Friday, August 09, 2013

West v. Radosh, Horowitz, et. al.


Ronald Radosh writes a lengthy review of Diana West’s American Betrayal:

McCarthy On Steroids
Radosh does a thorough job demolishing West’s arguments and her facts. He explains why he felt compelled to take on the book here:

Why I Wrote a Take-Down of Diana West’s Awful Book
while David Horowitz explains why Frontpage Magazine ran the review here:

Editorial: Our Controversy With Diana West
Diana West replies here:

If Frontpage Lies about This, They'll Lie about Anything, Pt. 2
Radosh is somewhat overwrought in his criticism, but he is sount on the main issue. West pushes her argument way beyond what the evidence supports. She is quick to blame communist subversion for bad outcomes to the exclusion of other causes. Radosh offers several examples in his review.

A further example is found in the first excerpt she posted at Breitbart:

Why Did FDR Fail to Relieve MacArthur and 151,000 Troops Fighting the Japanese in the Philippines?

Could the decision to abandon US forces to death or the horrors of Japanese POW camps by giving uninterrupted priority to the Red Army have had anything to do with the influence of the scores of Soviet agents and assets within reach of the levers of power inside the US government? How about the man driving military supply policy, the man behind Lend Lease?
I know of no serious military historian who believes that there was ever a chance that the US Navy could have relieved the Philippines in the spring of 1942. Those troops were not doomed because communists diverted resources into Lend-Lease for the USSR. They were in a hopeless position because the Imperial Japanese Navy was more powerful that any and all forces that could be mustered against it.

Max Hastings puts it bluntly in Inferno:

The US Navy would have suffered a catastrophe had it attempted to assist Wainwright in the face of overwhelming Japanese air and naval strength.


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