Book Review: 'High Noon for America: The Coming Showdown'

Book Review: 'High Noon for America: The Coming Showdown'

With Obama now heading into his second term and clearly intent on giving the Middle East away to Islamists and allowing the Muslim Brotherhood to infiltrate his own administration, a new book has arrived to diagnose this dire situation and offer potential remedies that Americans can apply. 

Dr. Jamie Glazov’s High Noon For America: The Coming Showdown dissects how and why this administration is severely undermining American national interests and leaving us vulnerable to penetration and attack. In so doing, High Noon is an extremely relevant read, since it underscores exactly what is flawed with Obama’s foreign policy and what policies must be adopted for America to regain its security.

It is not often that one comes across a book like High Noon, consisting solely of symposia. And it is rarer still to find a work of this kind that contains so many absorbing, profound and thought-provoking ones. But Dr. Glazov, who serves as the editor of David Horowitz’s Frontpagemag.com, has accomplished this feat in this, his latest tome. In High Noon, there are 28 symposia, divided into eight sections. They cover topics ranging from the war in the Middle East and Islamic radicalism to the former Soviet Union and its current incarnation, the question of America’s decline, and even a discussion on faith. Soon after opening the book, the reader perceives that it is permeated with an undercurrent and concern for freedom, both for societies and individuals. And like a philosopher-journalist, Glazov guides these profound discussions with a sure touch as the symposia’s moderator, skilfully handling an immense mass of detail.  

Besides his position as FrontPage editor, which keeps him in constant connection with the critical and ominous issues facing America, as well as Western civilization today, Glazov’s other qualifications make him well-suited for producing a work of such admirably conceived and deeply interesting symposia. He holds a Ph.D in history with specialties in U.S., Russian and Canadian foreign policy. He is also the author of the critically-acclaimed United In Hate: The Left’s Romance With Tyranny and Terror, in which he documents the Western Left’s alliance with radical Islam. And lastly, as regards High Noon‘s undertone of freedom, as the son of Soviet dissidents who fled to safety to the United States, Glazov possesses an instinctive understanding of this unassailable virtue (in the book’s acknowledgements, Glazov writes poignantly about how the family’s flight to America saw him, at age 5, cut off forever from his beloved grandmother).

As attractive as the topics are, the real strength of this singularly important book, and its chief selling point, lies in the outstanding and independent-thinking intellectuals, many of them experts in their fields, that Glazov has assembled to dissect the important and relevant issues presented. Former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky and Lt. Gen. Ion Pacepa, a top security official in Ceausescu’s Romania before defecting to the United States, Nonie Darwish and Robert Spencer, both acknowledged experts on Islam, and Robert “Bud” McFarlane, Ronald Reagan’s national security advisor, to name only a few, all help make High Noon For America an intellectually stimulating book of high order and a work of substance.

In ‘The Shadow of the KGB’ symposium, for example, Pacepa succinctly describes the political process in Russia after 1991 that led to the appearance of Putin’s KGB regime as “…like democratizing Germany with Gestapo officers at its helm.” Continuing on that theme, David Satter, a senior fellow of the Hudson Institute, warns that a KGB-dominated Russian government will not only lead “to an aggressive and unpredictable Russian foreign policy,” it will cause “an intellectual and moral stagnation that makes Russia the scene of possible future horrors.”  

In the symposium ‘American Economic and Military Decline,’ James Carafano, the Deputy Director for the Davis Institute for International Study at the Heritage Foundation, makes two salient points. He states that rather than talk aboutAmerica’s decline, “it might be better to talk about the rest of the world ascending.” But, just as incisively, Carafano does perceive “America’s traditional model of immigration,” an area of concern, as being “under assault.”

“Mostly what we do today is import poverty and generations are not assimilating as they did in the past,” he states.

And it is statements like those above that give Glazov’s symposia an attractive bluntness, free of any political correctness that surrounds most discussions on political issues today.

While all the symposia are an achievement, two in particular stand out: ‘Remembering the Dissident: Alexander Solzhenitsyn’ and ‘The Fear That Wilders Is Right’. In ‘Remembering the Dissident,’ former Russian dissidents and Western experts on Russia discuss Solzhenitsyn’s overall importance and the role he played in bringing down the Soviet empire, ending that threat to civilization. In this respect, Solzhenitsyn’s classic work, The Gulag Archipelago, is given its proper due in this discussion.  

In the symposium ‘The Fear That Wilders Is Right,’ Roger Simon pointedly enlightens the reader as to the reason why the Dutch politician Geert Wilders is demonized for his well-known warnings about the danger radical Islam poses to the West. Those doing the demonizing, Simons maintains, are simply “living in fear” that Wilders is right.  

“They have to hate Wilders,” states Simons, “because if he is correct, their whole world disintegrates.”

So there is something for everyone in High Noon For America, especially for those who want to delve into previously unknown areas or wish to expand their knowledge about subjects they may already be familiar with. And the person who does so will be well rewarded. Very few volumes on political topics nowadays, especially ones surveying today’s ominous events, are as muscular as Glazov’s symposia. Also, in very few volumes will one find such abundant knowledge, clear, deep thought, and precise speech espoused by people who possess such outstanding intellectual qualities and fearless character.  

To a leftist, this book is a heresy that should never appear on a college course reading list. That should tell thinking people that High Noon For America is a work of high value that contains discussions and ideas from which a reader may acquire an entirely new outlook on life, America, and the world today. More importantly, High Noon issues an urgent warning to Americans, illuminating the threat we face and the catastrophe that masquerades as Obama’s foreign policy. It also makes clear to the reader that there is no time to waste. And in seeing this horror, the reader is able to gauge what arsenal America needs to equip itself in the face of the enemies that fervently seek to destroy it.

Stephen Brown is a freelance journalist and has a graduate degree in Russian and Eastern European studies from the University of Toronto.

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