In 1984 a KGB defector explained what we're seeing in the U.S. today--and seems to nail it
Yuri Bezmenov was a KGB operative. He gradually became horrified by the communist system, and in 1970 he defected to Canada. In 1984 he was interviewed on video, which is the clip below.
He claims the former Soviet Union was carrying out a very long-range plan to de-stabilize the U.S. The main thrust was not spying--he claimed only about 15% of the KGB's budget is spent on espionage. He said the other 85% is a slow process called either ideological subversion or "active measures." In effect it was psychological warfare.
The first phase was to begin corrupting the education system, so that young Americans would have no knowledge of the fundamental beliefs or morality of the founders, but would instead believe the highest goal was to achieve absolute equality of outcome--which would be enshrined above all else.
According to Bezmenov, by 1984 all the "opinion shapers" in the U.S.--the media and Hollywood--were amoral idiots, products of the 70's. These faux-intellectuals had no core beliefs, so would constantly be looking for causes they could get excited about.
I'll try to get a transcript up as soon as I have time, but meanwhile it's worth hearing this guy. Clip is 15 minutes or so, and very much to the point.
Partial transcript--I've edited it to remove a lot of quirks in the language.
Interviewer: You spoke several times before about ideological subversion. When the Soviets use that phrase, what do they mean?
Bezmenov: Ideological subversion is a process which is overt and open. You can see it with your own eyes. All you have to do-- all American mass media has to do-- is to unplug their bananas from their ears, open up their eyes, and they can see it. There is no mystery. [It has] nothing to do with espionage. I know that espionage intelligence-gathering looks more romantic.
But in reality, the main emphasis of the KGB is not in the area of intelligence at all. According to my opinion and [the] opinion of many defectors, only about 15% of time, money, and manpower [are] spent on espionage. The other 85% is a slow process, which we call either ‘ideological subversion,’ or ‘active measures’—‘[Russian term]’ in the language of the KGB—or ‘psychological warfare.’
What it basically means is **to change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite of the abundance of information, no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interests of defending themselves, their families, their community or their country.**
It’s a huge brainwashing process that happens very slowly. It's divided into four stages. First is demoralization. It takes 15 to 20 years to demoralize a nation, because this is the minimum time it takes to educate one generation of students. In other words, Marxist-Leninist ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of at least three generations of American students, without being challenged, or counter-balanced by the basic values of Americanism (American patriotism).
The result you can see. Most of the people who graduated in the sixties (drop-outs or half-baked intellectuals) are now [this was in 1984] occupying positions of power in the government, civil service, business, mass media, [and the] educational system. You are stuck with them. You cannot get rid of them.
They are contaminated--programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain way. You cannot change their mind[s]. Even if you expose them to authentic information, you still cannot change the basic perception and the logic of behavior. For those people the process of demoralization is complete and irreversible.
To [rid your] society of these people, you'd need another 15 to 20 years to educate a new generation of patriotically-minded and common-sense people, who would act in the interests of the United States.
Interviewer: And yet you say those people who have been ‘programmed’ and [are] in place and who are favorable to an opening with the Soviet concept... these are the very people who would be marked for execution after a communist revolution?
Bezmenov: Most of them, yes. Because the psychological shock when they finally see what the "beautiful society" of ‘equality’ and ‘social justice’ really means, they will revolt. They will be very unhappy, frustrated people, and a Marxist regime does not tolerate such people.
Unlike in [the] present United States there will be no place for dissent in future Marxist-Leninist America. Here you can get popular like Daniel Ellsberg or filthy-rich like Jane Fonda for being a ‘dissident,’ for criticizing your Pentagon. But in [the] future these people will be simply squashed like cockroaches. Nobody is going to pay them nothing for their beautiful, noble ideas of equality. They don't understand this so it will be a great shock for them.
The demoralization process in [the] United States is basically already complete. For the last 25 years... actually, it's over-fulfilled because demoralization now reaches such areas where previously not even Comrade Andropov and all his experts would even dream of such a tremendous success.
Most of it is done by Americans to Americans, thanks to [a] lack of moral standards.
And as I mentioned before, even being exposed to true information does not matter anymore, because someone who's been demoralized is unable to recognize such information as true. Facts mean nothing to him. Even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, documents, pictures; even if I take him by force to the Soviet Union and show him [a] concentration camp, he will refuse to believe it, until he [receives] a kick in his bottom. When a military boot crushes his [gonads], he will understand. But not before that. That's the [tragedy] of the situation of demoralization.
So basically America is stuck with demoralization. Even if you start right now, here, this minute, you start educating [a] new generation of American[s], it would still take you fifteen to twenty years to turn the tide of ideological perception of reality back to normalcy and patriotism.
The next stage is destabilization. This time [the] subverter does not care about your ideas and the patterns of your consumption; whether you eat junk food and get fat and flabby doesn’t matter any more. This time—and it takes only from two to five years to destabilize a nation—what matters [are] essentials: economy, foreign relations, [and] defense systems. And you can see it quite clearly that in some areas, in such sensitive areas as defense and [the] economy, the influence of Marxist-Leninist ideas in [the] United States is absolutely fantastic. I could never believe, fourteen years ago when I landed in this part of the world, that the process [would have gone] that fast.
The next stage is crisis. It may take only up to six weeks to bring a country to the verge of crisis. You can see it in Central America now [1984].
Finally, after crisis, with a violent change of power, structure, and economy, you have so-called "normalization." It may last indefinitely. "Normalization" is a cynical expression borrowed from Soviet propaganda. When the Soviet tanks moved into Czechoslovakia in ‘68, Comrade Brezhnev said, ‘Now the situation in brotherly Czechoslovakia is normalized.’
This is what will happen in [the] United States if you allow all these schmucks to bring the country to crisis, to promise people all kind[s] of goodies and the paradise on earth, to destabilize your economy, to eliminate the principle of free market competition, and to put [a] Big Brother government in Washington, D.C. with benevolent dictators like Walter Mondale, who will promise lots of thing[s], never mind whether the promises are fulfillable or not. He will go to Moscow to kiss the bottoms of [a] new generation of Soviet assassins. He will create false illusions that the situation is under control. But the situation is not under control. It is disgustingly out of control.
Most of the American politicians, media, and educational system trains another generation of people who think they are living in peacetime. False. [The] United States is in a state of war: undeclared, total war against the basic principles and foundations of this system. And the initiator of this war is not Comrade Andropov, of course. It's the system. However ridiculous it may sound, [it is] the world Communist system or Communist conspiracy. Whether I scare some people or not, I don't give a hoot. If you are not scared by now, nothing can scare you.
But you don’t have to be paranoid about it. What actually happens now [is] that unlike [me], you have literally several years to live on unless [the] United States [wakes] up. The time bomb is ticking: with every second [he snaps his fingers], the disaster is coming closer and closer. Unlike [me], you will have nowhere to defect to. This is the last country of freedom and possibility.
Interviewer: Okay, so what can we do? What is your recommendation to the American people?
Bezmenov: The immediate thing that comes to my mind is that there must be a very strong national effort to educate people in the spirit of real patriotism, number one. Number two, to explain [to] them the real danger of socialist, communist, whatever, welfare state, Big Brother government. If people fail to grasp the danger of that development, nothing ever can help [the] United States. You may kiss good bye to your freedom, including freedoms [for] homosexuals, [for] prison inmate[s]; all this freedom will vanish, evaporate. Including your precious lives.
The second thing: [at] the moment at least part of [the] United States population is convinced that the danger is real. They have to force their government, and I'm not talking about sending letters, signing petitions, and all this beautiful, noble activity. I'm talking about forcing [the] United States government to stop aiding Communism. Because there is no other problem more burning and urgent than to stop the Soviet military-industrial complex from destroying whatever is left of the free world. And it is very easy to do: no credits, no technology, no money, no political or diplomatic recognition, and of course no such idiocy as grain deals to [the] USSR.
The Soviet people, 270 [million] Soviets, will be eternally thankful to you if you stop aiding [the] bunch of murderers who sit now in [the] Kremlin, and whom President Reagan respectfully calls ‘government.’ They do not govern anything, least of all such [a] complexity as the Soviet economy.
So basic[ally], two very simple... maybe two simplistic answers or solutions, but nevertheless they are the only solutions: educate yourself, [and] understand what’s going on around you. You are not living at [a] time of peace. You are in a state of war and you have precious little time to save yourself. You don’t have much time, especially if you are talking about [the] young generation. There’s not much time left for convulsions to the beautiful disco music. Very soon it will go--overnight.
If we are talking about capitalists or wealthy businessmen, I think they are selling the rope from which they will hang very soon. If they don’t stop, if they cannot curb their unsettled desire for profit, and if they keep on trading with the monster of the Soviet Communism, they are going to hang very soon.
I know it sounds unpleasant. I know Americans don’t like to listen to things which are unpleasant, but I have defected not to tell you the stories about such idiocy as microfilm, James Bond-type espionage. This is garbage. I have come to talk to you about survival. It’s a question of [the] survival of this system. You may ask me what is [in it] for me. Survival, obviously. Because I like... as I said, I am now in your boat. If it sinks, we sink together.
There is no other place on this planet to defect to.
He claims the former Soviet Union was carrying out a very long-range plan to de-stabilize the U.S. The main thrust was not spying--he claimed only about 15% of the KGB's budget is spent on espionage. He said the other 85% is a slow process called either ideological subversion or "active measures." In effect it was psychological warfare.
The first phase was to begin corrupting the education system, so that young Americans would have no knowledge of the fundamental beliefs or morality of the founders, but would instead believe the highest goal was to achieve absolute equality of outcome--which would be enshrined above all else.
According to Bezmenov, by 1984 all the "opinion shapers" in the U.S.--the media and Hollywood--were amoral idiots, products of the 70's. These faux-intellectuals had no core beliefs, so would constantly be looking for causes they could get excited about.
I'll try to get a transcript up as soon as I have time, but meanwhile it's worth hearing this guy. Clip is 15 minutes or so, and very much to the point.
Partial transcript--I've edited it to remove a lot of quirks in the language.
Interviewer: You spoke several times before about ideological subversion. When the Soviets use that phrase, what do they mean?
Bezmenov: Ideological subversion is a process which is overt and open. You can see it with your own eyes. All you have to do-- all American mass media has to do-- is to unplug their bananas from their ears, open up their eyes, and they can see it. There is no mystery. [It has] nothing to do with espionage. I know that espionage intelligence-gathering looks more romantic.
But in reality, the main emphasis of the KGB is not in the area of intelligence at all. According to my opinion and [the] opinion of many defectors, only about 15% of time, money, and manpower [are] spent on espionage. The other 85% is a slow process, which we call either ‘ideological subversion,’ or ‘active measures’—‘[Russian term]’ in the language of the KGB—or ‘psychological warfare.’
What it basically means is **to change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite of the abundance of information, no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interests of defending themselves, their families, their community or their country.**
It’s a huge brainwashing process that happens very slowly. It's divided into four stages. First is demoralization. It takes 15 to 20 years to demoralize a nation, because this is the minimum time it takes to educate one generation of students. In other words, Marxist-Leninist ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of at least three generations of American students, without being challenged, or counter-balanced by the basic values of Americanism (American patriotism).
The result you can see. Most of the people who graduated in the sixties (drop-outs or half-baked intellectuals) are now [this was in 1984] occupying positions of power in the government, civil service, business, mass media, [and the] educational system. You are stuck with them. You cannot get rid of them.
They are contaminated--programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain way. You cannot change their mind[s]. Even if you expose them to authentic information, you still cannot change the basic perception and the logic of behavior. For those people the process of demoralization is complete and irreversible.
To [rid your] society of these people, you'd need another 15 to 20 years to educate a new generation of patriotically-minded and common-sense people, who would act in the interests of the United States.
Interviewer: And yet you say those people who have been ‘programmed’ and [are] in place and who are favorable to an opening with the Soviet concept... these are the very people who would be marked for execution after a communist revolution?
Bezmenov: Most of them, yes. Because the psychological shock when they finally see what the "beautiful society" of ‘equality’ and ‘social justice’ really means, they will revolt. They will be very unhappy, frustrated people, and a Marxist regime does not tolerate such people.
Unlike in [the] present United States there will be no place for dissent in future Marxist-Leninist America. Here you can get popular like Daniel Ellsberg or filthy-rich like Jane Fonda for being a ‘dissident,’ for criticizing your Pentagon. But in [the] future these people will be simply squashed like cockroaches. Nobody is going to pay them nothing for their beautiful, noble ideas of equality. They don't understand this so it will be a great shock for them.
The demoralization process in [the] United States is basically already complete. For the last 25 years... actually, it's over-fulfilled because demoralization now reaches such areas where previously not even Comrade Andropov and all his experts would even dream of such a tremendous success.
Most of it is done by Americans to Americans, thanks to [a] lack of moral standards.
And as I mentioned before, even being exposed to true information does not matter anymore, because someone who's been demoralized is unable to recognize such information as true. Facts mean nothing to him. Even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, documents, pictures; even if I take him by force to the Soviet Union and show him [a] concentration camp, he will refuse to believe it, until he [receives] a kick in his bottom. When a military boot crushes his [gonads], he will understand. But not before that. That's the [tragedy] of the situation of demoralization.
So basically America is stuck with demoralization. Even if you start right now, here, this minute, you start educating [a] new generation of American[s], it would still take you fifteen to twenty years to turn the tide of ideological perception of reality back to normalcy and patriotism.
The next stage is destabilization. This time [the] subverter does not care about your ideas and the patterns of your consumption; whether you eat junk food and get fat and flabby doesn’t matter any more. This time—and it takes only from two to five years to destabilize a nation—what matters [are] essentials: economy, foreign relations, [and] defense systems. And you can see it quite clearly that in some areas, in such sensitive areas as defense and [the] economy, the influence of Marxist-Leninist ideas in [the] United States is absolutely fantastic. I could never believe, fourteen years ago when I landed in this part of the world, that the process [would have gone] that fast.
The next stage is crisis. It may take only up to six weeks to bring a country to the verge of crisis. You can see it in Central America now [1984].
Finally, after crisis, with a violent change of power, structure, and economy, you have so-called "normalization." It may last indefinitely. "Normalization" is a cynical expression borrowed from Soviet propaganda. When the Soviet tanks moved into Czechoslovakia in ‘68, Comrade Brezhnev said, ‘Now the situation in brotherly Czechoslovakia is normalized.’
This is what will happen in [the] United States if you allow all these schmucks to bring the country to crisis, to promise people all kind[s] of goodies and the paradise on earth, to destabilize your economy, to eliminate the principle of free market competition, and to put [a] Big Brother government in Washington, D.C. with benevolent dictators like Walter Mondale, who will promise lots of thing[s], never mind whether the promises are fulfillable or not. He will go to Moscow to kiss the bottoms of [a] new generation of Soviet assassins. He will create false illusions that the situation is under control. But the situation is not under control. It is disgustingly out of control.
Most of the American politicians, media, and educational system trains another generation of people who think they are living in peacetime. False. [The] United States is in a state of war: undeclared, total war against the basic principles and foundations of this system. And the initiator of this war is not Comrade Andropov, of course. It's the system. However ridiculous it may sound, [it is] the world Communist system or Communist conspiracy. Whether I scare some people or not, I don't give a hoot. If you are not scared by now, nothing can scare you.
But you don’t have to be paranoid about it. What actually happens now [is] that unlike [me], you have literally several years to live on unless [the] United States [wakes] up. The time bomb is ticking: with every second [he snaps his fingers], the disaster is coming closer and closer. Unlike [me], you will have nowhere to defect to. This is the last country of freedom and possibility.
Interviewer: Okay, so what can we do? What is your recommendation to the American people?
Bezmenov: The immediate thing that comes to my mind is that there must be a very strong national effort to educate people in the spirit of real patriotism, number one. Number two, to explain [to] them the real danger of socialist, communist, whatever, welfare state, Big Brother government. If people fail to grasp the danger of that development, nothing ever can help [the] United States. You may kiss good bye to your freedom, including freedoms [for] homosexuals, [for] prison inmate[s]; all this freedom will vanish, evaporate. Including your precious lives.
The second thing: [at] the moment at least part of [the] United States population is convinced that the danger is real. They have to force their government, and I'm not talking about sending letters, signing petitions, and all this beautiful, noble activity. I'm talking about forcing [the] United States government to stop aiding Communism. Because there is no other problem more burning and urgent than to stop the Soviet military-industrial complex from destroying whatever is left of the free world. And it is very easy to do: no credits, no technology, no money, no political or diplomatic recognition, and of course no such idiocy as grain deals to [the] USSR.
The Soviet people, 270 [million] Soviets, will be eternally thankful to you if you stop aiding [the] bunch of murderers who sit now in [the] Kremlin, and whom President Reagan respectfully calls ‘government.’ They do not govern anything, least of all such [a] complexity as the Soviet economy.
So basic[ally], two very simple... maybe two simplistic answers or solutions, but nevertheless they are the only solutions: educate yourself, [and] understand what’s going on around you. You are not living at [a] time of peace. You are in a state of war and you have precious little time to save yourself. You don’t have much time, especially if you are talking about [the] young generation. There’s not much time left for convulsions to the beautiful disco music. Very soon it will go--overnight.
If we are talking about capitalists or wealthy businessmen, I think they are selling the rope from which they will hang very soon. If they don’t stop, if they cannot curb their unsettled desire for profit, and if they keep on trading with the monster of the Soviet Communism, they are going to hang very soon.
I know it sounds unpleasant. I know Americans don’t like to listen to things which are unpleasant, but I have defected not to tell you the stories about such idiocy as microfilm, James Bond-type espionage. This is garbage. I have come to talk to you about survival. It’s a question of [the] survival of this system. You may ask me what is [in it] for me. Survival, obviously. Because I like... as I said, I am now in your boat. If it sinks, we sink together.
There is no other place on this planet to defect to.
Labels: "communist takeover", "yuri bezmenov"
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