Ponerization of society: Soviet subversion of Western Society by Yuri Bezmenov

Zadig

Jedi
Yuri Bezmenov, a.k.a. Tomas Schuman, soviet KGB defector, explains in detail his scheme for the KGB process of subversion and takeover of target societies at a lecture in Los Angeles, 1983.
Yuri Alexandrovitch Bezmenov is a former KGB propagandist who was assigned to New Dehli, India, defected to the West in 1970, and was interviewed by Edward Griffin in 1985. Bezmenov explains his background, some of his training, and exactly how Soviet propaganda is spread in other countries in order to subvert their teachers, politicians, and other policy makers to a mindset receptive to the Soviet ideology.

He also explains in detail the goal of Soviet propaganda as total subversion of another country and the 4 step formula for achieving this goal. He recalls the details of how he escaped India, defected to the West, and settled in Montreal as an announcer for the CBC.

Videos: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=66245842658CE1AF&search_query=Yuri+Bezmenov (subtitles in portuguese)

More information:http://www.crossroad.to/Quotes/brainwashing/2007/bezmenov.htm. Also an interesting interview about KGB interest in yoga: http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=GB&hl=en-GB&v=Srw3YSda1XY

"Yuri Bezmenov on demoralization":
ED GRIFFIN: Well, you spoke before about "ideological subversion" and that's a phrase that I'm afraid some Americans don't understand. When the Soviets use the phrase "ideological subversion" what do they mean by it?

1. YURI BEZMENOV: 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 [alluding to Pavlov]. 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.

ED: And yet these people who have been programmed and as you say [are] in place and who are favorable to an opening with the Soviet concept - these are the very people who would be marked for extermination in this country?

YURI: Most of them, yes. Simply because the psychological shock when they will see in [the] future what the beautiful society of EQUALITY and social justice means in practice, obviously they will revolt. They will be very unhappy [and] frustrated people, and Marxist-Leninist regime does not tolerate these people. Obviously they will join the [ranks] of dissenters; dissidents. Unlike the present United States there will be no place for dissent in future Marxist-Leninist America. [Now] you can get popular like Daniel Elsburg and filthy rich like Jane Fonda for being a dissident [and] for criticizing your Pentagon. In [the] future these people will simply be [he makes a squishy noise] squashed like cockroaches for criticizing the government. Nobody is going to pay them nothing for their beautiful [and] noble ideas of EQUALITY. This they don't understand and it will be the greatest shock for them, of course.

The demoralization process in the United States is basically completed already for the last 25 years. Actually, it's over fulfilled because demoralization now reaches such areas where not even Comrade Andropov and all his experts would even dream of such tremendous success. Most of it is done by Americans to Americans thanks to lack of moral standards. As I mentioned before, exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who was demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him, even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents and pictures. ...he will refuse to believe it.... That's the tragedy of the situation of demoralization.

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.

Most of the American politicians, media, and educational system train another generation of people who think they are living at the peacetime. False. 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 the world Communist conspiracy. Whether I scare some people or not, I don't give a hoot. If you're not scared by now, nothing can scare you.

ED: Okay, so what do we do? What is your recommendation to the American people?

YURI: Well, the immediate thing that comes to mind is, of course, 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, welfare state, Big Brother government.... The moment at least part of [the] United States population is convinced that the danger is real, they have to FORCE their government... to stop aiding Communism.
 
Full video of an interview with former KGB propaganda agent and Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov in the year 1984.

Highly recommended watching, especially the last part of the interview where he warns U.S. citizens to not repeat the Utopia which the Soviet system sought. 33 years aftert this interview, it is obvious that his warnings have not been heard in western societies, creating a very dangerous situation for all of us!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3qkf3bajd4 said:
This is G. Edward Griffin's shocking video interview, Soviet Subversion of the Free-World Press (1984), where he interviews ex-KGB officer and Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov who decided to openly reveal KGB's subversive tactics against western society as a whole.


https://youtu.be/y3qkf3bajd4
 
Data said:
Full video of an interview with former KGB propaganda agent and Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov in the year 1984.

Highly recommended watching, especially the last part of the interview where he warns U.S. citizens to not repeat the Utopia which the Soviet system sought. 33 years aftert this interview, it is obvious that his warnings have not been heard in western societies, creating a very dangerous situation for all of us!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3qkf3bajd4 said:
This is G. Edward Griffin's shocking video interview, Soviet Subversion of the Free-World Press (1984), where he interviews ex-KGB officer and Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov who decided to openly reveal KGB's subversive tactics against western society as a whole.


https://youtu.be/y3qkf3bajd4

I think you're confusing the natural outcome of powerful bureaucracies in the West becoming entrenched and corrupt (via the process of ponerization) with the 'blame-game' of finding external scapegoats who purposely and consciously did it. The above defector's spiel was tailored to give Americans exactly what they wanted to hear; that the negative direction their country was heading in was caused from without. It's the predecessor of 'Blame Putin For Everything'.
 
Niall said:
I think you're confusing the natural outcome of powerful bureaucracies in the West becoming entrenched and corrupt (via the process of ponerization) with the 'blame-game' of finding external scapegoats who purposely and consciously did it. The above defector's spiel was tailored to give Americans exactly what they wanted to hear; that the negative direction their country was heading in was caused from without. It's the predecessor of 'Blame Putin For Everything'.

I did notice that he is very slick in his presentation, and a bit unnecessarily blunt at times, suggesting an agenda. He very well could have been allowed to defect. Nevertheless, he does give an insight into how the KGB operated, and that was quite fascinating.
 
I watched the beginning and the last third and found the guy to be very insightful.

Niall said:
I think you're confusing the natural outcome of powerful bureaucracies in the West becoming entrenched and corrupt (via the process of ponerization) with the 'blame-game' of finding external scapegoats who purposely and consciously did it. The above defector's spiel was tailored to give Americans exactly what they wanted to hear; that the negative direction their country was heading in was caused from without. It's the predecessor of 'Blame Putin For Everything'.

Well, yes, he comes across as communism-bashing and seems to go overboard a bit à la Hayek, i.e. welfare state = road to hell and all that. However, I think what he shares goes beyond mere communism bashing; he actually comes close to describing the ponerization process IMO. He's also spot-on in his predictions - except that it's not a Soviet conspiracy that is bringing down the West, it's the destructive and Orwellian postmodernist/'leftist'/'liberal' ideology, which of course does have a lot to do with schizoidal communist thought. (At least that plays a huge part.) I mean look at his predictions and what we have today:

Totalitarian surveillance state: check
Prison camps, torture, decline of the rule of law: check
Free market essentially dead, controlled instead by big business and big government: check
People totally possessed by ideology & incapable of seeing the facts: check

He clearly was onto something I think and he made his points quite eloquently (at least in the parts I've watched). I don't see any reason why he shouldn't be a genuine defector who's had enough of the Soviet regime and who has seen a lot, connected some dots and was beginning to see the big picture. He may have idealized the West too much, probably because while he had inside knowledge about the Soviet regime, he didn't know too much about what was happening with the West's Secret Team. From what I understand, this happened to a lot of defectors from communist countries.
 
A small 'heads up' regarding this topic.

I just listened to the most recent Geopolitics and Empire podcast – a podcast I usually enjoy – where someone called Jeff Nyquist was interviewed. I've never heard of this guy but he appears to enjoy at least some popularity in the alternative sphere, and he's written some books. Long story short, Nyquist believes for instance that everything that's going on (including the Covid psyop) is, and was, planned by the evil Soviet KGB peeps and their Chines companions some 40-50 years ago, that the collapse of the Soviet Union was just a trick, and that JFK was, indeed, killed by the Russian KGB. Oh, and Putin is, indeed, an evil psychopath and Russia will imminently conquer Ukraine. Plus, Covid is a sneaky bioweapon attack by the Chinese-Russian old school communists.

I was about to stop listening to this interview after 10min since it got increasingly more ridiculous but I got curious enough to endure it until the end, and to see if the host would question his crazy theories at all, which he sadly didn't (I sensed that he didn't 'buy' everything this guy said but didn't want to engage in debate). I also wanted to hear what evidence he presented to support his theory, since I'm open to the idea that his theory could potentially be true. However, as I listened more the pieces of the puzzle he presented didn't in my opinion fit together with what we are seeing going on.

In any case, this made me remember this thread we had and thought I'd mention this because at least according to this Nyquist guy this theory of the 'ultra secret KGB cabal' masterminding (4d chess!) everything is apparently gaining attracation again.

I wouldn't be surprised if this guy is paid by the CIA to spread this nonsense. As has been said previously in this thread, it's tempting to buy this theory since the things Bezmenov said in the famous interview, and Golitsyn's predictions, fit with many details of what's going on. But as they say, correlation doesn't prove causality.

I'd be interested in hearing what you guys have to say about this, maybe there is something valuable in midst of all the noise? Here's the interview:


Here's the blurb from that page:

Jeff Nyquist discusses the work of KGB defectors such as Anatoly Golitsyn and Yuri Bezmenov who warned that the Communists in the East (e.g. Russia and China) were playing a strategic long-game against the West, where they would feign collapse, and ultimately come back to destroy Europe and the United States. The 1920s Soviet counter-intelligence Operation Trust was an early example of this. The Sino-Soviet split had been faked. The Soviets had infiltrated the major opposing intelligence services and fed them false information. 94% of Golitsyn’s predictions came true, including his forecast that China and Russia would emerge stronger than the West and change the military balance. He views the pandemic as a biological attack on the West, which is destroying the economy. Golitsyn ultimately believed that there would be convergence between the East and West into one global and universal Marxist-type system. In this new world, China would take control of the United States, which includes extermination of the native population. He believes the Russian takeover of Ukraine has been long planned and that what happened in Kazakhstan was Russia securing their rear in advance of their advance West. The U.S. and NATO don’t have the capacity to defend Ukraine, the West is weak and must avoid war.
 
Yep, and its adherents are only growing in numbers as the rot sets in. One version or another of this theory is predominant in Western 'historical thought' on 'how we arrived at this impasse'. If it's not the Russians, it's the ChiComs, or the Globalists (which is, at least, more reality-based, if, by that, American oligarchs are included in 'the Davos Set'), or the Globalist-Stooges-OF-the-ChiComs (this peculiar variant has Western elites being secretly controlled by China, the Arch-Puppet Master. ('ChiComs' = Chinese Communists. h/t Alex Jones)

It's completely unhinged, of course, because it includes the proposition that the Russian/Soviet 'PTB' made a strategic decision to torpedo their economy and shrink the Russian population by about a third in the 1990s as part of a ruse to 'take down the USA from within, 30-40 years from now'.

What all flavors of this 'meta-conspiracy theory' have in common is a fundamentally flawed 'US/Western-centric' worldview, whereby the other 7 billion are literally people with no will of their own, other than their usefulness to 'bad actors' who periodically 'activate' them in service of 'destroying the West'. It speaks to the scale and depth of this weird combination of egoism and naiveté - particularly in Americans - about the peoples of other countries, cultures, and 'civilizations', and their hopes, dreams, and national and social aspirations, etc.

The practical solution to discovering the truth or usefulness of Bezmenov's claims is to check them for historical contemporary evidence - not to judge them by the mayhem in the US today. The USSR archives have been substantially declassified since the 90s. Did evidence of the plots Bezmenov spoke of emerge from them? Has anyone attempted to verify that?
 
Yes, this idea seems to be pretty contagious. It's easier to believe that evil Russian masterminds are behind everything than to accept that corruption and decadence is everywhere.

Not so long ago Del Bigtree interviewed G. Edward Griffin who made the famous interview with Bezmenov. Since it's a while ago I watched it, I can't remember exactly what Del's and Griffin's 'angle' was but in any case they did appear very 'taken' and 'amazed' by Bezmenov's 'predictive words'.

Here's that episode:
 
It’s easy to imagine any defector from anywhere falling into this, right?
I picture myself from twenty years ago if I had actually moved to Canada to escape GW’s second term. I’d likely think the Pentagon “got to” the poor Canucks 😂

It seems we are slowly and then, all at once, coming to the conclusion that we really have no place to run, be it geographic, political, ideological, etc.
 

Know Your History | Official Call of Duty®: Black Ops Cold War Trailer (2020)​


Black Ops Cold War's campaign is set during the early 1980s of the Cold War, taking place between Call of Duty: Black Ops (2010) and Black Ops II (2012) chronologically. It is centered around a pursuit of the alleged Soviet spy Perseus, whose stated goal is to subvert the United States and tilt the balance of power toward the Soviet Union. For the campaign, the player takes control of "Bell", who is recruited by CIA officer Russell Adler into a multinational task force created to hunt down Perseus.
It became the best-selling game of 2020 in the US.

Somebody really wanted to make Bezmenov known to young Americans...🤔
 
I think it would be good to know.

(more embedded links in the original article; I'm leaving the most informative only and replacing a dead one)

WHO WAS YURI BEZMENOV?​

NOVEMBER 19, 2020 MARK HACKARD
Over the past several years, the testimony of a previously obscure Soviet defector has grown ever more potent as America unravels into chaos. Should we trust him?

The late Yuri Bezmenov (1939-1993), styled a man who turned his back on the KGB and a “fighter against totalitarianism,” has gained exalted status among independent media commentators and has even found currency in the mainstream. Bezmenov, the son of a Red Army officer and trained in oriental languages, was a journalist for the Soviet news agency Novosti and scored a posting to India in the late 1960s. In 1970 he vanished from the USSR embassy colony disguised as a hippy and made his way to the West, where he would rail against the Soviet system, writing pamphlets like Love Letter to America; No Novosti is Good News; World Thought Police; and Black is Beautiful, Communism is Not.

As a Soviet defector, Bezmenov was readily available to denounce Moscow and the communist menace in Western media outlets. His shining moment, now filtered through a multitude of memes and short clips on social networks, was a 1984 interview with author G. Edward Griffin. Bezmenov sold himself to his audience as a former KGB operative and proclaimed that the Soviet Union was applying a Marxist strategy of subversion to undermine the United States from within. It consisted of four stages:
  1. Demoralization
  2. Destabilization
  3. Crisis
  4. Normalization
Bezmenov’s analysis and prognostications have since been seized upon by columnists and media personalities as proof of everything from a cultural Marxist drive to take over America to a specifically Russian plot with the same objective. He stars in a trailer for the video game Call of Duty: Black Ops – Cold War as a Cassandra warning of communist subversion. He has also featured in no less than the New York Times’ clumsy “Operation Infektion,” a 2018 video series informing us that Russian intelligence “hacked” the 2016 US presidential elections through disinformation operations.

Few, however, have called into question Bezmenov’s story and his claims, most tellingly his supposed status within the KGB’s First Chief Directorate (Foreign Intelligence). This biographical detail is what made his story sensational, as the defection of a mere Soviet journalist would hardly arouse much interest in the reading public. Yet that’s the hard truth – Bezmenov never served in the KGB.

Yuri Bezmenov was never a KGB staff officer for the First Chief Directorate or any other unit of the Soviet intelligence service. Nor did he ever see the inside of School 101, where future intelligence officers trained, Lubyanka, or the KGB residency in India. Bezmenov was a low-ranking newsman for Novosti who wrote propaganda, and after he switched sides, he plied the same trade on behalf of the Western powers. The KGB may indeed have used him as an informant – to keep an eye on contacts of interest – and for participation in occasional “active measures,” disseminating Soviet narratives and piecemeal disinformation to foreign media. Bezmenov’s position would have allowed for such possibilities. While a certain number of KGB officers would have worked undercover as journalists at Novosti (not the inflated 75% Bezmenov gives), Bezmenov wasn’t one of them.

Bezmenov was also never a wizard of Soviet psychological warfare – he had no entry to the KGB First Chief Directorate’s Service A or the Communist Party’s Central Committee that oversaw its activities. Nor did Bezmenov, self-identified expert on active measures, ever mention Service A’s chief Maj. Gen. Ivan Agayants, or his successor Lt. Gen. Sergei Kondrashev. He demonstrates zero understanding of the strategic purpose of real active measures as practiced by the KGB. His supposed training in tabletop wargames and interrogation would have been part of cursory reserve officer mobilization courses mandatory for Soviet university students throughout the Cold War, not a special program that made Bezmenov a hardened expert in subversion. Indeed, the four-step process of subversion he claimed as a covert Soviet strategy could be gleaned by anyone well-versed in Sun Tzu and practical psychology. Further, Bezmenov provides no evidence of Soviet infiltration of American culture and institutions to advance a complex, globe-spanning campaign to implode the United States, only coarse ideological invective.

What Bezmenov embodies in Cold War espionage history, in exaggerated fashion, is the tendency of defectors to inflate their self-worth through ever-wilder claims. Anatoly Golitsyn, an actual KGB officer who crossed the Iron Curtain a decade before Bezmenov, forged a similar path with tales of a “Monster Plot,” including a false Sino-Soviet split, to deceive America and leave her ripe for conquest. Golitsyn enjoyed the patronage of James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s chief of counterintelligence, and his theories were popular among suspicious cold warriors throughout the West.

Today Bezmenov is clearly useful to US media and political elites, and so his assertions of Soviet subversion are dusted off and given a new lease on life. It’s much easier to ascribe the failure and dysfunction of an entire political system to “Kremlin meddling,” or an even older KGB plan just now being realized, than to shine light on the predations of an oligarchic superclass that has misruled America into civilizational breakdown. Anti-communism is a sure hit with the right, and liberals are programmed into a newfound hatred of Russia; each side is manipulated via dialectics in order to further obfuscate the truth and obscure any viable resolution to real cultural, political and economic challenges.

There very well may be a resurrected Bolshevist spirit of subversion present in the current disorder, a phenomenon that infused the Frankfurt School’s transvaluation of all values in the West. In our twenty-first century that spirit animates neither communism, an ideological corpse long-buried, nor the SVR, modern Russia’s intelligence service. Rather, the ruling class itself, with its panoply of media organs, multinationals, academia and government agencies, seems possessed by a force spiraling towards destruction.

In the video game Call of Duty: Black Ops – Cold War, players, briefed by prophet Bezmenov on the Soviet threat to America, are able to choose three options for their character’s gender: male, female, and non-binary. Just who is subverting whom?

BTW, according to Russian Wikipedia, Bezmenov died of "massive heart attack" due to alcoholism.
 
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