KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov's warning to America (1984)
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1) demoralize the people of a country over a period of "at least 15 to 20 years;"
2) destabilize the country's institutions over a period of "2 to 5 years;"
3) precipitate a crisis that would normally unfold over a period of "up to 6 weeks;" and
4) normalize the new state of affairs.
Whether the KGB and its successor organization(s) could have or might have been successful is of course debatable, but no one can deny this kind of persistent effort to subvert another country's people over such a long horizon is... audacious (words fail me).
In particular, I find the idea of a long-term government-sponsored program whose goal is to "demoralize" people a bit upsetting: It stands directly against the let's-roll-up-our-sleeves, we-can-do-it optimism for which US entrepreneurs have long been known around the world.
What Russians call "blowing fuflo" was certainly in use by the time the second flare up of second Chechnya war - 2003.
They funded a gazillion of cheap academicians, for-profit journalists, and think tanks with no apparent goal besides just keeping the buzz about it going, no matter what the actual argument was.
Basically they reduced the signal-to-noise ratio of sensible political discourse to near none, which then swayed the West into making bad decisions, and assured no high quality leadership can emerge, being outshouted by that cacophonic chorus of random opinion leaders.
The inability to take things for what they are, "analysis paralysis," politicians, and business leaders not being able to put a single coherent paragraph without an army of advisers — this is what it is.
They don't care what people keep arguing about for as long as they keep talking, and doing nothing.
It's funny how I guess both sides ended up thinking he is referring to the other side though.
Back then, organizations like Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament were Soviet-influenced.
To me it seems more demoralizing to look back and think things have gotten worse
And yes of course it's demoralizing, his theory was that if you think your country is evil or based on evil and not much better than anything else why would you ever fight for it? Especially when faced with an enemy who actually believes that he is dying for a great cause, and the best system.
From a cold war perspective, if the other side doesn't believe his system to be superior anymore that could've been decisive to win a war. Just look at the vietnam war and how it (thankfully) ended.
Then my normalcy bias kicked in and I thought "it would never get that bad"
What I'm essentially saying is that he doesn't really fit into the "demoralize/destabilize/subvert/normalize" framework. But that's not to say he doesn't fit very well in others ;)
Wouldn't subversion be opportunistic, though? Maybe during Cold War, their tactics had more success on the left, but more recently they've had more success on the right. If your goal is to subvert the whole, it's six of one, half a dozen of the other.
I guess it makes sense and it doesn't have to be pejorative: conservatives are usually more attached to traditional structures while historically leftist groups push for a transformative change. Subversion is a good way to transform a structure.
A good example would be the 1619 projet that, whether you agreed with its message or not, explicitly aimed at undermining the current mainstream narrative on the history of the USA. I can't think of any right wing equivalent
Read what I wrote in another comment. It doesn't matter if it's left, or right for as long as disturbing random discourse keeps your mind jammed, and prevents you from seeing things for what they are.
I'd say it is working. The sheer quantity of anti-American rhetoric online, places like Reddit and even on HN, is astounding. Ostensibly coming from our own citizens, in many cases. If this kind of self-loathing is reality, we have a big problem indeed. The optimist in me likes to assume that a good chunk of it is planted deliberately by America's foes.
The only way to make a great country greater is to acknowledge its flaws and strive to correct them. The default mode of communication seems to have been people pointing out US failures, and US people widely shouting them down, regardless of the merit of the claim. That has also been a major factor driving anti-American rhetoric, you can't blame that on foreign influence.
Or, in other words: anti-American rhetoric coming from American citizens is a good thing: it makes the country better.
No, it's more like he is a Russian authoritarian leader appealing to the greatest imagery of Russian national struggle to make a war of aggression look like something more noble.
But if you listen to the video, he is talking about using the Left's idealogy as subversion.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/25/tucker-carlson...
>But with all the right-wing folks I know, I've yet to hear ONE say they actually think this invasion is a good idea, or that Putin is a good guy.
How many right wing folks do you know?
Edit: Here's Candace Owens with 3M followers implying that the first air strikes in Kyiv were the work of NATO because Putin said he's only attacking the eastern parts.
Seriously, from everything I have been seeing going from meme accounts to trump aligned figure heads, there has been an overwhelming support for ukraine (while criticizing biden of course but that's still not being pro putin). Yes there are some on right who are but thats because the right isn't a monolith. Imo it's just unhelpful and it reeks of terminal partisanship mentality when even a pretty bad situation like this is used to score points against the other side using cherry picked examples even if it's so easily disproven. Inevitably it also turns into a "the other side is not as willing to go to war as we are so they are against us"
Now, part of this is the asymmetry of American politics where leftists, qua leftists, are generally marginalized, but it goes beyond that.
If this were some big Russian support smear campaign by the right, certainly we should see it in all their normal channels, right? I really do not feel like visiting any more right wing sites to prove my point. The simple fact is, we read comments like the grandparent, and we're supposed to believe that Russian support is wide-spread. The truth is, aside from a couple of nut-cases, both sides of the aisle seem to overwhelmingly condemn this invasion.
Her posts have 8 k. upvotes sometimes, that's still pretty low.
That's why so many of his examples are relatable today - we haven't actually fixed anything. And that's why it's unclear if the subversion was successful or not, these divisions already had momentum. They were already going to happen, the subversion, if present, only served to accelerate their unwinding.
This part is the most fun. Peeling back the curtain on these subversions doesn't do anything to make the subversion less effective! He has a reactionary perspective, certainly, but it could just as well be framed through the lens of leftism. It just happens that this particular framing leverages the fears of his audience to a decay of a glorious past whereas the leftist version would be the denial of a glorious future. That's why I like him so much. He's cementing his audience's stance in a way that makes them feel more resolute in their defiance to subversion which amplifies the division. It's like finding a perfectly crafted puzzle. Pure genius.
Putin has been recently using rhetoric that he must remove "neo-nazis" in an effort to "demilitarize" the rightful Ukrainian people.
The division is because we haven't had anything to unite over since 9/11. The Iraq war was divisive.
At this point it is half the country living in one media fantasy land and the other half living in different media fantasy land. Both think they are the ones not living in a media fantasy land but believe the other side is. Both think the fantasy land they live in is objectively true.
Just like from your post the fantasy land you are in is no mystery. It is fun to watch this process honestly when you don't have a horse in the race.
If another country invaded the US though this would all disappear instantly overnight. A legit war with China or Russia that brings the threat of intercontinental missiles, this would all vanish overnight.
This is an interesting choice of contrast between the KGB and US entrepreneurs.
How about when compared to US intelligence agencies?
Do you think they are more similar or different in their methodologies?
As with any country, different organizations have different missions and philosophies -- and so do the people within them.
Read my another comment below, by having a whoping 23 intelligence agencies, USA condemned its leadership to a shower of opinions out of which no correct one can be synthesized.
Only the size of antenna maters, not how powerful is the receive amplifier, or the number of them.
If you link up 23 pre-amps in a row, you will not get a 23 times clearer signal, but 23 times more noise.
“In the multitude of counsellors there is safety” — Prov 11:14
But democracies shouldn't fear coups, you say? 6 of January, I say back. Or Charles de Gaulle (wait, you didn't know that Charles de Gaulle successfully executed a coup in France in 1958? [1])
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coup_d%27%C3%89tat:_A_Practica... [2] https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674737266
> In particular, I find the idea of a long-term government-sponsored program whose goal is to "demoralize" people a bit upsetting: It stands directly against the let's-roll-up-our-sleeves, we-can-do-it optimism for which US entrepreneurs have long been known around the world.
Though, IIRC, their subversion projects use a similar strategy to VCs: throw a bunch of efforts at the wall, and see which ones stick. For a lot of it, I don't think they had a big master plan, but tasked agents with coming up and implementing ideas for subversion and disinformation.
The reality is that a society made up of people who think their country is terrible and don't feel any responsibility to work to support it is probably not going to last that long.
https://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/hypernormalisation-2016...
We seem to have little continuity in big picture thinking in the Govt and most things are on a 2 year cycle of trying to get majorities in congress and/or the presidency.
Meanwhile a totalitarian state can plot patiently over two or three decades by which time it might almost be too late for the other side to make a difference.
The situations around Ukraine and Taiwan seem like good examples.
Consider policies around strategic alliances (Saudi Arabia, Israel) and regime change (Iraq, Syria, Iran, among others) from at least the 90s through the present day.
Long term, american bureaucrats stay in the government pushing for the same stuff for the length of their career. Even once they've retired, people like Robert Muller come back to put in bits of work.
That's taken as an article of faith, but I'm not sure how true it actually is. Sure some totalitarian have fallen apart (the Soviet Union), but others have not (China), and Western liberal democracies aren't looking so stable nowadays.
Remember JFK, transfer of power after Nixon, even the Bush/Gore debacle. The whole machinery worked in the end, however flawed.
Totalitarian regimes like China, where you dismantle your opposition, including state institutions, make them very vulnerable. If Xi or Putin disappear tomorrow, there would be utter chaos.
Consider for one the soft power that the US has.[1] You can just limit this to the seemingly frivilous “everyone wants to wear jeans” point. It is nowhere near anything that the Soviet Union and now Russia could dream of. And the point is even stronger if we just consider the West. To propose that the Soviet Union and now Russia could psychologically undermine America itself is completely outlandish.
Now consider that Russia wasn’t even able to psychologically subvert their “brother people” the Ukranians. A smaller country (although still large) right next to them with a fair amount of Russian speakers. Let’s just for a moment pretend for the sake of the argument that the separatist movements were just indoctrinated by Russia. That was still a failure since the majority of Ukranians ended up being pro-Western.
[1] And I do mean soft and not the “we’ll persuade you to open yourself up to penetration by our corporations” kind of influence.
It's not outlandish at all. Many of the things he describes have actually happened.
Well, not all of them, but the there were enough separatists in Crimea and Donetsk, etc. to destabilize those regions. Were those separatists psychologically subverted, or did they just happen to want to re-join Russia?
They don't have to subvert all of America, just enough of a subvertable multitude to destabilize things.
First of all, us Westerners have already questioned how democratic the supposed cessation from Ukraine was. So let’s not get selective now. Russia already had their military stationed their. That could have a chilling effect.
Second of all, plenty of people in Crimea speak Russian. And a lot of the Crimean Tatars were forcefully deported under the Soviet Union. I just bring that up since forceful deportation is not exactly, uh, the tool of a governing party that feels that they can just manipulate their subjects into becoming… whatever the Soviet Union wanted them to become.
> ... and Donetsk, etc. to destabilize those regions.
In your quote you left out the rest of the paragraph where I addressed the separatists. Even if we assume—and this is an insane hypothetical for the sake of this specific argument—that all those separatists were hypnotized by Russia, that’s still a very lackluster result considering that the majority of Ukraine is pro-Western right now. I mean they did commit to an all out war with them. So much for subversion.
But let’s entertain this point for one more paragraph. The separatist conflict started after the 2014 coup which America supported.[1] So the separatist sentiment was in part caused by America trying to subvert the political process of Ukraine (and kind of openly, too). That’s in a way more impressive than Russian subversion considering how far away the US is.
[1] Page 4, https://www.mearsheimer.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Why-t...
> Were those separatists psychologically subverted, or did they just happen to want to re-join Russia?
This feels like a rhetorical question where one of the alternatives is the obvious answer. In case it is the former which is “correct”: it is quite common for peoples and ethnicities to not live neatly in each of their own little nation state. 25% of Latvia, for example, consists of ethnic Russians. Finland has a Swedish-speaking minority. You have Transnistria in Moldova. So what makes an ethnic/cultural separatist region at all weird or unusual? Especially when a major power is willing to unofficially help them out for eight years...
That’s… the point I was making…
Does Russia have a military presence in the US? It does not and it never will.
I remember the run up to the Iraq war. NBC, cnn and everyone else had a 24 hour running coverage about the evils of the saddam Hussein regime. They pulled the babies out of jthe incubators, we were told. They had weapons of mass destruction. And people were scared. We had just been attacked. We lined up behind George bush and gave him everything he wanted- the patriot act, which ended up being a massive increase in the surveillance state, a declaration of a state of emergency- anything he wanted. And it’s so, so easy for us now to point the finger at the people alive then and say, “what idiots”. But people were scared. They were shocked and afraid, and that is when you really have to be careful, that’s when the public is most easily manipulated. People are shocked and afraid now, which means that this is the worst possible time to trust any of our leaders or anything you see on the major news networks.
What kind of new patriot act is Biden going to push through? What new foreign policy disaster? Get a grip! Russia is not some kind of puppet master controlling America! There is only one direction this leads and it’s a bigger and bigger enlargement of the intelligence apparatus.
This person thought in the 1980's that American left wing propaganda will subvert and eventually destabilize the United States to a point were they lose a hot war with the Soviet Union, and that the American left wing propagandist will be summarily executed by the Soviet occupiers, rather than be allowed to rule.
Assuming you aren't from a parallel dimension, Bezmenov's predictions proved false.
Did you watch the video?
It did weaken Western countries internally, and the relations between them, but not (at least, I think from evidence so far) as much as Putin needed.
[1] That’s just what I have heard, living in a different European country. Maybe it’s just Ukrainian propaganda.
You can’t be a republican without being called a nut job anymore. We’re more divided than ever.
The US universities are today full of Marxist propagandists. Left wing politicians who visited and defended socialist dictatorships are elected and reelected. Many tonight shows enjoy calling anyone who disagrees with them the "alt right". This is consistent with Marxist propaganda coming from Americans themselves. The US media pretends there is no burning buildings behind them and call protests 'peaceful'. That is very similar to the idea that people will ignore burning evidence right in front of their eyes. If you make obvious statements about basic biology that contradicts the current insanity you are going to be cancelled. (Again ignoring evidence)
Th US is incredibly divided. People who disagree with the left are consistently called Nazis and yelled down. If you are going to make an event with people that disagree with the left protesters will physically stop you from getting in.
Where do you think putin took that "attacking neonazis" from? Calling your opponent a Nazi to justify taking them down has been a constant political tool in the west
- even if it was relevant at the time back in the 80s, applying it to today is not an accurate comparison
- sovietism wasn't real socialism
- whether what he is saying is true or not it arms ideological enemies and undermines the progressive cause, and is therefore misinformation
- his whole structure is decorating an underlying set of deceptions with facts that make it seem true, but it's not.
- if the soviet agenda is that subtle and complex as he says it could have produced him as an equally false disinformation source.
- governments need to do and hide things to manage people and the economy for the greater good so he's saying normal government techniques are evil to make you paranoid
- if you are educated you know this is how politics really work anyway and being responsible sometimes means compromising for the greater good, etc.
- people use this video to justify their existing racism, homophobia, anti-semitism, misogyny, etc.
These have some truth, but I don't think they persuasively discredit the systemic process of attacking a culture with the predictive power that he describes. They're separate things. There is a lot of prior art on the tactics and strategies of totalitarian movements, most of it in the form of american cold war anti-communist propaganda, which though campy, when you view it again from the present perspective of the US having lost it's surprisingly prescient stuff. The soviet goal was to destabilize and dissolve cultures in the space of a couple of generations, and that's what it does.
Sometimes I think the fall of the iron curtain wasn't the end of soviet totalitarianism, but rather, its liberation from being confined to mere nation states, only to spend the 90's and 00's infiltrating western institutions, and we're seeing the fruit of that today. Most of our current leadership went to university in the 90s and were introduced to a wave of critical theory virus then (last one was the 70s), and we are seeing it in the milennials now.
Propaganda and indoctrination makes less sense in a totalitarian society. It’s in the name: a totalitarian society needs no consent or illusion of choice because the choices have been made for you. The same applies to merely authoritarian societies to a lesser degree.
Putin had his whole narrative of the Russian Empire becoming a thing again. So that was definitely meant to motivate the average Russian. But on the other hand it is not crucial that Russians buy it; Russians were directly told that people who protest the invasion will get arrested.
There is too much fascination with the Orwellian “thought crime” type of propaganda and indoctrination. Try to have a more pscyhoanalytical approach to it. Like Bernays.
This is one of those funny and illogical arguments that come up often and uses a rather common (and ironic) propaganda trick of just denying a massive failure ever existed.
This is the equivalent of stating Nazism wasn't "real national socialism" or Mussolini wasn't using "real fascism".
You can't just pretend away bad outcomes from a terrible system when it doesn't go your way. They deployed socialism and communism and the outcomes were exactly what those systems always bring.
Where has this mythical "real socialism" been tried and succeeded? Venezuela? Its also a disaster. Was that not "real" socialism either?
The reality is Socialism has been most effective while being integrated in a hybrid manner with other systems (Social Democracy). Socialism on its own is a disaster that hands over far too much power to the state and doesn't work economically.
The only place it really worked were small communes like Longo Maï. Why? Because they are made by people who want it and everybody shares the common spirit. This is only possible on a small scale, never on a state scale when it's pushed down your throat and often you can't leave.
Yugoslavia under Tito.
Think about this war. Everyone is condemning Russia, making statements supporting Ukraine, applying all kind of sanctions against Russia.
Why did not governments do the same when US invade Iraq or Afghanistan?
Obviously, the USSR is gone but it did manage to demoralize enough people to shill for Russian foreign policy despite Putin being much more fascist adjacent, and enjoying close support from the bellicose Orthodox patriarchs who rail against western politics instead of sticking to droning on about God.
My leftists are British and Canadian however. YMMV based on geography.
But we also acknowledge that the Russian government, oligarchic autocracy as it is, is right to say that endless NATO expansion, for which read extended US hegemony, is not the security structure Europe needs. The chance was missed to abolish NATO when the Warsaw Pact went out of business more than thirty years ago; instead we are left with the consequences of broken US promises not to extend the alliance eastwards.
So Stop the War aims to provide the opposition that the Labour front bench seemingly won’t. The Tories have taken the lead internationally in talking up the crisis, announcing imminent coups, false-flag incidents or invasions almost every day, to the point where even the government in Kiev has asked them to tone it down a bit.
More substantively, they have sent fresh arms to Ukraine and deployed more British forces into Eastern Europe—all the very things which Russia has said it finds most menacing. All this pointless provocation seems to speak of a government which would actually quite like a war to break out, for strategic and doubtless domestic political reasons, particularly since it will not involve any British forces fighting.
https://tribunemag.co.uk/2022/02/keir-starmer-guardian-stop-...
Americans like to use “marxist” as a slur and to use it out of context to attack political enemies but there is no shortage of actual Marxist who label themselves as such, e.g this professor, found randomly by my Googling for 30sec: https://blog.apaonline.org/2020/06/17/black-lives-matter-as-...
Most people have no idea that they’re regurgitating Marxist ideology when they repeat the phrases and arguments they hear, and of course would never identify as such - but there’s no sense in which making this observation is misinformation.
Personally I lament the fact that people across the political spectrum are digging ideological holes for themselves instead of focusing on how we can all help each other.
The communists manifesto says
"Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat."
This grand narrative and ideology spoken with objective certainty with regards to binary oppositions, is the complete opposite of postmodernism.
Milton Friedman's works in a similar vein although on the other side are the opposite of postmodernism as well.
To revisit the original point, civil rights is deeply intertwined with radical left-wing and Marxist politics, for better or worse. Personally I think it’s a shame because civil rights should be for everyone, it is bigger than any political persuasion.
The best thing we can do is de-politicise these movements, the entire political spectrum has become so toxic and divisive.
Not the 80s but 60s. Nixon blamed the civil rights movement of the 60s on the soviets/communism. Nixon's ability to pin the civil rights movement on the soviets/communism made him extremely popular. People forget how popular Nixon was.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/november/7/...
This guy is all over youtube/social media, but he's just stating standard anti-communist propaganda we've had since mccarthy in the 40s/50s.
https://www.vox.com/identities/2018/12/17/18145075/russia-fa...
Anything that divides, causes upset, or is distracting is going to be a good propaganda target, regardless of whether the underlying cause is good or bad.
Yeah, that’s the real issue. If we can find a way to be neighborly (literally and figuratively) with those who have opinions (not actions) we abhor we might get somewhere.
But, all somebody has to do is say some opinion threatens their life and that plan is out the window.
In the west, he earned his money with anti-communist lecturing and his stories became more sophisticated over time.
https://jrnyquist.blog/2020/03/26/the-sino-soviet-long-range...
Serious questions to anti-Putin Americans: if Mexico developed a cozy relationship with China and Russia, and, as a sovereign nation, decided it wanted to install their nukes on its (Mexico's) land, would America allow it? (This is a serious question, please don't treat it lightly.)
2. Well before the Soviets put nukes in Cuba.
"1" is debatable (it was US-backed).