The Rebuttal: Defending 'American Betrayal' From the Book-Burners Read Online Free PDF Page A

hands.”
    Where did
that come from? This marks the intrusion of a “straw man argument.”
    Something
else: It should already be evident that Radosh is unlikely to know what I
consider or don’t. Frankly, it doesn’t seem to matter to him anyway. His
intentness on attack is such that he sees what he wants to and ignores what he
doesn’t. (Evidence to come will further bear this out.)
    Indeed,
it seems fair to ask: Did Radosh read my book? Did he read it and not
understand it? Or, did he read and purposefully distort it?
    Such
questions will recur in the discussion to come. I can only speculate on the
answers, but the effect is clear each time: my work, and the reader’s trust of
my work, has been harmed without cause, without evidence.
    ANOTHER RADOSH CHARGE: FALSE
    One
of Radosh’s many introductory charges against my credibility is this:
    “She disregards
the findings of the sources she does rely on when they contradict her ….”
    I have
flagged four instances in brief (see “Radosh’s Introduction,” #10) where I make
the reader aware of differences of opinion among the experts. But since we’re
in the “second front” section, I now offer one of them in full.
    On p. 267
of American Betrayal, amid talk of
the Italian/Balkan strategy − which was supported in 1943 not only by
Churchill but also by US Generals Mark Clark, Dwight Eisenhower, Ira Eaker and
Carl Spaatz − I note:
    “…There was a military
argument to be made to refocus on France. In Wedemeyer Reports! Gen. Albert C. Wedemeyer, one of the early
planners of the invasion of France, makes a compelling military counterargument
against Churchill’s and [Gen. Mark] Clark’s `soft underbelly’ strategy.
Essentially, when he looked at the map, Wedemeyer didn’t see the requisite
harbors through which a massive Italian-Balkan could be supplied as it made its
way through almost practically impassable terrain. To be sure, this military
debate remains open-ended…”
    I not
only did not disregard Wedemyer’s military argument favoring France over the
Italy-Balkan, I laid it out.
    MY
TRUE CRIME REVEALED: VIOLATING THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM
    Next in this foundationally
erroneous “second front” section, Radosh raises “another point that West fails
to consider.” This, he writes, is the “continuing fear shared by both FDR and
Churchill that … Stalin might seek a separate peace with Nazi Germany.”
    To be sure, I do not give this point
the requisite emphasis that conventional consensus histories do in perpetuating
the conventional consensus on our wartime alliance with and support for Stalin
− an even greater totalitarian monster than Hitler, who, it needs to be
faced (and American Betrayal argues),
was secretly and continually waging a dirty intelligence war against both
Britain and the US for the duration of the Allied war with Nazi Germany. That
said, I didn’t fail to take into consideration this “fear.” In my treatment,
however, it appears briefly as one of the “great mistakes of the war,” which is
the title of a 1949 book by military analyst Hanson Baldwin, a Pulitzer-Prize
winner who covered World War II from the Pacific, North Africa and Europe for
the New York Times.
    From p. 112, American Betrayal :
    Regarding
the globe this way isn’t just a glass-half-empty exercise. It is a massive
conceptual twist that forces what we “know” about “victory” into reverse.
Hanson Baldwin’s 1949 book [Great Mistakes of the War] provides a good, solid
point of analytical departure, particularly given that his four great and false
premises of the war all have to do with our (incorrect) assessments and
(mis)perceptions of the Soviet Union—head fakes, all—rather than conventional
military blunders, as one might expect. They were:
    ·       That
the Soviet Union had abandoned its policy of world revolution.
    ·       That
“Uncle Joe” Stalin was a “good fellow,” someone we could “get along with.”
    ·