Posted on 09/14/2013 10:30:57 PM PDT by No One Special
Well David, care to defend your alliance?
As an aside, I have always found David Horowitz an angry, unpleasant individual - even when I have agreed with him.
Anticommunist ping.
Diana West only scratches the surface of this Communist “conspiracy.” Read The Morgenthau Plan 2013. White and others almost succeeded in turning all of Europe Communist.
Worth reading in its entirety.
There is a considerable amount of contemporary primary source material (diaries, etc) that show how knowledge of the Morgenthau Plan had the effect of increasing the resolve of many German soldiers who were not particularly imbued with Nazi ideology. Such things didn't affect the DC elite and their ancillary intelligentsia, but they did impact the men at the point of the Allied spear.
Mr. niteowl77
This campaign, aided by Adler's State Department Chungking roommate John Stewart Service and other U.S. diplomats in China, succeeded, with results that we are still living with today. Meanwhile, an identical propaganda campaign was waged by U.S. and British pro-Red officials to discredit the anti-Communists of the Balkans, in order to deliver control of Yugoslavia to the Communist Tito. This, too, succeeded, resulting in the communization of the country and capture and murder by Tito of his anti-Communist rival, Gen. Draza Mihailovich.
Another piece falls into place, the US betrayal of the Serbs and the resultant false witness Clintonian war against them a second time.
On reading the Book:
West was going to write about MUSLIM penetration of the US of the present.
All the Commie stuff, while immensely important as background, and defining the ‘attitude’ of the government towards penetration (denial); our real problem today is the residual Commie stuff AND the Muslim penetration well fundied and well on its way.
I read Evans book on McCarthy and respect his opinion. However, I will wait for more info and comments by other conservatives before I form my own opinion. I do believe there were many Soviet agents operating in Washington at that time, and West may be right about their influence on the Roosevelt admin. But I want more info. I’m wondering if the truth, like many other things, is in the middle.
“...The book can stand on its own as a purely revisionist narrative of the Cold War...”
Not quibbling with your excellent post, but the phrase “Cold War revisionism” has in the past described works by left-leaning authors like Gar Alperovitz which assign guilt exclusively to the United States and the anticommunist West for causing the Cold War to exist.
(Aside: it was U.S. atomic strength that kept the Soviets from engaging in hot war with the West, but as Emily Litella would say, “never mind”.)
Maybe Ms. West’s new book is the `new revisionism’ after forty plus years of post-Vietnam Blame America First “scholarship”.
West was DEAD RIGHT about one thing in an earlier book...’grown-ups are pretty much extinct in the United States’. I have remarked to my wife before that the adults in Red England conduct themselves like 5-year olds...nearly impossible to even speak with them. This is what happens when you remove the moral compass set by G-d Almighty from the classroom...we have been on a steady decline since 1962, and nothing is going to reverse it.
I have this book; I recommend it.
The truth is n e v e r in the middle. That’s a leftist meme.
Mine is frayed, but still intact ... great read.
In my lexicon, the Standard History of the Cold War is: America, England and Russia were part of a Grand Alliance that destroyed fascism which ultimately disintegrated because of Russian insecurity (the Soviets had lost so many men, Russians are historically distrustful, and a host of other rationalizations) and a subsequent American overreaction caused by the anticommunists, moneyed interests, and militarists.
It's all rubbish, of course. We didn't need Venona declassification or the (brief) opening of the Russian archives to establish that. The open source information available to every historian and interested lay people, the testimonies of Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley, and the work of the Dies Committee were more than enough to establish the true parameters of Russia's war against the West in general, and The Main Enemy in particular.
Yet a strange thing happened when academic historians started looking at the new, previously hidden sources: they actually changed their minds. It's true that their treatments have been largely demure, but (shockingly) they have been largely correct: The Russians were at War with us long before they were at war with the Nazis. But it didn't matter, because the first narrative is now so thoroughly embedded in the public mind that revelations which would have been considered startling in 1944, vindicating in 1954, have been completely ignored.
So in my mind, any attempt to set the record straight now is revisionist. If you prefer Neorevisionist, let it be so. The truth, by any other name...
Wow, lots of food for thought there. As for the term `revisionism’, my knowledge is dated. I earned a master’s in international studies in the mid 1970’s and the dominant motifs among the faculty were: Nixon-bashing, post-Vietnam recriminations, transnational organizations can solve the world’s problems, communism in practice is state capitalism, true socialism hasn’t been tried yet, etc.
In that milieu, America-sucks revisionist authors were held in warm regard. William Appleman Williams was another of those.
To confirm your point, the reality of the evils of communism were even then already common knowledge to anyone with any intellectual honesty and the energy to do the research. But I was studying under professors (not all of them) who, to use the proverbial example, were convinced of the innocence of Alger Hiss and would not be dissuaded even if Hiss told them to their faces that he really did spy for the Soviets.
So then, some in the Academy have indeed changed their minds about the origins of the Cold War. Better late than never, I suppose. But those who have are probably a beleaguered minority.
The truth is not "in the middle."
Here are some books you can read. They were not written by conservatives, but by liberal leaning academic historians. They lay out the case very clearly. If anything, they don't take the conclusions all the way to the end.
You might like The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression , by Amity Shlaes. This is a bit drier and less overtly "shocking" than the communism revisionist [neorevisionist] books, but if you like history you very well may enjoy it. I certainly did. To the point: In this book Shlaes documents -- among many other interesting and heretofore mostly unknown things -- that most of Roosevelt's economic "brain trust" were leftist academics and fellow travellers long before most Americans even thought seriously about communism. Many of them had travelled to Russia to see for themselves what the excitement was all about, and came back to America thoroughly converted (or confirmed) in "the Cause." This was in the 1920's, not the 1960's or 70's.
[It's also interesting to see The Ickes and Blumenthals, the Harvard grads and Yalees of previous generations whose children and grandchildren thread their way through the history of the 20th Century and are still part of the Democrat nomenklatura today.]
At the Treasury, there were at least a dozen Communists and Soviet agents, headed by Harry White, who exerted influence on a host of issues. In late 1943, to cite a prominent instance, White and his fellow Soviet agent Solomon Adler, Treasury attaché in China, launched a disinformation campaign to discredit our anti-Communist ally Chiang Kai-shek, deny him U.S. assistance, and turn U.S. policy in favor of the Communists under Mao Tse-tung.
This campaign, aided by Adler's State Department Chungking roommate John Stewart Service and other U.S. diplomats in China, succeeded, with results that we are still living with today. Meanwhile, an identical propaganda campaign was waged by U.S. and British pro-Red officials to discredit the anti-Communists of the Balkans, in order to deliver control of Yugoslavia to the Communist Tito. This, too, succeeded, resulting in the communization of the country and capture and murder by Tito of his anti-Communist rival, Gen. Draza Mihailovich.
Another piece falls into place, the US betrayal of the Serbs and the resultant false witness Clintonian war against them a second time.
Thanks. For those who think the Hollywood crowd’s fascination with communism began with Jane Fonda and Oliver Stone (or no further back than Dalton Trumbo), “The Red Decade” by Eugene Lyons (1941) is still instructive.
Published just after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union and the incredible flipflops by the CP,USA which followed, the book describes of communist infiltration & recruitment of the filmmaking elite that began even before Lenin consolidated Bolshevik rule in Russia. The communists were early experts in using mass media to seize the attention of the masses.
As for the descendants of the fellow-travelers of the Comintern period, “The Coercive Utopians” (Rael Jean & Erich Isaac, 1984) is a useful and not yet dated reference. A revised edition would have to include Cass Sunstein in that assemblage.
S. Steven Powell’s “Covert Cadre” (1987) is also helpful in identifying those who were later forced to abandon pro-Soviet advocacy for today’s leftist movements (green, gay, gun control, anti-Western, government healthcare, etc.)
Though aging, `communitarianism’ theorist Amitai Etzioni & his writings give keen insight for understanding the thinking of those who belong to our latter-day Aristocracy of Conscience.
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