EDWARD CLINE: OF MALIGNITY AND MEMORY HOLES

http://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2013/09/of-malignity-and-memory-holes.html

There is a purge afoot, not at the behest of the Left or the White House, or at the Huffington Post or Salon, but in the ranks of “conservatives” and “neo-conservatives.” The purge, instigated by the Neocon editors of FrontPage Magazine, is designed to discredit and smear Diana West and her book, American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character, and to claim any collateral damage in the meantime. I have written on this purge in my August 8th column, “FrontPage’s Spitballs Strike Diana West,” and also reviewed her book. It is the Neocons who are sniping at West and anyone who defends her. I will not repeat everything I wrote in the “Spitball” column, except this:

But, then, we are dealing with Neocons here. Neoconservativism is simply a smorgasbord of supposedly “right-wing” ideologies populated largely by former communists, retired radical left-wing activists, cringing liberals, and even ex-SDS members such as Radosh. It is as philosophically rudderless as traditional “right-wing” Republican philosophy (provided anyone can find it). As a movement, it is so open-ended it may as well admit Barack Obama and all three Clintons as honorary members. Neoconservatism can accommodate just about every ideology but Islam.

And to judge by the way FrontPage’s leading editors are conducting the smear campaign, it’s not beyond fantasy that they could also accommodate totalitarian Islam. Islam is against everything, too. FrontPage may as well run ads on Al Jazeera TV. Perhaps the editors could also pen a series of defenses of Walter Duranty, the New York Times writer who helped to whitewash Stalin’s (and Lenin’s) skull-crushing, famine-as-policy régime.

On a dramatic note, the campaign against West brought to mind Milan Stitt’s 1976 play, The Runner Stumbles, in which an attractive nun is murdered by a Catholic convert, because she was too tempting to the parish priest.

The chief problem with Neocons is that while they are against Islam and make token noises about their opposition to “big government,” they are not for anything. This partly explains why the Neocons are fulminating against West. West, after all, is for the truth about the U.S.’s role in aiding and abetting, by design or by default, the perpetuation and arming of the Soviet Union. She is for revealing the depths and scope of the Big Con, a con which is reflected in academia and in the history of WWII found in most standard textbooks and read by most living Americans in their formative years. That con has been established dogma and narrative, and that dogma and narrative originated with FDR and his administration.

Woe to those who depart from it or challenge it.

West’s compellingly demonstrated and amply documented thesis swims against the current of standard history, which is that FDR cut cards with a very personable devil (Josef Stalin) in order to crush Nazism and Hitler, and that it wasn’t his fault or that of his cronies, dupes, and advisors (chiefly Harry Hopkins) that Stalin got atomic bomb materials and know-how and helped to replace Hitler’s murderous totalitarianism in Europe with the Soviet Union’s after the war.

The standard history is that it just “happened.” No fingers should be pointed at St. Franklin, because up to a point, Stalin was viewed as just a benevolent despot looking out for “his people.” That is how Stalin was sold to Americans during WWII in propaganda. After it was “revealed” that the U.S. was ignorant of Stalin’s responsibility for the murders of millions of Russians in a concerted campaign to eliminate all opposition to the Soviet régime, and that it really, really was the totalitarian horror that others had described, the standard history is that the U.S. could only adopt an Alfred E. Neuman-like “What-Me-Know??” stance.

West and her book have been defended by Andrew Bostom, Michael McCann and Shari Goodman, among others. The contemptible behavior of FrontPage’s editors has been noted and highlighted by Family Security Matters, Breitbart, and Gates of Vienna. West has published the first part of a lengthy and detailed rebuttal (not on FrontPage, of course) here.

I mentioned collateral damage. On September 3rd The Gatestone Institute published an article by Clare Lopez, “Recognizing the Wrong People,” in which she cites Diana West’s book and focuses on what moved West to write it, the baffling accommodation by especially the Obama administration of hiring Muslims into the most sensitive realms of policy and in indiscriminately patronizing the Muslim Brotherhood. Lopez discusses the distinct and observable parallel between that and FDR’s accommodation of the Soviet Union with its formal recognition in 1933 and its consequences.

Without warning or explanation, that article was removed by Gatestone the very same day. The next day Lopez was removed from Gatestone’s stable of writers and researchers. Shall we say expelled or purged? Qua terms, there’s not much difference in the motive or the consequence.  The Gates of Vienna relates the sequence of events.

In late August 2013, Clare Lopez, then a Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute, submitted an article for publication at the Gatestone Institute’s website. It was entitled “Recognizing the Wrong People”, and drew on the U.S. government’s 1933 formal diplomatic recognition of the USSR as described in Diana West’s book American Betrayal to form an analogy with the U.S.’s present day recognition and/or support of other fundamentally-anti-American entities, such as the AQ/MB-dominated rebel and opposition forces in places like Egypt, Libya, and Syria….

…The article was duly published the morning of Tuesday 3 September 2013 at Gatestone and was sent out to an email list of subscribers. Sometime shortly after that, however, it was pulled from the website, with no notice or explanation.

…The real shock came the following morning, though, on September 4, when Ms. Lopez received an email from Nina Rosenwald notifying her that her relationship with the Gatestone Institute had been terminated at the request of the Gatestone Board of Directors. On September 5, Ms. Rosenwald confirmed in an email sent to Ms. Lopez and others what some had already suspected, that her firing was due to her “choice of books to promote…,” a clear reference to Ms. Lopez’ citation of historical events from Ms. West’s book….

Gatestone’s removal of Clare Lopez’s further association comports neatly with FrontPage’s designation of West’s book as a product of “incompetence.” However, see Lopez’s exemplary bona fides, still up on Gatestone’s website (unless by now her page has been removed, as well, in that happy Big Brotherish tradition of designating certain individuals as non-persons):

Clare M. Lopez: Distinguished Senior Fellow, Gatestone Institute

Clare M. Lopez is a strategic policy and intelligence expert with a focus on national defense, Islam, Iran, and counterterrorism issues. Currently a senior fellow at the Gatestone Institute, the Center for Security Policy and the Clarion Fund and vice president of the Intelligence Summit, she formerly was a career operations officer with the Central Intelligence Agency, a professor at the Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies, Executive Director of the Iran Policy Committee from 2005-2006, and has served as a consultant, intelligence analyst, and researcher for a variety of defense firms. She was named a Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute in 2011.

Already an advisor to EMP Act America, in February 2012 Ms. Lopez was named a member of the Congressional Task Force on National and Homeland Security, which focuses on the Electro-Magnetic Pulse (EMP) threat to the nation. She is deputy director of the U.S. Counterterrorism Advisory Team for the Military Department of the South Carolina National Guard and serves as a member of the Boards of Advisors/Directors for the Center for Democracy and Human Rights in Saudi Arabia, the Clarion Fund, the Institute of World Affairs, the Intelligence Analysis and Research program at her undergraduate alma mater, Notre Dame College of Ohio, and United West. She has been a Visiting Researcher and guest lecturer on counterterrorism, national defense, and international relations at Georgetown University. Ms. Lopez is a regular contributor to print and broadcast media on subjects related to Iran and the Middle East and the co-author of two published books on Iran. She is the author of an acclaimed paper for the Center, The Rise of the Iran Lobby and co-author/editor of the Center’s Team B II study, “Shariah: The Threat to America”.

Ms. Lopez received a B.A. in Communications and French from Notre Dame College of Ohio and an M.A. in International Relations from the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She completed Marine Corps Officer Candidate School (OCS) in Quantico, Virginia before declining a commission, in favor of joining the CIA.

Clearly, to Gatestone, Lopez’s credentials (not to mention West’s to FrontPage) are irrelevant in the light of her having made an important, just, and favorable mention of West’s book. She must be vaporized and all record of her erased from the official gazette of Neoconservatism. She never happened. Was Clare Lopez one of Gatestone’s stellar writers? Who? Blank out.

Here is one of the offending paragraphs from “Recognizing the Wrong People.” Writing about the suicidal aid we have been giving not only the Muslim Brotherhood, but now, it is slowing coming out, to the Syrian “rebels” who are but a known tool of Al-Qa’eda, Lopez asks:

To what can such a perversion of reason and reality, of common sense, of any measure of American self-interest be attributed: Poole’s Brotherhood penetration of the U.S. foreign policy cadre? More wishful thinking? The illogic of an upside down world view and America’s place in it? Or the pernicious persistence of that first betrayal, the U.S.’s 1933 recognition of Stalin’s murderous gulag of a regime?

Lopez, together with Diana West, wants to know why we are aiding our enemies. It is indeed a baffling phenomenon. I offer my own explanation of that “pernicious persistence”: the liberals, the Progressives, the Democrats, and anyone else who believes that force justifies the ends, are totalitarians in mind, in heart, in essence. That describes especially Barack Hussein Obama.

As for the Neocons, it is about time that we include the smarmy and righteous thought police of FrontPage and Gatestone.

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