Cassandra as Historian—Diana West Interviewed by Ginni Thomas

Be near me as I go,
Tracking the evil things of long ago,
And bear me witness…

What if no man believe me? ‘Tis all one.
The thing which must be shall be; aye, and soon
Thou too shalt sorrow for these things, and here
Standing confess me all too true a seer.

—Cassandra, from “Agamemnon,” by Aeschylus

Cassandra, during her scene from Aeschylus’ “Agamemnon” is possessed with a truly  “multi-temporal” awareness that endows her with the unique ability to visualize past, present, and even augur future events, as if they were all happening in the present. There is a terrifying quality to Cassandra’s intensity, her peculiarly broad, profound, and temporally extended knowledge, and the directness with which it is conveyed.

Diana West’s American Betrayal—a remarkable, novel-like work of critically-needed historical re-analysis—shares this Cassandra-like quality of “multi-temporal” awareness. But West, although passionate, is able to convey her profoundly disturbing narrative with cool brilliance, conjoining meticulous research, innovative assessment, evocative prose, and wit.

American Betrayal, in essence, chronicles the nation’s original subversion by Communist totalitarianism—the ugly, watershed “Big Lie” event being US recognition of the Soviet Union in November, 1933, during the New Deal, despite knowing the Ukrainian terror-famine (see Robert Conquest’s The Harvest of Sorrow) orchestrated by Stalin’s Communist regime had already killed 4 to 5 million souls.  Having long since crossed that ignominious threshold, West argues, it is easy to fathom how we are currently being subverted by the contemporary “Big Islamic Lie,” which romanticizes totalitarian Islam, just as FDR, in a blatant lie designed to justify massive Lend-Lease aid to the Soviets, praised the USSR (in 1941) for its “freedom of conscience, freedom of religion,” which he further alleged, was comparable to “what the rule is in this country [i.e., the US].”

Diana West was interviewed by Ginni Thomas, who filed a summary report of her interview, below, for The Daily Caller. The full interview segment on American Betrayal is embedded at the bottom of this posting.

Author: Soviet agents subverted US in 1930s

Syndicated columnist Diana West says the ultimate conclusion of her new book shocked even her.

“Americans have been betrayed … by our leaders going back to FDR’s administration in the 1930s because we were penetrated by Soviet agents to such an extent that our policies and, indeed I argue, our character as a nation was subverted,” she explained in an interview with The Daily Caller’s Ginni Thomas about her book, American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character. “I don’t believe we won World War II,” West added. “I believe that we were actually carrying out Soviet strategy due to this penetration.” West says that though the United States helped defeat Hitler’s Germany, Joseph Stalin used the war to enlarge the boundaries of his Soviet empire by taking half of Europe.

“You replace Hitler, one monster of totalitarianism, with an even larger totalitarian monster, who killed even more millions of people,” West said. “How do we look at that and say, ‘we won, we’re great. Triumphal.’ It just doesn’t compute. And I think we have again been victimized by a tremendous, in effect, influence campaign.”

West started writing the book, which reads like a thriller, in 2009. Throughout her research of available historical documents, she tried to reconcile her findings with countless footnotes, memoirs, State Department records, out-of-print books, letters and revelations in files from the Venona archive and the Mitrokhin archives that became available after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

According to West, other authors and historians have yet to incorporate “these incredible revelations about traitors in the White House, in the Congress, at the State Department, in OSS, which was the precursor to the CIA, throughout government.”

West says that her integration of historians of the intelligence community and cryptographers, which she says is considered “some boutique academic speciality,” with general historians of World War II and biographies of figures of that war, made her new conclusions possible.

West says her book is a product of simply wanting to know “what happened to America” in an age when logic and reason is so often drowned out by popular narratives.”

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