A review of Diana West’s, American Betrayal—The Secret Assault on America’s Character
(Full Review at Pajamas Media)
They [the New Deal “brain trusters”] do not know that the America of Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln has been the “new deal” and that during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries we have been making great social progress. The common man is getting his place in the sun. Why try to put him back into the Dark Ages? Last summer I asked some of the individuals in this group what their concrete plan was for bringing on the proposed overthrow of the established American social order. I was told that they believed that by thwarting our then-evident recovery they would be able to prolong the country’s destitution until they had demonstrated to the American people that the Government must operate industry and commerce. I was told that of course commercial banks would not make long-time capital loans and that they would be able to destroy, by propaganda, the other institutions that had been making our capital loans. Then we can push Uncle Sam into the position where he must make these capital loans. And of course, when Uncle Sam becomes our financier, he must follow his money with control and management. The most surprising statement made to me was the following: “We believe that we have Mr. Roosevelt in the middle of a swift stream and that the current is so strong that he cannot turn back or escape from it. We believe that we can keep Mr. Roosevelt there until we are ready to supplant him with a Stalin. We all think that Mr. Roosevelt is only the Kerensky of this revolution.”
—Dr. William A. Wirt, 1934
In totalitarian states the restoration of historical truth is viewed as the most subversive of activities, one that merits persecution of the harshest type. But even in the West truth cannot be established as long as careless and uninformed statements are tolerated…This comfortable bed of illusions, this seemingly deliberate self-deception, is a characteristic trait shared by the Western press and many Western politicians; wishful thinking is sustained by verbal incantation…This urge to deal in illusions rather than in facts, which has since become almost universal, together with the ready acceptance of unscrupulous fables (about Russian and Soviet history), serves to blind the West in this time of danger, preventing it from grasping its true predicament and from finding a way out. It is as if the West actually does not want to know the truth until the moment when this knowledge has ceased to be of use.
—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1980
Diana West’s American Betrayal—a remarkable, novel-like work of sorely needed historical re-analysis—is punctuated by the Cassandra-like quality of “multi-temporal” awareness. Cassandra, during her scene from Aeschylus’ “Agamemnon,” is possessed with the unique ability to visualize past, present, and even augur future events, as if they were all happening in the present. There is a terrifying quality to Cassandra’s intensity, her peculiarly broad, profound, and temporally extended knowledge, and the directness with which it is conveyed. But West, although passionate, and direct, is able to convey her profoundly disturbing, multi-temporal narrative with cool brilliance, conjoining meticulous research, innovative assessment, evocative prose, and wit.
American Betrayal, in essence, chronicles the nation’s original subversion by Communist totalitarianism—the ugly, watershed “Big Lie” event being US recognition of the Soviet Union in November, 1933, during the New Deal, despite knowing the Ukrainian terror-famine (see Robert Conquest’s The Harvest of Sorrow) orchestrated by Stalin’s Communist regime had already killed 4 to 6 million souls. Having long since crossed that ignominious threshold, West argues, it is easy to fathom how we are currently being subverted by the contemporary “Big Islamic Lie,” which romanticizes totalitarian Islam.
FDR, in a blatant lie designed to justify massive Lend-Lease aid to the Soviets, praised the USSR (in 1941) for its “freedom of conscience, freedom of religion,” which he further claimed, was comparable to “what the rule is in this country [i.e., the U.S.].” Six decades later, George W. Bush mendaciously bowdlerized the timeless, global aspirations of Islam to impose its universal totalitarian system, Sharia (Islamic law), via jihad, when sanctioning the American response to the mass-murdering jihadist terror attacks of 9/11/2001. Addressing the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C. on September 17, 2001, Bush opined:
The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace.
By 2003, President Bush had fully embraced the delusive (and self-contradictory) Bernard Lewis Doctrine, which, squandering precious U.S. blood, and enormous U.S. treasure, empowered the forces of Sharia to foster Islamic “democracy,” just as FDR’s massive material and propagandistic support of Stalin’s Soviet transnational state, abetted the metastasis of Communist “democracy” during the World War II era.
(Continue reading at Pajamas Media)
