CINDY SIMPSON: DIANA WEST…SWIMMING AGAINST THE MAINSTREAM ****
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/diana-west-swimming-against-the-mainstream?f=puball
“The most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.”
That was the wisdom offered by award-winning novelist David Foster Wallace to the Kenyon College class of 2005, after he opened his memorable commencement address with this “didactic little parable-ish story”:
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
The graduates were then challenged by Wallace to recognize that their education did not necessarily teach them “how to think,” but rather to realize their ability to determine what to think about. The rest of his speech focused on that determination and the resulting differences in interpretation based on one’s self-awareness and worldview.
Wallace’s wise “This is Water” words came to mind as I watched the drama begin to unfold around conservative author Diana West’s new book, American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character. For if “water” could represent the generally-accepted reality about whatever it is a person might determine to think deeply about and then challenge — then not only has West, like the “older fish” in Wallace’s story, been “swimming the other way.” She also asked, “How’s the water?” and proceeded to write a book about her discoveries after she dared peer closely into the water’s depths.
West’s book seems to have stirred major ripples in the taken-for-granted narrative; ripples that have splashed the toes of the mainstream and its recognized experts, both liberal and conservative.
From the left, the negative response was expected. From the right, the reaction from some influential sources could be described, at the very least, as perplexing.
The current that West dared swim against? Narratives such as: McCarthy was wrong; powerful and influential communist spies and sympathizers did not really infiltrate the highest levels of our government, media, and entertainment; and any such spying since proven by historians had no real influence on our strategy during World War II or in its resolution and aftermath.
Those narratives are certainly popular, but are they true?
Numerous “anti-anti-communist” disinformation campaigns, such as “Operation Abolition,” recently revealed in declassified archives — have been observed by Dr. Paul Kengor as being so successful, that “after two decades of being wrong and being duped by Stalin, by Stalinists, and by secret supporters of Stalin, that America’s liberals/progressives…would come together to find their demon not in the duped liberals/progressives or pro-communists who defended Stalin as he murdered tens of millions, but in the anti-communists who tried to tell the truth to Americans about Stalin, his murderous state and his secret supporters in America.”
Decades later, we find that even some conservatives appear to share not only some of the left’s “demons” (using “McCarthyite” as a derogatory label), but also its heroes (like FDR).
Blogger Robert Stacy McCain, in his ongoing attempt to defend West and analyze the backlash against her book, observed that Roosevelt has replaced Lincoln “as the sanctified figure who cannot be examined critically” by conservatives without risk of being labeled “pro-Nazi.” McCain noted the tendency of some conservatives “to promulgate and defend ‘noble lies’ about American history, to decide who are the heroes and who are the villains, so that in the place of actual history, we have instead a political myth.”
Have the “political myth” and anti-anti-communist narratives become the water in which we swim?
West was accused of being an “ideologue posing as historian” by noted historian and conservative Ronald Radosh, who has been West’s most vocal critic. Radosh himself was the subject of similar accusations in a 1996 article in The Nation (which I happened to run across on a NYU-sponsored site dedicated to the innocence of known spy Alger Hiss) — for having the “ability to read into documents what he wished to believe in the first place.” Another famous historian, Dr. Ilan Pappe, is credited with the frequent assertion: “We do [historiography] because of ideological reasons, not because we are truth seekers…There is no such thing as truth, only a collection of narratives.”
So who are we to believe – “ideologues posing as historians,” or historians confessing as ideologues? What is “actual history,” and who are its gatekeepers?
Writer David Solway, after chronicling the negative treatment of West’s book by certain conservatives and the ensuing glee among the left, asked:
Why would a respected conservative writer attack a fellow conservative writer with such muscular rectitude that he opens an enormous crack in the façade of a much beleaguered movement, inviting its adversaries to exploit the weakness thus exposed? This is a more serious breach than presumably allowing anti-anti communism to run amok. What is it in the conservative sensibility that so readily turns against itself, creating rifts and fissures where there should be a fundamental unanimity regardless of intrinsic differences? This is not a crack, to quote Leonard Cohen, where “the light gets in.” It’s a crack where the liberal/left gets in, where the darkness gets in, where the opposition can wreak immense damage.
ritics’ use of “buzz terms” like “McCarthyism and John Bircherism,” argued West in her first Breitbart installment of a three-part rebuttal, “are not being used to shed light and truth but rather to stop debate.” West referred to David Horowitz’s move to pull a favorable review of the book from the archives of FrontPage and replace it with a highly critical one by Radosh. Horowitz’s justification in shutting down the book’s potential-light-shining crack before it could be further explored: that “the conservative movement had suffered from conspiracy-minded demagogues in the past.”
Horowitz, in his rebuttal-to-West’s-rebuttal, declared that “cover-ups often turn out worse for the guilty parties than the faults they seek to hide.” He went on to make it quite clear who he finds guilty, apparently overlooking the thorough un-covering of the facts by West.
Clare Lopez, “Distinguished Senior Fellow” of the Gatestone Institute — who could hardly be accused of lacking credentials or seeking to hide anything — was apparently fired for her favorable spotlight on West’s book in a recent essay. McCain, reporting on the “purge,” quipped that readers should hurry and buy American Betrayal now, “before Ron Radosh can burn every copy in existence.”
Clarice Feldman warned potential buyers that she was not intending to “attack West whose work I have not read, but to point out the dangers of demagogic writers — everywhere on the political spectrum and the emotional bonds their fans form with them.”
“Dangers?” To what or whom? Historical truth or “political myth?” “We scholars,” “emotional” fans, naïve book-buyers who can’t be trusted to judge the water for themselves? The whole “conservative movement?”
“Don’t go there, Nemo,”it’s not safe!”
Of course, all of us wear worldview goggles that filter our responses to the information that we notice (“What the hell is water?”) in front of us. Unless — as Wallace challenged (and West endeavored) — we make an intentional effort to choose the subject and/or adjust our perspective.
But most lenses have become so distorted with “cultural Marxism,” argues blogger “Andrew Mellon” in his positive review of West’s book, “that individuals when faced with truth and logic are unable to process events objectively or with prudence — the narrative takes precedence over all else.”
In his brilliant video on the Trayvon Martin narrative, Bill Whittle concluded:
And if all of this political power and journalistic malfeasance can be deployed to sell a tortured lie, as in the case of this little story, then what political power and journalistic malfeasance do you think might be deployed in making us buy a much larger one?
West’s book ponders a similar question.
Mellon, in a follow-up post, notes that while some are focusing on the accuracy of American Betrayal’s details and West’s interpretations thereof — we shouldn’t lose sight, most importantly, of the “broader insights of the book, in light of the current condition of Western Civilization.”
We don’t need to be recognized experts to see that, indeed, something has muddied the water. As conservatives, we should be able to strive, in unity, to get to the bottom of it — without betraying the principles we represent.
Cindy Simpson is a Christian, CPA, and business owner residing in Louisville, Kentucky. As a “citizen journalist,” her writing has appeared at American Thinker, World Net Daily, The Pearcey Report, and Catholic Online.
Read more: Family Security Matters http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/diana-west-swimming-against-the-mainstream?f=puball#ixzz2efkRiDPJ
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution
Comments are closed.
