Diana West
Born
Diana West

(1961-11-08) November 8, 1961
Hollywood, California, U.S.
EducationYale University (BA)
Occupation(s)Author and columnist
Websitedianawest.net

Diana West (born November 8, 1961) is an American author and former conservative columnist. She wrote a weekly column from 1998 until 2014 that was syndicated nationally. Her books include The Death of the Grownup: How America's Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization (2007) and American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character (2013).

Early and personal life

West was born and raised in Hollywood, Los Angeles to Elliot West, a conservative novelist and television and screenplay writer, and Barbara Belden, a one-time actress.[1] She moved to the East Coast and graduated from Yale University with a BA in 1983.[1][2] She is married and has twin daughters, and has later lived in Washington, D.C.[1][2]

Career

West worked as a student journalist at Yale, and later went to New York City to work as a junior editor of The Public Interest, which was edited by Irving Kristol.[1] She thereafter began working as a reporter for The Washington Times,[1] and won the first prize in 1990 for best feature writing by the National Newspaper Association.[2] She began writing her weekly column in 1998.[1] The column was later syndicated in about 120 newspapers and news sites,[3] until it was ended in 2014.[4] It often dealt with controversial subjects such as the war on terror with a critical focus on Islam.[1][4]

As a former CNN contributor, she frequently appeared on Lou Dobbs' shows Lou Dobbs Tonight and Lou Dobbs This Week.[3]

West has also been co-vice president of the International Free Press Society,[3][5] and been described as part of the counter-jihad movement,[6][7] a movement which she has praised in her column.[8] In 2010 she was a co-author of the Center for Security Policy's Team B II report Shariah: The Threat To America.[3] She has also been a contributor to Breitbart News.[3]

American Betrayal

On May 28, 2013, St. Martin's Press published West's second book, American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character. West argues that after the fall of the Soviet Union, historians failed to sufficiently "adjust the historical record" to account for newly available Soviet files and archives. West writes on the extent of Soviet influence during the Roosevelt and Truman administrations.[9] She argues that infiltration of the American government by Stalinist agents and fellow-travelers had significantly altered Allied policies in favor of the Soviet Union during World War II.

Reviews and responses

Frank J. Gaffney Jr. finds that West "painstakingly documents how America's government, media, academia, political and policy elites actively helped obscure the true nature of the Soviet Union."[10] West contends that there is a parallel with the failure to face the dangers of communism in the 1930s and the failure to face the threat of Islamic extremism today.[10][11]

Frank T. Csongos argues that West is right "up to a point." He notes that West rejects the standard narrative that Franklin Roosevelt, like George W. Bush, took drastic steps to "save capitalism." Unlike West, he believes that Roosevelt was merely naive when trusting Joseph Stalin.[12]

A Kirkus review finds that she has a number of valid points but her additional doubtful speculations go too far. It notes that, "Not until the 1990s, with access to the Venona files and Soviet archives, have historians wholly appreciated the scope of Russian spying in this country from the time FDR formally recognized the Soviet Union in 1933. West matches these new revelations to previously known facts and wonders why we’ve neglected to fully adjust the historical record." It ends with the warning: "A frustrating mixture of incontrovertible facts and dubious speculation. Proceed with caution."[9]

Former Canadian newspaper publisher and Franklin D. Roosevelt biographer Conrad Black published a critique of American Betrayal in the conservative journal National Review in late 2013, to which West responded and Black then rejoined. Like Radosh, Black believes West grossly exaggerates Soviet influence in the Roosevelt Administration, whose policies were driven by the extreme social and economic crisis America was going through during the Depression. Black believes the alliance with the Soviet Union in World War II, while driven by realpolitik, was a dire necessity to prevent the victory of Nazi Germany which had already conquered France and was threatening Britain, and finds West's dismissal of the D-Day invasion of Normandy as somehow the result of Soviet subterfuge to shift the strategic thrust from the campaign in Italy to be an absurd and amateurish contention that ignores the realities of logistics and terrain. All these authors also point out that for the first two years of World War 2 during the period of the Stalin-Hitler Pact, widely considered odious among liberals, the policy of the FDR administration was at loggerheads with that of the Soviets in aiding Britain through Lend-Lease and point out the irony that at that time communists allied with isolationists and the America First movement, whose legacy West extols.

Jonathan Chait, a liberal pundit and writer for New York magazine, says that West's "thesis that American foreign policy under presidents Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower was secretly controlled by the Soviet Union" has found supporters at The Heritage Foundation and The American Spectator.[13]

Andrew C. McCarthy also came to West's defense in a review-essay in The New Criterion, where he writes West relies on M. Stanton Evans' book that comes to the defense of Senator Joseph McCarthy and cites the "groundbreaking scholarship of John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr" to back up Evans' claims.[11]

West responded to Haynes and Klehr, writing: "Notice they do not claim American Betrayal makes serious historical errors. According to [Haynes and Klehr], American Betrayal makes serious interpretative errors. If you are wondering who sets the standard of interpretation, who deems what is in alignment or out, what is "incorrect" or correct, so am I."[14]

Haynes and Klehr claim West made serious historical errors, the most egregious being that Harry Hopkins was the Soviet spy "source 19" named in the Venona transcripts, who they believe the evidence shows was actually Laurence Duggan, a U.S. Department of State official.

Bibliography

  • The Death of the Grownup: How America's Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization. St. Martin's Griffin. 2007. ISBN 978-0312340490.
  • Shariah: The Threat To America: An Exercise In Competitive Analysis. Center for Security Policy Press. 2010. ISBN 978-0982294765. (as part of Team B II)
  • American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character. St. Martin's Press. 2013. ISBN 978-0312630782.
  • The Rebuttal: Defending 'American Betrayal' from the Book-Burners. Bravura Books. 2013. ISBN 978-1492884538.
  • No Fear: Selected Columns from America's Most Politically Incorrect Journalist. Bravura Books. 2013. ISBN 978-1484180228.
  • The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy. Center for Security Policy Press. 2019. ISBN 978-1076939630.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 "Q&A with Diana West". C-SPAN. December 29, 2011.
  2. 1 2 3 "West, Diana 1961-". encyclopedia.com. Retrieved December 1, 2023.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 "Diana West". MacMillan. Retrieved June 21, 2023.
  4. 1 2 West, Diana (December 12, 2014). "My Column Ends, But the Questions Don't". Townhall.
  5. ↑ "International counter-jihad organisations". Hope not hate. January 11, 2018.
  6. ↑ Pertwee, Ed (October 2017). 'Green Crescent, Crimson Cross': The Transatlantic 'Counterjihad' and the New Political Theology (PDF). London School of Economics. p. 267.
  7. ↑ "Stakelbeck on Terror: The West and Free Speech". CBN News. October 2, 2012.
  8. ↑ West, Diana (November 21, 2014). "Giving Thanks For The Counter-Jihad Network". Townhall.
  9. 1 2 "American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character". Kirkus. April 28, 2013.
  10. 1 2 Frank J. Gaffney Jr. (August 6, 2013). "Willful blindness, mortal peril: Fantasizing that enemies are friends is a dangerous pastime". Washington Times.
  11. 1 2 Andrew C. McCarthy (December 2013). "Red herrings". The New Criterion. 32 (4).
  12. ↑ Frank T. Csongos (June 19, 2013). "BOOK REVIEW: 'American Betrayal'". Washington Times.
  13. ↑ Jonathan Chait (August 8, 2013). "Conservative Historian Has Interesting Ideas". New York Magazine.
  14. ↑ "The Death of the Grown-Up | Diana West > Home - Influence and the Experts, Part I".
Wikiquote has quotations related to Diana West.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.