Introduction
American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character by Diana West, like the similarly titled Who Are We? Challenges to America’s National Identity, is not a pleasant book to read. That’s not to say it isn’t written expertly, full of insight that every conservative should read, or an important book for Americans that want to preserve America as the land of the free. It is all of those things. But, it’s full of so many revelations about the communist and Islamist takeover of our government that it made my blood boil.
What if most of what you knew about World War II and the Cold War is false? What if, instead of us leading the war effort in support of democracy, we went along with whatever the Soviets wanted and demanded no concessions for our aid and then, when the Cold War came, we remained unwilling to call the Soviets out on their duplicity and evil nature until the Reagan presidency. And then, even worse, once we won the Cold War, what if we started to appease the Islamists and kowtow to them like we did for the Soviets?
Those are the questions that West tackles in American Betrayal. It’s a great book and is certainly worth reading, but it will make your blood boil.
Summary of American Betrayal by Diana West
In American Betrayal, Diana West wastes no time puttering around the issue of Soviet influence in the US. No, she jumps straight into describing who those Soviet agents were, how they shaped US war policy to appease and help the Soviets, how they stopped America from preserving democracy and conservatism in post-war Europe, and why the US government refused to identify or punish those communist traitors.
Those of you familiar with Cold War history will recognize the names: Whitaker Chambers, Harry Hopkins, FDR, Harry Truman, Alger Hiss, and many other traitors, some of them in the Army. However, most were in the State Department. American Betrayal is, essentially, a collection of stories in semi-chronological order that demonstrates how those men betrayed America in favor of the Soviets, generally out of hate for America and its ideals.
They shipped needed war material to the Soviets under the guise of Lend-Lease aid. For example, when MacArthur and his men desperately needed resupply and reinforcement in the Philippines, FDR instead sent that aid to the Soviets. Communist lives were prioritized over American ones, according to Diana West in American Betrayal. They betrayed the Manhattan Project and shipped Russia uranium. Worst of all, they acceded to the Soviet-demanded invasion of France described in Ambrose’s D-Day rather than invading through the Balkans and cutting off Eastern Europe from Soviet aggression, as the British and many American generals wanted.
Then, when the Cold War came, the betrayals got all the worse. Nuclear, technological, and military secrets were sent to the Soviets constantly. American prisoners of war were sent to the Soviet Union and never came back. And we refused to call out the Soviets on their evil ways rather than confront them over supporting evil worldwide. All because of the communist traitors and sympathizers in the State Department. As Diana West proves in American Betrayal, McCarthy was right.
Finally, Diana West uses American Betrayal not just as a history of how the West got duped and infiltrated by the Soviet Union, but also as a warning against letting the same thing happen with Islam. It’s not a religion of peace. It’s a religion of violence and terror full of people that, like Representative Omar’s constituents, want to kill us for believing in Christ and living lives of freedom.
Overall, American Betrayal is about just that. How our elites betrayed America. They’ve let terrorists into our nation because they don’t want to be seen as racist. They shipped needed war materials to the Soviet Union, which ended up meaning that our troops did not have enough supplies with which to fight in those dark, early days of World War II. And worst of all, officials in all levels of government and academia worked with the enemy, the Soviet Union, during the Cold War. That was treason. Yet, for some reason, cowardly Republicans and unscrupulous Democrats let them get away with doing so.
That makes American Betrayal not just a book about the evils of communism and how its spies infiltrated America, but also one about how we were betrayed by our own leaders. Americans died because our unscrupulous leaders lied and covered up enemy activity within our borders.
Analysis of American Betrayal
No other author that I’ve read has been willing to tackle the immense failure of policy that the entire 20th Century was for the US. Some, like Rand Paul in The Case Against Socialism, Jonah Goldberg in Liberal Fascism, and Douglas MacArthur in Reminiscences putter around the issue. It’s brought up, but not nearly enough. Others, especially books about World War II like An Army at Dawn, Armaggedon, and D-Day don’t mention Soviet evil at all. They bought fully into the “Uncle Joe” propaganda. The only one I’ve read that demands its readers examine Soviet evil in the same way as American Betrayal is Inferno by Max Hastings.
We Americans need to understand our history. We’ve forgotten far too many facts and remain caught up in the myths of the 20th Century. We remember World War II as “the good war.” In reality, it was a war that led to communist domination of half a continent for the remainder of the century. I think that means that our participation in World War II needs to be re-examined.
That’s not to say we should not have defeated Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, or Imperial Japan. All of those powers were the epitome of evil and needed to be defeated, a fact American Betrayal in no way disputes. But, based on my reading, I think we went about it all wrong. We should have let the Germans on the Eastern Front grind and attrite the Soviets away in a stalemate for years before we intervened.
Then, we could have swept across Europe and secured more of it to be free. The Soviets would not have won and begun to push back the Germans as quickly as they did without our aid. How could we have let them conquer so much of freedom-loving, Eastern Europe?
Yet worse, how could we have not pushed back against them while they were clearly infiltrating our society and stealing secrets. The examples of Soviet perfidy West gives in American Betrayal are just as egregious as they are numerous. American leaders knew what was going on, but they betrayed us and let it happen anyway. That’s because leftists like FDR had such strong Soviet sympathies.
The Cold War wasn’t just proxy struggles in the third world. It wasn’t just firefights like the ones in The Frozen Hours and Phase Line Green. No, it was really an ideological struggle. And we ceded our ability to effectively participate in that struggle of ideology when we refused to ferret out the communist sympathizers in our government. McCarthy tried, but the left pushed him back and no one would stand up to defend him or pick up where he left off.
Now, according to Diana West in American Betrayal, we’re making that same mistake with Islam. I agree with her. It’s absurd we appease the Islamists as we do. No one points out that it’s a religion of violence, leads to backward living conditions because of its aversion to science, and the fact that it hates and abhors the West. Instead, we go over there to intervene in their wars and get our troops killed while following absurd rules of engagement. If that is not an example of an Amerian betrayal, than I don’t know what is.
Conclusion
If there was a non-political philosophy book I’d say you need to read right now, it’s American Betrayal. That’s because, in it, West refused to accept the line that we stood up to communism. Based on the evidence she presents, we appeased it, up until the Reagan administration.
It’s scary and anger-inducing to read. More than once, I had to put it down because my blood was boiling at the thought of our government being infiltrated by so many communist sympathizers. But, it’s an important one to read. You need to know the truth about how first the Soviets and then later the radical Islamists infiltrated our society. American Betrayal is a scary book. But it’s an incredibly important one to read.
By: Gen Z Conservative. Follow me on Parler, Gab, and Facebook
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