The war of words is over regarding Diana West vs. the Radoshites. She won hands down after the magnificent column defending her by Pavel Stroilov and Valdimir Bukovsky. Conrad Black has decided to ignite more debate in this feeble argument which is not worth a response. Most laughable is Black’s last paragraph:
“We all sympathize with and admire Mr. Bukovsky’s endurance of his ordeal. I do so as one who was also unjustly imprisoned, though for only three years and in the vastly gentler regime of the United States. (It was no day at the beach. And it has not destroyed my regard for the U.S., but it has not made me a compulsive American-flag-waver either.) Whatever injustices any of us may have suffered, they do not entitle us to defame the justly honored dead, invent and deform history, or impugn the righteousness of our civilization, flawed and tainted and often riddled with hypocrisy though it is, but the best the world has had.”
Huh? He dares to use the word “us.” Black was tried, convicted and jailed for fraud. Bukovsky was not tried but convicted for dissidence against a criminal government and spent a total of twelve years in Soviet prisons, labor camps, and forced-treatment psychiatric hospitals. Bukovsky is a giant and Black is a gnat…..rsk
Defaming the Cold WarriorsWest, Bukovsky, and Stroilov are wrong. By Conrad Black
It is a painful but implacable duty to return to the dismaying subject of Diana West’s book, American Betrayal, about which she has written, in the last few days, “The war of words is over.” Her authority for this triumphalist expression of relief is that Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky and his co-commentator Pavel Stroilov have described Mrs. West’s book as “huge and brilliant.” Part of their review of her book, and much of the debate, has been a fierce firefight including a considerable, though often somewhat entertaining, volume of recriminations that asperse the rigor, motivations, ideological orientation, integrity, and sanity of the two sides. I do not fit any of the stereotypes erected and riddled with high-explosive projectiles by both sides, and am merely a non-American biographer of Roosevelt and strategic historian (as well as other occupations), of impeccable conservative credentials, who has uttered no personal critique of the protagonists (I have enjoyed the previous work of Mrs. West that I have seen). And I am generally outside the circular firing squad that has been debating these issues, and so have not had to repair to the field hospital or even the dressing station, and am unafflicted in wind and limb by the tremendous exchange of ordnance this debate, if it can be so described, has provoked.