" who will be meeting for the next several days in Kabul.
Unless a small group of upstart US senators gets traction, our own representatives are assumed to be a rubber stamp for Obama's latest blunder abroad. Or so it seems. As quoted by the New York Times, Kerry's concern is limited to whether the agreement passes muster with the loya jirga, that world- renowned embodiment of sharia justice and tribal enlightenment.

“We have agreed on the language that would be submitted to a loya jirga, but they have to pass it,” Mr. Kerry said.
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By Diana West on
Thursday, November 21, 2013 2:24 AM

Signed copies of all of my books -- and this lovely mug! -- are now available with the click of a "signed copies" button on this website, located in both the blue navigation bar (above), and in the right-hand column.
Enjoy the brew-haha.
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By Diana West on
Tuesday, November 19, 2013 6:02 AM

Mightier Pen 2013 | Honoring Diana West
Introduction by M. Stanton Evans
November 20, 2013
The Union League Club | 38 E 37th Street, New York City
Registration & Book Signing | 11:30 AM
Luncheon | 12:15 PM
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By Diana West on
Monday, November 18, 2013 7:00 AM
In the amazing-what-you-find-on-Youtube category, here is Soviet Foreign Minister Litvinov expressing his pleasure over FDR's decision to "normalize" relations with Stalin's terror state in November 1933. (Spot the whopper when Litvinov discusses new relations between the two "republics.")
Gates of Vienna has now kindly posted short video clips from Friday's symposium on the 80th anniversay of of this momentously infamous event. Because the Soviet Union was always an abnormal state bent on world revolution, state-engineered terror and genocide against its own citizens, our leaders seeking "normalization" would have to deceive us about such things in order to maintain (and even extend and deepen) "normal" relations. This they did and with catastrophic results, as discussed in American Betrayal.
In a post called "Mantled in Deception and Denial," GoV writes:
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By Diana West on
Sunday, November 17, 2013 7:18 AM
Henrik Raeder Clausen has reviewed American Betrayal for Europe News.
Titled "Down the Rabbit Hole, Again," the review opens:
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.
To those of us in Europe who grew up under the protection of the US nuclear umbrella, with US troops still stationed in Germany to deter a Soviet invasion of our countries, history seemed solid: The heroic Americans saved us from the national socialist menace, rolling back the occupations that had plagued our countries...
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By Diana West on
Saturday, November 16, 2013 4:49 AM

With M. Stanton Evans, Frank Gaffney, and Chris Farrell at Judicial Watch yesterday, discussing the the world inaugurated by FDR's calamitous decision to "normalize" relations with Stalin's genocidal regime on November 16, 1933. Steve Coughlin, also on the panel, is not pictured.
One of the things I saw in even clearer terms in preparing my remarks and listening to the other presentations was the extent to which the epic struggles over what we now quite ignorantly and even superstitiously sum up as "McCarthyism" (tossing a pinch or two of salt over the shoulder) may be seen on one level as an extended cover-up by the executive branch of the calamitous, multi-pronged impact of that 1933 decision.
Not that "McCarthyism" came up on our discussion, the presence on the panel of Stan Evans, author of the seminal book overturning decades of lies about Joe McCarthy notwithstanding. Still, FDR "normalized"...
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By Diana West on
Friday, November 15, 2013 2:58 AM

This week's syndicated column:
On Saturday, Nov. 16, the United States marks a milestone: the 80th anniversary of when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt recognized the Soviet Union and “normalized” U.S.-USSR relations. It is a day that should live in infamy.
But it’s a day hardly anyone has ever heard of. I certainly hadn’t before researching my book, American Betrayal. As I studied the event, however, it became clear that it was on this day 80 years ago that what I call “American betrayal” began. It is the date on which the U.S. government institutionally learned to lie.
After the Bolsheviks seized dictatorial powers in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 1917, four U.S. presidents...
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By Diana West on
Thursday, November 14, 2013 2:55 AM

Center for Security Policy Convenes Symposium on Subversion in High Places:
The Legacy of FDR’s Normalization of Relations with the USSR
Eightieth Anniversary of Deal That Facilitated Penetration of U.S. Government, Society
Washington, DC — Eighty years ago this Saturday, President Franklin D. Roosevelt agreed for the first time to recognize the Communist regime of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. He did so on the basis of formal undertakings by then-Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov that the Kremlin would not engage in subversive actions in America.
The rest, as they say, is history. And a sordid and still unfolding history it is.
The Center for Security Policy is pleased to convene a symposium to review that history — both that of the immediate post-normalization period, of World War II, of the Cold War and of today — from noon-2:00 p.m. at the headquarters...
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By Diana West on
Wednesday, November 13, 2013 4:33 AM

A reader just reminded me of a post from those first weeks of the campaign against American Betrayal -- a campaign my editor at St Martin's Press tells me he has never before seen the likes of. I am re-posting this August 18 post today for the benefit of both new readers and old who may have heard David Horowitz belittle this mendacious and widespread campaign he and Ronald Radosh spearheaded against American Betrayal as "one bad review."
By the way, "take-down" was Radosh's word for this "review" (his first of multiple hits), which is referred to below. A chronology of the copycat hit pieces that followed appears in an appendix of The Rebuttal.
From August 18, 2013:
"The War on American Betrayal: The...
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By Diana West on
Tuesday, November 12, 2013 5:40 PM
I went to the Heritage Foundation today to hear David Horowitz discuss his newly published collection of essays, The Black Book of the American Left. Maybe, I thought, I could figure out why his personal views of Left and the Right necessitated the ad hominem attacks, the smears of American Betrayal, as completely rebutted in copious if not excruciating detail in The Rebuttal (not "Book-Burners," as Horowitz misstated today).
I don't know what I learned, but I surely witnessed something strange.
Watch the clip above and fact-check Horowitz with "The Rebuttal" in three parts as published by Breitbart News here, or The Rebuttal: Defending American Betrayal from the Book-Burners with Additional Commentary from the Blogosphere here.
Favorite Horo-whopper: "She's got a whole book, it's 22,000 words, it's called "Book Burners," for one bad review -- I mean, come on!"
Is he kidding?
A partial list:

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By Diana West on
Tuesday, November 12, 2013 6:03 AM

The cone of silence over public discussion of the Radosh-Horowitz attacks on American Betrayal cracked perceptibly last week as commentator and radio host Hugh Hewitt asked my great friend and Team B II colleague Frank Gaffney to interpret the controversy for Hugh Hewitt's sizeable radio audience.
(NB: On November 20th, I am deeply honored to say, Frank Gaffney's organization, The Center for Security Policy, will be awarding me The Mightier Pen Award for 2013. Information about attending the event in NYC here.)
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