A Former KGB Officer on Ideological Subversion

Note the date on this is fully thirty years ago, at which time he felt that the first stage -- demoralization -- was complete. Consider how far we've come since then in running down America, its Founders and its Constitution, as an aspirational ideal.



This was the official plan of the KGB, and one that they used effectively in Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s. (Also in Asia.) Why didn't it work here? Possibly because the Soviet Union collapsed, and so the professionals behind the program weren't there to leverage and guide the moment of crisis when it finally came. The Marxist-influenced intellectuals actually became in charge, rather than being shot against the wall and replaced with professionals.

But also possibly because the crisis was never great enough to overcome the American capacity for force. You couldn't roll tanks into America like you did in Czechoslovakia, and the country was always too big, too spread out, and too well armed to rule with a secret police. We can't even manage to get people to stop selling each other drugs, let alone effect totalitarianism.

In any case, this was the plan, and it failed. We still have to deal with the effects of the demoralization, however. It remains a huge problem for our country that the young have -- for what is now four generations -- been half-educated to despise its ideals and their own history. Recovering a natural patriotism and a proper admiration for the ideals of human liberty remains a major part of the work to be done.

There's a much longer interview with the same man here, for those who want to learn more.

12 comments:

Cassandra said...

OMG - I posted this years ago on VC and have been looking for it ever since (the copy I posted either disappeared or it was one of thousands of posts that were deleted and never restored).

Can't wait to watch it again!

Grim said...

Pleased to be of service. :)

raven said...

I don't believe it has failed. Look at the SJW crowd, the bugnuts anti gun crowd, etc- most leftist's are impossible to reason with , precisely because of cognitive dissonance. Orwell warned us of exactly the same thing as Bezmanov. The timing may be off, but the situation is the same.
I am not saying the Russians are still actively promoting this, but that like a cold war virus, it is continuing to run amok among the population.

Grim said...

I think the plan failed. The virus may still kill us, but it's 'in the wild' now. The Russians intended to shoot these people who are SJWs, running amok breaking the culture -- they knew these people were destructive to any social order, including the one they intended to supplant. The ideology is structurally intended to destroy social cohesion.

We've talked about this before, I think. The way that Marxist ideology works is that it analyzes all of human history into categories of oppression. For true Marxism, those categories are economic: master/slave, lord/serf, capitalist/worker. Every human interaction is explained in a way that must, by the structure of the logic, be understood as oppression and injustice. That is utterly destructive of any kind of social stability, because whatever you replace it with will also be explained in the same way. You'll get complaints about the Inner Communist Party and the Outer Communist Party versus the People, and you'll be in the same boat.

These poisonous ideologies that travel under the heading of 'Critical Theory' are all Marxist in this structure, they just replace the economic categories with other categories. For Critical Race Theory, it's race that explains everything. For Critical Feminist Theory, it's sex that explains everything. And it's not just 'everything right now' -- it's everything throughout history. It's all oppression, everything that has been or is now or ever will be. It's an eternal struggle, diving us against ourselves, forever.

No wonder they meant to shoot them!

Grim said...

That is not to say, of course, that you should never listen to a Critical Theorist or that they never have a point. The problem is that they can't themselves tell the difference between the times when they've identified a legitimate injustice, and the times when they're driven to assert one by the structure of their theories.

This is why you rarely hear Western feminists (who are also usually schooled in a kind of anti-colonial or post-colonial critical theory) coming down on radical Islam for far worse abuses than 'manspreading' on the subway in New York. The Muslims are in the victim class within the oppressor/victim dichotomy. It doesn't make sense to think of them as oppressors. To do so would be to privilege one of these critical theories over another, and there really is no ground for doing that native to the theory. If we have to explain why sex is more important than race, or either than economic class, then the solidarity on which the success of the movement is based flies apart.

So they don't.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

I saw this years ago and felt he had oversold the point, taking credit for things that were going to be happening anyway. The KGB has a long history of saying "Remember X? We totally did that!"

Still, that is not to say that they had no effect. They targeted certain institutions very skillfully.

If you are not familiar with the Romanian 1979 defector Ion Mihai Pacepa, I recommend you look him up.

Cassandra said...

I agree with AVI that he overstated (haven't watched it again) his argument, but I thought it was a very interesting way to look at the whole question of cultural decline.

Agree much of this was happening anyway and would have happened with or without them, but I also think there's something to the notion of catching the wave at the right time.

Cassandra said...

The way that Marxist ideology works is that it analyzes all of human history into categories of oppression.

Ummm. Isn't that pretty much where the Democratic party is now? They spend all their time pandering to and obsessing about victim classes and nattering on about how to use the law to shift power from the perceived elites/privileged ones to the perceived victims.

A lot of more moderate Dems don't buy the oppression narrative whole hog, but they do want to help the less fortunate (and believe the Right doesn't care about the less fortunate). That's what keeps them in the same camp, and why Bush II's much-derided compassionate conservatism won votes.

Grim said...

Ummm. Isn't that pretty much where the Democratic party is now?

Yes.

It's one of those things that becomes obvious once you learn to recognize the pattern of thought. What takes time is to convince people who have fallen into that mode of thinking to recognize that it is necessarily and only a destructive mode of thought. It's a dialectical mode of thought, which gives it a sense of being a powerful logic that really explains everything.

But you can't build anything out of it. Any new structures you build on the basis of this dialectic it'll tear down too.

Ymar Sakar said...

This isn't the full interview.

I found the full one on youtube, because the original link disappeared, as it happened with Cassandra's source.

Assistant and Cassandra are understating the Soviet WMD injected into the American host system. Counter intel on the US side has recently revealed to what extent foreigners had co opted American intel assets. They had no idea, and the ones that did have an idea, they were intentionally suppressed by Americans, not foreigners. The point is, "they have no idea", because they are blind. Their entire edifice was taken over, and they were blind to it. The normal civilians, in their various economic jobs, would not have figured out the truth unless they decided to go renegade and against the status quo. Neither Assistant nor Cassandra are practiced in the arts, even the abstract forms, of mind control, interrogation, emotional manipulation, propaganda techniques, or spycraft. When the nation does not know and is subverted, the citizens also do not know, especially when their total experience list does not exceed their authorities or superiors in the system.

Raven has a more accurate picture of the top down Go board of strategy here. The plan didn't fail, the creator of the plan died before they could take advantage of the plan. Now it is mutating, into a Weapon of Mass Deception, controlled by local factors, what Grim calls the "wild", but I see it as more structured than being in the wild.

But you can't build anything out of it.

The Viral WMD was designed to destroy, not to build. HIV doesn't build you a new immune system.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3qkf3bajd4

This isn't a subject that can be scrolled through or rushed through, and people are then capable of producing the accurate predictions. This is a multi decade project and operation. This isn't something people can grasp in the time it takes to order their chocolate or vanilla.

Ymar Sakar said...

Reading Grim's post in full, I see his link is to the same 1 plus hour video. Grim's position also seems to mirror my own, which I wrote without reading his first. It sets up a mini independent cross reference, analyzing the same data points without interference from the other view points.

In any case, this was the plan, and it failed. We still have to deal with the effects of the demoralization, however. It remains a huge problem for our country that the young have -- for what is now four generations -- been half-educated to despise its ideals and their own history.

I was planning on writing another comment focusing on seeing if there is any more downplaying to deal with, but it looks like there's nothing to work against. Oh well. Just accepting that demoralizing happened, as described, is difficult enough for people. That is a huge leap in mental constraints.

The future question is whether that will be enough, at this point in time given the enemy's mobilization of their strategic reserves and assets.

Ymar Sakar said...

I first saw Yuri Bezmenov's video from a commenter on Neo Neo's site, Art I think it was. And probably later, I also saw it at Cassandra's blog, but doubt it was more than once in total over the entirety of the observable internet from my point of view. At the time, I had already observed the various data points, although more were soon to come as I became self educated on the matter. Once I saw the data points, I drew lines connecting them and realized their significance, much in the same fashion Bezmenov noticed certain things happening when he was de brainwashing himself in India. My experiences and skill sets are different from Bezmenov's, but also very similar in some respects. He also came to see his own culture and nation with a more accurate and objective view/judgment, after learning from a foreign culture/language. By definition, he thought outside the box, the box of the social restrictions he was born with and the box the Soviet regime reinforced using social consensus and other control techniques.

At the time, so many years ago, I had wondered why so many people, on the internet, chose to downplay or just pretend to be blind to these conclusions, which became ever more obvious to me as time went on. Why is it that people do not connect the dots? And the answer I've consciously and subconsciously arrived at is, "they do not connect the dots, because they don't see the dots". Why do they not see? Because they lack the personal experience or ability in certain fields, to be capable of recognizing the existence of certain things they have no experience/expertise/capability in. The rest would be blamed on a lack of Willpower.

2007-2010

If people are beginning to recognize and accept what is going on now, that is because of the actions of the Left. That is not because ordinary normal humans have gained any peculiar experiences or obtained expertise in any particular field. It is an outside force acting in on them, not an internal force pealing away the onion of the world. I have no expectations that they would improve, an individual would already be different if they had an internal motivation. Theoretically, I had predicted that people would come to know in time, but that was an abstract conjecture. It didn't become reality until recently. Which is probably why I am still surprised, in a state of surprise, lacking appropriate contextual settings.

Watching 8 minutes of a 1 hour plus interview, isn't going to provide the context or the data points. Just as watching an hour long plus interview is not going to provide the data contextual points for people to connect the dots. More is needed. Just as a person on September 11 of 2000 needed more than just empty promises, to believe the claim that Islamic Jihad was a threat to the world's only superpower, a mortal one even. For those that had no idea about the Caliphate or the history of Islam, it would seem preposterous, crazy even. A conspiracy theory, right. It would be downplayed on September 10, 2001, almost a year later. Certainly it would be. Certainly it was. Certainly it will be in the future in some other context or scenario.

That is how humans are.