May 23, 2019

Hi Diana,

I'm a long time fan of your's and many other dissident voices on the right. At age 11, I read The Gulag Archipelago in like 1973,  and I've been an anti-communist ever since, so your work is of a piece with my political and intellectual development. 

But I always had cognitive dissonance as I walked through this world as I could never attribute the upside down view of everything that predominates our society and institutions completely to the Left. It seemed impossible to me - a lifelong anti-communist. I simply could not conceive that the depth of the disinformation campaign required for he insanity I've witnessed daily could actually be true.

In fact, I didn't have the language to describe it. I gave up on talking to people about it and began to suspect I was defective. This of course was never satisfying or edifying but still, it's what was so for me. 

The eye opening began with Blacklisted by History and another book I read, Disinformation by Prof. Ronald J. Rychlak and Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, former head of Romanian secret police. In that book, mention is made of how Oswald was of course a Soviet agent, Pacepa makes clear he learned this from KGB colleagues. The actual story was that Kruschev ordered JFK's assassination it, but changed his mind shortly before the shooting but Oswald could not be recalled. After the Cuban missile crisis and other conflict with the Soviets, this isn't surprising. 

I long ago concluded that Oswald had acted alone in the sense of the actual shooting. Case Closed by Richard Posner laid waste to all the truly loony conspiracy theories out there. But we are never even supposed to seriously consider Oswald as a Soviet agent, even though he lived there for 3 years. We are supposed to buy that Oswald was rejected by them as defective after being sent back to the U.S. after he moved there in the '50s. 

This was really the first big shock. It's obvious on its face that Oswald was very likely a Soviet agent. One particularly damning fact are his visits to Soviet embassies and consulates after his return. Why would he have any business with a nation that deported him? His last visit to the Russian consulate in Mexico city weeks before the attack has all the earmarks of a intelligence relationship with the Soviets. 

Yet we never even discuss it, rather, the main theory posited is that it was the CIA who killed JFK. Based on nothing. There is zero evidence to support this theory, or even another shooter involved yet this is presented as a real possibility while Soviet involvement is not mentioned. I'm certain we sealed the congressional investigation into all this due to communist involvement. 

I know you didn't cover this and I'm not advocating for you to become an "Oswald truther". Rather it was this moment that truly shocked my senses and disoriented me. Only then, when re-reading Betrayal did I begin to fully wake up to the massive success of the Soviet and global communist destruction of our societies. Get this - even the first reading wasn't enough. At some level, the social conditioning of this world made me unable to conceive of the scope of all this. The failure. The Betrayal... 

From the founding of the U.N., the WTO, the IMF, the EU - all by socialists - to the conduct of FDR in WWII and before, it all fell into place. I listened to the book on Audible, fyi, and I must say that your reading of it is superb. 

What it seems many people miss about your POV in the book is that it's not meant to re-write history. In fact,  you seem content to let the historians deal with that. Rather, the book is about trying to create a narrative and POV sufficient to account for all the facts (and I know, "that's not even the half of it", hehe) and the outcomes in WWII. 

The idea that we accept our fed govt was penetrated at very high levels by 500 or more Soviet agents is never taken any farther in our consciousness. You get exactly to the root of the big lie and suddenly it all fell into place. The dastardly betrayal of our very nation by those we supposedly trust to safeguard it is achingly clear.

It's quite a tumble down the rabbit hole. I'm changed forever, and not necessarily in good ways. I see our current politics on the right utterly insufficient to deal with the challenges we face and am left far more hopeless. But I'm no longer confused, and I no longer lack the voice to speak about it. 

Now I'm struggling to find a footing for my activism. I have done political commentary on several YouTube channels I built in the past, but I abandoned them as I constantly felt that I could not frame all this properly. I also blogged for a while politically long ago but favor video now.

So now I will focus my activism on discussing all this. I'm not sure how it will play out but I wanted you to know you have an impact. Perhaps it's due to reading Solzhenyzin at age 11 and your book. I consider them bookends on my political development. The Gulag Archipelago spared no truth and once heard, it's hard to forget. But even then, I could never have actually gotten to a point where the world actually makes sense to me without your synthesis of what we actually know on this subject. 

Thank you very much for your work. 

Best,

G.D.

July 27, 2018

July 23, 2018

July 22, 2018

March 25, 2018

Dear Diana West,

I have just finished reading “American Betrayal” and I must tell you that it is the most disturbing and important book I have read since “Witness” back in the 1950’s. I described it to someone when I was only halfway through as an “emotional/intellectual tour de force.” 

Your book became known to me from a reference to it in something I was reading, I forget what. Anyway, I bought the Kindle edition of “The Rebuttal” and got a hardbound edition of your book from a used book dealer rather than buy the soft bound book from Amazon. Since a stroke took away the use of my right hand, it is hard for me to hold softbound books open.

My reading lately has been directed towards trying to understand how the world I grew up in became the distressing place it is today. I believe your book is a break through in my quest to make sense of it.

The job of research you have done would merit a PhD in American History in any university worthy of the name. I do not understand how I missed your book when it was published, but I am thankful to have discovered it, as well as you. I shall bookmark your blog.

Respectfully,

J.D.H.

April 5, 2017

Hello Diana,

 

I just competed your book, American Betrayal – quite a tour de force.  ... I also read your 50 page response to David Horowitz. 

 

The corruption of the cognitive apparatus by persistent intractable lying has profound implications.  We have become, for the most part, a nation that has gone, quite literally, mad – taken leave of our senses.

 

I see it every day even, unfortunately, in my children who consider me a troglodyte. 

 

I do have one question for you:  what do you suppose was David Horowitz’s motivation for his duplicitous unmeasured response to your book?  Why did he do it.  I no longer trust anything he says.  Perhaps he’s not rooted out the last vestige of his progressive mindset?  I just can’t figure.

 

Anyway, thank you for this enormously entertaining and educational book. 

 

With very best regards,

 

Bob 

April 15, 2017

Dear Diana West,

 

I wish to extend some personal comments in admiration of you and your book, American Betrayal

 

I hope this e-mail finds its way to you.  

 

I am 59 years old and I haven't read many books in my life.  

 

This past December, when I had been called for District Court jury duty in Philadelphia,  I had reached into my stash of unread books I had purchased and pulled out "American Betrayal".

As it turned out,I never needed to attend the jury duty as I was dismissed for each day I was scheduled.  But, I did eventually read your book.

 

I had purchased your book a few years earlier after watching you on a Glenn Beck episode. I felt your appearance on the Glenn Beck show at that time was a highpoint in intrigue and information and  it was important for me to get your book.  However, there was always so much information and so many issues that had come up, I look back now and I am wondering why your book wasn't held up to be in the front and center of everything.

...

Your book has given me an ... understanding of what I have been so uneasy about for the past 8 or 9 years

 

I believe you've call it "soviet style Influence" or whatever it has morphed into.   For me;  it is all because of "influence". 

 

Thanks so much.

 

John

February 26, 2017

February 14, 2017

Dear Diana,

 

First I am almost finished reading American Betrayal and I am, as a 65-year old American, seeing the world now with new eyes. A few years ago I noticed that the Left has opposed every deployment of US military power that I am aware of since WW I, with a single glaring exception. It occurred to me that six months after Operation Barbarosa, in the hour of Stalin's need, American patriotism connected to a muscular deployment of US military power was allowed to flourish without a peep from the very ones who vehemently opposed every other US military deployment since. It was a puzzling factoid in my consciousness that connected to very little else until I found your book last month.

 

I am in awe of your ability to research and draw conclusions from such carefully hidden pieces of information. I have long sensed that great secrets have been hiding in plain sight and that the accepted view of  the history of the last century needed a "cynical" re-evaluation, as you might say. Thank you.

 

... Thanks again for all your work. With Trump's Swamp-Drainer persona riding high, American Betrayal rightly now finds itself at the center of the universe of American discourse, it seems. It might be described as a map of the swamp, even.

 

All the Best,

 

Peter

February 12, 2017

February 11, 2017

February 10, 2017

Dear Mrs. West, these days I’m reading the fine old book “National Suicide (Military Aid to The Soviet Union)” by Anthony C. Sutton, often repeating words of your recent article: “Truth wanted!” Mr. Sutton’s research (supplied with facts as generously  as your “American Betrayal” is) was written nearly half a century ago, in the early seventies, but the reasons for the regular transfer of the best Western military technologies from the U.S. Governments to “The Evil Empire” are still classified and known to a very few people only. 

   There is quite a lot of works by the honest and patriotic authors, devoted to the theme on my bookshelves – from John Stormer’s “None Dare Call It Treason” to Ann Coulter’s “Treason”. However, in my long personal experience of a historical bookworm, Anthony Sutton was the first to show (at least to me) that the main enemies of the West are not so [much] all kinds of Leftists, dupes, greedy traitors or plain fools, as the uncontrolled bureaucracy. While press is servile to this bureaucracy, the nation’s ability to control it is close to zero, thus allowing the national suicide to go on and on. Meanwhile the precise reasons (I do not mean elusive explanations) for suicidal decisions of the State Department, of the CIA, of the Department of Commerce, etc remain absolutely mysterious – Mr. Sutton even calls them “mystic”… 

    Victor Suvorov’s once wrote that Stalin probably had “something” to make of FDR his helpless puppet – the guess may be true, but these mysterious “somethings” seem to be a bit too multiple, both before FDR and after him, both under the Dems and under the Reps. The only constant grounds for governments being mystic from 1917 to 2017 are the totally unaccountable top bureaucracy and the totally servile press. Thanks God, these evil factors are as clear now as never, so the Truth’s classified chains have good chances to be finally broken (and the national suicide to be finally limited only to the national servile press’ one).

   Now I am living in -----, but the largest part of my life was spent in the Arctic Siberia, so, as I’ve already mentioned in my Amazon review of your excellent book, the hardly-seen English inscriptions, carved on the walls of old ruined GULAG barracks on permafrost, were my first unclassified acquaintance with the said bureaucratic “mystic” in many future great books, yours including. Thank you ever so much for your most noble efforts, dear Mrs. West!

    Yours respectfully, with every good wish  –

Rostislav  

November 3, 2016

Hi Diana,

I remember reading, first, something very positive about your book. That made sense. Then massive insulting, denigration. Then your well-reasoned, fact-filled responses - taking on one denunciation after the other. Just from the tone (which sounded like what goes on re Islam, with Islamics and the PC doing rage-filled denunciations), the truth seemed clearly on your side. 

It's taken me ages to read your book. I read a few pages months ago - you so evidently had facts and more facts. So once again I agreed with your conclusions, from your presenting detailed facts from the start - and from having watched the eye-opening (for me anyway) video from a well-known Soviet defector (name starts with B, name escapes me at the moment) as well as videos from Stephen Coughlin on the OIC, etc. 

But it's only now that I'm saying, BRILLIANT. Because now I've been reading your book. I didn't need more facts to agree with your conclusions. But all those facts are doing way more. All that evidence of how the infiltration shaped, say, World War II - to make much of it a Soviet-controlled Soviet-benefitting war. That goes way beyond my agreeing with your general conclusion. 

Thank you!!!! 

I wonder: cd there be - is there - a video, about an hour, akin to Bill Warner's Why We Are Afraid - which now has about or maybe even over 3,000,000 views. 

Best,

Elsa

PS. re:

There is always room for debate, quibbles or refinements — and there is certainly much, much more "court history" to overturn — but to try to kill it or make it toxic tells us they are deceivers.

total agreement - deceivers, and dangerous.

August 14, 2016

Diana,

I just finished American Betrayal, and I must say, my eyes have been

opened--wide!  So much of that time (1930-1950) , and after, now makes so

much more sense.  I am 60 years old, and have always considered myself

somewhat knowledgeable of history (at least for someone who has a daytime

job).  I first read Death of the Grownup.  Also a good read.  Puts things in

perspective.  I have not read all the follow up to Betrayal, but I suspect

you hit a nerve because of all the flak you received.  There is a line from

the movie Shooter, where Levon Helm says to Mark Walberg, "The world ain't

what it seems, is it Gunny...The moment you think you got it figured, you're

wrong."  Your book confirms this.

Thank you for one of the best reads.

Jim Hart

January 28, 2015

Message via Twitter:

January 17, 2015

Dear Diana,

I have just finished American Betrayal - not able to put it down! - and commend your dedication, hard work, heroic research and scholarship.  And, at all times with your dad in your heart.  As I read about the rampant subversion and infiltration of our country - far beyond what I learned from Whittaker Chambers’ book - I wish my own dear Dad had been here to discuss with me.  I can only imagine the vicious attacks you have endured but just the courage you have demonstrated heretofore tells me you can face these bastards down.  And those of us who are newly educated will pick up your torch and pass the word.

You are the light that cannot be put under a bushel.  You are a patriot and an honest, moral and enlightened human being.

"Thank you” does not seem sufficient for the gratitude I wish to express.  Keep swinging!!

Jean Head

January 1, 2015

Dear Diana (if I may):

We were in contact some years ago.  We met at Heritage.  I am rereading your magnificent "American Betrayal," which "forced" me to send you this note.  As a child of WW2, Estonian-born, a "DP" etc, I KNOW that everything in your tome is the truth.  

As one who subsequently was an official of VOA and a US Army Intellligence officer, I say there is nothing that "beats" your book.  I have written a couple of books myself (in Estonian language), I am now, at 81, grateful that I can continue to suggest your book to the many people I know.

With very best wishes for a Happy New Year,  

Vello Ederma 

Springfield, VA 

December 30, 2015

Dear Diana,

Through your wonderful book American Betrayal, I have come to the belief that the Brits and Americans aided Stalin to further his communist goals and enslave much of Europe. Tell me again that we won the 2nd WW?

I recently finished The Morganthau Plan by John Dietrich and I had an epiphany.  All my life, I never questioned why my Grandmother, three Uncles, & Mother were refugees to Bavaria from Silesia (Frankenstein) after the war. [NB: much of Germany's Silesia became part of new, Communist-controlled Poland, among the nations that mass-expelled German populations numbering in the multi-millions of people.] I just took this piece of family history for granted, assumed it had to happen, and never wondered why.  Reading Mr. Dietrich’s book in which he details the cleansing of ethnic Germans from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Lower Silesia, I suddenly understood that Stalin was the one who benefited: Germany had long been his goal, to bring Germany brought to her knees must have been satisfying to him.  Why are we not taught about this?  I had no idea.  

All I knew was that my family came to Bavaria.  A Baron and Baroness took care of these refugees in a castle.  My mother, who quite young at the time, remembers that they were shunned by the locals. My grandmother ended up being a domestic for them.  Now I think how hard it must have been for her, who had all the memories of Silesia where my grandfather had died of gangrene during the war.  He had fallen off a roof and all the medicine was at the front.

In fact, the whole book was enlightening for me, having grown up with the idea that the Americans rebuilt Germany, and through the Marshall Plan was benevolent to her.  I’d always had a feeling of gratitude to America and the fact that my relatives were refugees to *west* Germany rather than having to stay in the east.  Prior to reading American Betrayal, I had never heard of the Morganthau Plan, which was largely written by Harry Dexter White, to benefit the Soviet Union.  It’s all very shocking to my worldview.

As Mr. Dietrich writes, “the mass expulsion of ethnic Germans from the territory east of the Oder-Nisse Rivers. As many as 18.1 million people were driven from their homes because of their ethnic background. Somewhere between 2.1 and 6 million of these people, mostly women and children, perished.”  Why is this not widely known?  Surely it’s part of our history—we who have grown up with so much propaganda to mask the fact that really, Stalin was the winner of WWII.  As for my part, naturally I’m still grateful that my Grandmother, Uncles, and Mother survived this political movement of people, but I agonize that we—Americans & Brits—acquiesced to what could only benefit the enlarging of the communism.

Caroline

December 26, 2015

By @Roy_Cam

---

June 12, 2015

"In Response to Your Books"

Hi. You might recognize me from various things I’ve tweeted at you on Twitter over the past few weeks. In either case I thought it necessary to express my horror and gratitude that have come about as a result of reading Death of the Grown Up and American Betrayal.

Death of the Grown Up was, at first, a breath of fresh air. It confirmed things that I had suspected from a young age, but could never confirm or articulate, because I had no frame of reference for how things ought to have been. Why my parents (both Boomers though 9 years apart) seemed so immature whenever things got stressful. Why all the kids in sixth grade seemed to suddenly become sexed up maniacs whose concept of maturity seemed pulled straight out of MTV. Not that I was a whole lot better myself. I was more preoccupied with video games than learning or bettering myself until a few years ago. At times I found myself outraged, especially once the full weight of what had happened to our country, our civilization, had started to hit. Overall it was more enlightening than anything else, even if it left me with few answers as to what could be done.

Had I not read Death of the Grown Up first, I doubt I could have really handled American Betrayal. As infuriating as seeing the what of our societal decay was, slowly learning the why was far more troubling. Yet in a way it never should have been so shocking; you were right to say it was all in rather plain sight. I remember in school learning about that era, about the violent Bolshevik revolution and Stalin’s totalitarian control of the USSR. I even remember it being mentioned, as an aside, how Stalin’s regime led to more deaths than the Holocaust. And yet the connection was never really made. I never thought to ask “so why were we allied with someone as awful as Stalin?”. And when we learned about McCarthy, it was presented as though he just arbitrarily picked up anti-Communism as a cause to propel is political career, that he was some awful man who ruined harmless people’s lives, and that the “have you left no sense of decency” line was some kind of triumph of Good vs Evil.

And now the world makes so much more sense, albeit in the worst possible way. Our inability to say anything true about Islam and what it actually teaches, the way we shy from confrontation, our hemisphere-wide self-loathing. It’s almost too much at times. I’ve never been an optimist, but being faced by such a transcendent threat sitting at the very heart of our culture and history, it is very hard to believe we can actually recover. So few even want to recover, having completely internalized the narrative of white guilt and Western guilt (yet this doesn’t stop them from indulging in all the hedonistic revelry that only the 1^st World can provide).

On the one hand I am a Christian, so I can cope with the possibility of a world without America, without Western Civilization; eyes on eternity and such. Yet even with my misgivings about this “fallen sinful” world, I know there is no benefit to the world at large abandoning objective reasoning, morality, and the rule of law. The State is still necessary, and a just state is something worth fighting for, though I have to admit I haven’t the foggiest idea on how to fight for an America that started to die 82 years ago and is now primarily populated by people who can’t see beyond their own immediate gratification (among them far too many who take a perverse pleasure in watching our nation crumble).

So while I am eternally grateful to you for opening my eyes to this mess we have found ourselves born in, I must ask another question of you: what do we do now?

XXXX

May 30, 2015

Dear Ms. West,

... Not only have I read A.B., I've bought copies for a few significant former communist friends, and read A.B. to my wife, son, and daughter at the dinner table.  My family hasn't always appreciated the ritual, reading at dinner, borrowed from a physicist (John Wheeler) I admired.  Life in Berkeley can be parochial, as I learned firsthand when Jean Kirkpatrick was not allowed to speak here.  Your superbly structured writing, that pulls the reader forward like great fiction, planted seeds my children have already found valuable as they begin to wonder at a world so full of hypocrisy.  I don't happen to believe there is any grand plan, just tribe-like social assemblages so useful to people who don't have the time to explore, or who won't risk social isolation by questioning accepted truths.  I had read Epstein over thirty years ago and never lost the image of mothers smothering their babies to save them from the torture those mothers must have known would follow.  I didn't make the connection with your many citations, citations that proved their value when Horowitz and Radosh exposed their clay feet.  Several weeks ago, cleaning my garage, I came across and began to re-read Operation Keelhaul.  I knew you would find it relevant. I was just five or ten years too late.  You provided the context missing from Epstein's book, and his generation. 

What will be interesting is to see if and how A.B. penetrates history curricula.  I know I am always pleasantly surprised if I find some notion I attempted to present to my children has taken hold.  My daughter, a student who loves history and literature at Juilliard, a school not known for its erudition, absorbed and used some of the events you described in A.B. in her history class.  She discussed a group of intellectuals trapped by their youthful utopian idealism into serving the USSR, sometimes long after their naiveté had died. Most didn't dare openly reject their social and political affiliations, even after the brutality of communism became unavoidable. There are many Russians at Juilliard. I didn't ask her if the instructor was Russian. She was proud of her grades, and writes papers for many of her peers who don't have her writing skills, which could probably cause her problems at the school; her scholarship is in piano performance!  I wonder if there are any colleges with the independence to use A. B. as required reading in a history course?

Please continue doing what you do so well.   

XXXX

May 29, 2015

Dear Ms. West

As I was browsing for a new book for my Kindle, I came across your book American Betrayal. I bought it and it literally destroyed my world view. I have just, as I always do with books, read it again after 2 weeks. The second time through, I came to better appreciate your wit and style (this time I was not rushing through to see what came next), but the subject matter shocked me anew. During the 2-week gap, I purchased everything else of yours that I could on the Kindle. (I can no longer afford to buy “real” books in great number.) I greatly enjoyed The Death of the Grownup, though I don’t share all of the views expressed therein. I am writing simply to applaud you for your work. I am in awe.

As a 62-year-old man, I thought that I pretty much had a grip on reality. I didn’t, and I am forever in your debt for your waking me from my slumber. The most troubling thing, among a host of troubling things, to me in the “Betrayal” book was the abandonment of our soldiers to the gulag. That revelation prompted me to read two other books about that horrible thing and to begin to try to spread the word among veterans who are my friends and brothers. Why did I never hear about this? Why was it not front-page news every day? 

I am neither a conservative nor a liberal. I support some liberal ideas: for instance, I am not opposed to some government-run programs such as Social Security or Medicare. Also, I think that our financial elites on Wall Street cause as much damage, if not more, as do our political-class elites in Washington DC. But in many other instances, I am on the side of the GOP, especially when it comes to the size of the government and its unending spending spree. I also agree with everything you say about the threat of Islam, having read all of Robert Spencer’s books. I have always hated Communism, but I had no idea, until reading your book, just how truly successful it was in carrying out its evil purposes. “Demonic” is an apt word to describe the legacy of the Bolsheviks. Stalin was truly a genius at his evil vocation and Harry Hopkins was just as bad.

I don’t know what can be done, but I, for one, am trying to spread the word. Social media is a useful tool sometimes, although I have been “unfriended” by some friends on Facebook because I am an “Islamophobe.” One encouraging sign is that I am beginning to see a more open-minded attitude among young people. For instance, one of my sons, a Philosophy major when he went to Princeton, used to have the reflexive liberal attitudes toward everything. Now he reads “First Things” and “National Review.” There is hope. 

As the son of a man who grew up as one of five orphans in the Depression, all of whom served in WW2 (one of whom is buried in Normandy) and went on to successfully raise eight children after only a less than full high-school education, all I can say is thank you. I will be pointing many people in your direction.

Yours truly,

XXXX

April 15, 2015

Dear Diana:

 

In American Betrayal, you write about how the mere mention of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s name or the word “McCarthyism” impel most Americans to respond like Pavlov’s puppies in their belief that both were indescribably evil.  

 

Of course you are absolutely right.

 

I came across an example of this in a biography of the comic actor Lou Costello.  You are too young to remember them, but Bud Abbott and Lou Costello were an immensely-popular comedy team in motion pictures in the 1940s.  Millions of Americans were entertained by their clean comedy and self-effacing humor.  They presented their comedy routines with precision timing, having perfected them through years of work in vaudeville and radio before they achieved their greatest popularity on the screen in the World War II years.

 

Lou Costello was a devoted family man and patriotic American.  

 

In her biography of her father, published twenty years after he died, Chris Costello wrote:

 

     “All my life my father was a hardline Republican.  He found companionship and understanding in his producer, Robert Arthur, an extremely conservative Republican.  As far back as the mid-forties, Dad used to stop off at Arthur’s office and complain about Communist-inspired labor strikes.  He once told Bob, ‘You’re the only one that I can talk to who shares my beliefs as a Republican.’

 

     “Joe McCarthy was a demagogue,” she continues, “but to my father he was a man in shining armor, out to rid the country of Commies.  Mr. Arthur says that ‘Lou would often talk to me at length about what was occurring.  He was very much against Communism, as I was, and a supporter of Senator McCarthy.  Lou was also a champion of those in our industry who were being framed as Communists and would loyally stand by them and fight for them.  He was very pro-American and very much involved in his country.

 

     “Dad was thoroughly convinced that there was a Communist conspiracy to infiltrate the film industry.  Bob Arthur still is:  ‘Lou shared my feelings regarding the McCarthy era.  It has since become a distorted issue in the industry about the Hollywood Ten who were glamorized with this.  To this day I am convinced there was a conspiracy.  It made sense, because if there was anything that the Communists could get hold of, it was the motion picture business.  It would be idiotic to think they wouldn’t try.  Lou felt very strongly about this and tried to do his part to protect the freedom of America.

 

     “…..Dad was an old-fashioned patriot, of a sort far more prevalent then than now.  It was the kids that had him particularly concerned, because he believed they were wide open to philosophical and ideological propaganda, and that the Communists would stop at nothing to capture the minds of youth.  That was why he made such an issue of the ‘Communist menace’, which he believed to be very real.

 

     “Well-known entertainers were being blackballed and blacklisted by the movie industry, and people in Hollywood were scared to death by McCarthy’s accusations and the hot winds of ultraconservatism that fanned them…..”

When a newspaper reporter caught Lou Costello at the Los Angeles airport, he “was asked if he didn’t feel his support of McCarthy was going to hurt him at the box office and, if that were true, how could he continue his advocacy of a man who more and more people were discovering was more dangerous than the Communist conspiracy he believed to exist.

 

     “’That reasoning doesn’t make any sense to me,’ Dad replied.  ‘Since when is it more important to have good box office appeal rather than to try and be a good American?’…..”

 

     [ Chris Costello, Lou’s on First: A Biography, St. Martin’s Press, 1981, pages 195-97 ]

 

These words are important not only for what they tell us about Lou Costello but also for what his daughter reveals about herself:  Like millions of other decent Americans, she absorbed the Communist-inspired propaganda about Senator McCarthy and the “dark wave of fear” that she had heard he inflicted on all Americans.  It is reasonable to surmise that the word “McCarthyism” had the same effect for her that it had for countless others:  To freeze the mind at that point and minimize any possibility for further thought.  Note the words and phrases she uses to demonize Senator McCarthy not on the basis of anything she ever knew about him or those years but on the basis of what she had read and heard others allege about him.   

 

When Senator McCarthy was alive, Chris Costello was a child.  So was I.  She and I were born in the same year (1949).  Her knowledge of Senator McCarthy likely developed during her high school years in the 1960s, by which time the demon-word “McCarthyism” had become firmly entrenched in American culture. 

 

I do not intend these remarks as a criticism of Chris Costello.  Her book is a delightful portrait of a man who provided years of wonderful entertainment for millions of American moviegoers in the 1940s and for generations of children (like me) who discovered those motion pictures when they were shown on television in the 1960s or ‘70s. 

 

But her remarks about Senator McCarthy are an example of how easily people will absorb misinformation—largely by default—if they are taught to do so and if it is repeated so often that they seldom read or hear anything different. 

 

 

Best wishes,

 

David Schroth

April 3, 2015

Diana, 

I fell asleep late last night while reading Chapter 12 of "American Betrayal" and woke up at 4:30 AM this morning needing to finish reading it; the most fascinating, captivating book I've ever read. 

Like you, for me the official story of WW II never added up, and I've always been intrigued by what led nations to a second World War and then how we ended up in the conflict known as the Cold War after it. 

e.g. the "sneak attack" on Pearl Harbor. Fact: the Pacific Fleet was moved from San Diego to Pearl by FDR in January, 1941 (3 admirals who protested this as unwise were removed from their positions). Fact: the 3 aircraft carriers (one was the famous Enterprise) stationed at Pearl put out to sea just a few days before the attack. Left behind were obsolete battleships like the Arizona. Aircraft carriers were the new way to fight naval battles...

Exposure of soviet "Operation Snow" in your book confirmed my belief this was no sneak attack, which conveniently, overcame the objections of the isolationists in our country, virtually overnight; a nice, tight, convenient package - or shall we call it a "snow" job?

The two books I had just read prior to yours were "Bonhoeffer" by Erica Metaxas (pub. 2010) and "Killing Patton" by Bill O'Riley (pub. 2014), both of which back up your facts. 

As you stated Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a big part of the anti-Nazi resistance with Admiral Canaris. Their frustration with the lack of Allied response from the Great Britain and U.S. govts. fully corroborates your belief that the war could have ended early if it hadn't been for the communist infiltration of the Allied govts. and their Soviet influenced, "unconditional surrender" ultimatum. Both these fine men paid for it with their lives, sadly, hung just before V-E Day. Only recently were they recognized as heroes. 

George Patton was, to his detriment extremely anti-communist ("have you no decency"), and very vocal about it. After the German surrender (probably when he heard the Red Army announce the "official" surrender in Berlin, not the one in France the day before, as you pointed out) he advocated that the Allies "finish the job and take care of the communists while we have our forces here on the continent". He was also very vocal about the problems he had for his 3rd Army's lack of supplies (wonder what he would have thought had he known about the "Soviet First", Harry Hopkins led Lend-Lease billion dollar program?!) and the fact that Eisenhower led SHAEF was holding his army back from driving on to Berlin, which was a goal he knew was achievable for the Allies. 

The implications that the, long overdue, exposure of the facts of the conflict we know as "The Good War" are dire, and the parallels you draw to today's governments and today's world events are extremely valid and valuable to U.S. citizens. 

As I said above, the book was fascinating, yes...but at the same time one of the most frustrating, infuriating, and "frankly, in all frankness" (as FDR would say) one of the my most difficult reads ever. And it took me a long time to read, but not as long as it took you to do all the extensive and I'm sure exhaustive research you had to do. The hardest part had to be in writing about "The Big Lie" and our "American Betrayal"

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" - Edmond Burke

I would add - and for evil men to silence the exposure of evil.....

I want to say thank you for writing this book. It was necessary for all us Patriots who have asked "how did all this happen to our great country?" I have been recommending your book and continue to recommend it as a must read!

Cheers,

Rob Tait

Midlothian, Virginia

January 4, 2015

Dear Ms West

Thank you so much for writing American Betrayal which I just completed reading. Having experienced  the hot war of Vietnam as a young American officer and the cold war as a counterintelligence agent of the FBI, I can personally relate to the fact based anger, revulsion and concern you so eloquently convey in the book. Something I cannot forget or forgive was that years ago many a bloc country european  expatriate tearfully and bitterly condemned the duplicity of Roosevelt to me personally. 

I was very shocked and dismayed at the unfounded and vitriolic reaction to  the book by Mssrs, Horowitz and Radosh. They were very unfair and inaccurate,

Sincerely,

XXXX

San Jose, Ca

November 7, 2014

I felt compelled again to write you concerning your second book “American Betrayal”. This book is absolutely fascinating and unbelievable. I am 57 and never knew about the Lend Lease program or how bad the communist infiltration was. I never understood how the Russians were able to do so well in the Second World War and now it all makes sense. What’s so sad is that people who tried to tell the truth and expose the infiltration were all thrown under the bus. This will never be accepted as actual history. No wonder history always repeats itself. We can never learn from history if it is never revealed in full truth. I am disturbed by what I am reading, but admire the work you’ve done in this book. I have also read “Death of the Grown Up” and thought you nailed it in that book as well. Your grammer is so far above mine and sometimes takes me a while to digest, but you do a GREAT job. Wish there were more people out there who would look for and expose the truth. Seems like not enough people care. Good job!!!!

Joe Costanzo

Huntsville, Alabama

P.S. One other thing is that I just finished the Ken Burns series on PBS about Roosevelt. It proved how much this man was and is worshipped by so many as one of our greatest presidents. Amity Shales pretty much enlightened me as to his foolish government programs and how it actually made the Depression last longer than it should have. However, I always admired his leadership and how he brought this country together during the Second World War. After reading your book, I see it all so differently now.

August 30, 2014

August 5, 2014

August 4, 2014

August 2, 2014

Dear Diana:

Here is a glimpse backward to a journalist predecessor of yours: 

“DIES HAS COME BACK” is the headline of an article by Will Judy written in 1952.  He quotes from an AP account dated Jan. 3, 1939, which cites a report by the Dies Committee.  The report said, “…..we are convinced that a large part of the espionage and un-American activities and propaganda carried on in this country can be directly traced to the failure of the labor department to enforce the deportation laws of the land.”

Communism “is active in political parties, labor unions, and schools, and has penetrated the government to such an extent that some communists hold key positions in federal agencies and projects.” 

Note that this was in 1939, ten years before Senator Joseph McCarthy would undertake his own investigation.  

Will Judy wrote:  “It is idle to say that the taint of communism and treason in our government (the two today are mostly synonymous) is something new or is something which was not known fully by the high and low in Washington long ago.  It began in 1933 when Mr. Roosevelt took office.  One of his first moves was to secure recognition of Russia by the U.S.”  
 
That should sound familiar to anyone reading American Betrayal.  Seventy+ years ago, Americans who were not willfully blind were noting the deliberate non-enforcement of certain American laws.  Imagine how secure our nation would be today if that trend had been checked and reversed then. 

Capt. Will(iam) Judy was a World War I veteran who later ran a book and magazine publishing company in Chicago.  He was an American patriot and outspoken critic of socialism and communism, some of the topics about which he wrote in his magazine in the 1940s-‘50s.  The article from which I quote here appeared in his magazine The Spectator, Vol. 11, No. 4, Fourth Quarter 1952, pp. 26-27.  I found bound volumes of this magazine in the archived periodicals at the St. Louis Public Library.  Perhaps the Library of Congress may have similar volumes.  Apparently they are not available on the Internet and I imagine there are very few people today who have ever heard of Will Judy.  Here is more about his life:  Will Judy .    


David Schroth

June 8, 2014

Ms. West,

I just finished “Betrayal" and wish to convey my thanks for marshaling so many disparate facts from so many sources and fashioning them into such a compelling and convincing narrative.

I have read several of the original sources you cite, plus several others, on intelligence matters, and was an interrogator in Vietnam, myself, so I know something of the subject from my own research and experience.

I am looking forward to reading “Rebuttal,” as well. The truth must be told, and you are one of those whom I regard as an informed and trustworthy source for it.

XXXX

June 2, 2014

Diana,

I finished your book. Well-documented, too much info to absorb in one read. I will go back to it again. I had been operating under the assumption that "the truth doesn't matter anymore." What your book throws into stark relief is that the truth hasn't mattered for a long time, in particular, starting in 1933. We are now experiencing the same cover-up of the Islamic threat and not exposing Obama in the same way communists were protected. I have been reading about the US embassy in Moscow starting in 1934. It appeared to have been a den of iniquity. I have come to the conclusion that the US Government and the media as institutions are hopelessly corrupt and I am no longer sure we can turn things around. In any case, I think your book is an invaluable contribution to the truth.

Larry (Lawrence Sellin)

May 30, 2014

Dear Ms. West --

I've long enjoyed your columns, recently finished American Betrayal, and am now on Evan's Blacklisted By History.
Thank you for your fantastic work !

I am an old movie buff, and I wanted to ask if you are familiar with a couple of films.

The first is "The Best Years of Our Lives", the masterpiece of Goldwyn & Wyler that is wonderful in depicting the post war transition. It rings so true throughout, but one scene has always seemed "off" --
and that is the one where Homer ( the amputee sailor ) confronts a man who tells him he fought in vain, referring to his newspaper story of the real enemy (implying the Soviet Union). The "American Fascist" ( a description recently used by a NYTimes reviewer of the Bluray release )  is immediately dispatched by Homer's airforce buddy Fred, and there is to be no doubt for the audience that the man is a villain. The screenplay for the film is by Robert E. Sherwood.

The other film is "My Son John", a 1952 film directed by Leo McCarey and starring Helen Hayes and Robert Walker. Walker plays a Federal bureaucrat visiting his small-town parents. They gradually come to the realization that he is a communist conspirator. I had read about this movie for years but never seen it. It was universally referenced as an example of Cold War paranoia, and patently ridiculous. TCM showed it about a year or so ago, the first time it had been on TV in decades, with the usual disclaimers coming this time from Robert Osborn. I was surprised at how good the film was, and how un-paranoid and not-ridiculous it was !

I wanted to offer these as some unofficial footnotes to American Betrayal.

Sincerely,

Tim Raglin

April 22, 2014

Hello, Diana --

I am writing as I work my way through American Betrayal.  I am up to page 208 and felt compelled to write.  You have done a great job of laying out the detail of the betrayals, but have been especially effective in getting the message over by using a less formal style.  The contents are frankly awful to think about, but are not all new to me. What you have done is really created a great call for action.

I have been an anti-communist since I was 13 or 14, and the incident that sparked it off was reading about the Famine, the first Big Lie as you call it.  I was at school in the early 70s in Scotland and was perusing some news items in the school library.  I think it was Keesings Contemporary Archives, which I had started to meander through as I grew to enjoy reading about current events and history.

Well, I happened upon a wee article on the famine and it mentioned 6 million dead.  I had to double check the figure as I could not believe it.  Why had I never heard of this?  We all knew about the 6 million dead Jews, but Ukrainians?  Hardly knew the place, let alone that there were even 6 million to murder!

This all set me thinking and I began to see that this all fitted with the lack of angst in the media over so many communist crimes (Mao etc etc) that we were not being given the full picture about.  As I grew up I learned more and more, but generally by getting books from obscure military (and lefty!) bookstores in London.  Thank God for the internet now which has opened up the field more.

I agree with your pin-pointing the 30s as the time we lost it, and I agree that FDR really did for us.

It is incredible to me that I only see this so clearly now but the story has been so well obscured.  And I read a lot on this area!  For Jo Blow out there, he will never be told about Hopkins et al.  Even in the UK we only heard about the TVA!!!  Which I believe still exists, for God's sake!

I truly hope your work is seminal.  It is for me. Thanks.  Whatever else follows, you can rest assured you did your bit for all of us.  American Betrayal is unique.

Best regards,

XXXX

April 12, 2014

I found your book, American Betrayal,  fascinating and I must confess I would not have bought and read it if it had not been for all the people slagging you off.  I then followed your book to the biography of McCarthy.
 
It quite changed my view of history – very uncomfortable but much appreciated.
 
Regards
Sarah Ferguson

The writer is a member of the local legislature, the States of Jersey, in the UK

March 10, 2014

Via Twitter, I received the following email about American Betrayal that was sent to a blog called Plain Path Puritan:

Point 1: I've just recently seen something. I've been reading Diana West's American Betrayal about how the Soviet Union since 1933 has been subverting and undermining the United States and western Europe and all English speaking countries and so on, and then how the current coming to life of Islam is doing the same thing using the same tactics.

Point 2: Diana West's book exploded onto the scene, was viciously denounced by neo-conservatives (former leftists and former communists who are now supposedly conservatives) and was ignored by the left since the right was attacking it, and it was ignored by the big mainstream press overall (New York Times, Washington Post, etc.) yet still made it into the mainstream at lesser levels (the Washington Times reviewed it, the mainstream blogosphere has championed it, etc.) and it's published by a mainstream publisher, and she herself is a mainstream columnist and journalist.

Point 3: just recently I watched one of those Christian videos about the *four hidden dynasties*. The four dynasties, or kingdoms, or systems, being 1. Government, 2. Economy, 3. Religion and Education, and 4. News and Entertainment Media. And how the spirit of antichrist works through those four dynasties to subvert and defile and attack nations and peoples and individuals.

The realization I had was twofold: 1. what I'm reading in Diana West's book isn't new because I use to be *onto it* when I use to be into the mesoteric, spiritual warfare side of Christianity (Arnold Murray even use to talk of such subject matter). So that means my resentment at the Soviet Union getting such a victory over us used to be seen simply as the usual attack from the Kingdom of Satan on everybody all the time and I didn't necessarily associate it with communism or the Soviet Union, though they certainly have played the agent for the Devil in it over the last 80 years no doubt. 2. Diana West's book exploded on the scene *because* it brought spiritual material into the mainstream where it is hardly ever seen or allowed to be. David Horowitz even said, during the initial attacks he and others made on the book: "This book should never have been written." And nobody could figure out why he, a defender of free speech and a foe of political-correctness and so on would say such a thing. It's because unconsciously he was expressing the worldly demand that things from the spiritual realm not be talked of in the mainstream worldly realm.

And as I've been reading the book my overriding thought has been that she is talking about spiritual warfare things, the spirit of antichrist as it attacks through those four things, Government, Economy, Religion and Education, News and Entertainment Media; yet she obviously is not writing about it all from that angle. That would make the book just like the video I referenced above, something in the mesoteric/esoteric realm that never makes it into the mainstream worldly realm.

Interesting... - C.

March 4, 2014

American Betrayal crushed my view of history and broke my heart, but I love you for telling the truth

I'm just so angry and disappointed.  I've decided I'll do what I can to see that the truth gets out.

Than you, Ms West.

Regards,

XXXX

February 22, 2014

Dear Diana West,

In the 1960s, Richard Lamparski spoke with many people who had once been in the limelight.  Martin Dies was one of them.  When Lamparski asked him for a comment on the American political scene in the mid-1960s, the former Congressman replied, “I think we have scraped the bottom of the barrel.”  [ Richard Lamparski, Whatever Became Of…?, Crown Publishers, 1967, p. 33 ]

Now there’s an optimist for you: A man who thought American public policies couldn’t get any worse than they were in 1967.  Imagine how he would lower his estimate if he were here today and could see the monstrously evil and suicidal public policies that Americans now agree to embrace, not to mention the fools, liars, and traitors who promote those policies. 

Your assessment in American Betrayal of the moral and intellectual rot in American public policies promoted during the FDR years is absolutely valid.  But the rot extends back farther than 1933. 

A hundred years ago, in 1914, Fabian Socialist ideas were promoted in a book called The Great Society by the Fabian Socialist Graham Wallas.  Fifty years later, in 1964, “The Great Society” became one of the slogans in Lyndon Johnson’s administration.  Was that “just” a coincidence? 

Fifty years after that, we are suffering with the consequences of LBJ’s “War on Poverty” (whose effect was to increase and expand the power of the federal government) and the 1965 immigration reform act (whose effect was to weaken Americans’ national strength and confidence by admitting millions of aliens who have no allegiance to America). 

There is no innocent explanation or excuse for such things.  Those effects have unfolded over a span of decades.  But that is exactly the Fabian Socialist plan:  To promote radical changes gradually, slowly, patiently, in order not to provoke too much attention or resistance at any one time.  This has proven enormously successful in modern America, where most people have the attention span of a flea or are too busy with the many diversions and amusements in their nationwide fun house to give much thought to slow-acting, long-range alterations to their way of life. 

You are one of the few in your generation to see and understand the unspeakable, indescribable, immeasurable evil in public policies of acquiescence, accommodation, and appeasement like those I have seen adopted over the span of my life.   Your two books are wonderful and your judgments are absolutely valid.  Please continue your excellent work.  

Sincerely,
David Schroth

February 19, 2014

Diana,
 
I have just finished reading your book, American Betrayal, for the second time, and it has left me more upset than I have ever been.  I’ve already gotten three of my friends to buy it and they are reading it now and one of them calls me every day with some outrage they never knew about.  We’re all middle-aged, college-educated professionals, and we feel like throwing out every history book we’ve ever read because they are filled with garbage.
 
I need to ask you a few questions:  Does knowing what you know make it impossible for you to watch or read the news because it is so much BS?  Do you have friends who know the “real story”  that you can communicate with on a regular basis so that you are not isolated (in a sense) by your knowledge?  I just feel that you have done your readers such a great service that it is unfair to know what you do and then see it ignored or avoided so that the “talking heads” keep their place at the table.
 
Are there writers or programs you watch (we all watch Fox News, but I can’t even stomach Charles right now), that you feel are trustworthy or of some value?
 
I know you are busy, but I’d appreciate anything that you can tell me that will lift my spirits—because right now, I feel no connection to this country.  I guess I’m a bit isolated by what I’ve learned from you, too.
 
Sincerely,

XXXX

February 9, 2014

Ms. West,

I had to put your book down multiple times because I could not bear to read more than a few pages at a time, but I finally finished it. What you have given me however is the ability to see through the moral relativism, the continuing agitprop that is our lot in 2014, and beyond. Like sheep we tacitly accept PC and all manner of sugar coating from every quarter, “conservative” and liberal alike. It is no wonder in a way why this has all been hidden, because the outrage would have brought down the entire government. The war to make the world safe for Communism was a smashing success, and we are oblivious to what is right in front of us.
 
I have had arguments online with people who say your research is bunk, without them even knowing it was you I was drawing from.  My final replies have been, “Ah, now I understand, you are a Communist.”  On disqus I have untiringly promoted your book, and sometimes commenters have thanked me.  Now I am going to dive into your rebuttal book; I am quite curious why everyone has been attacking your research.

I had many thoughts as I read your book, which I may share if it is ok.  At the moment I am exhausted though.

My heartfelt thanks to you for uncovering all you found.  Now I have another mountain of books that your cited to read.
 
Cheers,

David Barber

February 7, 2014

Dear Mrs. West,

I have read your book "American Betrayal" with huge interest. Together with the books of English professor C. Andrew in a co-authorship with the former Soviet spies-defectors Gordiyevsky and Mitrokhin, together with Evans and Romerstein's work "Stalin's Secret Agents," your book made me to look differently at history of the Soviet penetration into the American establishment and rendering influence on the American policy. Your book is indeed very deep, interesting and is much more serious, than, for example, [other] work. Though for the non American reader it is sometimes difficult to read because we here do not know much of the details of the American history.

Very wise are your thoughts of proximity of ideologies of communism and Islam and about their incompatibility with American values and in general the western values. In my opinion, however, it would be necessary to speak not about communism as that, and about that communal, anti-individualistic outlook which proceeds from traditions of the Byzantine Orthodoxy and in which the communism was only the most radical phase but not more. Anti-individualistic “Soviet” ideology is, as I think, not 90, but more than 1000 years old and it is not dead since 1991. I think that Russia, Ukraine and other oriental Slavonic orthodox countries of the former USSR anyway remain “communal”, where the individual rights and freedoms do not play big role, and they won't be able to apprehend the western values of individualism and a personal liberties and human rights. ... Politicians of these countries will use these words in their political rhetoric and for most part – for the “export” it means to make western politicians believe. I mean not the politicians in Russia and Ukraine will not introduce the western values, but the societies themselves. Some individuals do want to live “like in the West”, and there are many of them, but the societies as whole do not want. But their population in its majority won't apprehend these values. And in this regard the Post-Soviet orthodox countries are ideologically closer to Islam countries, than to the West countries. So as the infiltration of communistic ideology in the USA in the 1930-1940 years did harm to America or as now the Islamic ideology harms to the USA like it any attempts of the USA to introduce any kind of democracy to the Islamic countries only harm those countries (Iraq after Saddam Hussein, Egypt after Hosni Mubarak at all didn't become prospering democratic societies, and Syria, if Bashar al-Assad would be expelled, would not become prospering and democratic society). And in the same way the attempts of the western countries to introduce democracy on the western sample in Ukraine and Russia harms to the people of Ukraine and Russia. Russia and Ukraine simply are not parts of the western civilization (Prof. Huntington knew it) and every attempts to change this situation are in advance doomed to failure. We simply are others, and nobody can change it.

And what is more, any actions of America in this direction cause negative feelings in relation to Americans, thus the USA harm to themselves. Everybody in Europe, Russia, Islamic World liked Americans in the 19th century. By Jules Verne Americans were most favorite and always positive heroes after Frenchmen. The Russians liked Americans very much. But now, as you know, the recent polls show quite different picture. I think one of the most important causes is the so called import of democracy. Alain de Benoist in his “Religion of the Human Rights” has shown why the western values are not necessary good for non-western societies. And the introduction of these values in those societies is a big error.

The Islamic world, the Western world and the Orthodox world are different civilizations, and any mixture of them is dangerous and harmful to all of them.

I would say so. The attempts of the communist infiltration in America were wrong and bad. The attempts of Islamic infiltration in America are wrong and bad. But the attempts of the “liberal-democratic” infiltration in non-western societies – Orthodox, Muslim, maybe Confucian – are wrong and bad too.  The world is big, and there are enough places for every kind of peoples and cultures, but the mixture and standardization of them, making of the “grey mass”, it is bad for any people and any culture, and the cause of more and more conflicts.

Once again many thanks for your book and my best wishes!

Best regards

XXXX

Kiev, Ukraine

January 23, 2014

Dear Ms West,
 
Thank you very much for having the courage to write such a controversial book, American Betrayal. I finished it in the first few weeks of this month and posted my review on the Amazon.co.uk site, as I live in the UK and purchased my book on the UK site. I do think that what you uncovered is only part of the story, and many more gruesome details will emerge in the fullness of time.
 
What prompted me to take this unusual step of writing you today, is an article I read on the Andrew Bolt website. Andrew is an Australian newspaper journalist and he also hosts his own TV programme, that has a very big following in Australia. The numbers are of course not comparable with the USA. In any case, today I read Andrew reviewing some work of Kipling, the Bard of the Empire. Kipling noted in the piece that Andrew Bolt quoted: -  

 
.. I had met several men and an occasional woman, whom I by no means loved. They were overly soft-spoken or blatant, and dealt in pernicious varieties of safe sedition. For the most part they seemed to be purveyors of luxuries to the ‘Aristocracy,’ whose destruction by painful means they loudly professed to desire. They derided my poor little Gods of the East, and asserted that the British in India spent violent lives ‘oppressing’ the Native. (This in a land where white girls of sixteen, at twelve or fourteen pounds per annum, hauled thirty and forty pounds weight of bath-water at a time up four flights of stairs!)

The more subtle among them had plans, which they told me, for ‘snatching away England’s arms when she isn’t looking—just like a naughty child—so that when she wants to fight she’ll find she can’t.’ (We have come far on that road since.) Meantime, their aim was peaceful, intellectual penetration and the formation of what to-day would be called ‘cells’ in unventilated corners. Collaborating with these gentry was a mixed crowd of wide-minded, wide-mouthed Liberals, who darkened counsel with pious but disintegrating catch-words, and took care to live very well indeed...

Sorry, that is a long quote, but you can get the context, and I am sure you can see the relevance to your book.
 
For your convenience I give the link to whole Andrew Bolt article hereunder:-
 
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/reading_kipling/
 
To my mind it only affirms what you uncovered, but goes even further, as it exposes a mindset common in our species, the hatred of own kind, our own kith and kin.  Stories of antiquity gives examples of people who despised and acted with treason, driven by money or just plain hate, against their own. There is no reason to expect that mankind, be they living in the new or old world, has changed. The problem with the USA is that it is populated by people, and you just have to accept them, warts and all.
 
Rgds
 
Loodt Pretorius, a new follower of your work.

December 23, 2013

Merry Christmas from your thankful Russian reader

Dear Mrs. West,

Recently I received one of the best Christmas gifts of this year: a comment to my Amazon review of your magnificent  American Betrayal, which says:

"Dear Rostislav from Saint Petersburg,
Thank you and God bless you for your wonderful review and heartfelt comments. I am first generation American born from a family of Russian immigrants and I have tried to encourage friends and husband to read this incredible book, thus far, to no avail. They seem to be afraid of what truths they may find. But, like you, Rostislav, it was not just the incredible scholarship but the woman's incredible voice--her passion and righteous indignation--that hooked me.
Like you, I hope it is not too late for my country to step back from the precipice of oblivion upon which we are now poised. But I do so appreciate your reaction to American Betrayal because it so mirrors my own.
Intrepid".
 

It's such a joy to see that your attitude to history has many understanding "mirrors" in our wide world, from your America to my Russia!

Yours, with respect, gratitude and every good wish for Merry Christmas and A Very Fruitful New Year

– Rostislav, Saint-Petersburg, Russia.

December 20, 2013

Hi Diana,
 
The attack continues. I posted a link to American Betrayal (as my choice for Book of the Year, and the decade) at James Taranto's Fans of the Best of the Web Today facebook page and within minutes the vipers were out, none of them having read the book. They posted the Radosh atrocity and Clare Sparks review from American Thinker.
 
I smacked them around. Deleted the post. Reposted it asking for nothing more than a cessation of bullshit. They went right back at it.
 
I always say that Diana West broke the first rule of Fight Club, she talked about Fight Club.
 
American Betrayal, along with Radzinsky's Stalin, Edward Jay Epstein's Deception, and Claire Sterling's The Terror Network, all read in close proximity, helped me to reach a completely new perspctive on history from 1933 to now.
 
Thank you. Yours was the best.
 
Martin McPhillips

November 29, 2013

Dear Ms. West,

Thank you for confirming I am not crazy.  I am half way through American Betrayal and continue to sit slack-jawed as I read each chapter.  Count me as one who took issue that we "saved" eastern Europeans from Nazis only to turn them over to totalitarians.  And then I too find screen print pics of Mao vile.  I even started quite the buzz on some decorating blog (decorating!) when I pointed out the pen and ink drawing of "cute" Mao in some chick's country chic bathroom showed a distinct lack of comprehension for the talents of one of history's famed mass murderers. I don't think the women readers had any idea what I was talking about.  And that's the problem you eloquently cited, few people know, understand or care to understand the horrific narrative of communism in the 20th century.
 
I am 57 years old and can barely find a contemporary who gets it let alone someone younger than I who has a clue the depth of depravity that communism wrought.  During President Reagan's funeral I sat in a break room at work and watched portions of it.  A coworker, one year younger, sat down and started to trash him (she being of the left persuasion) so I turned to her and said, "One hundred million."  She asked me what I said, so I repeated, "One hundred million."  I said, "More than 100 million people died at the hands of communism in the 20th century and this man was one of the few who identified the evil and stood up to it and for that I will always admire him."  She just looked at me with no response. 
 
When your book was released I was shocked at the negative response that came from the RIGHT side of the aisle!  I plan to go back and reread what was written once I have finished the book.  I recall being quite disappointed in Clarice Feldman's bizarre article in American Thinker and pointed it out to my husband.  I always look forward to Clarice's Sunday morning columns but found her commentary on your book (that she had not read) peculiar and seemingly from out of no where.
 
I could go on and on with other anecdotes and observations but you get the picture.  Only those who actively seek out the truth are going to find it but so few care to know.  I can't even get my millennial children to care.
 
So thank you for your meticulous research and for taking the brunt of such unwarranted criticism.  I plan to buy a couple copies for friends and family and I will keep my copy close at hand.
 
Best Regards,
XXXX

November 25, 2013

Hello, Diana.

Firstly, I extend a thanks for removing the veil of lies I've worn. I was a history major and no one has EVER touched on what you've written about in this book.

Secondly, I teach history at University of Phoenix, more specifically, I teach the Cold War. Do you have an outline of events I could use to help me give them the counterpoints to the textbook material?  I'm prepared to go through the book and make an outline, but if you have a working one written, that'd be extremely helpful.  No pressure, just thought I'd ask.

Thirdly, you are an excellent writer. Your gifted brain holds limitless fathoms of helpful frameworks and your intelligence is dizzying.  Thank you for writing.  Reading this book is a game changer and I'm shouting it and quoting it from the rooftops. (Okay, not literally, but you understand.)

Solzhenitsyn was right about the future; we're seeing it now. I'll keep standing for truth.  Thanks for standing, too.
Enjoy Thanksgiving while we can.  I don't foresee it always being this way, but I harbor such hope for our nation.

Yours to Call Upon,

Brandi

November 18, 2013

Diana,

Thank you for American Betrayal.  I am guessing that you not only are receiving a lot of heat for the book, but a lot of mail from folks like me that are so thankful for your painstaking research.  You have put together many pieces that have floated around in my mind for years.  Victor Herman's book, Coming Out of the Ice, is for me one book  that exploded any myth about Americans not being kept in the Soviet Union and the lack of forthrightness on the part of American politicians to take care of our own people.  You have put together so many pieces of the puzzle for us all.  Thank you.  And keep up the good work!

Dr. Tim Leever
Professor of Theology and Philosophy
Grace College of Divinity

November 17, 2013

Dear Ms. West,
 
I have read your book, American Betrayal, and found it to be in harmony with other books, including Stanton Evans' work. Initially I was a bit stunned by the Radosh/Horowitz attack on your work. I have been leery of Radosh for some time over comments he made about McCarthy, and now I have difficulty with Horowitz’s integrity.   I hoped historians would jump into this mess, but I shouldn't be surprised none of those infesting academia would step forward. They are the problem.
 
At any rate I have followed this from the beginning preserving all the articles – pro and con- and I am happy you chose the course you did, and that you continue to attack those two over this.  It is my opinon the public has not been taken in by their stand, unless they’re leftists, then nothing truthful is meaningful to them since truth is the antithetical to leftism in all its permutations, including environmentalism.
 
I’m an exterminator in Ohio and I publish a blog is called, Paradigms and Demographics, which (surprising to me) is being hit from all over the world, including China and Russia…both in the top ten, and I run between 22 and 30 thousand hits a month.  Not that big of a deal, but I’m pleased, especially since there are a number of scientists who read my work regularly.  Anti- green, anti-environmentalism and support of traditional values is the thrust of my work, and your book fits in perfectly with my views that industry and government have been infiltrated by radicals attempt to make their radical views ‘mainstream’.   
 
I have linked your articles defending your book, and will continue to do so, since I have taken your side on all of this, and I have made your site a regular stop in my daily searches.  Keep on with your good work!
 
Best Wishes,
 
Rich Kozlovich
Pest Management Incorporated
 
Truth is the sublime convergence of history and reality. – Rich Kozlovich
 

October 18, 2013

I can't begin to tell you how amazing and yet dreadful it has been for me to
read your book, American Betrayal. I began to realize that U.S. and World History
courses I taught for 35 years in a Wisconsin high school were part of that betrayal
and I and my textbooks were passing on a narrative that, though "official" was dangerously
false. I now know, thanks to you, who the true heroes of those decades were.

I often wondered in those teaching years, why Alexander Solzhenitsyn could return to Russia. 
I was terribly sad about the mysterious death and smear of J. Edgar Hoover.  A friend had me read "Major Jordan's Diaries" and so I was at least familiar with his chilling accounts.  I did have our school library order Robert Conquest's book, and Claire Sterling's as well.Thank you for your work, integrity and this fine book.Now we need to begin working on updated, (and back-dated) history books for our present and future generations.Believe me, with all the media, graphics and primary sources now available, it should not be rocket science to work with textbook committees in states such as Texas to get a product that will be refreshingly written from an American, post Cold War perspective.
It also should be possible to write and market to the home schooling parents and associations.

With links to records and sources, a text should be interactive, and in effective honesty, share sources that can be accessed by students and parents. As long as it is now possible to use the internet, we can make an "end run" around the "official" history narratives and the disinformation mills. ...

Dan

Octber 18, 2013

Diana,

You are truly a gifted and brilliant writer.  Every night for the last couple of weeks I can't wait to get in bed, grab my iPad and read "American Betrayal."  It should be required reading in every American history class from the 7th grade through college.  Your abilities to put words together, ignoring for the moment the unbelievable research and insights you offer, is truly one of the best I have ever seen.

XXXX

October 18, 2013

This is a must-read book.
After reading part of it I was so angry told my wife that her father took a bullet in the head for no good reason.
When I finished the book  I was ashamed that we could let what happened to our troops and eastern Europe happen.
With what is going on in DC. and the culture in general it is books like this that might wake up what little is left of the American spirit.
Thank for all your effort to get the story out.
Sincerely,

XXXX

October 17, 2013

Diana:

I have been recommending American Betrayal to everyone I believe bright enough to appreciate the brilliance of your arguments. You know in your book there are many names that I suppose are unknown today,  that is to all but a few history junkies like my self. I just finished dinner at my country club with a large group including my brother; West Point, full colonel, Notre Dame Law and he knows a bit of history.  Nearly everyone at dinner has a minimum of a masters degree and about half are Phd's.  But when I mention Harry Hopkins, Alger Hiss or Harry Dexter White no one knows who I'm talking about. Hardly anyone I meet has read Solzhentsyn or knows what a zek is.      
In the past, my brother and I and have discussed Mark Clark at length and apparently Clark is not well regarded at The US Military Academy.  When I tried your revised history of the Italian campaign he was not convinced. Unlike him, I have been training for your book all my life.

Thank you so much for making sense of so many issues.  My goal is to get everyone reading your book. 

XXXX

October 16, 2013

Diana. 

This is what I’m writing to my deserving friends:

Are you familiar with the new book "AMERICAN BETRAYAL" by Diana West?

This is the most extraordinary and important book I have ever read, and I have read plenty.  In general terms, it explains what has really happened to America since 1933 and what is happening to our country today.  West connects the dots.

Diana West reaches many of the same unpopular conclusions that I have entertained over the years and answers some of the same important questions on history and politics I have been asking since I was in grammar school.  If many of the characters and facts in this book are unfamiliar to you trust me, the people and events are very accurate; I have been following or studying them for over 50 years.  Expect this book to be attacked and suppressed and Diana West to be vilified.   Expect ridicule when you quote this book in certain circles.  Don't expect easy reading or a feel good experience.

This book should make you feel very bad, for our country, for what may have been, for the million American casualties of perhaps needless wars. ...

Prentiss Davis

October 11, 2013

Dear Ms West

I just finished reading one of the scariest books I have ever read.
American Betrayal should be mandatory reading for every college student in our country.
Our government and elected leaders scare the hell out of me.

I am of the Viet Nam generation. Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, left us with 56,000 dead young men and women. I wonder if we will ever find the weapons of mass destruction that have cost us 4,488 more American lives in Iraq & Afghanistan.

Your last chapter should be re-printed in every newspaper in the country. Here are some scary numbers from Pew research - by 2030 (17 yrs) the Muslim population of the world is projected to be at 2.2 Billion which will be 26.4% of the world population.

Keep writing and PLEASE - get on as many talk shows as possible. America needs to wake up and hear what you have to say.

Sincerely,

XXXX

October 8, 2013

Dear Mrs./Miss West,
 
As I wrote in my "review" for Amazon", this is a "must read" book.   Although I lived through this era and remember my Dad telling me about Harry Hopkins, etc., I had NO idea the depth and range of the Soviet affect on the FDR regime and the tragic effects on WW II, particularly in the early Pacific era.  We all knew of "Roosevelt" shutting off Patton's gasoline for his tanks in an effort to protect the Russian advance across Europe and I was aware of Stalin's late minute East Asia "grab", etc., but was unaware of the "real time" supply of the "atom bomb" secrets to "Uncle Joe" and his minions.
 
Boy, was Patton EVER RIGHT!!!  Unfortunately we need some Patriots like him today with this Muslim imposter in the Oval Office!
 
GREAT JOB!
 
Thoroughly enjoyed it and am recommending it to all and sundry.
 
Thanks,
 
Richard H. Irish
Korean "Police Action" era E-5

October 4, 2013

MS. WEST:
 
Just wanted to thank you again for AMERICAN BETRAYAL.  I've passed out several copies to friends and cannot even begin to express how important I believe it is.  It should be required reading in every school.
 

XXXX

October 2, 2013

Dear Ms. West,
 
I am very grateful for the chance to write to you. I admit I did not know your name until a friend of mine told me about American Betrayal and urged me to read it. Hence I did. What courage and boldness you have shown digging into the dusty (perhaps locked?) archives of a very crucial period of our history. The scorn and outright malice which has met your work is truly sad. People cannot bear the notion that the emperor has no clothes. I am simply stunned at what the record shows. From Lend-Lease to Katyn Forest, from D-Day to the second front, from the sending back of Russian soldiers to American prisoners in the Gulag. It is almost too much to bear. The  exhaustive documentation speaks for itself. No wonder the elite would rather keep it all under a bushel. What frightens me is that most Americans could care less about this story. We began as a nation planted firmly by streams of water the Framers devised the best they knew how, given the nature of man. I have tried to fill in the gaps of my own education. My own reading has included Sdyney, Locke, Cato’s Letters, Federalist, John Adams, Jefferson & Madison (the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions were so far ahead of their time, especially now!). Those who followed in their footsteps, like Randolph, Calhoun, and in our own century Russell Kirk and Richard Weaver, the Fugitive Poets and Southern Agrarians, these are the ones I seek out for wisdom. I don't want to lose my zeal to learn. Your work has given me renewed vigor. I thank you. May the Lord God bless you and all your loved ones.

XXXX

September 24, 2013

Dear Ms. West,

I am not sure if you will even get the opportunity to read this, but should i be so fortunate as to have you take the time to do so, it would have been worth the effort. As a 35 year old long-time conservative living in NYC, my girl friend and I are a rare occurence and rather "alone" from a political perspective. Having been nearly a victim of leftist brain washing at my my liberal arts college back in the '90s, i was able to educate myself about the real state of the world. I have read over 100 books about modern history and politics and after reading American Betrayal, I have to tell you that this is the first time i have felt so compelled to write to an author.

American Betrayal covers several inter-connected topics that i have been studying for years on my own, and which you, for the first time, managed to connect them all. From the similarities between the way in which the West/US deals with its confrontation with Radical Islam and how it dealt with the Soviet Union before, during and after WWII, to men that were left behind from World War I through the Vietnam war, to the absolute penetration of the US government by the subversive Communists, your book touches on topics that have intrigued me for years. Even better, your witty, sarcastic writing style makes reading more about how the US government willingly gave over control of its foreign policy to the Soviets thanks to pressure from within and without, all the more captivating.

What i found of particular interest was how, over the years, there were lone individuals who realized something was amiss, either by accident or intention, and made an effort to alert those in charge  to the facts, unaware that not only did they not know the half of it, as you say, but that they had come across an impenetrable wall of a mindset that refused to face the facts for ideological reasons and political expediency.  Unfortunately, we never learn about those unsung heroes, or, when we do, it is only through the perspective of leftists who have managed to vilify them.

I could go on, but i'm sure you get a lot of fan mail. One more thing - I was very disturbed to read about the treatment you have received from Horowitz, Radosh and others.

Thanks again for writing what is without a doubt the best book i have ever read.

Sincerely,

XXXX

September 16, 2013

Dear Ms. West,

I recently finished AMERICAN BETRAYAL and was deeply affected by it. I’ve read most of the prior books on Soviet penetration of the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations and yours is by far the most revealing and compelling account. I was particularly taken by your emphasis on the subversion of policy rather than espionage; and focusing on Harry Hopkins as the most influential and destructive figure in the vast constellation of enemy agents. His role in giving the Soviets precedence with Lend-Lease has to rank with Yalta and Roosevelt’s insistence on unconditional surrender in determining Europe’s post-war map.

Since Hopkins and the other traitors presumably believed in the Utopian future, I fault Roosevelt more than them for the Red Army’s location at war’s end. No matter how malleable and feckless he was in foreign policy he wasn’t a believer, but in his reflexive acceptance of Stalin’s demands might as well have been. Then there’s Churchill, albeit the near-powerless junior partner, but still… At least he admitted after the war that his greatest mistake was his indifference to the many overtures of the German Resistance. Reading the book with its endless litany of folly and betrayal, I was reminded of how Evelyn Waugh looked forward to joining a crusade against Hitler and Stalin during the Pact, but lost interest once Stalin became an ally of sorts. So an eccentric novelist was far more prescient about the Soviets than the near totality of Anglo-American politicians and generals.

Your book also revived unpleasant memories of having once believed the enveloping lie that Hiss and the others were innocent victims hounded by ruthless inquisitors. (Sidebar: As a student I was in the senate gallery when the august body gathered to expel one of its own. Prior to the vote the senators were milling about but carefully shunning McCarthy, by then a beaten man and standing all alone a good twenty yards from the nearest solon. When in comes Kennedy from another universe with his orange skin, blinding smile and summer tailoring. He goes straight to McCarthy with a loud ‘Hello, Joe” and puts an arm around him. A “profile in courage.” 

As to your father’s courageous efforts to publish the two anti-Communist novels, I can easily imagine all those bien pensant Houghton Miflin editors crowding into the boss’s office in outraged indignation. But why outraged when they knew the truth? The most baffling thing about leftists, that they knew about the purges, the Famine, the Gulag, all of it, but became enraged if the subject was brought up in print or a public forum.

My own experience parallels your father’s in one instance, and, incredibly, diverges in another. Regarding the latter, my very liberal editor inexplicably published a novel of mind, LONG SHADOWS, despite it’s theme: the Allied betrayal of the German Resistance, the Vlasov Army and all those other Russians rounded up or killed during Operation Keelhaul. Not surprisingly, the few reviews were not just hostile but vicious, perhaps due even more to the novel’s Appendix than the novel itself. After reading AMERICAN BETRAYAL I looked at the Appendix for the first time since LS was published. Among other things it refers to the connection between members of the Resistance and Vlasov’s people, but I can no longer remember my sources for this. I do recall someone referring me to an article on the subject sometime after LS was published but it was in a German-language journal and I didn’t pursue it. Some years later I met the German Foreign Ministry’s liaison with Vlasov at a dinner party in Paris, a Baron von Ludwighausen-Wolff, a former soldier of fortune (the Riff Wars!) straight from Central Casting. Unfortunately he wasn’t very forthcoming about Vlasov except to say that he was already a hopelessly depressed alcoholic by the time he met him.

I had a very different experience with the same editor in the Eighties when I wrote a second anti-Communist novel—despite repeated warnings from then-wife and friends. I can only speculate that his outraged two-paged rejection had to do with the book’s being contemporaneous rather than referring back to the Stalinist era. Anyway…

Let me again express my admiration for your book’s revelatory detail, and the clarity and passion with which it’s conveyed. If only it were written from the correct POV it would be up for a Pulitzer.

All the best,

Lawrence Snelling

September 8, 2013

Dear Diana,

After belatedly reading Death of the Grownup, it was inevitable that I should snatch up a copy of    American Betrayal when it came out.  As I read it, I pondered its similarities to and differences from one of the most compelling tales of all time--Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.  When I was guided to Lord of the Rings by a student who wanted to treat it as a medieval quest epic, I had no idea what it was, but I was willing to see.  Once started, I read at white heat for an entire weekend to finish it.  I was compelled by Tolkien's masterful prose and his vision of terror and courage reflecting Good and Evil in this world.  He weaves together the myths and legends of Celtic, Germanic and Finnic peoples, to form a tapestry of the folk-thought of the Western world,

I read American Betrayal with the same intensity, but not at the same speed.  It too, swept me along, but it is impossible to read it at speed because it is studded with references and not to pay attention to them would be like driving full throttle through the battlefield at Gettysburg and believing you were taking a historical tour.  It too, weaves an unmistakable pattern from an impressive array of sources, and drives the narrative with wit, verve and righteous indignation.  It is a classic in its own right.

Since then, I have followed the firestorm of its reception.  I am no expert on neo-cons, but I have spent much of a lifetime hearing and reading about Communists and what were once called "fellow travelers."  It is a good thing when a lifelong Communist sees the light and becomes anti-communist.  That is more than can be said for the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre, who received the news of Soviet tanks in streets of Prague and continued to contemplate his existential navel.

But, if neo-cons are born-again anti-communists, why are not all of them rejoicing at the publication of your book?  Why are some of them not celebrating the use of sources not available when they made their crucial decision?  Why are they not  applauding the painstaking re-assessment or resurrection of older sources to reveal as yet unnoticed or purposely ignored patterns and "dots to connect"?   Why are they not shouting in the streets, "Yes! Yes!  That's what we have been telling you!"

Aye, as someone once said, there's the rub.  They have not been telling us  that.  They have renounced the Stalinist state, but not the heroes of their childhood.    Hands off FDR!  Hands off Harry Hopkins!  These newly minted "democrats" have taken a major step away from one kind of tyranny, and become part of another.  It is the Age of Alinsky: identify the enemy; isolate; destroy.  And the enemy in this case is someone who has created a counter-narrative to their own.  How could you know that former Communists and their fellow-travelers would be horrified that you had, in all innocence, so to speak, ripped the winding sheet off the putrefying corpse and let the world peer in at what had been hidden in the dark?

As Tolkien knew, and countless metaphors and divine pantheons have informed us since the beginning of intelligent thought, darkness is the enemy of light and cannot abide its presence.  So, when you lifted the shroud and let in the light, the creatures of darkness flew out in haste and rage and fear and, summoning any who would join them, swarmed to the attack.  The ferocity of the attack bespeaks the desperate need to re-assert control of the narrative by destroying both dissent and dissenter.  And the desperation is emphasized by the nature of most of the attacks and attackers.  There are those who  have not even read the book--probably not even held it in their hands, and yet leap to the attack at a nod from a friend or mentor.  There are those who rip through the text, seeking  the lone sentence or passage that can be expanded and distorted out of relation to its context and used to "prove" the entire thesis is false.  They have even resorted to the time-honored Stalinist technique of censorship, deep-sixing a favorable review in hopes that no one noticed it had been there, then summarily dismissing the author.

I believe they have been surprised by the blowback.  They should have foreseen in the age of the internet, which they have used to their advantage, that it was not possible to carry out a character assassination without attracting unwanted attention.  The fact that they are scurrying to reply to a spate of counter-counterattacks is evidence that the campaign is not going as smoothly as they had hoped.  You were supposed to lie down and die.  No one was supposed to listen to you, because you had been made laughable or contemptible.  So the battle is not over.

It would be comforting if this were an old film, and and we could anticipate the final scene, when a heroic figure drives a stake into the heart of darkness.  But there is no heart here--only the drive to control.  So beware.  The attack may abate or recede, but it will never be gone.  Even if your Rebuttal causes a cessation of hostilities, it will not be the end of hostility.  If you are offered a truce, remember Mao's "fight fight, talk, talk" and look carefully at what is in the hand that is extended to you. 

Best of luck and thanks for being in the vanguard.

Jim

James Hodge, professor emeritus of Modern Languages and German at Bowdoin College.

 

August 16, 2013

Dear Ms. West,

I'm appalled at the attacks on you and your book. After reading it, I checked many of your sources and then continued to do more research on my own, and I'm convinced that your research is solid and your conclusions are worth serious consideration. In fact, I reluctantly found myself having to change some of my long-held ideas. Even though I'd long since shed my 1940s "red diapers," I realized that I still retained some of the undercurrents of the propaganda that I'd been raised with, mostly lodged in attitudes rather than opinions. Ironically, though, the evidence that you bring forward in your book, and that's been brought forward in other books by M. Stanton Evans and Paul Kengor (among others), rings especially true for me since I recognize many of the names, events, sources, and disinformation from my red-diaper youth -- but I'd never made some of the connections that you make, or known some of the documented facts that you've added to my own experience and research.
 
Thank you for your addition to my own knowledge and to the furtherance of knowledge in general. As you say, it's horrifying to realize how much damage has been done to our Nation in the past, and how much continues to be done today with the same methods -- and the same refusal to acknowledge what's happening.

Sincerely,

P.S.S.

Professor Emerita, English
The Ohio State University

P.S. May I also add something to my previous comments, especially now that I've read more of the attacks on your scholarship? One of the things that impressed me in American Betrayal was the way you scrupulously presented evidence against some of your own theories, obviously confident that your own evidence outweighed that on the other side, or at least that the subject needed more investigation. One example that comes to mind is the matter of Harry Hopkins' initials on the uranium shipment orders, where you do note that Hopkins normally used all three initials rather than simply "H.H." This is such an obscure point that it would have been easy for you to leave it out and hope the reader wouldn't know about it, but you reported it anyway -- and your other evidence was convincing enough so that the unisual initials became a matter of curiosity but largely irrelevant to the rest of your case. As a scholar myself, I appreciate this kind of scholarly honesty.
 
Thank you again for all your work. Now I can hardly wait for your next book.
 

August 15, 2013

Dear Diana,

By virtue of your book, "American Betrayal" and the absolutely vicious response by the Neo-Conservative (i.e. not at all conservative) wing of the Repubican Party, I think you have achieved a victory beyond your wildest imagination.  From my perspective, your book is the most important book since Barry Goldwater's "The Conscience of a Conservative", and I am sure that if Senator Goldwater were here today, he would be in your corner 100% and urging you forward with every thing he had. 

Since he's not here, let me be the one to encourge you.  You've done it.  You've unlocked the key to the American decline of the last 60 years, when we've gone from No. 1 in math and science to no. 21 and no. 23, respectively.  When we've lost millions of jobs and entire industries to overseas competition.  When we've become the least physically fit nation on earth and our health care expenses have skyrocketed from 5.2 percent of GDP to more than 17%.  We've wasted trillions upon trillions of dollars trying to be the "world's policeman", and our own borders are not even secure.  And in the process of this fiasco, we've gone from being the biggest creditor nation in the world, to the biggest debtor nation in history.  How has all this happened? 

The key to the riddle is in your book, which should be a must read for all Authentic American Conservatives.  The bottom line is that there is no defense to the truth that you bring to the table, and everybody knows it.  And of course that scares them to death.  The decades long death grip of power by Neo-Communists, Neo-Leftists, and Neo-Conservatives is coming to an end, and it should not be surprising that they will fight to hang on to their hegemony.  Don't sweat it.  The truth is on your side.

So keep up the great work and keep on swinging for the fences.  As far as I am concerned, you are now the Leader of the Authentic American Conservative Movement, and all you have to do is keep knocking the cover off the ball, keep on smiling and keep on laughing, and good things are bound to happen. 

You're the best,

XXXX

August 14, 2013

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, editor, Dispatch International

August 14, 2013

Greetings from Latvia

Dear Diana,

In my view, you are nothing short of a heroine. I appreciate your enormous courage to take on a controversy of such monumental proportions.

I first got interested in this line of history while completing my PhD in Texas. I read Target Patton and after some correspondence with its author, I also read Skubik's account. Then I met an American lady from Latvia who fled the Soviets and she told me how they viewed FDR in relation to the outcome of WW2 (her husband was from Poland).

Finally, I got acquainted with Glen Frazier's account of Bataan and his take of the events (see his website). Simply fascinating. One more thing, they called Bataan a "tragic blunder". Does not it sound similar to IRS "poor customer service" in 2013? Here is another parallel for you. Very powerful one, I think.

Keep up the good work. Believe me, many Eastern Europeans would not consider your explanations "bogus" at all. But I think you would derive most justification for your work from the people who can still testify what happened in Philippines, such as Colonel Frazier (a wonderful man, by the way).

http://colonelfrazier.com/blog/the-sacrifice/

Learned some new words from your talks. Your English is pure delight.

Best,

XXXX

August 13, 2013

... Ron Radosh [has] an unfathomable crush on Harry Truman (about whom RADOSH is the liar), and a pathetic fear of his Red Diaper Baby confreres.  I love how David Horowitz extols Radosh's "bravery" in concluding the Rosenbergs were guilty --  most sane people casually assumed as much by 1954.

I think that you can hold your head up high on the issue of what Truman knew or didn't know about Venona and Red infiltration of his government in general, a front on which Radosh is attacking you. Stan Evans, in his McCarthy book, offers powerful evidence that Truman in fact was briefed on Venona.  In any event, there is no doubt  that Truman consciously lied about Hiss (a "red herring") and Harry Dexter White to the American people; it's incontrovertible that he appointed Dexter White to head IMF after being briefed by Hoover on the evidence against him.

 

Evidence of Radosh's slavish admiration of Truman is his Amerasia book, written with Harvey Klehr. I'll forgive Klehr  based on subsequent performance, and also note that the book was written before much Venona scholarship had emerged.  But the book is a bigger whitewash than Amerasia itself.  It manages to imply there was no conscious effort on the part of the Truman administration to cover up treason.  Its treatment of John Service's witting transmittal of secrets (through Phil Jaffe) to the Soviets is so diffident as to be soporific.

I raise one further point with some trepidation, and emphasize at the outset that I am a Jew and a fervent Israel supporter,  Wouldn't want you to think I'm a Stormfront supporter, or something like that.  I feel the real hornet's nest you've stirred is liberal American Jewry, who are inflamed beyond reason by the idea that a "separate peace" might have been reached with anti-Hitler Germans.  Perhaps they should be reminded that some 1,000,000 as-yet-untransported-to-Auschwitz Hungarian Jews might have been saved by disruption of Hitler's government in '42 or '43.

 

The sensitivity of my people, I fear, is a major reason why the perfidy of much of the Roosevelt administration, or even the heinous crimes of Stalin, can never be broached in "polite" society.  To suggest a pro-Soviet tilt of FDR's camp is to invite an endless barrage about anti-semitic isolationists (as though that was their exclusive motivation), Lindbergh, Burton K. Wheeler, Joe McCarthy's "sympathy" for German officers wronged in the Malmedy affair, etc.  Your book is powerful for its anguished expression of disbelief over how the American people can have been blinded to infiltration and takeover of their WWII government -- consider the abuse they'd have to take on this front (and it's a scary front, with awesome media force) to raise any important questions.

Your face is now my screen saver.  I think you are brave and admirable beyond belief!

 

XXXX

 

August 11, 2013

Hello Diana,

 

I've been following this closely; I knew there would be pushback but never expected it from the Right (if that's really what it is).

 

It's pretty telling when an ex pro-Soviet Marxist, now 'Conservative" History professor, calls you out for not drawing the permissible conclusions from your data. Especially when you've never stated that HH was a dead to rights Soviet agent. You've been clear that there is no smoking gun document, and that it is up to the reader to draw their own conclusions.

 

In his misreading of your intent and his enthusiasm in fault finding, RR has entirely missed the point of your book. Another agenda is at work here I think... in fact, if a Leftist influence agent penetrated Conservative circles, is this not the exact type of influence activity they would undertake to divide Conservatives?

 

It's good to see lots of support for you online. I will watch with interest as this unfolds.

XXXX

August 11, 2013

My heart sank when I stumbled across the Radosh hit piece a few days ago.  If someone writes a ten page "review" the reader should know right away that something is amiss.  I have just now found time to read all the way through both his writings and yours on the subject and I must commend you for standing tall.  I'm sure your readers appreciate it as well.

XXXX

August 10, 2013

Dear Ms. Diana West:

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.

Best greetings,

Hans Jansen

NB: Hans Jansen is an eminent Dutch scholar of Islam.

 

August 8, 2013

Dear Diana,

I have stumbled upon the Radosh-Horowitz ballyhoo and some of the very interesting comments to it. Then I read your two replies on your own site. I am reminded of two things.

 

The first is an interview on German radio with the Islamic scholar, Hans-Peter Raddatz, in which he aptly and trenchantly points out that the “elites” of every nation and group will find accommodation with each other (and implied, with no regard to the consequences for the hoi polloi). They will ignore evident truths and existential dangers to their homeland while defending with tooth and claw their positions of authority and privilege.

 

The second is a case in point from my own experience in academe, when a group of faculty members agitated for special treatment--less teaching and better pay to encourage their scholarly publishing. Their misfortune was that they applied to the then-president of the college, who could--and did--out-publish all of them with one hand tied behind his back and still managed to run the college. The irony--and what makes this an apt example in your case, is that their enormous contributions to scholarship and knowledge were to a great extent in their own minds, and to the undiscriminating derogation of others. Reminiscent of Radosh and Horowitz?

XXXX

August 8, 2013

Diana,

 

Send Radosh a dozen roses. He's unwittingly done you a great service. Your card should simply say, "Thanks, pal".

 

When someone has their "stuff" together as you do; you benefit from an attack because you can bury the attacker with your superior knowledge and thus win heretofore unknown support.  A response to the attacker is an opportunity to soar (when you are in the right). I know this experientially.

 

As I read the lengthily attack a little voice in head kept saying; "methinks he doth protest too much".  The length suggests an attempt to bury you in paper alone, being short on fact. He's got an agenda well beyond a book review. Jealously? The 15-book author threatened by a 2-book upstart?   Radosh plays Stellen Skarsgard to your Matt Damon in GOOD WILL HUNTING?

 

The Times in 1905 said Einstein's theory was scientifically indefensible and an affront to rationality. Point being; you are in good company.

 

Perhaps AB will play out in the  traditional fashion of shocking truth:

1. Truth initially ridiculed

2. Truth then denied as true (Radosh nicely handling #1 and #2)

3. Truth finally accepted as having been obvious from the beginning

 

Bottom line: You go girl!!!!

XXXX

August 8, 2013

Dear Diana West

Thank you for your recent and totally awesome work on America's betrayal. You have pieced together a narrative that will reverberate with consequences for years. 

What prompted me to write was the Radash critique I read on Front Page Magazine. Do not let this get you down!  You have done a wonderful job. 

The intellectual class must come to grips with its own facilitation  of the murder of the innocent.  Radash is peering into the abyss of his own accountability while quibbling about details. 

Thank you.  I am indebted to you for your work of the heart and the head. Its great value is augmented by its moral force. I know many have applauded your effort. but at the same time, you are probably dealing with the dark storm and backlash of negative energy that your book has unleashed.  You have confronted the "beast" head on, so to speak.

Don't be overwhelmed.  You are not alone.  You are greatly appreciated and your work couldn't have been better timed.

Warm regards

XXXX

August 7, 2013

Hello Diana,

 

Wow.  What nastiness at Front Page.  I couldn't make it through (it's late) all of RR's "review,"  but the tone is so, well, liberal--condescending, and downright vicious.  I did expect you to be attacked by the right; I didn't expect it to be FP.  I've always admired Horowitz, having read some of his earlier books, as well as the _Heterodox_ broadsheet he used to publish many moons ago.  It's as if we are living in the return of the bodysnatchers.

 

What is this old bromide about the John Birch Society?  They never attack the Left w/this amount of vitriol.  Why is it so important to believe that it was essential to support the Russians in the war against Hitler?  I think you've said it best:  We traded one monster for another.

 

The snobby, "let's be reasonable" attitude is one of the (many) downfalls of the "right".  It's downright creepy to see the squishiness at the core of so many who are supposedly conservative.

 

Well, my dear, I am on your side.  You are doing a great job publicizing your book.  God bless you.

XXXX

July 29, 2013

Diana,

Just wanted to say "Thank You" for all the great work you've been doing. You're a gifted writer seeking the truth and I really appreciate and admire your insight and keen political instincts. I've read your 2 most recent books and have enjoyed both immensely. "American Betrayal", well, I just couldn't put it down and I'm reading it through a second time.

Before "American Betrayal" I read Richard Wurmbrand's  "Tortured for Christ", a book about his Christian ministry in Europe under both the Nazis and the Russians. As soon as I started reading your book I was reminded of Pastor Wurmbrand's quote early in his book, on page 14. He had been under Nazi rule, but "beginning August 23, 1944, one million Russian troops entered Romania and, very soon after this, the Communists came to power in our country. Then began a nightmare that made suffering under the Nazis seem easy."

Pretty much sums it up right there.

I'm trying to keep this brief as I'm sure you're flooded with email. My wife and I live in XXXX where we home school our children. I just wanted to let you know that we will be covering World War II this year, and after reading your book we've decided to teach that history in 2 parts: pre-Second Front and post-Second Front. Your historical research and extensive footnoting basically make this idea irrefutable. We will be going through quite a bit of what you
bring out in the book. Maybe this will be the first official school to enter your book into its curriculum!

I'm looking back on my public school education,trying to put all of this in context, and realizing what a false narrative we've been fed. The  parallels to Islam, as you've been saying, are striking and I hope and pray that the people of this
country somehow wake up to what's going on. I'm going to an annual family get-together, and they are all Obama freaks and it's all I can do to remain cordial. They all have one thing in common that I've discovered over the years, and that is that they take the news that's given them, they don't go seek it out on their own. If the mainstream press says "it is", well, then IT IS. It's sad, but I think that's the state of our nation right now.

 Anyway, thanks again. I hope the new books is selling well. You deserve it.

XXXX 

July 25, 2013

Dear Ms. West:

It is not possible for me to express fully my thankfulness for your having
produced "American Betrayal".  This book has been an education and a half
for me!

My journey began before the fires were finally doused in NYC. A determination
set in to teach myself who are enemies really were. The dark hand behind the events.
A few years ago I was introduced to "Witness".  When "American Betrayal"
appeared on the horizon I was elated. Your efforts have
placed corrective lenses on my failing vision. Thank you many times over for your
most excellent journalism, fantastic research, and conclusive reasoning.

I am almost finished with "Disinformation".I view this as another support for your conclusions in "American Betrayal."
Now when I hear the leftists/statists chants or see those I-don't-quite-understand events,
their source becomes much more transparent. I sense that we all have
grown more prescient because of the heavy lifting done by patriots such as you.

May the God of our creation continue to bless your voice and mind with the
clarity that this world so desperately needs. May He also grant you a long and
peaceful life in which you may enjoy the sweet fruit of your successes.

John Catchings ('cellist)
Nashville TN

July 8, 2013

Dear Diana,
 
I have just finished your enraging and depressing American Betrayal.  I too will never hear "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" in the same light ever again, nor listen to the Glenn Miller 8th Air Force oldies in the same way.
 
My uncle Jerry was yanked out of Harvard Law School on Decmber 8, 1941, and sworn into the Army.  He was made a clerk-typist and wound up on Omaha Beach, like your father.  (My father had parachuted just behind the beach hours before.)  Both spent hours looking for the body of the other.  Neither had suffered a wound, as luck would have it.  Uncle Jerry, by then doing all the legal work of the division, wrote himself orders to return to Los Angeles and go to OCS.  (The general would sign anything Uncle Jerry would put before him sans looking at it.)   "That Omaha Beach business was something I wished to avoid in the future" he opined.
 
Dad, cleaning his .45 on the kitchen table c 1950: (how it got in his B-4 Bag was a mystery to all of us; clearly stamped on the slide was Property of U.S. Army) "Remember son, the only good Kraut is a dead Kraut!"
 
It was about then that I was watching him shave with his father's old straight razor early one morning and he was very thoughtful, listening to the news on the radio.  The Chinese had just come over the border in Korea.  "Are you going to have to go back and kill Germans again Daddy?" I worriedly said.  "No, son, but someday you are going to have to kill Russians."
 
Five decades after that, I wound up teaching Alexander Solzhenitsyn's son Stephan calculus at St. Paul's School in New Hampshire.  By then virtually a hermit, Solzhenitsyn came to St. Paul's to see his son graduate.  "Come and meet my Mom and Dad" Stephan enthused.  "Oh no, what am I to say to such a man" I thought.
 
"Sir, I have absolutely nothing to say to an infantry veteran of the Great Patriotic War and a zek from the Gulag.  Except to say you have a truly gifted son and it has been an honor to teach him mathematics and he will do well at Harvard".
 
He smiled and shook my hand, and seemed grateful not to have to engage in any small-talk with another inconsequential person such as myself.
 
Below are a few personal reflections on the evils of communism-socialism-fascism, whatever you wish to call it, when in Cambodia I reverted to my (mostly) ill-spent youth as a parachute rigger and parachute instructor.
 
http://bradenfiles.wordpress.com/quartered-safe-out-here/
 
You are an incredible woman.  Never have I read such a depressing but perspicuous book, the most important book published since WWII.
 
With greatest respect,
 
Larry
 
Lawrence S. Braden
Concord, NH
 
July 8, 2013

The following reader's journal came in from James Hodge, professor emeritus of Modern Languages and German at Bowdoin College. Not a formal letter, but rather a series of impressions Hogde had as a reader, they make entry perhaps best described an interactive!

Dear Diana,

I recall a year or so ago earnestly warning you that the people you were beginning to tangle with were deadly dangerous. In retrospect, that was a bit like the Babe-in-the-Woods warning the Hunter to beware of the Big Bad Wolf. At the time, I had not yet witnessed the full blending of your indefatigable research skills with your menckenesque verve for sabering the enemy. I also had yet to recognize the pure GUTS, as well as the family history behind this drive to uncover the truth.
___________________________________________________________________

SEPTUAGENARIAN STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS INTERSPERSED WITH BURSTS OF LOGIC AND PIQUE, UPON READING AMERICAN BETRAYAL

I always liked Andersen’s tales, but thought of them as homilies on life. I knew a few Ugly Ducklings in high school, who never turned into swans, but married other ugly ducklings and had little ducklings and never seemed to worry about their uglyducklingness.

But I regarded the emperor and his non-clothes as a monitory tale on presumption. I never expected it to land like a block of granite on the preconceptions of my pre-, during and post-War experience and smash them all to pieces.

I actually preferred the Grimms’ tales, because they seem to be scattered detritus of the ancient myths, with a reference point somewhere in the more arbitrary and simplistic past. The transformation of Andersen’s emperor in your book is similar to what happened to the happy and entertaining Grimm tales when I realized that the original evil stepsisters were not simply punished by not being able to attend the ball. In fact, they cut off their own toes and heels and tried to stuff the bloody stumps into the glass slipper, to no avail, and met their ultimate punishment at the end when a (crow or) raven landed on the shoulder of each one and pecked her eyes out.

Of course, the ravens are reminiscent of Odin’s ravens, Hugin and Munin (thought and memory), lending a flavor of divine judgment. But after reading Chapter Two, I began to wonder if the second one might have been named Bukovsky.

So our history has been bowdlerized, “for our own good.” Geez, Charlie Brown, and this is only Chapter Two.
_______________________________________________________________

Well, not quite done with Chapter Four, but I have already had a glimpse of how G. H. W. Bush--that old “spymaster”--conducted his “negotiations” with Gorabachev, and now I understand the catch-phrase that bothered and bewildered me at the beginning of his four years: “a new world order.” Until now, I could not square it with Reagan’s successor. Now, unfortunately, I can.

And I can draw a neat and horrifying parallel between Patton being held back from Prague and Schwarzkopf being held back from Baghdad. Plus ça change, and all that.

Only this far, and already I contemplate a vast line of suckers and unconscious fellow-travelers in the Oval Office, interrupted briefly for a B-movie actor whose steely spine was formed in the battle of the attempted SAG takeover, and even behind and below him, a teeming mass of (bureauc)rats nibbling the cheese of the Big Lie. How now can I be surprised at any depth reached by the legions of the elegant Besserwisser among us? And I understand a little better the fruitless arguments I had with friends and acquaintances leading up to the 2008 elections, when I was of the opinion (optimistic in comparison to the reality) that Obama was a dangerously empty suit.

(One of my closest colleagues said on a joyful public occasion: “I cried when Obama was elected.” And I muttered: “So did I!”)

________________________________________________________________

Chapters 5 and 6... All those names I recognize from the FDR and Truman years! And so many of them grubby moles. One I did not know was John Stewart Service, but his name tripped a synapse in my mind to Robert Service, author of that favorite of junior high school boys to entertain themselves and gross out adults and junior high school girls: The Cremation of Sam McGee. And I thought about what it would be like to do a re-write:

There are strange things done
In Washington,
By the men who chase Fool’s Gold.
And the swampy trails
Have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold.
The White House lights
Have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Were the efforts by night
To Harry our fight
And pervert our victory.

I will never finish it.

Research like this has the capacity to fill me with futile outrage. It makes me think of an African hero who returns home to discover that his mother and his friend’s mother have been victimized and turned into paupers by the local ruler. In a fury, he invades the city and demands the whereabouts of the king, but is told that the king has since died. So he asks for the location of his grave so he can open it up and shoot six pistol balls into it. But the grave’s location is unknown. So he demands a huge payment from the citizens. And all of them have to pay--whether they aided and abetted or not.

That is our problem now, isn’t it? The dead will not care if we raise them up to praise them or condemn them. So we have to use what we learn to cut down their successors. But will we? You are familiar with Cassandra? Or was her name Bentley, or McCarthy? I sincerely hope that your work, and Evans’ will finally percolate into enough of the petrified brains to activate some revelation. My own contribution will begin with putting this book, once read, into our local public library. We are, namely, a college town in the outskirts of New England and I suspect the staff would not dream of ordering the book. If I want to look at it again, I will, I hope, have to compete with some of the inquiring minds still left to us.

Toward the end of chapter 6--”How to break it to Doris Kearns Goodwin?” I have a suggestion--Let her think she plagiarized it!

Schecter--I had a high school history teacher by that name whom I much admired. She informed our class one day that Truman would be judged by history to be one of our great presidents. She also pointed to the recently formed UN and predicted that we would one day be part of a “world-wide community of laws.” I hate that she is turning out to be right about both of those things.
______________________________________________________________________

“What the Communists had not succeeded in doing in their own country--as the purges and millions of political prisoners indicate--they had succeeded in doing in America.”

It is odd that the nation whose language gave us Realpolitik should have been so badly outplayed by a society not noted for its cleverness. Whose soldiers were depicted by returning GIs as Neanderthals who could not assess the value of a pack of Luckies vs a watch or nylons and were incapable of operating a flush toilet. We on the other hand...Is it that we were so easy to dupe or--given the present Western response to Islam--is there a lemming-like love of the cliff?

Still Chapter 7--The Madden committee is dismayed that General Bissel considered the consequences to the relationship with the Soviets when he clamped down on Katyn. What a hollow feeling, after all the evidence thus far, to make a straight-line connection to the comments of the Army chief after the massacre (oops, work-place violence) at Fort Hood. Poor fellow was concerned that there might be a backlash. Well, hell, that’s how we got into this, isn’t it. Dubya--an otherwise harmless fellow--had a severe attack of backlash after 9/11. Did he never hear of moderated response? But he made up for it by explaining that Communism--pardon me--Islam is the religion of peace.

And do I sound a bit too angry? Maybe it’s because for years I offered a course in
European mythology, and the Slavic representative was Marko of Serbia--the only national hero I know of who vividly represents a captive people. So we read the epic poem on the Battle of Kosovo and I explained the source of Serbian frustration and anger (“I didn’t know the half of it”) and spoke of 400 years of anger.

And, of course, I had to do some superficial research on Islam--a theology I knew little about, but viscerally disliked. In academe, however, the first consideration (for SOME of us) is to be balanced, fair, open to other opinions and that means believing your sources, which, in my case were of the outline variety. (Does this translate as gullible?) I had bought (although they never became part of the course) the contemporary explanations of who did what to whom in Yugoslavia, and also that jihad could be an “inner struggle,” (which to my shame and sorrow was a part of my brief presentation of Islam), No oversight or fumble in explaining German grammar pains me now as much as that swallowing whole of academically approved propaganda.

I did better later, when I began an African myth course and really looked at Islam vs Christianity and both of them vs the indigenous religions, and who exactly was still practicing slavery. (Fortuitously, one of these times, I had a Nigerian in class who “testified” to the class on what he had seen in his own family. Not the Arabs, although they were still--and long had been--the major slave-masters on the continent, but the Nigerians themselves. The rich could afford to buy the children of the poor. And the life they lived was shocking, even when they were “well” treated.)

Well, how far off the point can you get?
====
Kissinger, the man who could not be president but could be emperor. And now, seamlessly, a Bilderberger
====
Solzhenitsyn arrested for joke about Stalin--at least it wasn’t a cartoon.
===
Russians committing suicide IN DACHAU to prevent being repatriated. Any minute now, I expect to see the Red Queen enter, stage left
===

Looking back on the war I experienced as a child, I have often asked myself why we did not do exactly that and let them tear each other apart, and walk in to take care of the victims. Even the stupidest Roman general could have figured that out. The answer is so awful that I have to ask myself if we have fought any war since the war with Mexico that was truly in our own interests (Yes, selfish counts.) For all his faults, George W. may have launched the only patriotic war since then.

Eisenhower and Overlord. I couldn’t vote in that election, but given what you reveal and his opponent, I guess I would favor “I Go Pogo.” Of course, Kelly not only swallowed the party line about McCarthy, he pilloried him as a new character.

Chapter 10

Earle publishes in Confidential. OMG! The MSM as we now call them existed already! Where was the fair and impartial press I thought we had?

“That is Russophobic.” Is this the ancestor of “Islamophobic”?
__________________________________________________________
“Whom we worshipped as a veritable demigod.” I don’t know if you include yourself--certainly not me. The dinner table rants in our lower middle class house were along the lines of packing the Supreme Court, etc. My later father-in-law was a rabid union man--imagine how that worked out!

The mobs of betrayed and hopeless Americans in the gulags, slowly realizing that the American dream did not exist for them. What a crushing lead-up to the concluding chapter!
“We will meet the Americans and we will tell them”--deadly leitmotif.

_____________________________________________________________________
When all is said and done, how do we purge these these vermin and their contagious subversion from the bureaucracy? Simply, miraculously, electing a reform ticket--if there ever is such a thing--will not do. Just watch “Yes, Minister!” if you can find it.

You have managed to stand the whole idea of good guy-bad guy on its ear. It will take me a while to recover.

Jim Hodge

June 27, 2013

Diana;

I bought your book, "American Betrayal" after reading a excerpt online. I can't count the times I found myself shaking my head in total disbelief at the information I was seeing for the first time in my 62-year old life. I can never again look at the world and its major players as I once did, especially FDR and Washington, D.C. during the war and onward.

Today we find ourselves once again being played and betrayed by an equally sinister, deceptive cast of characters at the highest positions of government.

I thank you so much for such a scholarly and detailed glimpse into that bloody period of history. "American Betrayal" should be required reading in American colleges and universities and by any rational person who cherishes freedom and liberty.

Best wishes,

XXXX

June 26, 203

Dear Ms Diana West: 

This is fan mail. I am deeply impressed by your new book. It is an incredible tour-de-force. It is almost superhuman to be able to tell such a story in a convincing way. And write well at the same time. A similar book about Europe is badly needed. I suspect it cannot have been very different here.

Also your book brought back to my memory a passage in a book by Bruce Lee (a pseudonym?), Marching Orders, 1995. The author describes how American troops in Germany, to their amazement, were ordered not to march on to Berlin, which they estimated they could have taken in a few days, well before the Soviets would have reached it. The Americans were told to halt at the Elbe, see especially pp. 435/37: ‘Forty-eight hours. That is all it would have taken’.

Of course I should not be writing to you before I finished reading the whole book, perhaps you mentioned this somewhere. 

You deserve praise and gratitude.

Best greetings,

HansJansen

June 26, 2013

Hello Miss West, (I have no idea what you prefer to be called)

My name is XXXX.  I'm going into my senior year at Liberty Harbor Academy in downtown Manchester, New Hampshire. During study I was roaming about the school as always (I'm known for getting my work in a week early so I have a lot of time on my hands) and I found myself in Professor XXXX's office. As the professors always dealing with someone's girl or guy problems/drama/latest break up I sat in his office just listening and reading the titles of his books on one of his six shelf in a small cramped office. the right next to Ayn Rand was this book that I hadn't heard of before called The Death of the Grown-Up, I was intrigued at the title and decided to pick it up.

As a side note, I never read. Well I read, but I don't physically read. I prefer to digest  on average about two audiobooks per week depending on length. I use audio books to multitask, and because I'm an artist and the process of making art is long, I never have time to sit down for hours on end enthralled in a book. But there I sat in Professor XXXX's office  reading until page 12 when he asked me what has brought me there. Normally, and my guess is from lack of practice, I get easily distracted when reading, but I couldn't put your book down and every single word registered. That day I went home and I bought a copy on Amazon, I'm only on page 55 right now, but I just thought I'd let you know that your book has changed my life. I wish I could give a copy of it to every teenager I saw acting like memetic apes that think their "edge" or view on life is some new phenomena. But I was once in a group of teens like that, so there is hope for every fallen man. Thank you so much for devoting all your time energy and everything else that you put into the book. It's great and I just wanted to let you know that I look up to you.

Sincerely,
XXXX,
Age 16
NH, USA

June 26, 2013

Dear Ms. West,

Mencius Moldbug here - if the name rings no bells, you can see what Derb has to say about me:

http://www.vdare.com/articles/john-derbyshire-s-google-reader-keeping-up-with-the-dark-enlightenment

While I very much enjoyed this well-researched book, it strikes me that you considerably understate the magnitude of the problem.  Yes, it is sadly the case that history since 1933 is a thing of smoke and mirrors.  Given this reality, however, you seem oddly confident in the integrity of history before 1933.

For instance, collaboration between American and Russian "progressives" hardly begins with the election of FDR.  It requires relatively little digging to reveal Woodrow Wilson as the chief international protector of Lenin, Trotsky and Co.  Point 6 of the 14 is quite clearly read as "no one messes with the Bolsheviks"; Raymond Robins, who is close to Colonel House, is essentially acting as the unofficial ambassador of American progressivism; Herbert Hoover in his _Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson_ reveals that the Whites lost the civil war because Wilson leaned financially on the British and French to cut their funding; the supposed "intervention" against the Bolsheviks is clearly a case of sandbagging, that is, joining an enterprise in order to kill it; and indeed the alliance between American radicals and Russian revolutionaries, reliably murderous even before the revolution, considerably predates not just 1917 but in fact 1900.

In general, I find you still too attracted to the classical anticommunist "espionage theory" of the relationship.  There is no reason whatsoever to see Hiss and Hopkins as spies, like Aldrich Ames, because there is no reason whatsoever to think they did anything without FDR's knowledge and consent.  American progressives before 1945 - and I have read a lot of their writing, as well as that of their enemies - did not see themselves as tools of Russia.  They saw Russia as a tool of their own.   In their minds, at least, they were not clients, but patrons.  (The Russians never saw it this way, of course.)

This hardly decreases their guilt.  It increases their guilt, and it makes it America's guilt.  Much as Hitler is morally responsible for the crimes of his foreign clients, say the Latvian SS, FDR is responsible for the crimes of his foreign clients, or supposed clients, or in any case collaborators.  And much as Germany, by supporting Hitler, became nationally guilty and nationally responsible for the crimes of the Third Reich, America bears the same responsibility for the crimes of the New Deal - and of Stalin, the New Deal's strong right arm.  The difference is that we won, so no one has forced us to get all weepy.

You seem to understand this at a certain level, but - understandably considering your sources - there is still IMHO a strong flavor of '50s anticommunism in your work, a genre which stressed nationalism, foreign subversion, etc, largely because this is what Americans of the era would buy.  In 2013 this approach seems neither particularly accurate, nor particularly saleable.

But worse, for any conservative (my perspective is not conservative but reactionary), I find there is a date D before which they think the narrative of history is Just Fine, and after which Everything Went Wrong.  For most conservatives this is around, I don't know, 1963.  You have done well by pushing it three decades earlier.  But...

It is easily observed that in all conflicts of Left vs. Right - and these sides, properly defined, are easily identified well before the labels were invented - the conservative, after date D, supports Right against Left.  Before date D he supports Left against Right.  Generally Left wins, so he supports history's winners before D and history's losers after.

So, for instance, Betrayal contains a certain level of debunking of WWII, which could easily be supplemented by the contemporary revisionist (not Holocaust denial) works of Tansill, Beard, Sanborn, and quite a few other fine historical narratives - not to mention, more recently, the very interesting work of Preparata.  I believe you cite Suvorov.  I cannot prove it, but I am pretty sure the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is a ruse de guerre, I'm pretty sure this is well understood in the White House, and I'm pretty sure the basic story of WWII was that Western progressives designed the war to protect the Soviet Union.  Or at least, I cannot think of any other story that really seems to make sense.

But to debunk 1940 without debunking 1914 is a somewhat sterile exercise.  To debunk 1914 without debunking 1860, ditto.  To debunk 1860 without debunking 1776, ditto.  To debunk 1776 without debunking 1688, ditto.  To debunk 1688 without 1642... etc.  In all of these conflicts, the modern conservative reflexively supports the winning, left-wing side, without any intellectual contact whatsoever with the losing, right-wing side.

Typically, in fact, the conservative's prejudices cannot survive any such contact.  You can test this hypothesis by reading any major statement of the resistance in any of these conflicts - for example, Thomas Hutchinson's response to the Declaration of Independence (_Strictures on the Declaration_), or Daniel Leonard's debates with John Adams (Novanglus and Massachusettensis).  Adams is the finest political philosopher the Patriots have, and in fact improves considerably after the Revolution.  Leonard still owns him like a little boy.  Or you could read a Confederate, such as Dabney, Semmes or Fitzhugh; a Cavalier, like Clarendon; a critic of WWI, like Francis Neilson; etc, etc, etc.

Your instinctive response may be that going "full reactionary" isn't sellable.  I agree!  But what of it?  Your hardcore conservatism is a little bit sellable, perhaps.  But only for the moment.  Sub specie aeternitas, it will soon be sucked down the loser's memory hole.  The 20C is full of these writings, true within their context, but basically ephemeral.  It is hard for a reactionary to feel too sorry for them.  By throwing all previous right-wingers under the bus, the conservative prepares his fate at the hands of his successors.  Who can argue that he does not deserve it?  You clearly see this in the case of the Buckleyites and McCarthy.  But the pattern is much, much older.

June 26, 2013

Dear Ms. West:
 
I was compelled to buy your new book, American Betrayal, after hearing a guest on a local radio show laud it.  It was riveting!  I agree with others who believe that it should be trumpeted long and loud.  I finished it yesterday and it is now in the hands of my sister who has been an 8th grade history teacher for forty years.
 
I do have one question?  Before I purchased your book, I had bought Doris Kearns Goodwin’s No Ordinary Time because I immensely enjoyed Team of Rivals.
Despite it having won the Pulitzer Prize, after having devoured your book, will I be able to get through No Ordinary Time without getting ill?
 
Consider me a Diana West devotee!  I look forward to anything and everything you will write in the future.
 
Sincerely,

XXXX

June 23, 2013

Dear Ms. West,

Yesterday I watched the video of your stirring presentation at the Heritage Foundation presentation. I was very moved because I had given up hope that Americans would ever recognize the extent and tragedy of the German resistance against Hitler and its betrayal by the Allies, especially FDR. I am anxious to read your book.

This topic has been part of my doctoral dissertation at Boston University. I wrote an interdisciplinary thesis (theology, history, sociology of religion), which was published under the title, The Fabricated Luther: Refuting Nazi Connections and other Modern Myths (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1995/2007), focusing on Carl Goerdeler, the civilian leader of the German resistance. Before World War II, Goerdeler traveled in vain to Britain and the United States desperately trying to convince their leaders to take the German opposition seriously and lend it moral support. Goerdeler's daughter, the historian Marianne Meyer-Krahmer, a former concentration camp inmate in Dachau, was a friend of mine.

However, let me offer a follow-up to your story of the former AP bureau chief in Berlin, Louis Lochner, whom you mentioned in your lecture at Heritage. You said a prominent German sent Lochner to Roosevelt. That was Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia, the Kaiser's grandson, whom Carl Goerdeler had hoped to name chief of state of a post-Hitler Germany.

Louis-Ferdinand was involved with the Kreisau Circle of anti-Nazi German nobles but in the end decided against accepting the role of regent. His reason was the Hohenzollern dynastic law that didn't allow the eldest son of a crown prince to take precedence over his father. But the father, Crown Prince Wilhelm didn't want to get involved with the resistance.

I knew Prince Louis Ferdinand quite well. He told me that his decision to stick to Hohenzollern family law in this case was a tragic mistake for which he could never forgive himself because the majority of the Germans were at the time still monarchists and would have accepted an overthrow of Hitler under the prince's leadership.

Now comes the fascinating part about Roosevelt and Louis Ferdinand. While preparing for my doctoral dissertation at Boston University, I went to Hyde Park, N.Y., where I studied, among other documents, Roosevelt's pre-war correspondence with Louis Ferdinand and his wife, Princess Kyra, ingratiating himself with them in the embarrassing way of wannabe aristocrats whom Germans of my generation call Hermelinflöhe, or ermine fleas.

Before the war, Louis Ferdinand and Kyra had stayed with the Roosevelts at Hyde Park and kept, and FDR kept imploring them to return. Louis Ferdinand had great links to America having worked at Ford Dearborn as a car mechanic; historically all  German royal princes were trained in three vocations: military, academic and craft. Louis Ferdinand  told me that he had misinterpreted Roosevelt's repeated prewar invitations as a sign of genuine friendship, which is why he turned to him during the war.

When America entered World War II and U.S. citizens in Germany were sent home, Louis Ferdinand entrusted Lochner with a message to Roosevelt urging him to recognize the extent and integrity of the German resistance and not to inhibit their work by, for example, imposing the demand for unconditional surrender on postwar Germany. The OSS had told FDR the same thing but he not only refused to see Lochner but also had his underlings instruct him to refrain from contacting the White House.

[DW: One such "underling" was Soviet agent Lauchlin Currie. See pages 295-296 in American Betrayal for more about Lochner's thwarted mission -- one of many such thwarted missions.[

As you know, most of the German resistance leaders were hanged, though not Louis Ferdinand. The Nazis didn't dare to touch him out of fear of provoking a popular uprising.

Please feel free to use this episode in future lectures. There is much more to be said about Carl Goerdeler. You will find this in my book ...

Yours sincerely,

Uwe Siemon-Netto

June 18, 2013

Dear Ms. West,
 
I have been following you for some time via The Jewish World Review.  I ordered American Betrayal and find it hard not to put down, but to pick up again. It is truly enraging. It should be required reading in every college American History course.  (I am old enough to recall shouting arguments between my mother and father about the guilt of Alger Hiss.)
 
This morning a fellow Eli (of yours; I am not a Yalie myself) sent me this very interesting tidbit about Ernest Hemmingway.  I did not find him in your Index so you might not have seen it.
 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jul/09/hemingway-failed-kgb-spy
 
Of particular interest to me is reading how thoroughly the Manhattan Project had been penetrated.  I recall, as a child, the night they electrocuted Ethyl Rosenberg.  I looked up the time difference between Sing Sing, New York and Bakersfield, California, and went outside to "see the streetlights dim", like they did in the movies.  But alas, we were not on the same electrical grid.
 
Having survived Berkeley's so-called "Free Speech Movement" and having once lived in Moscow, I know exactly the sort of useful idiots of whom you so brilliantly write.  That is why I take your book in small doses.  It does my blood pressure no good whatsoever.
 
Your devoted and admiring fan,

XXXX
 

June 15, 2013

As a graduate of Reed College and Princeton University, I have long held the belief that the histories to which we are treated are written by leftists, published by leftist organizations, filtered by leftists committees and presented in leftist classrooms.  Therefore, all histories require a great deal of skepticism.  Your writings seem to prove the point.

Frankly, you make so much sense, I fear for you.

Keep writing,

XXXX

June 14, 2013

Diana,

The $6 million worth of searchlights and beacons you mention from Lend-Lease in American Betrayal is indeed chilling. As I read that, I was wondering where I had read something along that sort of grotesque use of Lend-Lease goods before.  Finally, I remembered: Ian Frazier also mentions a shocking application of Lend-Lease items in the Russian Gulag in his book Travels in Siberia. 

The passage in Frazier's book revolves around a visit he made to what remains of a Siberian "lager."  ... What's especially interesting is that the 1950's work camp is still basically in tact because the Russian cold keeps the wooden buildings from decaying.  According to Frazier, these camps are simply unmarked and ignored by the Russian people, as if the horrors there never happened.

Anyhow, on page 427 of the Travels in Siberia paperback, there is this: "For example, some of the barbed wire, a product vital to the camps, might have been of American manufacture; barbed wire was among the 9.2 million tons of Lend-Lease goods shipped from the West Coast to ports of the Soviet Far East . . ."

Thought you might be interested in Frazier's visit to the lager. There is a tactile eerieness about it, and perhaps even more eerie, American schoolkids never read anything about this in history class, mirroring the Russian denial of the camps' existence. 

June 13, 2013

Dear Ms. West:

I just finished reading American Betrayal and I am astounded both at its revelations and at the amount of research through very obscure sources that you have performed.

This information and its implications to American history are profound extraordinarily important, and, for me, answer the question as to how the Left became the dominant culture in America, despite the collapse of the USSR and Communism nearly everywhere else.  I have watched this evolve of my entire life (I was born in 1953) and have never before understood how it could be that America has forgotten what and who we are (were?).

The implications of how this same phenomenon is happening with regard to Islam currently are also highly instructive, and I agree, if we repeat this delusion, we may not survive it.

Your book and your insights are critical to the survival of this nation.  Yet, I have heard nothing about it in the media, even the conservative media.  I see from your blog that Monica Crowley has discussed it on her show, but you need to get it out on all of the major talk radio shows, Fox News, and Glenn Beck's internet offerings, and conservative websites.  This should be the biggest news of this last 100 years and needs to be trumpeted from the hilltops.  If there's enough of a fuss, maybe even the MSM may eventually catch on.

I have read you for many years and have always enjoyed your "telling it like it is," which is refreshing even from the conservative side of the media.  Good luck to you, and please, please, push this book into the light as best you can.

XXXX

June 13, 2013

Dear Ms. West,   

Thank you for replying to my previous email [see letter of June 10, 2013 below] concerning your book.

I just had to get back to you about that scene in "The Best Years . . ." as I have read further in your book about all
the coverups of Soviet crime by our own officials (absolutely outrageous and heart-rending stuff). I now understand what is going on there and why that scene is in the movie (I've always thought it was a bit weird--a kind of thrown-in sort of thing). But I now get it.

The film-makers KNEW about the accusations of betrayal (and most certainly about their truth) and had to disarm any momentum they might gain. So, the scene involves us with a very unattractive character who insults Homer, the man who has lost his hands, by telling this now disabled vet that he lost his hands for nothing. The stranger says that there is much more to the story of the war than Homer's citing of Hitler and Tojo as the reasons for it. The function of the scene is to present this thesis as an object of cruelty and/or the paranoia of false "patriots." It is a small vignette that serves the larger purposes of the mystery that you have so surgically examined. If you get a chance to view this movie again sometime, look carefully at this scene. It verifies the truth that Hollywood cleverly imported pro-Soviet themes (or at least Soviet protectionism) into stories that are not directly political.

Thanks again for your work. I have a small circle of friends to whom I send out book reviews, and I will develop
a review for them and highly recommend the book to them.

June 12, 2013

Diana,

The comment in the Reader's Corner immediately got my attention. That scene in the cafe [in "The Best Years of Our Lives"] always bothered me, and as much as I always enjoyed the film, it always struck me as a leftie movie. Kudos to the art professor.

XXXX

June 10, 2013

I am about a third of the way through your book and I just had to write to you about it. So many "dots" are connecting for me. This is a great, great book and I hope that it "stirs the drink" big time.

I am a retired professor of Art, small college in XXXX. I have known colleagues who, if the subject of communism came up in conversation, would just sniff at it as if you were talking about aliens from space or "deros" from inside the earth. I continue to teach, in churches, on issues of Islam and Christianity. Recently I raised the issue of "narrative" with an audience of 75 people, and asked them two questions: First, "how many of you are familiar with something called the "Holocaust?" Of course, every hand went up. Then I asked, "how many of you are familiar with something called the Terror Famine?" NOT ONE HAND went up! Nobody had ever heard of it, and this was a pretty well-educated audience.

I like your discussions of how the narratives we believe are fostered in popular culture, especially film. I recently came across "Mission to Moscow" on Turner Classic Film channel, and I thought, for a time, I was watching some kind of satire or joke, but then realized that this thing was meant as a serious take of Soviet life. I was disgusted. But, here is a serious DOT that I'd like to run by you, something that you do not include but which I think makes the case you are onto. There is a scene in THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES, a universally acclaimed movie about World War II vets returning to civilian life, that I have always wondered about. It takes place in a cafe, where one of the vets, who has lost both his arms, is in a conversation with a mysterious character to talks about how "we really lost the war." This guy is portrayed as a dangerous "patriot" and the scene ends up with him getting beat up by the other vet behind the soda counter (Dana Andrews). It's a great example of how the Soviet propaganda of ridiculing pro-America perspectives was being imported into film in such "aside" scenes that actually had nothing central to do with the main story line but are there for a subversive purpose. This movie, which I have come to scorn, also has similar scenes which are clearly intended to indict American civil life and institutions and make them look ridiculous and cruel.

Thank you for writing such a powerful book. I am sure the rest of the ride through its pages will be enlightening (and probably infuriating).

June 10, 2013

Thank you for researching and writing this great book!  It’s the one I’d have written had I had the finances and time for research – though I hasten to add I think your work is better than anything I’d have put on paper.
 
I’m 81 years old and have had an aching cognitive dissonance in my soul since the McCarthy era.  I knew he was right and was being railroaded. I was in college when he was finally dispatched by those words: “At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” I recognized it as character assassination at the time, unsophisticated as my political sense was then.  I’m one of those Enlightenment people who’ve managed to steer my way through the half-truths and misdirections that have engulfed America since.   
 
I’m only about half way through my Kindle version of your book but I paused to write this when I came across a comment that someone like Harry Hopkins should never again be allowed such intimate influence over a U.S. President.  That brought Valerie Jarrett to mind.  As a friend ironically joked when the Chilean President violated protocol by sitting at the Oval Office desk: “Valerie Jarrett’s going to be very angry!”
 
I hope your book changes many minds but I fear we’re perhaps already too far down the grim path of moral relativism.
 
Best Wishes,

XXXX

June 10, 2013

I saw you on C-Span (a segment that was not repeated by the way because of the multiple Olympia Snow reruns) on your book. I bought it and I’m in the middle of it (just when you’re getting to take down Harry Hopkins). Your book is marvelous and I don’t understand why there is nothing being said about it. I will tell everyone that I know that they need  to read your book.
 
Thank you for writing the book. It seems America has been sleepwalking about the history of the WWII and post WWII era. I cannot put into words my appreciation for what you’ve done.
 
XXXX

P.S. I cannot tell you how badly I would like to question Doris Kearns Goodwin on Harry Hopkins!

June 5, 2013

Mrs. West,

Congratulations!  Your work is masterful.  I have been recommending The Death of the Grown-up for years, now I have another.  I just sent an email to my wife, children and my sisters, insisting that they all read your new book.  Wonderful, just wonderful... albeit appalling and shocking to most.  Not shocking to me, but there are many new details available to me, thanks to your thorough research.

I have a thought for you to ponder, perhaps a subject for your next book.  The source of our loss of conviction in our own institutions is our loss of faith - the fall of Christendom began with the so-called Enlightenment.  For years, I have taught our children to call it the "endarkenment."  This period of rejection of the word of God, led by Voltaire et. al. is what arrested the fantastic advances in thought pioneered by Newton, Kepler, Pascal, et. al.  We rightly used to call Theology the Queen of the sciences.  Now, as stated so clearly in Romans chapter one, our foolish hearts have become darkened and we worship the creature rather than the Creator.

This has crippled our thinking and led to the widespread loss of the courage of our convictions.  I like to consider myself an advocate of the men of the West, the paladins of Christendom.  Please forgive this old fashioned, patriarchal anachronism for saying "congratulations and well done" for being more sagacious and more courageous than the vast majority of men who have failed to lead - and defend our cherished institutions.

By the way, I spent the last ten years of active duty openly calling Islam evil and challenging flag and general officers on their opinions.  I wasn't received very well, and was often shunned, but, miraculously, I didn't get into any formal trouble for this.  Many, many sailors and officers heard the unvarnished truth about this wicked ideology from me, and it often included a hearty recommendation of your previous book as well as your website.

My oldest son loves to read Rebecca West and has great respect for her erudition; I think we now have two Wests to admire.  Great work, Dame Diana!

Yours aye,

XXXX

June 4, 2013

During my first Army tour of Germany (74-77), a few of us would hang out a couple days a week off duty at the base's bowling alley.  The maintenance guy there was then in his mid 50s. Everyone called him 'John' because no one could pronounce his real name.  He was short, tough as nails, and had muscular forearms like Popeye, only they were crisscrossed with long scars.

I recall later seeing John in a Polish Labor Force uniform, with a shovel in his hands, along in a crew on the backside of the base repairing maneuver damage to a farmer's field.  The U.S. Army post-WWII employed thousands of displaced German Poles. They did all kinds of back-breaking, dirty jobs.

John was an ethnic German in Poland in 1939 who was first conscripted into the Russian Army, captured by the Germans, worked as a slave laborer, was conscripted into the German Army, and was then captured by the Russians.  He told us of his 10 years spent in the Soviet gulags, watching thousands die including a few Americans captured during WWII, before being allowed to return to Poland. He then walked hundreds of miles to escape to West Germany. We knew John was not crazy, but none of could recall learning of those lost Americans in school or in news reports.

June 4, 2013

Hello Diana,

I've admired your clear-eyed analysis and writing for several years now, but tonight, after listening to the full three hour interview on X-Squared Radio regarding the substance of American Betrayal I'm really shocked at what you have revealed. Essentially you are saying that ALL of post-1930 American geo-political, WW2, and Cold War history, as it has been presented, is a fiction. I've long believed that the narrative was a little too cut and dried, but I never imagined things could be as false as that.

With what you have uncovered I believe you have just written the most important book in American history, and I hope America has the good sense to take heed and understand the implications for present day issues.

I wish you all the best and look forward to seeing this book fully discussed on an international level.

June 3, 2013

Dear Diana,

I am only in the very beginning (just three chapters)... I wished I could read your "American Betrayal" in one huge swallow, yet I am reading it carefully line by line (my 2nd language English being stretched to its limits in order to follow your linguistic brilliance). ...

However what really shakes me is the meticulous details and historic traces brought by you together - all confirming what I knew only shallowly by hints, intuition or my own life experience. Your book fell onto a very fertilized ground... Not only I am shaking myself while reading, but I also feel you shaking writing about this. And I had a guess why... Impatient, I took a quick look through - and my guess was confirmed: YOU DID FIND the "Icebreaker" plan revealed by V. Suvorov!.. Yes... The reality is sickening: So sickening that it profoundly disturbs the mind with questions how to go on and cope with it...

I read the Russian edition of the Icebreaker in 1990 then living in Moscow... Already then I realized that this plot begs for re-writing of the entire modern history. Now you did it...

Will send you more reflections later...

Sincerely,

XXXX

June 2, 2013

Just watched your Embry Riddle interview/lecture. MIND BLOWN! Soon as the funds are next available I will be buying both books! Future books as well! ...

I have been Chasing down the Liberal Spirit throughout obscure books through history to find the defining difference in two warring spirits over the ages. From the Liberal (Commie, Atheist, Socialist) vs the Conservative/Libertarian (true conservative) standpoint. I have connected dots of admiration from modern leaders, their mentors etc... to many figure you touched on in your interview (FDR, Harry, Hiss etc etc) to classic thinkers such as Marx and those who he oft admired from the past. Men Such as Darwin, The French Revolutionaries etc etc.. It lead me to Darwin's father, then later discovering his son's involvement in the Eug*nics movement, Sanger, Galton etc etc which had me reconsidering the full title of "origin of the species" and the willing ignorance of man (which I was guilty of most of my life, and to some degree we all will be, but for me its no longer by choice!)  Later I was moving forwards in history. And then back again. Took a much needed break and read Dickens Christmas Carol and something stuck out to me about the character of Scrooge. (Labor camps, Surplus population) so I found Marx, Darwin etc not only were all the rage in their  time, some more so posthumously, but they spoke of men they admired. Thomas Malthus etc etc etc.. the list goes on forever. This spirit almost hasn't change in any way. From the Malthusian Curve/Limit to the Glob*l Warm*ng hoax.

My point is - throughout all of these movements, the truth has not carried the day. Why would you, if this is sincere conviction, risk so much? I mean is this a religious conviction? This is why I personally feel drawn to these topics. I notice throughout history its as though their are not many wolves, but perhaps only two spiritual movements contending, one with another.

I just wanted to say THANKS!!!!! I see WWII with a new clarity. My Great grandfather fought in it. My Grandfather in Vietnam and also Korea. I used to believe that WWII was far more noble than I do now. (Soldiers aside!)

In closing my question is, WHY? Did you have a goal, other than notifying the handful who would catch that video, or perhaps the book? Is it religious/moral/righteous conviction? Is it that you believe we could win back this culture war, or erase the sovie*ization.

Thank you again for that information, I feel dumbfounded. I do not know what to say, but to hope and wonder at the stars when I thought deeply about everything you said pertaining to the war and men's lives lost. It pushed me very close to my God somehow. If there is such evil, surely there is some greater good. To me that is God and Jesus Christ his son. But I am super curious, why would you risk all this, knowing the cards are heavily stacked in their favor, even brainwashed billions world wide who eat com*usnism or the ji*adist message up.

Thank you again, I have found a new hero amoung us mere mortals! Up there with McCarthy!!!

June 1, 2013

When I was 12 years old I watched the black and white films on TV of the Soviet invasion of Hungary and became immediately convinced that communism was BAD. As an adult I worked against them for over 30 years and was familiar with much of the history you cite in "American Betrayal." You've done a wonderful job connecting the dots in a way everyone should understand. We certainly now suffer under the tyranny of political correctness and the distortion of the meaning of "tolerance." The word has now come to mean the exact opposite, much like the Soviet affinity for the word "democratic."

May 30, 2013

Ms. West:  

Just finished your excellent book:  "American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character".   Splendid, this should be a must read for all Americans, regardless of political affiliation or philosophy.  You have laid out the portrayal of what has happened over the past 65+ years with facts that cannot be refuted.  In fact, I wish your book could somehow become a textbook for our colleges and universities to use.  But that would really be wishful thinking.
 

May 28, 2013

Dear Ms. West:
 
I just heard you interviewed on the radio and immediately got the book.  Best book (by far) I have read in many years, and I am sincerely grateful to you for documenting and publishing Soviet agents of influence in the USA, particularly in the 1930s and 1940s.  You deserve a medal!
 
Very sincere thanks for your critically important contribution to history and American Patriotism.

May 28, 2013

I started your book as soon as it appeared in my Kindle this morning...and
later, I took a break to watch the Daily Caller interview.

I am old enough to remember the Cold War and the HUAC meetings, though I lived
in an orphanage without a television, there were newspapers and Henry Luce's
TIME magazine.

I remember being staunchly anti-Communist in my little southern Catholic
ghetto. I remember the hiding under desks in case of an
atomic bomb -- but cold,very early mornings at daily Mass, waiting in the half-
darkness for the Communist troops to break down the doors and kill the priests
and nuns while they demanded that we children renounce our faith. I was never
sure I'd be able to do it. At least in those cold, dark early mornings, I
wasn't certain I was willing to die for my faith at age six.

We had daily prayers for everything, but a particularly solemn one was the
petition for those in concentration camps in Russia and Eastern Europe, and
then later in China and North Korea. Like the others, I shiverd with dread at
the stories of the North Koreans fleeing south after having their eardrums
pierced with chopsticks. Reader's Digest is a lot tamer than it used to be.

Thank God I didn't learn about Hitler's camps until adolescence. *My* camps
were in Siberia and everyone was hungry, cold, and lived in slavery. The
conditions made American southern slavery sound not-so-bad. I mean in the self-
referential way that children try to calculate which misery they could handle
better.

I was raised on stories of Cardinal Mindszenty.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%B3zsef_Mindszenty

I held out hope that if they simply held me under house arrest as they did
Mindszenty - rather then running me thru with a bayonet in that cold half-lit
cathedral pew where I was kneeling each morning praying for those poor
Russians -- then maybe I'd not be faced with my own cowardice.

Thus when your book arrived this morning, it began with a walking tour through
the rooms of my oldest memories, pushing aside cobwebs and shaking those old
memories by the shoulder, rousing them out of a half century's slumber.

Actually, they weren't sleeping all *that* soundly; some of them have been
slowly rousing themselves for a while now, ever since Ned began his fight
against Sharia in all its forms. It is not beyond irony that my life has
circled 'round from the fearful tyrannies of my early childhood to the even
more barbarous massacres of my old age, with the Enemy living not very far
away from here at all?

I never planned to end my days engaged in the same struggle with the same
enemy -- though it wears a different mask underneath it is still the Prince of
Lies. And in an echo from the past, there is the same Greek chorus, jeering in
unison about our weird hatred and the perverted strangeness that possesses us
to spend all our time worrying about Communism - oops, I mean scaring
ourselves into a hateful Islamophobia.

Why can't we just lighten up?

To which I reply: Jesus told us to be as innocent as doves and as wise as
serpents. Of course he never said that we could become wall-eyed trying to do
both.

Congratulations on your masterpiece. It will live on just as "Darkness at
Noon" has done, and for the same reason: an excellent truth told skillfully.

We are in your debt. I hope it didn't cost you too much.

* * *

"American Betrayal ----" is beyond CORRECT.

    When I was a little boy, my Republican Pol Great Grandfather used to say that in the long run, FDR would do more harm to America than Hitler had done to Germany.  My family knew Whittaker Chambers & was familiar with his life story which your book largely reinforces & validates.

    The other side of my family has the Teutonic Order as their heritage which also gives a correct understanding of the 1400 year old horror called Islam.

May 24, 2013

Dear Diana,

Just watched your interview on Book TV.

Stunned when you mentioned the American
and British POWs left behind in Soviet hands.

My mother was a nurse in the British Army
during World War II.

She traveled all over the world on a hospital
ship.

One time she told me of the Allied troops left in Russian
captivity. What's more she used roughly the same
figures that you did - 20K Americans and 30K British and Commonwealth
troops. It was common knowledge at the time.

That we would sell out our own sickens me every time I think of it.

You're the only other person I've heard speak of those poor men.

Can't wait to read your book.

Sincerely,

XXXX

PS: Eisenhower also refused to give aid to the Hungarian rebels of 1956 after Voice of America encouraged them to rise up. Their fate was grim.