Stumbling into a barroom brawl was the
last thing I’d intended. Lined up on one side: sculptors of a
hagiography that is now conventional wisdom crow about a noble conquest
over totalitarian dictators. The other side bellows: “Nonsense! In
defeating one monster, your heroes merely helped create another,
sullying us with their atrocities and burdening us for decades with a
global security nightmare.” The first side spews that its critics are
deranged, defamatory conspiracy-mongers. The critics fire back that
these “court historians” are in denial; their heroes did not really
“win” the war, they just helped a different set of anti-American savages
win—in the process striking a deal with the devil that blurred the
lines between good and evil, rendering the world more dangerous and our
nation more vulnerable.
To readers of American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character, this heated debate will sound familiar. American Betrayal is the bestselling author and syndicated columnist Diana West’s cri de coeur
against Anglo-American collusion with Stalin’s hideous Soviet Union in
the war that vanquished Hitler’s hideous Nazi Germany. The controversy
swirling around the book exposes a chasm on the political Right: on one
side, admirers of Franklin Roosevelt’s World War II leadership; on the
other, detractors who blame FDR’s
indifference to Communism (and, particularly, Communist infiltration of
the U.S. government) for the rise of what Ronald Reagan dubbed “the
evil empire.” The resulting acrimony is what put me in the mind of the
aforementioned brawl I wandered into twenty years ago, involving a
different, albeit related, episode: the Central Intelligence Agency’s
collusion with the Afghan mujahideen, which hastened the Soviet death
throes.
No comments:
Post a Comment