Yuri Bezmenov Soviet Marxist socialist subversion 1983
Yuri Bezmenov was a former KGB Officer specializing in propaganda and subversion. He defected to the U.S. and Canada after years of service with the KGB due to years of ethical and morale conflict with the Soviet Union's agenda. Yuri Bezmenov gave this lecture to American audience in 1983.
The KGB can make the target country dysfunctional by simply exacerbating political differences. Research has found that when making political decisions, political polarization — to put it bluntly — makes you dumber:
We find stark evidence that polarized environments fundamentally change how citizens make decisions. Specifically, polarization intensifies the impact of party endorsements on opinions, decreases the impact of substantive information and, perhaps ironically, stimulates greater confidence in those — less substantively grounded — opinions.
And this effect is especially prominent among politicians and the politically active:
1. Evidence suggests that partisan selective exposure contributes to political polarization;
2. American political elites are polarized;
3. Most Americans are tuned to something other than the news and thus, are not politically polarized by partisan media;
4. Politically engaged partisans, those who occupy the fringes of the American electorate and yet, wield immense political influence, are the most polarized by selective exposure to partisan media.
The findings of this meta-analysis suggest that increased polarization of politically engaged partisans due to these factors has serious implications for our nation’s democratic processes. Further research is needed to explore the effects of a tuned out American electorate and how to re-engage them in a national political conversation.
By influencing the way people think alone, practitioners of ideological subversion like the KGB can inflict serious damage on a country’s Government, economy, and society.
Ideological subversion is broader than fanning political divisions. Bezmenov writes:
The essence of subversion is best expressed in the famous Marxist slogan, (if you substitute “proletarians” for a more appropriate word): “Useful idiots of the world — UNITE! To achieve the desired effect, the subverter must first — make idiots out of normal people, and DIVIDE them, before turning the people into a homogenized mass of useful and united idiots. Tanks and missiles may or may not be needed at final stage. For the time being they are simply the means of terrorising people into inaction and submission. 500 years before Christ, the Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu formulated the principle of subversion this way:
1. Cover with ridicule all of the valid traditions in your opponent’s country.
2. Implicate their leaders in criminal affairs and turn them over to the scorn of their populace at the right time.
3. Disrupt the work of their government by every means.
4. Do not shun the aid of the lowest and most despicable individuals of your enemy’s country.
5. Spread disunity and dispute among the citizens.
6. Turn the young against the old.
7. Be generous with promises and rewards to collaborators and accomplices.
Sound familiar? About 2500 years later we can read this very same instruction in a secret document, allegedly authored by the Communist International for their “young revolutionaries”. The document is titled “Rules of Revolution”:
1. Corrupt the young, get them interested in sex, take them away from religion. Make them superficial and enfeebled.
2. Divide the people into hostile groups by constantly harping on controversial issues of no importance.
3. Destroy people’s faith in their national leaders by holding the latter up for contempt, ridicule and disgrace.
4. Always preach democracy, but seize power as fast and as ruthlessly as possible.
5. By encouraging government extravagances, destroy its credit, produce years of inflation with rising prices and general discontent.
6. Incite unnecessary strikes in vital industries, encourage civil disorders and foster a lenient and soft attitude on the part of the government towards such disorders.
7. Cause breakdown of the old moral virtues: honesty, sobriety, self-restraint, faith in the pledged word.
It looks like Sun Tzu’s basic principles are indeed timeless: you can see them in analyses of the Kremlin’s “active measures” today:
Until recently, Western governments focused on state-to-state negotiations with Putin’s regime largely missed Russian state-to-people social media approaches. Russia’s social media campaigns seek five complementary objectives to strengthen Russia’s position over Western democracies:
Undermine citizen confidence in democratic governance;
Foment and exacerbate divisive political fractures;
Erode trust between citizens and elected officials and democratic institutions;
Popularize Russian policy agendas within foreign populations;
Create general distrust or confusion over information sources by blurring the lines between fact and fiction