The Rebuttal: Defending 'American Betrayal' From the Book-Burners (21 page)

In his book “
Commies: A Journey Through the Old
Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left” (
June 15, 2002) he discloses the
essential and formerly classified fact that his second marriage ”rehabilitated
the sexual self-esteem that my former wife had crushed.” Well, thanks for
sharing, Ron. I’m glad your mojo in the bedroom is back because on Islam you
consistently hide under the bed.

Incidentally, just about every sentient person
in America knew the Rosenbergs were guilty long before his opus minimus was
published in 1983.

At the end of that book he makes the risible claim:

“The country is stronger for having encountered and
withstood us.”

Memo to Ron: “Better to remain silent and be thought
a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.”

# # #

Too Much Schnapps

By
Takuan Seiyo

Gates of Vienna

September
12, 2013

Taking the controversy ov
er
Diana West’s book
as his jumping-off point, Takuan
Seiyo discusses our occluded history — not to mention our occluded
present.

On instinctive shooting

One
would have to be a pierced slacker or in a sensory deprivation tank to not take
notice of the storm that erupted on the Left and the neoconservative semi-Right
after the publication of Diana West’s
American
Betrayal
. Citing Ms. West’s own early stock of her detractors’ forays, the
most serious was Ronald Radosh’s 7000-word “
McCarthy
On Steroids
” plus follow-up pieces — FrontPage’s own inventory
is
here
— with echoes in
Pajamas
Media
,
The
Ameran
Thinker
,
National
Review
and undoubtedly elsewhere, prodigiously.

My
own favorite is Mother Jones’s
“The
Latest One-Upmanship on the Lunatic Right
”, parsimonious in that
it quotes generously from Andrew Sullivan’s critique of the book and its
author. In a country where an Andrew Sullivan gets so much paid column inch
space and bandwidth, one is in a Looking Glass world, an upside-down mishmash,
so maybe even David Frum will soon inveigh with his conservative opinion in a
syndicated column.

Horowitz,
Radosh and Black are the only weighty names in the critics’ gallery, though
I’ll omit Conrad Black from further consideration. His “Right-wing loopy who
has [not been] house-trained” is so embarrassing for a man I came to expect more
from that I wish he were back to tending his collections of cars, antiques and
(reportedly $9-million-worth of) Franklin Delano Roosevelt memorabilia, instead
of voicing strong opinions on the événements du jour.

I
have not read American Betrayal, though I will as soon as time allows. I am
also not a Sovietologist or specialist in modern American history — but I
need not be. Having been born behind the Iron Curtain, I, my people, my family
— those remaining by 1941 after Katyn, Kolyma, Kazakhstan, and the rest
later, after Majdanek, Janowska and Belzec — have lived and endlessly
argued the consequences of the history revisited by Diana West and so eagerly
reburied by her detractors. I will, however, mostly stay clear of the fine
points argued by both sides in the controversy, noting only that in its broad
outline, which I know having read the reviews and the polemics between Diana
West and her detractors, and bringing my store of information to bear, I side
fully with Ms. West’s contentions even if, as her critics allege, one or
another detail she discusses it erroneous.

What
Messrs. Radosh, Horowitz et al. are doing is akin to a learned historian of the
Spanish monarchy looking at Velazquez’s “Las Meninas” and foaming at the mouth:
“What kind of dog is that? No such rough-looking mutts would have been allowed
anywhere within the precincts of the Royal Palace! And what’s that coffered
door on the back wall! This style had all but disappeared by the time Velazquez
arrived in Madrid. What ignorance! What chutzpah! How could this pushy parvenu
from Seville have purported to represent faithfully the fauna or the
architecture of the Spanish Habsburg Court!”

But
this tells more about the critic than the painter, for “Las Meninas” would
remain one of the iconic paintings of our civilization even if that dog should
have been a Pomeranian and the door should have been inlaid marquetry. In other
words, the vehemence of Diana West’s detractors would be grossly out of
proportion even if their allegations of error in fact or methodology were
correct. Their failure to acknowledge the singular merit and critical
timeliness of American Betrayal’s larger theme is highly troubling, in
particular because of the urgency of her insight as to the parallel to the
current infiltration of Muslims and Islam’s Useful Idiots in the halls of
American power.

But
the question remains: why the vitriol? Why would a smart, well informed,
experienced, effective defender of what’s left of the United States, Clare
Lopez, be dismissed from Gatestone Institute after having written a favorable
review of Ms. West’s book? Diana West asked the
“
why
”
question in the
context of quoting this phrase from her book:

“Once we finally
incorporate the facts of Soviet-directed penetration of the U.S. government
— the Communist-agent-occupation of the U.S. government — which
began in earnest in 1933, everything we know about ourselves as a nation will
also have to rearrange itself, our history taking on a brand-new pattern of
revelation . . .”

Why
should critics acknowledged as foes of Communism and, in the case of both
FrontPage and Gatestone, also important members in the anti-Islamization coalition,
be so disturbed by this “new pattern of revelation”?

Here
I have to reveal my other qualification for entering this debate. For when
Messrs. Horowitz and Radosh were still on the barricades of the Proletariat, I
was learning both my English and my points of the political compass from the
writings of William F. Buckley. And Bill Buckley had started his public career
as a pioneer, fearless fighter standing athwart the March of the Left and
yelling “Stop,” but would end it peeing habitually from the open door of his
moving limo onto downwind traffic. He would pee metaphorically too: onto
conservative writers still toiling in the topical fields of reality that he had
by then found inconvenient to his social ambitions.

Once
upon a time, Buckley wrote copiously and courageously on the subject of Commie
infiltration, in defense of Joe McCarthy, in defense of Chamberlain and against
Hiss, in scathing rebuttals of the Rosenberg denialists and other red-diaper
intellectuals, in praise of various positions of the John Birch Society, and so
on. He allowed race-realist and immigration — realist articles in
National Review. But slowly, “the Pope of the conservative movement” started
turning. First, he turned on the John Birch Society.

In
March 2008, Buckley published an article entitled
“
Goldwater,
the John Birch Society, and Me
”
in Commentary, of all possible venues, the premier organ of Jewish neoconservatism.
In it, Buckley described why and how a group of conservative thinkers and
machers
,
including himself, came to ditch the John Birch Society (JBS) in 1962. The
trigger was their shared opinion that JBS founder Robert Welch was a man
disconnected from reality, having written a book, “The Politician,” alleging
that President Eisenhower had been a Communist agent.

National
Review would be pivotal in the excommunication of the Birchers, starting with a
5000-word opinion piece Buckley wrote and published a week after that meeting.
“The wound we Palm Beach plotters delivered to the John Birch Society proved
fatal over time,” gloats Buckley at the end of his Commentary reminiscence.

Robert
Welch may have gone overboard in his choice of words, but not in the sense of
his allegations. For FDR, Truman and Eisenhower too may have been unwitting
Communist tools, but tools they were. That alone, revived and refreshed in
Diana West’s book, is a red cape in front of the neocons — and few
conservatives remain in America who aren’t — for it’s linked to an old
anathema already branded and excommunicated half a century ago.

Moreover,
as much as it was clear that Welch had gone hyperbolic in some of his sweeping
accusations, his paranoia was justified then and has been vindicated by history
since. He was one the first to attack Fidel Castro and his regime, already in
1959. He was perhaps the first to expose the United Nations for the Third-World
run, global socialist government vehicle that it has plainly by now become
^[1]
.
He exposed odious conduct by U.S. presidents that looked like they were doing
the Soviets’ dirty work. Among others, ‘Welch’s book about Eisenhower and the
forces controlling American politics, relays, per the
JBS
précis
, “300 pages and 150 pages of footnotes and documentation,
including covering one of Mr. Eisenhower’s most immoral and despicable acts of
authorizing ‘Operation Keelhaul’; which used American soldiers to repatriate
anti-communist Poles to their certain death or torture.”

Polish
history as the insufficiently known, unacknowledged and unwanted depository of
much evidence of base, traitorous, Commie-manipulated conduct by the wartime
leaders of the United States and Great Britain will feature prominently in this
little review, for like Ms. West’s disclosures, it’s another skeleton that
people with agendas wish to leave buried. But thus far in my defense of Welch,
even neocons would probably not object too much, looking in hindsight. One
would have to be brain-dead or snatched by alien spores from space not to
notice that the now-thwarted causes Welch advocated already in the 1950s:
limited government, individual liberty, the rule of law and restoration of the
Republic as envisioned by the Founding Fathers are the causes that the entire
conservative movement should have embraced and sustained from the beginning.
Instead, they focused only on fighting formal Communism (but not the stealthy
one), furthering capitalism, and continuing to play ball on a pitch whose goal
posts were being continuously moved leftward without a pip of protest from the
away team.

I
believe that the
herem
(haram in Arabic) imposed on the John Birch Society by the “conservative
movement” to this day may be due to its five decades of still-continuing
rejection and opposition to two sacred American totems: “Civil Rights” and
“Immigration.” That these two totems and other lesser ones are the work of a
secondary infection of the polity by Communist agents either professional or
instinctively sympathetic — what I call yin or estrogen-driven — is
a separate subject that cannot be treated here
^[2]
. But by 2013, when
“Civil Rights” have for decades morphed into Equal Outcomes despoliation and
hateful truculence, and “Immigration” has morphed into a disjoining compound
injected by the tens of millions of units into the arthritic joints of a
hobbled nation, these should not be controversial issues any more.

But
still they are, and they are neocon anathema.

I
don’t have a ready definition of neoconservatism myself, but like Potter
Stewart with pornography, I know it when I see it. It’s not even useful to
distinguish between “conservative” and “neoconservative” anymore, for the
latter has subsumed the former, including the Republican Party. And it’s clear
that the institutions and individuals on the Right who are attacking American
Betrayal exhibit a particularly “conservative” set of values, proclivities and
practices, the derision quote marks warranted by some idiosyncrasies that have
nothing to do with genuine conservatism. In Samuel Francis’s words, “Despite
their dislike of the New Left, their anti-communism, and their concern about
destructive cultural and moral trends, the neo-conservatives for the most part
never quite managed to break completely with many of the underlying liberal
assumptions.”
^[3]
Paul Gottfried, a prolific historian of
conservatism and a fierce critic of conservatism-light has characterized this
syndrome as “sentimentally drawn to the left despite conservative positions on
many policy issues.”

Gottfried
attributes this ambivalence to the cultural differences between the
neoconservatives and the old right. In his words, “Both groups come largely
from self-contained cultures that once confronted each other across an abyss of
mutual suspicion: the one, Eastern urban-Jewish and the other, American heartland-Protestant.”
^[4]

To
list the sieve layers in my own filter wherein “conservatives” with derision
quotes are identified:

• Support for “social justice”
  and the welfare state.
  
• Fondness for Woodrow Wilson and
  FDR.
  
• Support for immigration in all
  its forms
  
• Extreme sensitivity to “racism”
  and omerta with respect to race and gender group genetic differences.
  
• Unequivocal advocacy of
  democracy and of interventionist foreign policy to enforce it,
  particularly in the Middle East.
  
• Fondness for abstract universalist
  principles (James Burnham referred to the latter as compassion,
  kindliness, love and brotherhood instead of what a true conservative ought
  to advocate: civic virtues).
  
• Scorched-earth tactics against
  conservative ideological opponents such as Paul Gottfried, Pat Buchanan,
  Samuel Francis, John Birch Society etc. And now Diana West, though she was
  not aware that in the eyes of “conservatives” she had just written herself
  into that camp.