Readers who are familiar with my stance on this whole Diana West brouhaha know that I am proud to be on the extreme wing, balancing myself out here on the whipping winds of this Sopwith Camel (it’s safely on the ground, but there happens to be windy weather these days; but I digress…), in favor of West and against the Horowitz/Radosh/Black Bizarro Men.
I’m curious to know, nonetheless, two things:
1) whether those on my side are also saying, in effect, that during the ramp-up of WW2 and during the prosecution of that war, the Allies should not have used the Soviet Union as a “necessary evil” in order to stave off and ultimately destroy the Axis metastasis;
and
2) whether they think Churchill would not have agreed (if, indeed, he actually did not explicitly agree) that we did, in fact, have to use the Soviet Union as a “necessary evil” in order to stave off and ultimately destroy the Axis metastasis.
These two questions “become” (as William F. Buckley used to say) further questions:
Are those on my side of the West Brouhaha saying that the Allies, during the ramp-up of WW2 and during the prosecution of that war, were not (as all humans in history are) limited by a lack of 20/20 hindsight whilst in the midst of a horrible and catastrophic problem (viz., the problem of Hitler and the Axis alliance)?
And would they deny that the Churchillian thesis — that we “work with the Devil” (Stalin) in order to defeat another Devil (Hitler) — was tenable and necessary precisely because it could have been done in such a way as to make sure we betrayed Stalin and defeated him after his usefulness was over? And thus that the hoary problem West has unearthed and analyzed was not a problem of allying with Stalin adventitiously and cunningly (as we should have), but rather of allying with Stalin with starry-eyed stupidity?
(Note: I have no truck with those who in articulating an adjudication of the interrogatory meditation above would lurch off from the outer promontory of Diana West’s analysis without a propellor (much less wings) into the groundless air (and its whipping winds) overlooking the vertiginous canyon of a Diabolical Crypto-Totalitarian Cabal controlling America from approximately the 1930s (if not even more fancifully long before that) to the present; which brings us to the broader and deeper question of just how broad and deep has been the Communist infiltration of America — for which question one ought navigate between the two extremes of the Horowitzian It’s Bad Enough to Help Me Sell My Book, But Let’s Not Get Carried Away and Think It’s Actually a Dire Problem Like that Kook Diana West Does, on the one hand, or the GOVian A Diabolical Crypto-Totalitarian Cabal Is Now Controlling America As It Has All Along (Post-Marked After the President of Pre-FDR Yore of Your Choice, Depending on Your Particular Cranky Hobbyhorse Such As For Example the Crisis of the Gold Standard in the Late 19th Century, & Etc.. on the other hand.)