The Rebuttal: Defending 'American Betrayal' From the Book-Burners by Diana West Read Free Book Online

cited in American Betrayal , [8] war historian John Keegan raised the
possibility that it was Stalin while at Yalta, which took place in early
February 1945, who was behind the Allied decision to the firebomb Dresden later
that month, killing at least 35,000 people, mainly civilians, just three months
before war’s end. Keegan wrote:
    “The raid was
intended to disrupt the German defence and to lend support to the Russians,
who, it was alleged, had specifically requested it. In the days before the
raid, when it was being planned, Churchill was at Yalta agreeing with Stalin
and Roosevelt on the future of Europe.”
    Keegan
continued:
    “It is said that
Stalin asked for the bombing of Dresden at Yalta, though in conversation, not
on paper. It is still difficult to identify who gave the critical order. Air
Marshall Saundby, Harris's deputy, admits to approving it `with a heavy heart’.
Harris said later: `The attack on Dresden was at the time considered a military
necessity by people more important than myself.’ "
    American Betrayal discusses the Yalta agreement by which
the US and Britain participated with the USSR in what surely counts as a crime
against humanity: Operation Keelhaul. This was the forcible, often violent
“repatriation” of over two million Soviet-claimed nationals in Europe to Stalin
to death and/or the Gulag, enabled and made possible by the participation of US
and British authorities and military forces. Radosh doesn’t mention this
crucial aspect of my book at all. Indeed, I have to wonder, did Radosh miss
this part of my book, too?
    He goes on, again,
book-report-style, about Yalta as extracted from Harvard’s S.M. Plokhy’s Yalta: Price of Peace – more
mainstream, conventional consensus history, this time drawing extensively on
Soviet sources. Radosh picks up with conference developments that have little
if anything to do with American Betrayal .
    And then:
    “But as Stalin
told Molotov when signing the Yalta accords, `Do not worry. We can implement it
in our own way later. The heart of the matter is the correlation of forces.’ That correlation of forces is something West
simply wishes away .” (Emphasis added.)
    NOT IN MY BOOK
    This
is a non-sequitur.
    This
relates to no part of American Betrayal .
I repeat: This Stalin anecdote from the Yalta conference is in no way relevant
to what is under discussion in American
Betrayal.
    The
anecdote does, however, appear in both Gaddis and Plokhy, Radosh’s go-to
mainstream, conventional consensus academics.
    ABOUT OUR LOST MEN
    I devote a chapter of American Betrayal to a discussion of
American POWs/MIAs.
    Chapter 11 of American Betrayal is the hardest chapter of the book to read just
as it was the hardest to write because it is about what is the ultimate
American betrayal, by successive US administrations, of American fathers,
brothers, husbands, sons who became prisoners of war in 20 th century
conflicts, fell into Soviet hands, and never returned home. Worse, these men do
not exist in the history we continue to tell ourselves as if it were true.
Among other sources, I draw from a thorough, document-based investigation
produced by staff on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1990, and focus
on its findings regarding thousands of American GIs, ex-POWs of World War II,
who seem never to have returned from Soviet territory.
    “Actually, as Plokhy shows, the
Soviets treated American POW’s fairly well,” Radosh writes – although I
notice he doesn’t cite any of Plokhy’s evidence, either (I don’t know if there
is any).
    Here we see a recurrence of the
Radosh pattern. Once more, he is holding up a conventional, secondary source
– in this case, Plokhy’s book, Yalta:
The Price of Peace – and simply declaring that my primary source
research is not just wrong but so much “conspiracy theory.”
    And, according to this same pattern,
Radosh never mentions my primary source research, never frames my argument in
the context of my