“Soviet possession of an atomic bomb in 1949, due to the treachery of American Communists, helped precipitate the Korean War in 1950.” It wasn’t just the Rosenbergs who enabled the Soviet theft of U.S. atomic secrets; West describes a “massive looting effort” underway inside the U.S. government itself, overseen by senior Washington officials.
from “Mark Tapson on Diana West’s American Betrayal,” Ruthfully Yours, Monday, July 8, 2013.
And yet the infiltration and deception of which they warned was vaster than most Americans know. “Expert estimates,” West writes, “now peg the number of Americans assisting Soviet intelligence agencies during the 1930s as exceeding five hundred.” She quotes the former chief of intelligence in Communist Romania, who told her, “During the Cold War, more people in the Soviet bloc worked for the dezinformatsiya machine than for the Soviet army and defense industry put together.” She quotes Joseph D. Douglass Jr. as saying, “The Soviets live and breathe deception. You cannot understand what they are doing without understanding this. Indeed, you can’t even begin to understand Communism without understanding deception.” Along the way in her new book, West raises new revelations for many readers, such as the fact that “Soviet possession of an atomic bomb in 1949, due to the treachery of American Communists, helped precipitate the Korean War in 1950.” It wasn’t just the Rosenbergs who enabled the Soviet theft of U.S. atomic secrets; West describes a “massive looting effort” underway inside the U.S. government itself, overseen by senior Washington officials. A central figure in the book is Harry Hopkins, FDR’s most intimate, ubiquitous, enigmatic, and even sinister adviser. Hopkins was the driving force behind the Lend-Lease program, whereby the United States supplied thousands of tons of war supplies and aircraft to the USSR, China, Great Britain and other Allied nations during the war (West devotes considerable attention to the consequences of this bounty to the Soviets, and quite a bit of space to Hopkins himself). His hand was often at the wheel of U.S. foreign policy. “Few men of this century,” wrote diplomat Robert Murphy about Hopkins, “have exerted more influence upon American politics, domestic and foreign.” West argues that the impact of this “deep occupation” did not simply fall away with the collapse of the Soviet Union. It lives today in our embrace of the Communists’ false historical narrative, exemplified in our “denial of the Soviet regime-engineered Famine in the Ukraine… a seminal moment in the history of the world. The seminal moment, perhaps, of the twentieth century.” It lives also in our weakened resistance to their ideology. “Americans are not equipped,” West notes, “not prepared, to regard anything resembling Communism… as an existential threat to liberty.” Instead, we still romanticize Moscow’s agents as “idealists” and “are continually conditioned to embrace Communistic principles, all serving to expand the power and authority of the state over the individual.” Another “measure of the success of Soviet subversion in America” is Hollywood’s complicity and support, “the near-total absence of movies that dramatize arguably the primary historical drama of the last century: the struggle – military, guerrilla, spiritual, artistic, personal – against spreading Communist totalitarianism… Not a single Hollywood film has ever shown Communists committing atrocities.”
