Diana West on Who Betrayed Whom

Who is Diana West?

Diana West is an American conservative author and former columnist. She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree from Yale University in 1983.

Wikipedia

West began her journalism career as an editor for the Yale Political Monthly during her undergraduate studies. She later worked as a junior editor at The Public Interest in New York City and as a reporter for The Washington Times, where she won the National Newspaper Association's first prize for best feature writing in 1990. In 1998, she started writing a weekly column that was syndicated in about 120 newspapers and news sites until it concluded in 2014. Her columns often addressed controversial topics, including the war on terror and critiques of Islam. Wikipedia

Throughout her career, West has contributed to various publications, including The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, The New Criterion, and The Washington Post Magazine. She has also appeared as a CNN contributor on shows like Lou Dobbs Tonight and Lou Dobbs This Week.

Macmillan

Politically, West is identified as a conservative. She has been associated with the counter-jihad movement and has served as co-vice president of the International Free Press Society. In 2010, she co-authored the Center for Security Policy's Team B II report titled "Shariah: The Threat To America."

Wikipedia

West's notable publications include:

• The Death of the Grown-Up: How America's Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization (2007)

• American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character (2013)

• The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy (2019)

In American Betrayal, she alleges that the country has been influenced and undermined by communist infiltration during the mid-20th century. West contends that this infiltration shaped key policies and cultural shifts in ways that have been concealed or downplayed by historians, politicians, and media elites.

"Here, since even before the earliest days of the twentieth century, the riddling, boring penetration of Marxian through the influx of true believers from Europe and Russia, through the conversion to true belief of new Marxists at home, and through campaigns of Soviet disinformation and other “active measures”—advanced mainly unchecked. The ideological war abroad, or, more accurately, the anti-ideological war abroad—because, as Robert Conquest reminds us, the West, unlike the USSR, “did not have a universal and exclusively defined mindset”—was lost on all fronts in the battlespace at home: in the academy, in the media, in the popular culture, in the arts, and in the zeitgeist up and down Main Street and even, or perhaps especially, along capitalism’s main thoroughfare, Wall Street.³ 

It was as if we opposed an enemy Over There without noticing that great chunks of his ideology had taken root, flourished, and borne collectivist and thus anti-American fruit Over Here. 

I’m not just referring to those most radical elements of the early Soviet agenda (the original “Bolshevik plot,” as President Obama might have said) that became Western fixtures even as they were, ironically, reversed under Stalin in the 1930s when they proved to be destabilizing to the young regime. These would include the de-sacralization and legal diminishment of marriage (state boosterism of marriage became apparent in 1936 when wedding rings became available in state-run stores), quick ’n’ easy divorce (curtailed in 1936, largely abolished in 1944), “freedom of abortion” (abolished in 1936), and the elevation of children’s rights to the detriment of parental authority (“respect” for elders became a theme in state-controlled press by 1935).⁴ 

Such “antibourgeois” ideas, however, would become the basis of Western manners and mores. Sometimes specifically ascribed to the 1920s writings of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci or the later teachings of the so-called Frankfurt School, other times seen as spillover from the wellspring of early twentieth “socialist” and “progressive” political and educational movements, in recent times repackaged as “Alinskyite,” such ideas, rising from the same Marxian wellspring, have flooded, saturated, and finally warped those bastions of Western civilization that conservatives, by definition, feel compelled to defend—just as though those bastions of Western civilization were still bastions. Secure places. Enduring repositories.

Eternally unchanged by all the meticulously, continuously documented breaching. In fact, the biggest problem today is with the bastions. They’re not secure, they’re not enduring, and they have been breached. Broadly, these bastions include Christianity itself, the concept of “patriarchy” and family, and all safeguards of nationhood and traditional culture. My purpose is less to trace the weblike and overlapping origins of the ideas that have undermined these institutions than it is to recognize their common endgame—a place, a world, where these same core Western institutions are no more."

So she argues that Marxist ideology gradually infiltrated and undermined Western society, influencing culture, family structures, and traditional values. It criticizes the West for failing to recognize this ideological shift and claims that the core institutions of Western civilization are now weakened and transformed by these Marxist ideas. The Frankfurt School, Gramsci, and Alinskyite tactics are identified as key contributors to this cultural transformation.

I disagree that the premise that Soviet agents/ideas infiltrated America is a valid argument at all. Why wouldn't Russia infiltrate its agents if America is doing the same? If we are all at war then infiltrating agents and ideas is a legitimate thing to do, isn't it? 

I think that the Marxist ideas were not infiltrated in America, but they took root much earlier in that country. When they did take root and why, we should investigate further. I do not want to get into that now as I partly gave the answer to that above. My argument is that the West produced Karl Marx, so to speak. He came from the West, i.e. not America, but Germany and lived in England. His ideas spread all over the world, starting from the 19th century. 

We should be asking a question not only about the origin and the originator of Marx, Engles, and Bolshevik ideologies. They did not originate in the Russian Empire, obviously. The ideology was imported into the Russian Empire, so to speak. People had to be subject to propaganda to be able to buy into these ideas and ideologies based upon them. Just like the German people were subject to Hitler`s propaganda and brainwashing techniques.

We should be asking ourselves a question, not how these ideas spread, but when and where they started. We could argue that they originally started with the French Revolution, as an idea that the people should have equal rights as the kings, simplistically put. To me, this is the basis of equality. Except that in the long run we have seen that certain elites come up on top of the social hierarchy and they take the leading role. As it happened in France. I am not putting forth an argument that the ideas of the French Revolution are the same as Marx`s philosophy, but in my understanding they are similar.

Similar in the sense that both ideologies or philosophies, whichever term you prefer, brought forth revolutions that shed blood. Plain and simple. However, they fail at being democratic, as it was not their intention in the first place. Beheading a king is not a democratic trait. "Many of its ideas are considered fundamental principles of liberal democracy, while its values and institutions remain central to modern French political discourse." Wikipedia

How ironic for the ideas of the French Revolution to be considered as fundamental principles of liberal democracy. What is so liberal there? The fact that you can liberally up and kill who you deem the oppressor? That is totally opposite of the notion of democracy in Ancient Greece and as we understand it today. 

Today we are experiencing a crisis of democracy, exemplified by the so-called woke ideas that undermined free speech and imposed Bolshevic-Lenin-Stalin-like censorship of all kinds that we in the Balkans, Serbia are "trained" to recognize. America, this supposed beacon of freedoms, almost fell into the abyss of totalitarianism.

I understand that this view could be seen as simplistic and that these ideologies have nothing in common, and democracy had its ups and downs and had to evolve. My question is did it evolve or just change its shape? Both the French and Bolshevik revolutions got away with regicides. The next question is who organized those revolutions, who funded them and who prospered from them?

"The characteristics of liberal democracies are correlated with increased political stability, lower corruption, better management of resources, and better health indicators such as life expectancy and infant mortality."

Just because someone wrote it on Wikipedia and it sounds nice on paper does not mean that in reality, democracy works like clockwork. In my opinion democracy today very much relies on bureaucracy (refer to the EU and its robust and costly ruling system), the oligarchy of the so-called elites of dark money, banking corporations, entertainment/music industry, Big Pharma/agricultural/supplements/plastic industries, big tech, military/aviation industry and national security agencies.

I disagree with everything regarding the Wikipedia quote above. On the contrary, there is less security, Europe has prevailed with the older population, the mortality rate is higher, and there are increased cancer deaths, especially cancers that are virus-induced (like Covid or HPV, just to name a few), which means bad health indicators, life expectancy is shorter, resources are not managed better, but simply taken advantage of governments and dark money corporations. Finally, corruption is rampant, not to mention nepotism. 

What the Age of Enlightenment with the intellectuals it produced based on reason failed at is to use that reason. It also failed to fulfil moral and ethical principles of a basic human right to life, by inventing Guillotine and deprivation of life. 

"Marxists and communists, as well as some non-Marxist socialists and anarchists, argue that liberal democracy under capitalism is constitutively social class-based and therefore can never be democratic or participatory. They refer to it as "bourgeois democracy" because they say that politicians ultimately fight mainly for the interests of the bourgeoisie, and thus argue that liberal democracy represents "the rule of capital". Wikipedia

I agree as a non-Marxist, like I stated above, that a certain elite emerges, the elite of not only wealthy individuals but corporations and government agencies who undermine democracy or usurp it for their own needs and purposes. In my opinion, social order needs the class system and therefore I disagree that the class system is something to be frowned upon in a democratic state or society. The problem arises when certain classes usurp power to conspire against the lower classes that they deem poor, uneducated and worthy to be subjected to eugenics methods of depopulation. This highly smells of Nazism be it called, Zionism, democracy or you name it.

So, to conclude as this can go on and on, I disagree that the post-Cold War climate is to blame for the betrayal of America. Who really betrayed America? Those who invented it are a product of the secret societies that even the American University system is full of, the societies everyone knows of but everyone still underestimates their influence on the average American. Yes, all manners of secret and no-so-secret societies, agencies, clubs, or however you want to call them. They are all interconnected, they are all in it for the profit albeit on a smaller scale.

So, America is run by all manner of industries, societies and the oligarchs who use the Americans to social-engineer their populace through these societies, institutions and the media. They are all just a tool to implement the main ideology which is definitely not Marxist, infiltrated by the Russian whoever, in whatever time in history. 

Human nature is the same everywhere and greed is the main drive of any political party, including any type of government, monarchy or the above-mentioned oligarchy. We should bear in mind that nothing mentioned here pertains only to America. It equally goes for the EU, the Balkans, the Middle East, Israel, Mongolia, Russia, China, Indonesia, Australia, the UK, or Japan. Human nature or corruption is the same everywhere. What is not the same is the way corrupted nature reveals itself or what particular weakness one nation is prone to.