Answer: The Marxist mechanism that disconnects facts from conclusions to make war on our minds.

Much of the Trump Effect today is due to Donald Trump's rejection of what we all know and instantly recognize as "PC." But what is political correctness? Where does it come from? The origins and seeding of "PC" into American culture are topics of much scrutiny in American Betrayal. Here is one excerpt that I just read for the upcoming audiobook.

Under discussion is the process by which what was at one time common knowledge, or a fact-based conclusion  -- for example, that the Communist Party USA was controlled and directed by Moscow -- could be un-learned by society at large. 

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Their frustration is palpable. All those sparkling, witty gambits by conservative pundits to denigrate Trump supporters -- as, for example, when National Review's Kevin Williamson wrote in a column that Trump supporters are "engaged in the political version of masturbation: sterile, fruitless self-indulgence" -- has earned little more than approbation from their own kind -- as when Commentary's Noah Rothman, for example, responded with equally sparkling wit: "Man. This piece. @KevinNR grabs Trump supporters by the ... well, you know."  

Do they ever. But no matter how many conservative websites take the dirty thang forward -- "Donald Trump Is Porn for Nativists" The Federalist recently declared -- Trump's support continues to rise. 

And that's what's so frustrating for these gentleman-pundits. Unable to reckon with Trump -- namely, with his unique ability to bring the crisis of the immigration invasion to national attention, giving last-ditch hope to many that he is a man who will actually do something about it -- their strangely, sexually framed hostility has proved to be (borrowing from their thesaurus) impotent.

...

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My thoughts -- more apostasy from brave new world -- on the anticipated graduation of two female Army Rangers tomorrow are encapsulated in the column below. I wrote it in January 2013 in response to the decree by SecDef Pannetta and JCC Dempsey that turned combat into an "opportunity" for women, making tomorrow's ceremony, and others like it, inevitable.  

"When Women Fight, Civilization Loses"

And so it came, the coup de grace. The final “barrier” to “opportunities” for women in combat is no more. 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 is off-limits to the female sex. The defense secretary and the general thus liberated mothers, daughters, sisters and wives to kill and be killed in the infantry, commando raids, even in Obama administration “overseas contingency operations.” In so doing, they also slashed away at that last institutional protection for the space that separates men and women, where civilization once grew.

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The derangement over Donald Trump and his supporters is nowhere more evident than in the rank, rancorous reactions by anti-Trump journalists, pundits and political strategists on the Right. It's one thing for the Washington Post to run pictures of Trump grimacing under the headline, "Trump Runs for the Spite House," etc., but the intensity -- the crudity -- of the voices of brand-name conservatism is nowhere exceeded. 

Cindy Simpson has collected a recent sample of the visceral, even pornographically-themed hostility to Trump and his supporters erupting amid the punditry on the Right. Even when some of these wordsmiths reach for the bon mot, it comes out graffiti. Simpson sees the trend as off-putting not only to Trump supporters but also to those seeking a "Big Tent" more generally. After...

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To say the Media-Political Complex has really lost its cool over Donald Trump, also every marble, is barest understatement.

From lib's lib Chuck Todd, gasping for oxygen here, to Fox princess & former "W" spokesgal Dana Perino, exasperation disarranging her 'do here, their frustration and even apoplexy are perfect foils to Trump's calm (yes, calm). The Huffington Post has responded oh-so-rationally by relegating coverage of Trump's presidential campaign to its entertainment pages. Can you spell d-e-n-i-a-l? 

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The media are trying to eject Donald Trump & his Border Wall from the presidential primaries before a single voter gets the chance to pull a lever.

And they say Donald Trump is a disgrace. 

Some thoughts while trying to keep pace.

1. "News" organizations should not run presidential debates.

As Michael Savage noted on his radio show, the first GOP debate this week was co-sponsored by Fox News and Facebook. Fox News is owned by pro-amnesty Rupert Murdoch and Facebook is owned by pro-amnesty-Mark Zuckerberg.

No wonder the fix seemed to be in. No wonder the Fox-Facebook debate demonstrated there is no mythological "balance" to be found between "conservative" and "mainstream" media; nor, I would add, is baiting candidates the best use of the public airwaves to inform the electorate. That said, they have to get used to it -- and so should we, and *even* from Fox.

Fox News,...

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Robert Conquest has died at age 98. He was a gigantic hero of truth and the voiceless.

On a professional note that is also personal, Robert Conquest's tremendous body of work -- and, I would add, the consternation and controversy his work engendered amid the "intelligentsia"  -- has been and will remain a guiding inspiration. 

In many ways, American Betrayal is itself a paean to Conquest. 

Some relevant passages from the book follow. 

p. 94

British historian Robert Conquest is one such magnificent exception. Conquest’s special branch of Soviet history might well be called Soviet exterminationism—a new “ism,” perhaps, but one that fittingly encapsulates the history of mass murder Conquest has immersed himself in, cataloging and analyzing the boggling scale of murder and tragedy deliberately wrought by the Communist regime in Russia. His macabre exercise began, most notably, with his history of Stalin’s purges of the 1930s, The Great Terror. The book came out in 1968, a time when no other historians were even acknowledging the existence of this hulking wound of a subject, a time when, amazingly, Joseph E. Davies’s twenty-seven-year-old pro-Stalin tract, Mission to Moscow, was still the first and last word on the subject. Noting the Conquest book’s uniqueness in 1968, Andrew and Mitrokhin called it “a sign of the difficulty encountered by many Western historians in interpreting the Terror” (emphasis added).45 When Conquest finally marshaled the available research and put a number on the horror— twenty million killed during the Stalin period—it was as though the historian had additionally become a cold-case criminologist and, further, by implication, a hanging judge. As crunched by columnist Joseph Alsop, commenting in 1970 on a particularly callous review of the Conquest book and its themes, those twenty million souls killed by the regime represented one-eighth of the entire Russian population “of that period, in peacetime and without provoking a whisper of protest.”46

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As we approach the 70th anniversary of the atomic age, inaugurated in a radioactive blast at Hiroshima, know that the information below, which will prove shocking to some, has previously been collected, developed, verified in both newspapers and research tomes. It has been reported by time-tested journalists and noted historians. It has been confirmed and declared by top military figures and world famous political leaders. It is information that belongs to the American people, but it is information that is virtually lost to us, "disappeared" from what is well-described as our "court history," written not to shed light on events but to burnish the ideologies that be. Yes, more American betrayal.

Today's subject, then, is not only the two atomic bombs that the US dropped first on Hiroshima and then on Nagasaki, but also the fairy tales we tell each other about them.

...

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The quotations below are found (and end-noted) in American Betrayal.

In a 1951 letter to Norman Thomas, perennial Socialist candidate for president in the 20th century, novelist and onetime Socialist candidate for Congress Upton Sinclair wrote:

"The American people will take Socialism, but they won't take the label."

Norman Thomas  wrote in 1953:

"Here is America more measures once praised or denouced as socialist have been adopted than once I should have thought possible short of a Socialist victory at the polls."

Thomas wrote in 1958:

"The United...

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Last-of-the-Mohicans-style, the New York Times remains synonomous with being the so-called paper of record. "All the news that's fit to print," according to its avowedly judgemental motto. At this precarious point in its history, however, any brand-sense of selection or discernment is purely a matter of vaporous pretentiousness.

Take today's "Arts and Leisure" section. The title promises arts and leisure, but, of course, it showcases fare once relegated to "pulp magazines" or even wrapped in a paper bag.  

What we are looking at (above) is (1) Blood and gore lede: " `Fear the Walking Dead,' " a spinoff of `The Walking Dead' on AMC, goes back to the early days of the zombie plague."

Excerpt: "The two shows fit under the same mythological umbrella created by Mr....

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I don't know what came over Chris Matthews, putting the DNC's Debbie Wasserman-Schultz on the spot like that, calling on her to explain the difference between a Democrat and a Socialist. 

What was the poor "chair" supposed to say? One party believes in free enterprise and limited government and other doesn't? Such a lie (no problem!) would "alienate the base." Admitting that both creeds are identical in their drive to "redistribute the wealth" -- Marx 101 -- would blow the smiley-face off the Democrat brand.

Then again, what if the DNC honcho-ess had decided to say something like: Well, Chris, maybe it's time to recognize the outmodedness of the "Democrat" label. We were, after all, the party of...

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This just in from Angelo Codevilla.  

After reading my essay, "On Myths and `Farragos,'" which comments on his recent exchange with Conrad Black in National Review, he writes:

Dear Diana

[Quoting from my essay]: "If Codevilla ever gets a chance to read American Betrayal, he will find additional evidence supporting the opposite point of view: that the Soviet Empire was not inevitable, but was rather crucially assisted by veritable armies of agents and other assets."

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Venona intercepts indicate that Soviet GRU officer/State Department official Alger Hiss was awarded the USSR Order of the Red Star (above) after the Yalta conference.

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Readers of the often-perverse National Review will have noticed that FDR biographer and convicted felon Conrad Black has opened an extended firefight with Angelo Codevilla over Codevilla's review-essay in the Claremont Review of Books about Henry Kissinger's recent book. 

Codevilla notes: 



My review’s one and only reference to Conrad Black was to quote his praise of Kissinger’s book: “brilliantly conceived and executed . . . even by Henry Kissinger’s very high standards.”...

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As the majority-European-minority-African experiment that made America disappears into a Third World maelstrom of population-replacement and culture-eradication, the question, as we approach 2016, is whether there remains enough patriotism -- love of country that is also openly declarable -- to try to save it.

There is, alas, little good news. Yes, Trump, the man with the mouth who has at least blurted out the all-important message about borders, illegal aliens and sovereignty, has been surging on that message. This is evidence of rebellion in the land, and rebellion is good. It comes from a vestigial survival instinct; also from the bitter life experience...

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Hillary for Iowa Photo

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The pulse rises on reading Breitbart's rundown of the Central-Americanization of Virginia, but the pulse really rises on reading that Trump may be pro-amnesty! Even the Washington Post headline -- Reach of the Day -- pales a little, although it is pretty good: 

"During Iowa campaigning, Clinton confronts enthusiasm gap." 

The Enthusiasm Gap -- makes...

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As I have learned, and particularly since the publication of American Betrayal, history is far too important to be left to professional historians content (ordered?) to trudge along the familiar groove of false narrative (until roused to any-means-necessary search-and-destroy missions against those who venture off-road in search of buried truth).

This is a matter of more than academic import. It is of much wider concern than to students or buffs. History is, should be, the guidestar of our conduct as a nation.The fact that we founder so dangerously today is directly related to the continuous loop of falsehood and misunderstanding about exactly how we got this way.

Take the 1940s international war aid program for anti-Axis powers known as Lend Lease. This program, which passed into law in 1941,...

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Watch the video (click "Read More" below).

Read Sharyl Attkisson's Fact Check.

Donald Trump has absolutely nothing to apologize for, even before we turn our attention to all of the noxiously fake concern currently being avowed by the Establishment-Political-Media-Complex for the plight of the American POW as exemplified by Sen. John McCain -- who himself has done more than anyone to cover up the plight of American POWs who did not return home!

In other words, where was all of this now-pained, -etched, and -so-serious concern for POWs then?

Nowhere. It just wasn't a useful mechanism of the political agenda. Today, that agenda is to Get Trump, and by any means necessary. Even by making and blowing things up, drenching them in crocodile tears, hoisting an American flag over the steaming mess, and saying Trump, the candidate leading the way on a real border, immigration control, and maybe even survival as a nation, "crossed the line" and, thus, according to the Establishment-Political-Media-Complex, is out.

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Another American serviceman, U.S. Navy Petty Officer Randall Smith, has died of wounds inflicted by jihad-killer Mohammad Abdulazeez, bringing the Ramadan 2015 death toll in Tennessee to five.

America mourns.

America also despairs. No one in power, no one with authority, no one with ratings, has the honesty and courage to link the killer to his religious faith, Islam. This seemingly unbreachable wall between cause and effect, between fact and conclusion, has created psychological, political and also spiritual chaos in the land.  

In the place of reality -- or, rather, to obstruct reality -- we see yet another round of "interfaith" rituals,...

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Kudos to CBS's Major Garrett for asking Obama a piercing question about Iran's four American captives -- bonus: CNN's Dana Bash calls it "disrespectful!

From CBS:

Transcription of exchange between CBS News Chief White House Correspondent Major Garrett and President Obama over Iranian hostages.

Major Garrett: As you well know, there are four Americans in Iran - three held on trumped up charges according to your administration, one, whereabouts unknown. Can you tell the country, sir, why you are content, with all of the fanfare around this [nuclear] deal, to leave the conscience of this nation, the strength of this nation, unaccounted...

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As the Morally Elite purge purportedly sinful symbols and statuary -- surely prepatory for the upcoming main "live" event (please don't say I didn't warn you) -- I suggest they widen their scope of destruction.

Having moved on from the purge of the Confederate battle flag -- that was soooo easy -- the Morally Elite have turned their sights to the more concretely monumental problems of statuary, schools, streets, etc., that commemorate, for example, the heroic life of Robert E. Lee. 

As many have reminded us, including the NYT's David Brooks, Lee held slaves -- 196 human beings that he "inherited" from his father-in-law. Lee abhored slavery but defended the institution...

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Czech and US soldiers patrolling Parwan, Afghanistan, 2014, for no good reason. They are still there. 

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There is no mission. There is no strategy. But 13,000 US and NATO troops are still risking their lives and limbs every day in Afghanistan. Even worse, as the Military.com story excerpted below makes clear, these forces are operating in a war zones under rules of conduct befitting a peacetime police force. Bonus: in one example reported below, when the going gets tough, there is no Afghan support.

From Military.com:

"New Mission Brings New Rules for Patrols in Afghanistan": 

PARWAN, Afghanistan — American Marines and Georgian soldiers waited outside the mud-brick compound about a mile north of Bagram Air Field as their interpreter...

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No doubt, another letter to another editor of another journal about another knock-out game on American Betrayal  is just the thing for the summertime hammock, particularly since this one, bonus, also manhandles Stalin's Secret Agents by the late M. Stanton Evans and the late Herbert Romerstein. 

This time around, I am writing to the academic journal Intelligence and National Security(hence, the academic style and European punctuation). In fall of...

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If July 4, 1776, is our Independence Day, March 11, 1941, is our Interdependence Day.

A revolutionary thing happened on the way to World War II. It was called "Lend Lease." This was the legislation, approved on March 11, 1941, by which the neutral USA began to supply aid to countries at war with Hitler. It was spun by President Roosevelt and Democrats in Congress as a means of keeping America out of World War II, although it was recognized by many Republicans at the time as a war bill.

But that's not all. Lend Lease granted extraordinary powers to the executive. Indeed, it transferred war-making power from the Congress, where the Constitution placed it, to the president, where it has pretty much remained ever since.

There was something else that was revolutionary about the bill -- something revolutionary in a deeply ideological way: 

From American Betrayal,...

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H/T Blazing Cat Fur

It is not too many centurions, particularly 100-year-old-plus writers, whose vision of the world is as relevant today as it was when first shared with the public over half a century ago. It is this vision of Orwell, the X-ray view through the cant, platitudes and lies to that ugliest of human drives, the lust for powers absolute, that still distinguishes the British writer, born 112 years ago this week on June 25, 1903. He was only 46 when he died on January 21, 1950. It is his frightening acuity that keeps him not only in the pantheon but even within the orbit of contemporary consciousness.  

This is testament not only to Orwell's talents, but to the unhappy state of the human race. The totalitarian drive, cloaked in cant, platitudes and lies, is more vigorous than ever before, which explains why it is that Orwell's Cassandra cries resonate to this day. Frankly, how much better to live in a world...

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About this illustration: A non-exhaustive Internet search indicates that the illustration (above) may well be the cover of a 1960 comic book for Catholic schools published by the Catechetical Guild. Whatever it is, the cartoon beautifully captures a conventional fallacy regarding the Cold War: namely, that while "domino"-nations fell to Communism the world over, the good ship USA remained secure, fighting off the external foe. Even if the USA is headed toward the "Red Iceberg" in the picture, Uncle Sam and the republic are still the same as ever. Sure, a single Hiss or a pair of Rosenbergs might pop up from time to time, but, systemically speaking, Communist subversion, Communist influence, are what happened Over There. Not here. Never here.

American Betrayal, of...

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Some years ago, Jeff Nyquist was witness to the perfect confluence of operational illusion and under-the-table-reality. He captured the moment thus:

As a former British MP once said within my hearing; “Reagan and Thatcher saved the West from socialism.” But a former Russian GRU colonel, sitting across the table, whispered in my ear, “But America is the Marxist paradise.”

These two sentences fit the crux of American Betrayal. There is the false narrative of ideological victory in the Cold War expressed here by the British MP. To this day, the narrative plays on,...

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Read the rest here.

Looking back, I can think of no better way to describe June 9, 1954 than as a demonic day of creation.

On this day 61 years ago, the simplest, most enduring Big Lie about Sen. Joseph McCarthy was created on the floor of the US Senate. It began in a question that still quavers disembodied:

"Have you left no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" 

The speaker, later seen brushing tears away, was US Army counsel Joseph Welch (above left). The loss of "decency" Welch decried allegedly came about when Sen. McCarthy supposedly exposed a young lawyer in Welch's Boston firm named Frederick G. Fisher as a past member of the National Lawyers Guild, which Attorney General Herbert Brownell had in 1953 described as the "legal mouthpiece" of the Communist Party in the United States.  

I say "allegedly" and "supposedly" because the person who had already exposed Fisher...

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The New York Times Magazine has published an in-depth report by Adrian Chen on Russian disinformatzyia in the Internet Age. The piece opens a window on the extremely dark and widespread use of well-paid Internet "trolls" who use social media and online outlets (and even non-virtual art exhibits) to wreak havoc not only on public opinion, but on reality itself, both inside and outside Russia, very much including here in the USA.

One troll-goal in Russia, according to a Russian anti-corruption activist, is to drive bona fide political debate away from "trolled" Internet forums. “The point is to spoil [the Internet], to create the atmosphere of hate, to make it so stinky that normal people won’t want to touch it,” 

I confess this observation about the trolls' mission rang a bell with me personally. The cabal against American Betrayal  -- "trolls" from here on out -- has so many times attacked American Betrayal by falsifying the contents of the book that they have created a discernible pattern of deception that many have compared to a Soviet-style "disinformation campaign."

...

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June 5, 1944: Gen. Mark Clark arrives in Rome, the first European capital liberated from the Axis.  

From American Betrayal, Chapter Nine:



The decision to abandon Italy as an expanding, leading front at the end of 1943 made very little sense—unless, cynically, the true objective was to ensure that Central and Eastern Europe remained open for Soviet invasion. Then again, maybe that’s putting things too crudely, too harshly. Let me rephrase: The advantages to enlarging upon Anglo-American gains in Italy were obvious. There was no good strategic objective to be served by virtually abandoning this theater. Not because I say so. The top U.S. commander of strategic bombing in Europe, Gen. Carl Spaatz, said so,...

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You might call American Betrayal one long, sustained, unyielding assault on "the conventional wisdom" -- i.e., the fake history we are reared on and shaped by.

Thus, it hits the beaches of Normandy, too.   

A D-Day excerpt for June 6, 2015.



From American Betrayal, Chapter Nine:

It’s impossible to overestimate the centrality of D-day in Americans’ sense of ourselves, in our understanding of our role in the world, in a national nostalgia for a made-in-USA...

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There is something not a little surreal about announcing that I have published yet another rebuttal to yet another attack against American Betrayal -- but, surreal or not, such is the case. More surrealism: I am again publishing my rebuttal at Breitbart News, not the outlet that mounted the attack because the outlet-- in this case, National Review -- turned it down.  

Who would ever have imagined that the "disinformation campaign," as Jed Babbin called it, or the "mugging," as the late, great M. Stanton...

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Big Brother is watching  ... I mean, FDR Four Freedoms Park

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Longtime reader Robert Strauss wrote in on May 31:

There are the beginnings of a new trope out there.  Call it a pivot, if you will:

"Eleanor Clift Defends Hillary, Compares to FDR": “If she’s elected, she would probably be the richest president ever, But is this a liability? I look back at FDR, I mean, he was very wealthy. He did a lot of great things for the little people.”



Another example: "Matt Bai: Hillary Clinton isn’t like the rest of us? Good!" 

From a photo caption: "President Franklin...

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CNN reports that Dan Pfeffer, "longtime top aide to President Obama," is joining CNN as a contributor. Since I was for a time a CNN contributor, this marks the first another time an Obamabot has followed, sort of, in my footsteps.

Not that he won't halt right there, of course. Pfeiffer has interested me, however, since he was a point man at the 2011 White House unveiling of Prez Obama's online longform art project. See "Let Them Eat Birth Certificates." 

Pfeiffer was also on former Rep. Cliff Stearns' (R-FL) case in 2012 when the member of Congress had the temerity to mention Sheriff Joe Arpaio's quite compelling evidence that the online longform birth certificate was in fact a forgery, which is a very mean word for "art project." See "Silence of the Lapdogs."

...

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"Should one point out," Solzhenitsyn asked, "that from ancient times a decline of courage has been considered the beginning of the end?"

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1989, 2005, 2015.

These are the years in which the West was tested, the years in which the principles, standards and laws from which modern Western civilization uniquely emerged were challenged. These were the years when those charged and even sworn to defend these principles, standards and laws panicked, flinched and surrendered. 



Our first test came in 1989 when, after the 1988 publication of The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie, the mullahs in Iran led by Ayatollah Khomeini issued their "fatwa," or death sentence, against the celebrated author, a British citizen with a wide Western literary following, including in the US, for the Islamic crime of blasphemy against Islam.

Instead of Britain and the US and other Western...

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Below is the syndicated column I wrote to mark the tenth anniversary of 9/11, also adapted from this speech (28:00). From Westergaard, to Wilks, to Fawstin: The artist holds a mirror to the Islamized West and it flinches.   

Having passed the 10th anniversary of 9/11, I can now say with certainty that something major was missing from all of the ceremonies, the symbolism and the media coverage. It was something that not only captures the meaning of the attacks themselves, but better defines our response to them than any other single thing. It is the face of the age itself, and it is not Osama bin Laden's.

I refer to the most familiar of the 12 Danish Muhammad cartoons, the one by Kurt Westergaard. I always think of this world-famous drawing as "Bomb-head Muhammad," for the lit bomb that serves...

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With thanks to Vlad Tepes, my Friday chat with Sam Sorbo about my latest piece at Breitbart about what is missing (as usual) from the Iraq War debate.  

The Iraq debate that has erupted three, seven, eight, twelve years too late may end up disproving the old adage, "Better late than never." Why? Too many glaring omissions from the conversation.

Let's start with Numero Uno: Islam. 

Once again, Islam is not part of the discussion. 

This omission, as readers of the website know, is nothing new in discourse about American wars in the Islamic world. Many's the time over the past dozen years when I attended Washington confabs where the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan were discussed at length by experts, military officers and elected officials, but Islam was not even mentioned -- and certainly not as as a cultural-legal-political-religious roadblock against the US policy of "nation-building" through "hearts and minds"  "counterinsurgency." This is a failed policy, as we have seen.

Or have we? I think not.

So long as the discussion of Islam -- its collectivist...

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Red-Blue election map from Wikipedia  

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Earlier this month, Rep. Louie Gohmert (TX-01) released the following statement on the ‘Jade Helm 15’ exercises the federal government plans to stage in Texas and other states:

Over the past few weeks, my office has been inundated with calls referring to the Jade Helm 15 military exercise scheduled to take place between July 15 and September 15, 2015. This military practice has some concerned that the U.S. Army is preparing for modern-day martial law.

Certainly, I can understand these concerns. When leaders within the current administration believe that major threats to the country include those who support the Constitution, are military veterans, or even ‘cling to guns or religion,’ patriotic Americans have reason to be concerned. We have seen people working in this administration use their government positions to persecute people with conservative beliefs in God, country, and notions such as honor and self-reliance. Because of the contempt and antipathy for the true patriots or even Christian saints persecuted for their Christian beliefs, it is no surprise that those who have experienced or noticed such persecution are legitimately suspicious.

...

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From Memoirs of a Dissident Publisher by Alfred Regnery:

As for the association with Bill Buckley, it has been greatly rewarding. Our friendship has had its ups and downs, as seems often the case in the rather difficult relationship between author and publisher, but we published with great success another of his books, McCarthy and His Enemies, which he wrote with Brent Bozell [holds up to this day as an excellent study -- dw]. And we are still on good terms. Buckley was probably more sensitive to criticism in those days than he has since become, and was quick to fire off letters in reply to his critics, some of which I tried, without success, to induce him to tone down. When I sent a copy of God and Man at Yale to T.S. Eliiot, I was disappointed that he did not think it was suitable for publication in England by Faber & Faber, but was gratified to have him say, in his letter of reply, "Thank you ... for sending me Mr. Buckley's book, which interested me very much. While I thought that he made one or two serious mistakes of strategy, I am glad to hear that it has attracted much attention." Buckley, however, was incensed, and in a letter to me commented, "I am astounded and disappointed by the superficiality of T.S. Eliot's remarks about my book." I had expected him to be pleased that Eliot had read the book at all and taken the time to say something about it, but Buckley was a young man then, and his first book was, quite properly, a matter of the utmost seriousness...

...

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The aftershocks of World War II continue to make headlines. Seven decades after the fact, the president of the Czech Republic considers it an "act of bravery" to mention on Russian radio the role played by the Gen. Vlasov's WWII-era Russian defector army, still considered traitors in Putin's Russia, in liberating Prague 70 years ago this month. No mention, however, that days later, the US turned the Vlasov Movement over to Stalin to certain death or the Gulag in the shameful Allied crime of forced repatriation known as Operation Keelhaul.

Now, the AP reports on more reverberations:

BELGRADE, Serbia -- A Belgrade court on Thursday quashed the treason conviction of Gen. Draza Mihailovic for his collaboration with Nazis during World War II, politically rehabilitating...

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Anti-Red Gen. Andrey Vlasov, whose Russian Army of Liberation liberated Prague

Every May it comes around: valedictories to "victory" in the "good" war, as if World War II were all and only about defeating the totalitarian monster Hitler.

That's the two-dimensional visions of the war that is decked in bunting, marked by parades, endlessly featured in books, movies and miniseries. 

But there was another war.

This other war was the Soviet war of deception, corruption and subversion waged from Moscow against the US and GB. While FDR and Churchill embraced "Uncle Joe" Stalin as their indispensable ally against their common enemy Hitler, "Uncle Joe" Stalin was all the while secretly waging a covert war against them, his putative allies, FDR and Churchill, directing...

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This excellent table charting Muslim immigration since 9/11 -- an ever-expanding demographic for sharia -- is by Daniel Horowitz of Conservative Review.

"How many people in this country," he asks, "are aware of the fact that immigration from Islamic countries has doubled since 9/11?"

A New Yorker essay by David K. Shipler titled "Pamela Geller and the Anti-Islam Movement" opens thus:   

The winning cartoon in the contest to draw the Prophet Muhammad, early this month in Garland, Texas, which two gunmen attacked, depicts a fierce Prophet waving a scimitar and saying, “You can’t draw me!” The artist, whose hand and pencil are visible, replies from outside the frame, “That’s why I draw you.”



Note: This word-picture is the only "picture" New Yorker readers get. The prize-winning political cartoon by Bosch Fawstin (above) is nowhere to be found -- surely an extra irony for a magazine whose existence depends in large part on the thousands of social and political cartoons it has published through the decades. Come to think of it, Fawstin's sharp cartoon-commentary on Islam's death-penalty prohibition on drawing (also critiquing, even factually discussing) Mohammed...

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Founder of Arabs for Israel Nonie Darwish, who tells her fascinating story of being the ex-Muslim daughter of a celebrated Egyptian "shahid" in Now They Call Me Infidel, offers a thought-provoking insight (above) on the impact she sees Islam -- specifically Islamic terrorism -- having on Americans.

Terrorism in the Islamic world, she explains, is a tool that is used at every level of government and in the family, too, as a "legal tool" of sharia enforcement. Such terror-violence, in other words, is perfectly normal in Islamic society, and is in accord with Islamic law. People, including "moderate" Muslims, have long been desensitized to such terrorism and accept it.

However, she says:

I am noticing that America is starting to feel that terrorism is normal -- we get excited, we see the torture,...

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Cartoon by Bosch Fawstin

Fox News' Jeanine Pirro opened her last show with a pro-free-speech, anti-sharia stemwinder that Mediaite aptly described in a headline as "Sharia Law Is Coming for Your Free Speech." The summary concluded:

Pirro did add that she thought Geller’s event, which was attacked by two gunmen last weekend, was probably a `dumb move,' which is pretty much what all the critics of it are saying.

Out of the mouths of Mediaite. With that "dumb move" dismissal, Pirro entered the left-to-right media mainstream, which has overwhelmingly thrown its support to the totalitarian sharia principles that some, including conservatives such as Pirro, also disavow.

Pirro then interviewed Pamela...

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With thanks to Ken Sikorski at Tundra Tabloids (no link -- TT is currently switching servers).

The winning cartoon by Bosch Fawstin

Listening to Laura Ingraham's interview with Pamela Geller, I made some notes on their lines of argument. Geller, obviously, is for the cartoon contest as an exercise of the American right to speech free from Islamic dictates; Ingraham supports Geller's right to free speech but opposes the contest, nonetheless, as not "helpful." 

Geller opens by taking exception to Ingraham's earlier comment calling the cartoon contest needlessly provocative. Geller argues that, on the contrary, it is murdering cartoonists that is needlessly provocative, and then says something about the importance of not surrendering to violent sharia enforcement. Once established, she says, we...

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Kudos to Tom Trento's United West for this critically important series of man-on-the-street interviews with Muslims attending the recent "Stand with the Prophet" convention in Garland, Texas. It is no spoiler to reveal that on being asked to condemn the Islamic blasphemy law, not a single Muslim interviewed would do so. It really has to be seen to be believed. 

Islamic blasphemy law is Ground Zero in the clash between Islam and the West. It is also the mechanism of Islam's totalitarian command over its folllowers.

Islamic blasphemy law is also wholly and utterly at odds -- no, at war -- with Western standards, Western norms, regarding life on earth as an individual with God-given rights and protected liberties. Such rights and liberties include, of course, the right to free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of conscience. This is where we in the West are "coming from" -- the sharia-enforcing media excepted...

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