Stealth Communism

Aside from the usual sense of this term, Stealth Communism -- espionage during the Cold War, and Socialism (a kind of "Communism Lite" or the Communist version of a "Moderate Islam") -- there could well be a type which, as far as I know, has not been analyzed much (let alone investigated):  the deeper infiltration behind enemy lines by pretending to be anti-Communist.

Being a deeper cover, of course, necessitates more pretense, more deceit.  And being pseudo-anti-Communist, it would necessitate, as well, throwing bones to the genuine anti-Communists, in order to win their approval and earn one's anti-Communist bonafides.

Sure, it sounds like a conspiracy theory -- but as Russian dissident Vladimir Bukovsky and his colleague Pavel Stroilov put it, in their robustly substantive defense of Diana West against her calumniators David Horowitz and Ronald Radosh:

It is dishonest to attack anything as a "conspiracy theory." So long as there are conspiracies in the world, a conspiracy theory may be perfectly true. It is a conspiracy theory that Al Qaeda organized the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and yet, it happens to be true. It was a conspiracy theory that the Nazi leaders plotted aggressive wars and genocide, but it was proven, and the conspirators went to the gallows. Unlike "academic consensus," conspiracy is a concept with a clear definition; so much so that prosecutors can prove conspiracy theories beyond reasonable doubt in court. Moreover, the criminal law concepts of conspiracy and complicity are not very far apart. Almost anything we say about communist crimes against humanity can be attacked as a conspiracy theory--and, as a rule, is attacked in these terms by Radosh & Co.

It is high time to stop dismissing things as conspiracy theories or accepting things as being consistent with the academic consensus. Some of us here are talking about truth and lies. And this, perhaps, is precisely what annoys the academics, whose monopoly on writing history depend upon the half-truths of the "consensus."

And speaking of Radosh and Horowitz, Diana West has meanwhile penned a new essay in which she formally announces that the "war of words" they have fomented is now "over".  While she may be right on one level (insofar as her meticulous and lengthy Rebuttal not too long ago, and now the weighing in by Bukovsky and Stroilov, definitively destroy the flimsy yet complex tissue of half-truths woven with lies concocted by Radosh and Horowitz), on another level, much needs to be done still.  This other important level concerns uncovering why Radosh and Horowitz have behaved the way they have. Their tactics of distortion, obfuscation and disinformation about West's book go beyond normal ego or turf-protecting habits, because they involve blatant errors, falsehoods and elementary hypocrisy.  

One example of the latter I just came across in a helpful comment at the Gates of Vienna blog, where a reader quotes from a David Horowitz book written a few years ago in which Horowitz analyzes the sly and influential tactics of anti-McCarthyite baiting and demonization -- and yet Horowitz has done just that to West.  As that reader notes, for example:  

On [Horowitz's] FrontPage Magazine, Ms. West ‘s book was denigrated as “McCarthyism on Steroids.” It is also noticeable that the picture on FrontPage Mag of September 28, 2013, under the headline “Another Personal Attack Inspired By West,” shows McCarthy pictured next to Stalin.

It defies credulity to think that Horowitz is so stupid, and so obtusely hypocritical, that he cannot see what he is doing.  The more plausible explanation is that he is deliberately using this tactic, among many others from the Alinskyite playbook -- both because he thinks he can get away with it, and because he has been driven to this desperate measure because West's book is just that threatening to what he wants to protect (the stealth Communism hidden beneath the pseudo-anti-Communism he has been publicly promoting).  

Thus, broadly speaking, the more plausible explanation is that Horowitz and Radosh found West's book -- particularly the exposé of Harry Hopkins, the vindication of McCarthy, and the disquieting implications these and other facts have for the grand project of FDR's America and our conduct in WW2 -- to be 1) singularly threatening, yet 2) impossible to refute.

Thus their only recourse was to foment a strategy of disinformation straight out of the Alinskyite playbook (if not Pravda and Cominform).

What, therefore, is not yet over and which needs to be further uncovered is the question, Why? Conventional explanations do not suffice. The most plausible explanation is that they found West's book threatening because it casts a light on the stealthy nooks and crannies of the propaganda industry of pseudo-anti-Communism which has, in many ways, over the decades taken over the only sector of our society capable of keeping the flame of truth about Communism alive -- the Conservative sector.

I.e., over the decades, stealth Communists realized that in order to keep their flame alive (of the Revolution, which is not going to go away with the Fall of the Wall), they needed to infiltrate the opposition -- the anti-Communist movement.

Radosh and Horowitz would be two influential soldiers in that stealth movement.

No other explanation does justice to the surreal way they have behaved in reaction to West's book.

And the fact that they took this daring risk of outing themselves (not that risky, as it turns out, since no one but me, and perhaps Andrew Bostom, apparently, suspects them of being stealth Communists, and in fact every time I bring it up, I get gently shot down by West defenders), indicates just how powerfully revelatory West's book is, and ipso facto how threatening to their mission they perceive it to be.