“Existential” has become a very popular word today, even among those who aren’t adherents of French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. For example, people who want attention focused on some pet issue will often call it an “existential threat.”
We’ve heard that climate change is an existential threat (not likely), that ISIS is an existential threat (not really), that “structural racism” is an existential threat (not exactly), and that China is an existential threat (you bet). But a true existential threat, and the greatest one we face, is rarely understood well or discussed. But a voice from beyond the grave warned of it Monday — issuing words to the wise.
Yuri Bezmenov was a KGB asset from the Soviet Union who defected to Canada in 1970. From that point forward, he increasingly sounded the alarm about what he called “ideological subversion” in America. And it appears that now, 28 years after his death, more people may finally be heeding his warnings.
This is both encouraging and alarming. Encouraging because it means more citizens are becoming aware of our truest existential threat; alarming because it means that this threat to our existence is beginning to materialize fully.
Bezmenov was featured Monday by Newsmax’s Grant Stinchfield in a video titled “Americans Are Being Trained to Accept Socialism.” The host warned that this was the result of a “devious subversion” process that is “nearly complete.”
“It all sounds like a grand conspiracy theory, until you listen to one of the men who helped carry out the scheme to take down America,” Stinchfield continued. Enter Yuri Bezmenov.
Stinchfield then began playing excerpts of an interview the Soviet defector granted to author and former New American contributor G. Edward Griffin in 1984. “Marxism-Leninism ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of at least three generations of American students without being challenged or counterbalanced by the basic values of Americanism, or American patriotism,” Bezmenov can be seen saying.
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Bezmenov has explained that contrary to Hollywood-spun myth, the Soviets’ actions in America weren’t mainly of the James Bond-flick variety. “The main emphasis of the KGB is not in the area of intelligence at all,” he elaborated. “Only about 15 percent of time, money, and manpower is spent on espionage and such. The other 85 percent is a slow process, which we call either ideological subversion or active measures … or psychological warfare.”
This is the process of “demoralization,” in KGB parlance.
What this “basically means is, to change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite 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,” Stinchfield then showed Bezmenov explaining.
Does this sound familiar, maybe when you see people advocating bizarre ideas such as flooding the country with illegals and eliminating ICE; defunding the police; advocating “transgenderism,” even for kids, and having men compete in women’s sports; opposing voter ID and election integrity in general; demeaning the Founders; and the wholesale destruction of our history, culture, and traditions? As Stinchfield put it, “Reality in America is already gone.”
Consequently, “exposure to true information does not matter anymore,” Bezmenov then stated in Stinchfield’s video. “A person who is demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell him nothing to him.”
Think about this the next time you present a leftist with irrefutable facts, only to have him look at you as if you have two heads and resort to ad hominem attacks (e.g., “That’s racist!”). To demoralized people, the commonsensical is controversial.
Unfortunately, what comes after subversion’s demoralization phase — which Bezmenov said was already “more than complete” in the mid-1980s already — is the next step: destabilization.
As Stinchfield points out, this is precisely what the last few years’ chaos has been all about, with the Black Lives Matter and Antifa riots and agitation and the aforementioned “Year Zero” attacks on our culture.
The host then played a Bezmenov warning. The subversion “has to be stopped, unless you want to end up in a gulag [socialist] system and enjoy all the advantages of socialist equality,” the defector said. “Working for free, catching fleas on your body, sleeping on planks of plywood, in Alaska this time, I guess. That’s where Americans will belong — unless they wake up” (video below).
Hat tip: Whatfinger.com
Continuing, Stinchfield also mentioned ideological subversion’s third phase: crisis. This is when “socialist” revolution occurs and is what the left-wing radicals currently in charge of the executive branch, using Joe Biden as a figurehead, aim to thrust us into, the commentator avers.
Tyranny’s rise “is what will happen in the United States if you allow all the schmucks to bring the country to crisis, to promise people all kinds of goodies and paradise on Earth,” Bezmenov is then seen concluding.
Bezmenov would likely be amused, and saddened, that he’s only now, in the 11th hour, getting wider exposure. As my faithful readers may know, I’ve been citing him for many years. And having watched hours of his interviews, a few matters should be clarified.
First, the process of demoralization in KGB-speak isn’t just a matter of undermining morale, but more of causing people “to turn aside or away from what is good or true or morally right: to corrupt the morals of,” as Merriam-Webster puts it.
Second, contrary to many commentators’ impression, the demoralization process has been occurring, by Bezmenov’s reckoning, for far longer than they think. Remember, he said back in the mid-80s that at least “three generations” had already been affected, which means that it has been a reality for 67 years or more. (I’d argue that our problems go back even further, but that’s a subject for a different day.)
Third, while Bezmenov was actually involved in feeding disinformation into the West when he worked with the KGB, he did not frame our demoralization as being some grand conspiracy; rather, he said that most of it is done “by Americans and to Americans” with the KGB just giving us little disinformation nudges in the right (read: wrong) direction.
Most significantly, Bezmenov seemed to indicate that the problem’s root cause is a lack of, as he put it, “moral values.” These are more properly known as “virtues,” as I often point out. And their cultivation in ourselves and our children is the solution to our woes. Demoralization is remedied by moralization (sense 2b).
The complete version of Bezmenov’s “ideological subversion” interview is below.
So our greatest existential threat is, as the Founders would have put it, a lack of virtue in the citizenry. For no conspiracy to enslave a people to government is necessary if you first enslave them to vice.
