Defending Western history

Recently, one of our favorite authors—Diana West, author of American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character— has been attacked, not from the Left but from prominent pundits who identify themselves as conservatives.

“Why did the U.S. and Britain not prevent the totalitarian USSR from taking over Eastern Europe after it had defeated the totalitarian Nazis?” Ronald Radosh wrote on frontpagemag.com. “It had nothing to do with the Rubik’s Cube of diplomatic and military considerations, a calculus that had to take into account the willingness of the American and British publics to continue to sacrifice and their soldiers to die.  No, it was a conspiracy so immense, as West’s hero Joe McCarthy might have said, that it allowed Western policy to be dictated by a shadow army of Soviet agents. It is unfortunate that a number of conservatives who should know better have fallen for West’s fictions.”

The issue between us is not political in this sense, and it would be helpful if West and her followers would acknowledge that and stop treating our disagreement as political treason,” Radosh’s compatriot David Horowitz claimed on Breitbart.com. “The real question for us is this: Does it matter if conservatives regard Lend-Lease and D-Day as Soviet plots, and describe allied wartime decisions–however mistaken–as being orchestrated not by Roosevelt and Churchill and their generals, but by Joseph Stalin?”

“In the State Department, while Alger Hiss would become the most notorious Soviet agent of the war years, he was far from going solo,” M. Stanton Evans points out in a column on CNS news entitled “In Defense of Diana West.” “According to a long concealed but now recovered report compiled by security officers of the State Department, there were at war’s end no fewer than 20 identified agents such as Hiss on the payroll, plus 13 identified Communists and 90 other suspects and sympathizers serving with him.”

“Like the FBI report saying ‘nearly every department’ of the Federal government was infiltrated by Communist apparatchiks, these staggering numbers from the State Department security force look suspiciously like the description of a de facto ‘occupation’ given in Ms. West’s supposedly unhinged essay.” Evans, co-author of Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government, is well familiar with “long concealed but now recovered” reports from the U. S. government. Indeed, he has personally recovered many.

“Conversely, our own research in Soviet secret archives has led us to very similar conclusions about FDR and his administration, Vladimir Bukovsky wrote of West’s book. “For example, here is (sic) a couple of quotations from transcripts of FDR’s conversations with Stalin while Churchill was away.”

“At [the] Tehran Conference:

• “Roosevelt says it would be better not to mention India when talking to Churchill, because he, Roosevelt, knows that Churchill has no thoughts concerning India. Churchill plans to postpone the solution of this problem till the end of the war.
• “Com[rade] Stalin says that India is a sore point  for Churchill.
• “Roosevelt agrees. However, he says, Britain will have to do something about India. He, Roosevelt, hopes to discuss the problem of India with Marshal Stalin one day. He finds the parliamentary system of government to be unsuitable for India and it would be better to create something like the Soviet system in India, beginning from the bottom rather than from the top. Perhaps, that would be the system of Soviets.
• “Com. Stalin answers that to begin from the bottom would mean taking the revolutionary path. There are a lot of various nationalities and cultures in India. But there are no forces or groups capable of taking power in the country.”

Bukovsky sources the above to “(Russian state archive of social and political history (RGASPI), fund 558, inv. 11, file 235, pp. 8-12).”

Bukovsky “is one of the founders of the Soviet dissident movement,” his credit line reads. “He spent twelve years in Soviet prisons, labor camps and psychiatric hospitals during his fight for freedom.”

Arguably, and we would argue the point, an examination of the collected works of all of the authors cited above shows that Radosh and Horowitz, for all of their accomplishments, and they are many, are relative strangers to the government archives essential for compiling this history. (Full disclosure: I proudly served as Mr. Evans’ research assistant for two decades and can attest to his tireless and painstaking research.)

 

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.
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