There is great confusion in our political discourse today. “Former” Communists in Russia are sounding more and more like conservatives. The same might be said of “former” Communists in the United States. Everyone talks a good anti-Communist line. After all, Communism is dead, and only exists (we are told) as an artifact of college life. Most people are focused on Global Warming, multiculturalism or homosexual rights. Nobody seems to notice that Global Warming, multiculturalism and homosexual rights are artifacts of the supposedly “dead” religion (some of whose acolytes have become “conservatives”). Well, there are a few of us – a small minority – who see what is happening. As a member of this minority I feel as if a cold wilderness has swallowed me up. I do not feel represented by the big foundations, or the conservative “smart set.” And so, when Diana West’s American Betrayal was published, and received favorable attention, I was excited and hopeful. But then, predictably, the celebrity pundits of the alternative Left (i.e., the Republican Right) began to attack Wests book, starting with David Horowitz and Ronald Radosh. There had to be, in the greater scheme of things, an attempt to kill the book. It was getting too much attention, and God knows what would have happened if somebody had not intervened.
It all began when Mr. Horowitz removed a positive review of West’s book from his Frontpage website, replacing it with a negative review by Ronald Radosh, titled McCarthy On Steroids. Baring his fangs, Radosh proved to be the Alternative Left’s junkyard dog. He alleged that West’s book was full of “yellow journalism conspiracy theories.” He described Mrs. West as Joseph McCarthy’s “heiress” and attacked her scholarship. It was, in fact, no review at all. It was a dishonest, poorly devised, hit-piece. Little wonder that Radosh was rhetorically impaled by historian M. Stanton Evans, who commented on Radosh’s “extensive” lack of knowledge “made the worse by the strange inventions with which the discourse [was] salted.” Evans wondered how such an egregious poseur could set up shop as an “Olympian arbiter” when he knew so little about the topic. Evans mused, “It is quite a puzzle.”
Here, indeed, we approach a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Here we have, from the website of a famous “conservative” (and former Marxist) pundit, a studied misrepresentation of a tremendously important book – a book that can open people’s eyes to the historical roots of our present malaise. Although the snarling poseur has been exposed as a drooling incompetent, there has been no apology or backtracking on the part of Mr. Horowitz. When offered a chance to moderate his position, Horowitz dug himself into a deeper hole. During a question and answer session at the Heritage Foundation, Horowitz was challenged on this issue by Dr. Sebastian Gorka. Below is a brief transcript of the exchange:
Sebastian Gorka: I’m with the FDD Foundation for Defense of Democracies. My father was put in prison for life by the Communists … and I like this idea that they [the Communists] lost in the 1960s but they won by stealth since then. From your presentation it seems clear that we are in a very small minority in terms of understanding the deep story. Maybe people are disturbed getting thrown off their health care … but to understand the backstory to where we are today, there are very few of us. Given your reputation in what you’ve accomplished, and the ten volumes of articles, it would seem very lacking in strategy to attack those on your own side. Can you talk about why you’ve taken somebody whose written what I think, as a Ph.D. who teaches at university, a historically important book such as [American Betrayal] and divided the Right yet again. If you have issues with Diana West’s technical expertise, then take her to task on that; but ad hominem attacks that destroy the unity of our camp will not make us stronger in 2016.
David Horowitz: … I am a very busy person … so I don’t monitor Frontpage…. An article appeared that was a review of Diana West’s book American Betrayal. It was an endorsement. I knew it was going to be read … as an endorsement from me. I looked at the book, actually Ron Radosh called me and alerted me … so I got the book off Kindle and I began reading it, and in my judgment it is a very very bad book and I see it as a threat to everything I have done, and Radosh has done, and … all the conservatives who have dredged up the information from the archives about Communist influence. But I don’t attack people on the Right. [So] I removed the review…. This book is a complete reinterpretation of the Second World War based on the presence of Soviet agents and Communists … and sympathizers, fellow travelers in the Roosevelt administration. And to inform Diana that I removed the review, because I didn’t want to be seen endorsing it, that if she needed to reply she could have as much space as she wanted. I actually had in mind … to have her debate Radosh. I’m a great believer in intellectual debate and dialogue. She rejected the offer and went on the attack. She called me a totalitarian, a commissar and a book-burner. So if you have a problem with this so-called ‘war,’ the war is all coming from her end….
If you remember anything from this controversy, at least remember Horowitz’s words: “But I don’t attack people on the Right.” How, then, does he explain publishing an all-out assault on Mrs. West’s reputation. He has personally said that Mrs. West’s scholarship is sloppy, that her book should never have been written. He called it “a very very bad book.” Everyone recognizes, as a matter of necessity, that people are obliged to defend themselves. And why, then, should Mrs. West be obliged – according to Mr. Horowitz’s insinuation – to defend her reputation on his website, on his terms? What egomaniac attacks a person’s integrity, blackens their reputation, dismisses their work, and expects them to produce a reply which will bring more readers and publicity to themselves? Naturally she could not accept Horowitz’s invitation to reply on frontpage. Furthermore, we have eyes to read the ungallant review of Mr. Radosh, the unscholarly poseur who fired the first shot in the so-called “war.” (In my view, this “war” was nothing but a bungled mugging in which the mugger was seriously injured by blows from the victim’s purse.) Even more egregious, the Radosh review was not written in the style of a gentleman; rather, it was a parade of gratuitous insults peppered with more than twenty falsehoods (as documented in Mrs. West’s reply, available on Amazon as The Rebuttal: Defending ‘American Betrayal’ From the Book-Burners). As for Diana West’s alleged ad hominem reply to Mr. Horowitz – if it has a snout and it oinks, the cognomen “pig” is not an ad hominem. It was perfectly reasonable for Mrs. West to satirize her assailants as metaphorical book-burners and totalitarians; for they used Communist rhetorical techniques to cover the tracks of Communist subversives – and to cover their own tracks. It doesn’t matter if Mr. Horowitz and Mr. Radosh are anti-Communists. It doesn’t matter what kind of Communists they are. It is strategy that counts, and strategy is how we should judge them. In the above-quoted exchange, Dr. Sebastian Gorka suggested that Horowitz was lacking in strategy because he was obstinately dividing an already attenuated anti-Left minority by attacking Mrs. West. We all know that Mr. Horowitz is not an idiot. If he did not intend to divide the enfeebled cadre, then why did he attack the lady’s book? Well, we can go back to the idea that he is an idiot, but let’s play the Devil’s Advocate for a few paragraphs. If the attack on West was done innocently, without any intention to divide the conservative Right, why was it done with so little regard for the truth? Aha! There is the telling point. The words of M. Stanton Evans, and the rebuttal of Mrs. West, reveal one invention after another by Professor Radosh, one blatant falsification after another endorsed by Mr. Horowitz. Anyone can click on the links above, go to the source material, and read.
