American Betrayal by Diana West

The Secret assault on our Nation’s Character I recently purchased this book from Amazon. I had heard about it and since I have written several articles on what I assumed would be the same subject I wanted to check it out to see if my concerns were addressed. As I started reading the first chapter my pen was busy page after page underlining statements concerning our current elected leader’s inability to accept the curse of Islam as it spreads its poison everywhere. Then she changes course and for the next ten chapters she recounts problems beginning in the years after WWI, concentrating most of her bile on the Roosevelt Administration and in particular Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s most trusted advisor. She does her best to paint Hopkins as a communist doing all he can to aid Russia not for the obvious need to keep Russia in the war against Germany until our forces could be built up in sufficient quantity to make an impact on the war against Hitler but rather as supporting communism itself. I will not attempt to refute her admonition that communist sympathizers were imbedded in all areas of our government and they had an impact on the conduct of the war effort. She does elaborate on the attempts by a number of people to expose the threat to no avail. I lived through the war years and have read many books about it in my lifetime as well as watching documentaries, etc. She does correctly point out that FDR was convinced of his ability to charm Stalin and get him to mellow. In this he was completely wrong. By ignoring Stalin’s history of killing over 20 million of his own people, he through the mistakes made during the conferences created the ability of Stalin to subvert the freedom of all people behind the iron curtain for over 50 years. This was totally wrong. Neither Truman nor any other President until Reagan did anything of substance to free these nations. Finally Reagan referred to the USSR as the “Evil Empire”. Many world leaders and the press were shocked. She is convinced the Second Front in attacking France was wrong and that we could have ended the war sooner by massively pushing our way up the length of Italy. She is wrong. The mountainous terrain kept us from using our armor effectively. Not only that but we needed a huge base to assemble our forces. England was that base. N. Africa, Sicily or Italy could not have provided that need. In her final chapter she returns to exposing Islam as the threat of today. She says ‘Islam is the Communism of today. But, because of our failure to come clean with Communism, we are unable to deal with it, trapped as we are in the old Communist habit of deceit and double-speak that used to haunt the countries in the East and that now haunts all of us”. In this I am totally in agreement. My condemnation is not only President Obama but also 90% of Republicans in leadership positions. Not one presidential candidate spoke to the issue. I cannot give this book high marks as I found it depressing to read her disparage General Marshall, Eisenhower and others, men who were of sterling character in my opinion. I was alive during the war, she wasn’t. Jack B. Walters October 1, 2013