You Can't Understand Communism Without Understanding Deception

The author of American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character is the fearless, incisive columnist and blogger Diana West, who also wrote The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization, and who is the co-author of Shariah: The Threat to America. With her characteristic fierce passion, West argues in her new book that the Communist infiltration led to a successful “assault on our nation’s character” during the Cold War that left us the “heirs to a false and hollow history” and “unwitting participants” in “a secretly subverted pageant.” In other words, perhaps we didn’t win the Cold War after all. 

For West, one of the clear indications that something in the American consciousness had changed is the fact that, thanks not only to Soviet propaganda but also to domestic peer pressure, many Americans were more outraged by Ronald Reagan’s unapologetic phrase “evil empire” than by the evil empire itself. This is the result of “the hocus-pocus transformation of liberty-loving anti-Communism into a force of repression to be reviled” and its flip side: “the hocus-pocus transformation of totalitarian Communism into a force of liberalism.” 

Thus, post-Cold War generations of Americans have a kneejerk revulsion toward the witnesses and investigators who tried to raise the alarm about the presence of traitors in positions of influence. “In each and every instance,” West writes, “it was the anti-Communists, the ex-Communists, and the Cassandras who were punished and castigated by the Washington Establishment, and then ostracized for their ‘crimes’ of exposing treason.” The names of those demonized Cassandras either have been forgotten by history or live in infamy. 

The most notable example, of course, is Sen. Joseph McCarthy, whose name has become synonymous with red-baiting and Cold War “paranoia.” True, McCarthy’s hyperbolic theatrics “enabled lots of people to dismiss the whole issue as a witch hunt or the product of a demagogue,” notes Harvey Klehr, author of Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America. But West is certainly correct that McCarthy and Whitaker Chambers and their ilk were and still are hardly hailed as patriots. 

And yet the infiltration and deception of which they warned was vaster than most Americans know. “Expert estimates,” West writes, “now peg the number of Americans assisting Soviet intelligence agencies during the 1930s as exceeding five hundred.” She quotes the former chief of intelligence in Communist Romania, who told her, “During the Cold War, more people in the Soviet bloc worked for the dezinformatsiya machine than for the Soviet army and defense industry put together.” She quotes Joseph D. Douglass Jr. as saying, “The Soviets live and breathe deception. You cannot understand what they are doing without understanding this. Indeed, you can’t even begin to understand Communism without understanding deception.”