34 years ago, a KGB defector chillingly predicted modern America

[pangaia]

34 years ago, a KGB defector chillingly predicted modern America
July 18, 2018 by PAUL RATNER

Looks like the Russians have been at this for quite a while...

In 1984, Bezmenov gave an interview to G. Edward Griffin from which much can be learned today. His most chilling point was that there’s a long-term plan put in play by Russia to defeat America through psychological warfare and “demoralization”. It’s a long game that takes decades to achieve but it may already be bearing fruit.

- The first stage is called “demoralization” which takes from 15 to 20 years to achieve

“As I mentioned before, exposure to true information does not matter anymore,” said Bezmenov. “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, with 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 fan-bottom. When a military boot crashes his balls then he will understand. But not before that. That's the [tragedy] of the situation of demoralization.”

- the second stage of ideological brainwashing is “destabilization”. During this two-to-five-year period, asserted Bezmenov, what matters is the targeting of essential structural elements of a nation: economy, foreign relations, and defense systems.

-The third stage would be “crisis”. It would take only up to six weeks to send a country into crisis, explained Bezmenov. The crisis would bring “a violent change of power, structure, and economy” and will be followed by-

- the last stage, "normalization." That’s when your country is basically taken over, living under a new ideology and reality.

https://bigthink.com/paul-ratner/34-years-ago-a-kgb-defector-described-america-today

[spanone]

1. K&R...

[BigmanPigman]

2. Fux Ruse has been on TV for about the

entire "demoralization phase". I think they are a tool to destroy the country. They might as well be owned by Putin and not Murdoch since they are completing Putin's agenda and time frame.

[pangaia]

3. Maybe we are still learning that there are truly evil human beings on this planet.

Or that there are more of them than wee thought.

My 'favorite line, if favorite is the right word, is--

"When a military boot crashes him in the balls, then he will understand."

[LiberalLovinLug]

5. Only problem is that it will be our balls they are crashing

When they start on the right, the silent moderates, it will be to late.

[Turbineguy]

4. This is the thing.

Conservatives think it stopped when the Soviet Union collapsed. The Soviets used skills developed by the Okhrana, and the Federation continued in the same vein.

[RandomAccess]

18. Okhrana

Okhrana: Secret Police in Imperial Russia | Study.com
https://study.com/academy/lesson/okhrana-secret-police-in-imperial-russia.html
The Okhrana were the secret police of the Russian tsars, created following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. For over thirty years, they infiltrated, monitored, censored, and detained groups seen as destabilizing the nation or threatening the autocratic power of the Russian Empire.

[AlexSFCA]

6. All of the intelliegence and plans from SU were transferred to Russian Federation

they just renamed KGB to FSB but all of the long term plans, institutional knowledge, training bootcamps, all remained. The difference now is that they have more resources than ever before far outside russia in many countries around the world. Trump is trying to destroy US economy and induce second great depression (it won’t be recession this time sue to the collapse of world markets) in order to complete transfer of wealth to the top and seize full control over the country, congress, judicial system and the entire political system. We can expect increase in all kinds of cyberattacks including infrastructure, financial sectors, aviation, transportation, and yes, voting machines whenever possible.

[pangaia]

8. So-- what would do if you were holding T-Bills in a modest retirement account with a brokerage firm?

And 74, "retired" and living on that and SS?

[AlexSFCA]

13. I am not an expert but seems like you have it secure enough

you have no control over SS but at least you are not invested in any markets.

[pangaia]

16. Thanks. It is not the first time I have asked this.

So far all have given the same answer.

And also if the ship totally sinks it won;t matter WHERE my modest $$$ is..

[Cal Carpenter]

25. That's about the same as my take on it

If the shit hits the fan in a big way, I think it probably won't matter if I have $100k or $2 million. I would guess that, other than those with a gazillion dollars or a giant estate in Paraguay with its own water source, we will all be in the same boat.

I do what I can as far as building a retirement fund (which isn't a whole lot, mind you), as though there is some logic and security in the economic system as we know it, but a huge part of me questions whether or not that will save me if/when it is time to retire regardless...

[markodochartaigh]

24. "induce second great depression ,it won't be recession this time"

This time interest rates are so low that the Fed will be unable to bounce the economy as it has so many times before by lowering interest rates. And of course we know what happens when quantitative easing goes to the big banks to create bubbles but not to stimulate the economy. Of course tRump has made a lot of money from bankruptcy, Secretary of Commerce wilbur ross is famous as "The King Of Bankruptcy", and Secretary of the Treasury mnuchin made a fortune from bankruptcy. This all seems to me to be no coincidence. Conspiracy theory? Isn't it intuitively obvious that the rich and powerful conspire behind closed doors to decide how best to run society for their own interest. Ever since the third monkey fell out of the tree we have been conspiring.

[erronis]

35. So if all those "smart money" people end up losing their world because of upheaval -

Would that be a smart conspiracy?

I'll take your hypothesis and wonder why those really smart vested interests haven't at least tried to stop this slide to a cataclysm that even they can't control. Mercers, Buffets, Murdochs, Kochs, world-wide plutocrats. Do they really think that they can survive happily in a post-civilized world?

[calimary]

7. Yikes...

Makes me wonder if some start-up money for Pox Noise came from Russia.

They’re even more wily than I thought.

[pangaia]

10. I've a;lways assumed they were more wily than I thought/knew,

but I never thought they were this wily...

[smirkymonkey]

9. K&R

[Celerity]

11. G. Edward Griffin is a mainstay of the far RW Alex Jones conspiracy crowd set

That interview referenced was when Griffin was in The John Birch Society.

jus sayin'

[pangaia]

12. Oh. I had no idea,, obviously... LOL

In that case, does what he says seem to be occurring?

[Celerity]

14. Griffin, Jones, The Birchers argue that it is the Democratic Party that is making all of that happen

They see Putin and the Republicans' ties as historically soicio-ethnic white nationalist bonds, not at all Communist. Like a more extreme version of Pat Buchanan's Death of The West and all the other more recent blood and soil movements that are permeating the West (especially in some of the new RW European governments like Poland, Italy,Austria, Hungary, etc). They see Trumpism as falling into that rubric.

[pangaia]

17. You know a lot more about this than I do.. but..

How the heck can they say the Democratic Party is causing this?


It sure seems to me like it is all RW psychopaths.

[Celerity]

21. they think the Democratic Party is a primary agent of cultural Marxism, as well as the

old bullshit that any sort of socialised program (ie social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, Head Start, etc etc etc) is pure socialism which exactly equals communism.

They are too stupid to even understand all the differences between:

social democracy (such as the Scandinavian nations, where a robust, but highly regulated capitalist private sector exists alongside an expansive social safety net)

democratic socialism (Which is now here in our news, and is not at all what Sanders and the rest even believe in, yet foolishly insist on self-labelling as. They are trying to rewrite the term to mean social democracy, but democratic socialism simply is state control of the means of production that is ushered in democratically, which none of them promote at all.)

pure socialism (which entails state ownership of the means of production and is often authoritarian),

and finally communism (almost always authoritarian, except for microscopic experiments historically) and is holistic in the overall takeover of all aspects of society



Unwrapping the 'Cultural Marxism' Nonsense the Alt-Right Loves

You might have heard the term thrown around by figureheads of the new radical right. This is what they're talking about and why they're wrong.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/78mnny/unwrapping-the-conspiracy-theory-that-drives-the-alt-right

On July 22, 2011, in downtown Oslo, the right-wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik—who once gifted his mother a vibrator—detonated a bomb outside the prime minister's office, killing eight. He then drove 25 miles to Utøya island, where the ruling Labour Party's youth rally was being held, and began an hour-long shooting spree that ended with 69 more dead, most of them teenagers. That morning he had electronically distributed a 1,520-page tract, 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, decrying the "rise of cultural Marxism/multiculturalism in the West." Later, he said the massacre had been a way of publicizing his manifesto.

The trope of "cultural Marxism" has been steadily gaining traction among the broad and diverse entity that is the radical right (although, hating diversity, would baulk at you saying so), where it serves as an umbrella term variously responsible for such un-American and anti-Western ills as atheism, secularism, political correctness, gay rights, sexual liberation, feminism, affirmative action, liberalism, socialism, anarchism, and, above all, multiculturalism. The ultimate goal of cultural Marxism, we're led to believe, is to slowly and stealthily dilute and subvert white, Christian Western culture, thereby opening sovereign nations to rule by a one-world corporate government. Whether that's by Jews, lizards, or communists isn't always clear.

So the theory goes that "cultural Marxism" was the master plan of a group of émigré Jewish German academics—widely known today as the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory—who fled Nazi Germany in 1936, decamping to New York. What's certainly true is that, in an attempt to understand why the objective conditions of the European proletariat had failed to trigger widespread revolt, they concluded that religion—that great "opium of the people"—and mass culture served to dampen revolutionary fervor and spread "false consciousness." So adding a splash of Freud to their Marxism, the likes of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Walter Benjamin trained their eyes on the subtle intertwining of social and psychic/sexual repression, believing that a revolutionary consciousness could be engendered through psychic liberation and more enlightened cultural forms and attitudes.

While these were the staunch views of a handful of left-wing thinkers writing in the middle of the 20th century, it does not follow that they have been the ideological architects of a wholesale takeover of Western culture. Yet those who believe it has already happened end up having to explain how George W. Bush and the neocon hawks somehow served a leftist agenda.

clip

[muriel_volestrangler]

19. For it to be relevant, you have to switch all kinds of categories and ideologies

It's a huge rant on how Marxist-Leninist ideology had been fed, via education, to gullible Americans for a generation (ie from the the 60s to the 80s), and how that had demoralized Americans then running things. He warns against the "benevolent dictator" Walter Mondale, which makes it rather hard to stop laughing after that. But this next bit sounds quite apt, if you substitute "Trump" for "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 new generation of Soviet assassins, never mind... he will create false illusions that the situation is under control. [The] situation is not under control. [The] situation is disgustingly out of control."

But it's paranoid nonsense claiming that the KGB had already achieved so much of that - not just destabilizing the USA a bit, but damn near in control, not just with a few politicians, but having brainwashed millions.

I looked up when Bezmenov defected (I had an online argument with a right winger about the clip only 3 weeks ago - they were claiming the KGB really had succeeded in installing socialism in the USA ) - by the time he recorded this, he'd spent more of his adult life in the west than in the USSR. So basically, he was just making it all up.

[pangaia]

20. yikes. Did I just make an idiot of myself?

I was relating all this to yes. "trump" and republicans....

And, damn, it seems to fit so well..

Not in a million years would I ever agree that it was democrats that were "involved," obviously..

Thanks for the clarifying...

[Celerity]

22. you absolutely didn't make an idiot of yourself

The danger of conflating Putinism with the old doctrinaire Marxist Leninism is something I see all the time. The RW in the USA are not 'commie-lovers' at all, they (like Putin) are authoritarian kleptocrats with a shared white nationalist ideology.

[pangaia]

30. And if a dem were sidling up to putin, he/SHE would be raked over the coals

for being a commie..

Mind boggeellling...

[Celerity]

34. the Cold War set the narratives in our country for at least 100 years plus

It certainly doesn't help when our side resorts to the same old red-baiting memes (just spun to attack the asshole Republicans).

The outright homophobia (and also the causal kind) of some also really disturbs me as well.

Link to tweet

Link to tweet

[Achilleaze]

15. republicans are apparently a-ok with this evil anti-American shit

and it shall not stand

[RandomAccess]

23. This is simply jaw-dropping

I'm stunned.

[elleng]

26. Right, posted earlier:

https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016211542

[roamer65]

27. ABC should replay the old 1987 mini-series "Amerika".

Very prescient and would wake a lot of people up.

[Initech]

28. Demoralization happened under Nixon, Reagan, and Bush.

Destabilization happened under Bush 2 and 9/11. Crisis happened after the 2016 election. Now we're wondering what the fuck we should do. Scary.

[gtar100]

29. It seems to me that all totalitarian governments eventually fall simply under the weight

of their own corruption. I wouldn't call "normalization" the "last stage". The silver lining around every dark, right-wing cloud is that their ideology really is so bankrupt of integrity that their governing power is impossible to sustain. Sadly, we-the-people have to suffer their bullshit ideas... all because of these pricks who think they can rule the world. Woo-hoo, rule the world and make a shit hole of it. Modus operandi.

Nationalistic fascism is a foolish form of government. The small-minded interests of a few cannot control the great complexity of the human masses for any extended period of time. I think in part it's because interests change frequently, often unexpectedly, and so there is no long-term stability.

Now if the rich want some real sustainability as a ruling class, they need to do what the emperors of old did and declare themselves to be gods on Earth who will crush anyone who so much as looks at them. As a side job, they could do mushrooms and perform ritual human sacrifice on top of a pyramid. Some people really did have high ambitions back in the day.

[pangaia]

32. But isn;t it true that everything eventually "falls', or 'dies,": or changes....

entropy, if you will ?

[world wide wally]

31. Russia is the same thing as the Sovet Union.

We can see how adept Republicans have become at using language and branding for influence. Americans think that Russia somehow changed with their new flag. The only thing different is their tactics. In an unexpected move, Russia has incorporated corporations, lobbyists, and the religious right to sew discontent and confusion in the USA. After what Obama accomplished, why would a stable country want to change leadership? It wouldn't. Not without an outside force acting on it. (Newtons Law of Inertia).
Russia has become sophisticated in their tactics as Trump does his best to promote stupidity in the US by Putin's design. Our own Constitution is leading to our downfall as we allow Trump's protector assume a Supreme Court seat and Putin knows it

[pangaia]

33. "Our own Constitution is leading to our downfall....."

Very interesting observation...