RUTHFULLY YOURS

If you wish to read the response, be my guest, and, incidentally Frontpage turned down the Bukovsky, Stroilov column, although in the past Bukovsky was extolled in their pages:

Vladimir Bukovsky. Not a Victim, But a Soldier By: Jamie Glazov: http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=22395

A Life of Integrity: Vladimir Bukovsky at 70: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/vladimir-kara-murza/a-life-of-integrity-vladimir-bukovsky-at-70/

David Horowitz’s answer to Bukovsky at Frontpage:
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/david-horowitz/another-personal-attack-inspired-by-west/

Horowitz writes:

“Here is what she wrote in her book and actually quotes in her rebuttal:

“The vast and deep extent of Communist penetration, heretofore denied, had in fact reached a tipping point to become a de facto Communist occupation of the American center of power.”

Apparently she doesn’t realize that the Latin phrase de facto means “in fact.” It is impossible to argue with a mind as obtuse as this.”

HOW DE FACTO IS PROPERLY USED:

It means “concerning fact.” In law, it means “in practice or common experience but not ordained by law” or “in practice or actuality, but not officially established.” The words”de jure”would mean established by law .

As in: Horowitz was a de facto traitor when he published Ramparts, but not a dejure traitor. He, himself admits to de facto treason in: http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=24332′

Diana is quite right in her usage of the expression because she did not use the words de jure. But then, it is impossible to argue with a mind as obtuse as his.

He also dissembles about his own past:

“I am not going to make apologies for my political views as a five-year old. But both Radosh and I became New Leftists when Bukovsky was only 15 and never supported the Soviet totalitarian state or Bukovsky’s jailers.”

HUH?

As Andrew Bostom has noted….

Horowitz’s “New Leftism” defense is more mendacious drivel-mongering. His August 1973 Ramparts essay, “Historians and the Cold War: The Battle over America’s Image” (written when he was 34 years old) acerbically denounced the “myth” of aggressive, ideological Soviet expansionism—despite the fact this was indeed the lasting, openly pronounced creed of the revolutionary Communist Soviet state, since its World War I-era advent. Writing, at age 35, with breathtaking cognitive dissonance, in the June 1974 Ramparts (“Solzhenitsyn and the Radical Cause”), not even Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago had convinced Horowitz the “critics of Bolshevism” were “right,” or that the “Soviet experiment has failed.”

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com  http://blogs.jpost.com/users/just-look-us-now ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS   Putting the spring back in broken hearts.  Tel Aviv University scientists have manufactured cardiac tissue from spring-shaped fibers.  The elastic tissue mimics the expanding and contracting heart and is more suitable for transplants than tissue made from straight fibers. http://www.aftau.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=19153   A diet just for you.  Israel’s Weizmann Institute […]

  www.geraldahonigman.com Republicans, Democrats…they’ve all had a hand in this dangerous manipulation. But I’m getting ahead of myself–so let’s hold off on that for a while. Kenya is one of the latest fairly new places that the Jihadis have chosen to target–well over a hundred  dead and wounded in a shopping mall. The day before […]

http://send.hadavars.com/index.php?action=message&l=2096&c=21630&m=20117&s=a317a26441993bdd8f740ee9a6c71bce President Obama re-introduced his New Middle East vision during his September 25, 2013 speech at the UN General Assembly: “Let me take this opportunity to outline what has been the US policy toward the Middle East and North Africa, and what will be my policy during the remainder of my presidency….”  Obama clarified that […]

http://www.city-journal.org/2013/eon0927ss.html The early political careers of President Obama and Gotham’s likely next mayor, Bill de Blasio, have followed similar trajectories. Both Obama and de Blasio emerged from the radical activist wings of their respective big-city Democratic parties. Both achieved broad political success despite their leftist backgrounds, winning big electoral victories against the odds. Both have […]

I’m sorry, but we have to talk about the barbarism of modern Islamist terrorism http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/brendanoneill2/100238080/im-sorry-but-we-have-to-talk-about-the-barbarism-of-modern-islamist-terrorism/ In Western news-making and opinion-forming circles, there’s a palpable reluctance to talk about the most noteworthy thing about modern Islamist violence: its barbarism, its graphic lack of moral restraint. This goes beyond the BBC’s yellow reluctance to deploy the T-word […]

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/09/26/Its-worse-than-a-conspiracy-it%20-s-consensus

Vladimir Bukovsky is one of the founders of the Soviet dissident movement. He spent twelve years in Soviet prisons, labor camps and psychiatric hospitals during his fight for freedom. In 2007, he was nominated for president of Russia by the democratic oppostion in moral protest of Putin’s powers. His many works include To Build a Castle and Judgement in Moscow.

Pavel Stroilov is a Russian exile in London and the editor and translator of Alexander Litvinenko’s book, Allegations. He is co-author with Bukovsky of EUSSR: The Soviet Roots of European Integration, and the author of Behind the Desert Storm: A Secret Archive Stolen From the Kremlin that Sheds New Light on the Arab Revolutions in the Middle East.
Groundbreaking books about the history of communism, such as Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago or Viktor Suvorov’s Ice-Breaker, are never written by “professional” historians. Indeed, historians typically meet those books with remarkable hostility.

Yet, non-academic history books certainly have their advantages. For one thing, they are readable. More often than not, they are better researched too. Above all, they are intellectually honest, free from the unspoken taboos of the academic world and from allegiances to theories and to colleagues that tie the hands of many an academic.

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.

That is what Diana West does in American Betrayal:The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character. By her own admission, she started that book with no intention of writing much about the Cold War. She started not as a historian, but a simple mortal puzzled and disturbed by the obvious question: how on earth could this great civilization of ours have degraded into such a hypocritical nonsense as political correctness? Having written her previous book about the death of the civilization of grown-ups, now Mrs. West, in her own words, attempts a post mortem–only to discover unmistakable signs of a murder.

She digs deeper, “tracing references and footnotes backward along a well-mapped historical route that has simply fallen into disuse”, as she puts it–and discovers the true history of the 20th century, the history of communist crimes against humanity, to which so many in the Western Establishment were accomplices and collaborators; and then a massive cover-up of those crimes, which infested our entire public life with a culture of hypocrisy and double standards.

It is this search for the causes of our moral crisis that brings her as far back in history as 1930s, when the Great Famine was artificially organized by the Soviets to force the peasants into collective farms, and the Western media consciously helped Stalin to cover up that mass murder. She cites a fascinating account by a repentant journalist who had been present at the meeting of Moscow press corps with the Soviet chief censor, Umansky, to work out a “formula of denial,” after one reckless correspondent reported the news of the famine in 1933.

After “much bargaining in the spirit of gentlemanly give-and-take”, the “formula” was agreed, wherefrom the Western journalists and the Soviet censor proceeded to party with vodka and luxurious snacks until early hours in the morning. The next day, it was infamous Walter Duranty who took the lead in attacking the famine report as an incompetent and biased “big scare story”, and then explaining: “There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation, but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition”.

“To understand this episode,” Mrs. West comments, “is to understand the extent to which Orwell’s ‘Newspeak’ had its birth in the pages of the free press as much as in the totalitarian censor’s office. […] Looking back over more than three-quarters of a century of Big Lies to follow, this initial instance, this first time, demands a level of scrutiny and reflection it doesn’t ordinarily receive, not having been recognized as the Original Sin that would ultimately corrupt us all. It was as if society suddenly became incapable of making the most elementary if vital connections between facts and conclusions, logic and judgment, ideas and implications, and truth and morality.”