Written by: Diana West



As noted here, CNN recently "reported" the following:

"Steve Bannon in 2013: Joseph McCarthy was right in crusade against Communist infiltration."

... Bannon made his comments in July 2013 while interviewing conservative pundit Diane [sic] West about her book “American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character.”

These statements of facts engender hisses, screams, fainting -- but only among media and other fact-proof ideologues. Informed readers will just shake their heads over the hermetically-sealed mindset that kills curiosity and engenders such Pavlovian-prompt reporting.

As in -- excerpted from American Betrayal, p. 72

McCarthy, bad.

Communists, good and/or nonexistent.

Anti-Communism, terrible.

Who cares what Venona says, outside of a few academics? Have you left no

sense of decency?

Or, to take a longer excerpt, from pp 229-230.

Left, Good; Right, Bad.

“The people,” good; We, the People, “imperialist.”

Individuals (especially businessmen), greedy.

Hollywood Blacklist, bad.

Hollywood Ten, martyrs (except “squealer” Dmytryk).

Elia Kazan, Judas.

Communists: persecuted freethinkers. Have you left no sense of decency?

McCarthyism: repression.

Mao, expensive decorative art.

Che Guevara, fashion statement.

Ho Chi Minh, agrarian.

Mommy, who’s Ho Chi Minh, and what’s an agrarian?

Scratch Ho. The signposts recede from view, but the direction is fixed, which is why “evil empire” still triggers that patronizing chortle to make Pavlov proud and earn his dog a cookie. How Neanderthal can you get? says the roll of the eyes. No answer is necessary because our minds have been battened down against logic and morality both. Seventeen a year, ten a month, a thousand a month, forty thousand a month . . . Solzhenitsyn’s moral calculus, like Conquest’s compendia of Communist slaughter, or Bentley’s eyewitness evidence of Com- munist treason, or Bukovsky’s “détente” nightmare in psychiatric hospitals and prisons, remains beyond our ken and comprehension, much like Solzhenitsyn himself, who was virtually locked out of the White House in the summer of 1975. Twenty-four years later, Elia Kazan had to be sneaked into a side door to receive his special Oscar to avoid pro-Communist (pro-hundred-million- killed?) protesters in front of a Los Angeles theater. In the meantime, Sol- zhenitsyn never really got inside with his story, the one he always wanted to tell us Americans.

The historical trigger for him was a toast Franklin Roosevelt made to Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin in late 1943 at the Tehran Conference, the first of two utterly disastrous wartime meetings (unless you were Stalin) of the so- called Big Three in which the Soviet Union presented its measurements for the “Iron Curtain,” and Britain and the United States helped him hang it.

You want some more Poland? Help yourself. The Baltics? Why not? Those two million anti-Bolsheviks in Western Europe? You’re right, Uncle Joe; they should be shot! To the Gulag with them. Here, let us help . . .

That was still to unfold when Captain Solzhenitsyn, probably glued to a radio in a cold encampment somewhere in Europe’s east, got stuck on a point of principle. As he recalled it, the American president’s Tehran toast went like this: “I do not doubt that the three of us”—meaning the “Big Three,” Roose- velt, Churchill and Stalin—“are leading our peoples in accordance with their desires and their aims.” Solzhenitsyn and his comrades were aghast. How could FDR say such a thing—that Stalin, the blood-drenched dictator of fear, was fulfilling the Russian people’s “desires and aims”? Did Roosevelt believe this? As Solzhenitsyn said in his 1975 address, “How can this be understood? Let the historians worry about that. At the time, we listened and were astonished. We thought, ‘When we reach Europe, we will meet the Americans and we will tell them.’”29

How poignant. These Red Army Rover Boys actually seemed to believe: We will meet the Americans and we will tell them . . . and everything will be all right. This wasn’t naïveté, exactly. It was just the regular old way of thinking, of assessing what Orwell called “neutral fact,” of analyzing the situation and judging it. In essence, Solzhenitsyn believed two plus two does indeed equal four, not five; this, however, contradicted the ideological order....

It still does.

What is fascinating to me in a strange, out-of-body-way-experience way is how cunningly CNN was able to omit all context for what was, I find, Bannon's remark in passing about McCarthy as he concluded a 33-minute in-depth interview about American Betrayal. In fact, my book is not mainly concerned with defending Joe McCarthy because Stan Evans already did that. Having read Blacklisted by History, I was able to take Stan's defense as a given and go on from there, opening a door to what my friend, historian Lars Hedegaard, called "a new vista on the past" -- a terrible but very clear sight of mass corruption and betrayal cheaply covered over with glorious memorials to "court history." It is a door that the media-political-academic complex, aka, the Establishment, plus my so-called "conservative" detractors, want to keep closed against all revelations of exactly how the deep and terrible subversion of our nation achieved critical mass during the FDR years (1932-1945). Not that it stopped there.

Anyhow, here is the complete Stephen K. Bannon interview on American Betrayal.

It is the first of two or three (we also discussed the "controversy"), and dates back to the busy summer of 2013.