http://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2013/09/of-malignity-and-memory-holes.html
There is a purge afoot, not at the behest of the Left or the White House, or at the Huffington Post or Salon, but in the ranks of “conservatives” and “neo-conservatives.” The purge, instigated by the Neocon editors of FrontPage Magazine, is designed to discredit and smear Diana West and her book, American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character, and to claim any collateral damage in the meantime. I have written on this purge in my August 8th column, “FrontPage’s Spitballs Strike Diana West,” and also reviewed her book. It is the Neocons who are sniping at West and anyone who defends her. I will not repeat everything I wrote in the “Spitball” column, except this:
But, then, we are dealing with Neocons here. Neoconservativism is simply a smorgasbord of supposedly “right-wing” ideologies populated largely by former communists, retired radical left-wing activists, cringing liberals, and even ex-SDS members such as Radosh. It is as philosophically rudderless as traditional “right-wing” Republican philosophy (provided anyone can find it). As a movement, it is so open-ended it may as well admit Barack Obama and all three Clintons as honorary members. Neoconservatism can accommodate just about every ideology but Islam.
And to judge by the way FrontPage’s leading editors are conducting the smear campaign, it’s not beyond fantasy that they could also accommodate totalitarian Islam. Islam is against everything, too. FrontPage may as well run ads on Al Jazeera TV. Perhaps the editors could also pen a series of defenses of Walter Duranty, the New York Times writer who helped to whitewash Stalin’s (and Lenin’s) skull-crushing, famine-as-policy régime.
On a dramatic note, the campaign against West brought to mind Milan Stitt’s 1976 play, The Runner Stumbles, in which an attractive nun is murdered by a Catholic convert, because she was too tempting to the parish priest.
The chief problem with Neocons is that while they are against Islam and make token noises about their opposition to “big government,” they are not for anything. This partly explains why the Neocons are fulminating against West. West, after all, is for the truth about the U.S.’s role in aiding and abetting, by design or by default, the perpetuation and arming of the Soviet Union. She is for revealing the depths and scope of the Big Con, a con which is reflected in academia and in the history of WWII found in most standard textbooks and read by most living Americans in their formative years. That con has been established dogma and narrative, and that dogma and narrative originated with FDR and his administration.
Woe to those who depart from it or challenge it.
West’s compellingly demonstrated and amply documented thesis swims against the current of standard history, which is that FDR cut cards with a very personable devil (Josef Stalin) in order to crush Nazism and Hitler, and that it wasn’t his fault or that of his cronies, dupes, and advisors (chiefly Harry Hopkins) that Stalin got atomic bomb materials and know-how and helped to replace Hitler’s murderous totalitarianism in Europe with the Soviet Union’s after the war.
The standard history is that it just “happened.” No fingers should be pointed at St. Franklin, because up to a point, Stalin was viewed as just a benevolent despot looking out for “his people.” That is how Stalin was sold to Americans during WWII in propaganda. After it was “revealed” that the U.S. was ignorant of Stalin’s responsibility for the murders of millions of Russians in a concerted campaign to eliminate all opposition to the Soviet régime, and that it really, really was the totalitarian horror that others had described, the standard history is that the U.S. could only adopt an Alfred E. Neuman-like “What-Me-Know??” stance.
West and her book have been defended by Andrew Bostom, Michael McCann and Shari Goodman, among others. The contemptible behavior of FrontPage’s editors has been noted and highlighted by Family Security Matters, Breitbart, and Gates of Vienna. West has published the first part of a lengthy and detailed rebuttal (not on FrontPage, of course) here.
I mentioned collateral damage. On September 3rd The Gatestone Institute published an article by Clare Lopez, “Recognizing the Wrong People,” in which she cites Diana West’s book and focuses on what moved West to write it, the baffling accommodation by especially the Obama administration of hiring Muslims into the most sensitive realms of policy and in indiscriminately patronizing the Muslim Brotherhood. Lopez discusses the distinct and observable parallel between that and FDR’s accommodation of the Soviet Union with its formal recognition in 1933 and its consequences.
Without warning or explanation, that article was removed by Gatestone the very same day. The next day Lopez was removed from Gatestone’s stable of writers and researchers. Shall we say expelled or purged? Qua terms, there’s not much difference in the motive or the consequence. The Gates of Vienna relates the sequence of events.
