The Rebuttal: Defending 'American Betrayal' From the Book-Burners (22 page)

And
two characteristics that, sadly, both sides involved in the American Betrayal
brouhaha, including this reviewer, share:

• Awareness of and activism
  against Islamization.
  
• Strong support for Israel.
  

Let
it be said that the presence of the last two items in the neoconservative
agenda and their conspicuous lack in the paleoconservative one is, in my eyes,
a credit to the former and a black eye to the latter. Still, even with the
black eye, that visage looks truer to me.

American
Betrayal revolves around a John-Birchey “extreme-right” theme. And JBS is not
only tainted by some unfortunate choices of words and tackling of tribal
taboos; it’s also uncool. Bob Dylan wrote a song mocking it. Norman Lear made a
film mocking it. Stanley Kubrick mocked it in Dr. Strangelove. In other words,
the liberals who dictate the terms of the discourse don’t like it.

Ms.
West had ventured into taboo territory. She had to be shot down. Before her,
Lawrence Auster had been. His supremely reasoned and reasonable arguments
against racial preferences, about black criminality and white cowardice, about
the crippling dysfunctions planted intentionally through Third World
immigration got him banished from FrontPageMagazine’s pages, for “racism.”
Before Auster it was Gottfried who had been picked, frozen, personalized and
polarized — by the entire “conservative” establishment.

William
Buckley himself went down this path much beyond his vendetta against the
Birchers. He transformed into a neocon during the Reagan years, for that’s
where the power, money and perks lay. Soon purges started at National Review, with
the firing of all writers and editors who’d taken “controversial” positions
with regard to “sensitive” subjects. John O’Sullivan, Rick Brookhiser, Peter
Brimelow and others were let go.

An
instinctive “off with her head” is what I think the neoconservative reaction
has been with respect to Ms. West’s book, too. But let’s look at the substance
of the criticism, not just its springboard.

What we know we know and
what we don’t know but need not prove

The
gist of the critiques is that Diana’s West’s book is too much: an overreach
mixing personal bias with incorrectly interpreted facts, as allege none too
politely Messrs. Radosh et al. To this is added a self-serving contempt of the
“expert,” e.g. Radosh is a “professional” historian with a PhD, and West is
not, and Horowitz cited that expertise as his main reason for siding with its
position.

Having
completed the coursework for a PhD in a pre-Affirmative Action top shelf
American university, and a Masters at another, I have come by my contempt for
such contempt the hard way. Tocqueville had a couple of years of college and
some law courses as his preparation for writing “Democracy in America.” Patrick
Leigh Fermor — the most erudite travel writer and history savant who has
ever put pen to paper — had only had a high school education, albeit in
the days when high schools were for real. Epictetus earned his diplomas in
philosophy from his slave insignia and crippled leg.

Even
if some details of West’s vast painting of Communist infiltration of
Washington’s power structure could stand correction, the tableau is not, cannot
be, vast enough. For instance, a big part of the Radosh critique evolves around
the assertion that FDR’s closest and most trusted advisor Harry Hopkins was not
a Soviet agent like Diana West alleges; someone else was. He cites sources I am
not familiar with, and so does she. I cannot decide who is right — but it
matters so very little. What matters is that Hopkins might as well have been a
KGB agent for all the stupendous commie-friendly damage he has wrought. And Ms.
West amply and irrefutably makes that case, whatever formal label might apply.

If
that is not shocking enough, warranting a moment of national silence and
reflection even if Hopkins did not carry a KGB identity card, our survival
instincts have been dulled. On purpose?

Professor
Radosh’s objections remind me of the PC contortions in the U.S. and Great
Britain to avoid “labeling” Muslim terrorists as Muslim terrorists. Apparently,
one must have a rag wrapped around one’s head and a discful of emails from Bin
Laden to be considered as a Muslim terrorist. If you wear a United States Army
officer’s uniform and murder 13 American soldiers and wound 30 while screaming
Allahu Akbar, that is only “workplace violence.”

But
it’s Islam itself where the terrorism lies, with or without Al Qaeda. Just as
nihilism, subversion and destruction lie in Marx/Engels/Lenin & Co, per se,
with or without the KGB. And so Ms. West was on the correct track when having
noticed the number of Muslims in high public positions swaying American policy,
she had a déjà vu concerning the high number of Communists in earlier
administrations.

It’s
the extent of Communist infiltration that matters, not the exact relationship
between the infiltrators and the ideology and organizations on behalf of which
they were infiltrating. The scorn wrapped in defining Diana West as McCarthyist
is risible when we now know that Communist infiltration was as wide and deep
then as McCarthy alleged, and not as narrow as his Useful Idiot detractors have
claimed ever since. Moreover, this infiltration remains all-important and
destiny-shaping now, though mutated like a smart flu virus into Cultural
Marxism riding piggyback on submerged Leninism.

But
let’s revisit briefly the vast picture of the World War II Alliance, to
understand why as detailed and scathing an expose as American Betrayal is, it’s
not enough and cannot be, for no one book could contain all the horror, and
minds would reel from contemplating the abyss then, just as they should reel
when contemplating the abyss-in-progress now.

Class,
raise your hands: how many have heard the name Władysław Sikorski?
Poland had a quarter million men fighting in the Allied forces, often with
great distinction (e.g. Squadron 303, Monte Casino, Narvik etc.). General
Sikorski was their Supreme Commander and Prime Minister of the Polish
Government in Exile, headquartered in London. He died on July 4, 1943, when the
Liberator plane carrying him, his daughter and his staff plunged into the
Mediterranean right after taking off from the British airfield in Gibraltar. A
British Court of Inquiry decreed three days later that jammed elevator controls
caused the crash but it was impossible to establish how this jamming occurred
— except that it certainly was no sabotage (this and the reference are
cited in Wikipedia’s entry on Sikorski, but I relied on Polish sources).

“Impossible
to determine” yet possible enough to determine that there was no sabotage? In
contrast, the unofficial and non-British explanations of Sikorski’s death
differ only with respect to who ordered the hit and exactly how it was
executed. Perhaps the most credible theory is that Sikorski’s plane was
sabotaged by the KGB with full knowledge or at least a wink and a nod of the
highest echelons of British government, perhaps even Churchill himself. The
more radical version of this scenario has been presented in Rolf Hochhuth’s
1967 play “Soldaten.” He based it on
personal
revelations from Jane Ledig-Rowohlt
, the wife of his publisher,
who had worked during the war in the British Secret Service and knew Churchill
personally.

Now
what would Messrs. Radosh et al. comment if I wrote a book alleging based on
such anecdotal and additional circumstantial evidence that Winston Churchill
was complicit in the murder of General Sikorski? Maybe this would have been an
irresponsible allegation, tarnishing the reputation of an otherwise great man,
as great as they come. But a critique based solely on vituperation with regard
to a perhaps-erroneous assertion of Churchill’s involvement would have been a
great disservice to the broader truth, and a gross impediment to our understanding
of those times and their implications for us who live now.

First,
even if Churchill had no knowledge of the hit on Sikorski, he appeased Stalin
constantly, ignobly and unnecessarily — though less so than Roosevelt
did. He went as far as impeding the release of information about the Soviet
massacre in Katyn
^[5]
: “We shall certainly rigorously oppose any
“investigation” by the International Red Cross or any other body in any
territory under German authority,”
he
wrote
in a telegram to Uncle Joe.

Second,
just as America was riddled at the top with Communist agents both official and
spontaneously sympathizing, so was Great Britain — and that’s the more
important truth. There is little doubt that Great Britain’s wartime decisions
too were formed partly by such agents of Communist influence.

What
we know about Sikorski’s last day is that when his Liberator was about to take
off from Gibraltar en route to London, NKVD/KGB asset Kim Philby, OBE [sic!],
had been Chief of the Iberia subsection of the British MI6 for two years
already. Which means that this Cambridge lowlife, incidentally son of an upper
class British convert to Islam and, true to type for a diehard commie, a vocal
supporter of the Islamic cause in the Arab-Israeli conflicts, was in charge of
all British counterintelligence operation in Gibraltar too, including the
security of the airport. And on July 4, 1943, the plane of the Soviet
Ambassador to Great Britain, Ivan Maisky, was at the Gibraltar Airport, parked
rather close to Sikorski’s Liberator, with KGB operatives on board. Maisky had
just been recalled to Moscow for a consultation with Uncle Joe concerning major
trouble that had erupted between Sikorski’s government and the Soviets. Philby
was in Gibraltar too
^[6]
).

Just
two months before Sikorski’s all-but-certain assassination, the Germans
announced the discovery of 20,000 bodies (21,768 eventually) of Polish officers
and inconvenient intelligentsia murdered by the Soviets and buried in Katyn
Forest. The Soviets denied this but Sikorski rejected the denial and demanded
an international investigation. The Soviets then accused the Polish government-in-exile
of cooperating with Nazi Germany and broke off diplomatic relations.

Sikorski
had become a major burr under the saddle on which rode the troika of Roosevelt,
Churchill and Stalin, for he had begun opposing such an alliance with the
mega-murdering psychopath from Georgia. As to what the first two intended
relative to Poland for the sake of appeasing Stalin may be inferred from their
failure to invite a representative of the Polish government to the Teheran
Conference. There, merely five months after Sikorski’s murder, Poland was
preliminarily cast loose and abandoned to Uncle Joe’s tender ministrations. The
two leaders of the free world also agreed that the Polish Government in Exile
was not representing Poland anymore but a puppet Communist government would be
set up in that country instead. The betrayal was formalized at the February
1945 Yalta Conference, again, without Polish participation.

e
have here a murder motive nonpareil. To the question of cui bono, one can
answer that World Communism and the USSR would benefit, and so would the
Alliance per its two Western leaders who were so innocent of street smarts that
they were unable to realize the Soviets needed them far more than they needed
the Soviets, and who were being played by Stalin as if they were rubes from the
provinces standing before a practiced con man in a downtown dive. But where
were their advisors?

To
the singular opportunity on July 4, 1943 — and Sikorski’s planes had
experienced three “malfunctions” in the preceding 12 months — we can now
add a powerful motive. Although not proven, speculation that KGB agents in
coordination with Philby and Maisky sabotaged Sikorski’s plane is not only
possible but warranted
^[7]
.

The
main issue is not whether orders to wipe out Sikorski had been given in London
or Moscow
^[8]
. The issue is, first, that the British government has
obstructed the possibility of finding that out by sealing its relevant records
as a “military secret” until 2050 — why, one wonders. The second issue is
whether it has been fully disclosed to what extent the administrations of both
FDR and Churchill were shot through with KGB operatives and “mere” Soviet
sympathizers acting as trusted advisors and double-agent executors of their
respective countries’ war efforts.

Diana
West has now treated the Roosevelt-Truman-Eisenhower case comprehensively. The
British case still begs re-examination, for the “Cambridge Five” were surely
neither just in Cambridge nor just five.

Two
of Diana West’s most irritating (to her critics) assertions in American
Betrayal is that the Allies were swayed by Soviet agents not to pursue early
peace overtures from Germany, and to land in Normandy rather than in Italy. She
describes this as “the most serious indictment of the US Communist movement for
having spawned the traitors, fellow travelers and dupes who worked inside the
federal government to advance Stalin’s interests.”

I
will not quote from Professor Radosh’s critique of these points, as West
already does so in her rebuttal, showing that he criticized mostly what she had
not written. But I happened upon a chance confluence that supports Diana West’s
thesis. Reading up on Ivan Maisky, the very Soviet ambassador in London whose
co-presence with Philby and Sikorski in Gibraltar on July 4, 1943 is so hard to
brush off, I had to circumvent his memoir, not being able to judge without much
further study what was truthful and what was a whitewash. However, the
Wikipedia entry on
Ivan
Maisky
includes the following paragraph, supported by
bibliographical references: