American Betrayal
Diana West
St. Martin's Press
May 28, 2013
New York
[From article]
Where a professional historian pursues an academic career, the amateur seeks after the truth. Ignorant of taboos, the amateur can follow the trail of evidence to wherever it leads and discovers things which, according to the academic conventional wisdom, are best left untouched and unsaid.
[. . .]
Did all these people (the glorious FDR administration) really conduct the Second World War in the interests of Western democracies, or was it in the interests of Comrade Stalin? Having declared that war to defend the freedom of Poland, the Western democracies ended it by surrendering Poland and a dozen other nations to a totalitarian empire worse than Hitler’s. Was that really a victory? Above all, was that outcome inevitable, or did it, to a greater or lesser extent, result from the work of the Soviet agents of influence in the positions of power in the West?
[. . .]
if some 80 years later we find the Western Establishment to be utterly corrupt, we should know what has corrupted them.
The Left have learned a lot since the times of Duranty and Agitprop. They no longer try to argue with such books as Mrs. West’s. They no longer try to sue us for libel in the courts of law. They quietly assassinate such books well in advance, by confidential e-mails to publishers and editors. In rare cases when that does not work and the book is out, they simply ignore it and wait for another crisis in the Middle East, or the release of the next series of the latest blockbuster, or mid-term elections, to distract the public attention from everything else. They simply let the dangerous revelations sink in the massive flood of information that overwhelms today’s readers.
[. . .]
The “consensus” is that Soviet agents of influence had no real influence, that FDR was a great patriot and war leader, and that Stalin’s occupation of half of the world was the best possible outcome of the war. On these points, it has emerged, the "conservative" and "liberal" academics have no disagreements. All their disagreements are about how exactly to explain away the facts that do not fit into their “consensus," and how exactly to suppress dissent.
[. . .]
In the best traditions of those campaigns, most of the eminent critics attacked the book without ever reading it, and some of them even admitted this. Come to think of it, one hardly needs to read a book in order to accompany any mention of it with a garland of epithets such as “awful”, “embarrassingly kooky”, “poorly conceived”, “ill-informed”, “conspiracy-mongering”, “preposterous”, “incompetent”, and “dishonest”, and to insult the author in similarly intelligent expressions, including positive assertions that Mrs. West is insane (pity Professor Lunz is no longer with us).
[. . .]
The difference is no greater than between a "liberal" academic liar and a "conservative" one.
[. . .]
Some of us here are talking about truth and lies. And this, perhaps, is precisely what annoys the academics, whose monopoly on writing history depend upon the half-truths of the "consensus."
[. . .]
There is another danger in attacking books without reading them.
[. . .]
It is in the nature of a totalitarian regime to try and corrupt not only its own society, but anybody within its reach. This is how they conquer the world. Communism has corrupted greater men than a few arrogant academics. Indeed, the academics turned out to be one of the easier targets.
[. . .]
As a ‘community’, they are bound together with their corrupt colleagues, and have to defend their collective monopoly against intruders. It is for a very long time that they have been no more than a self-serving nomenklatura, caring nothing about the truth, but only about their own elevated positions. Like politicians. Like the media. Like the rest of the modern world.
[. . .]
To them, the history of that battle has been no more than a comfortable job. They never saw establishing the truth about it as a sacred duty we owe to the memory of millions of victims; but merely as a matter for “gentlemanly give-and-take” between "liberals" and "conservatives," leading to a sound academic consensus.
[. . .]
A nice, endless debate with no practical conclusions– just what the academics need.
[. . .]
Diana West, with her “reckless” discoveries, has jeopardized their comfortable world.
[. . .]
The sheer number of their academic degrees bears witness to their infinite knowledge. It is just that they lacked honesty and courage to tell us the truth.
Clearly, history is far too important to be left to the historians.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/09/26/Its-worse-than-a-conspiracy-it%20-s-consensus
WHY ACADEMICS HATE DIANA WEST
by VLADIMIR BUKOVSKY AND PAVEL STROILOV 28 Sep 2013
* * *
http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2614/-Professor-Radosh-Gets-an-F.aspx
"Professor" Radosh Gets an "F"
Written by: Diana West
Friday, August 09, 2013 2:08 AM
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