What Soviet Subversion?

Friday, February 5th, 2010

I find it fascinating that a man who worked inside the Soviet propaganda machine can defect to the US and say, in the early 1980s, this is how we’ve been manipulating your media and your schools, and no one seems to notice or care:

Ideological subversion is the process which is legitimate and open. You can see it with your own eyes…. It has nothing to do with espionage.

I know that intelligence gathering looks more romantic…. That’s probably why your Hollywood producers are so crazy about James Bond types of films. But in reality the main emphasis of the KGB is NOT in the area of intelligence at all. According to my opinion, and the opinions of many defectors of my caliber, only about 15% of time, money, and manpower is spent on espionage as such. The other 85% is a slow process which we call either ideological subversion, active measures, or psychological warfare. What it basically means is: to change the perception of reality of every American that despite of the abundance of information no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community, and their country.

It’s a great brainwashing process which goes very slow and is divided into four basic stages. The first one being “demoralization”. It takes from 15 to 20 years to demoralize a nation. Why that many years? Because this is the minimum number of years required to educate one generation of students in the country of your enemy exposed to the ideology of [their] enemy. In other words, Marxism-Leninism ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of at least three generation of American students without being challenged or counterbalanced by the basic values of Americanism; American patriotism….

The result? The result you can see. The people who graduated in the 60′s, dropouts or half-baked intellectuals, are now occupying the positions of power in the government, civil service, business, mass media, and educational systems. You are stuck with them. You can’t get through to them. They are contaminated. They are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern. You cannot change their mind even if you expose them to authentic information. Even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still can not change the basic perception and the logic of behavior.

In other words [for] these people the process of demoralization is complete and irreversible. To rid society of these people you need another 15 or 20 years to educate a new generation of patriotically minded and common sense people who would be acting in favor and in the interests of United States society.
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The next stage is destabilization…. It only takes 2 to 5 years to destabilize a nation. This time what matters is essentials; economy, foreign relations, [and] defense systems. And you can see it quite clearly that in some… sensitive areas such as defense and [the] economy, the influence of Marxist-Leninist ideas in the United States is absolutely fantastic. I could never believe it 14 years ago when I landed in this part of the world that the process will go that fast.

(Hat tip to Aretae, who cites Soviet subversion as a pillar of Eric Raymond‘s thinking.)

There are many videos up on YouTube now of Yuri Bezmenov explaining the process of subversion.

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