by David Josef Volodzko at The Radicalist
It is always an honor and a pleasure to write for Konstantin Kisin, who is one of my favorite public intellectuals, especially on the subject of political extremism in America. The last time I wrote for him, October 7 had recently exposed shocking levels of antisemitism on the American left, but our campuses had not yet caught fire. It is ironic now that they have because Americans seem to need a good education more than anything else, so let this essay be a brick in that wall. – David Josef Volodzko
In his famous 1984 interview, Soviet dissident Yuri Bezmenov explained that Moscow knew it couldn’t defeat the United States in a head-on conflict. Instead, the Kremlin devised a four-stage plan to subvert U.S. society and turn the American public against itself.
The first stage, the former KGB agent said, was called demoralization and would take 15 to 20 years because that’s how long the media and sympathetic teachers needed to re-educate one generation of American students. But Bezmenov said this stage was already completed because the hippies of the 1960s, who were “contaminated” with Marxist-Leninist values, were entering positions of power by the time of the interview.
The next two stages would be marked by political polarization and the erosion of trust in our institutions. The final stage of communist subversion, normalization, would be realized once Americans began to freely express the views of their own enemies.
Forty years later, we have American teens on Chinese Communist-run TikTok telling us bin Laden had a point. We have champagne socialist vloggers on BreadTube arguing Russia invaded Ukraine in self-defense. We have Leninist antiwar activists cheering when Iran fires missiles at our allies, student speakers praising North Korea, and activists chanting “Death to America!” in California, Michigan, and New York.
The United States is in the fourth and final stage of a communist subversion and half the country doesn’t even know we’re in a fight. That’s because we misidentify and misjudge communism when we see it…
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Uploaded by Nicholas Marshall at YouTube
FULL INTERVIEW with Yuri Bezmenov: The Four Stages of Ideological Subversion (1984)
Continue Reading“Yuri Bezmenov is a name few Americans seem familiar with today. Mr. Bezmenov was a Soviet informant and KGB operative who defected to the United States in the early 70s. In an increasingly difficult to find 1984 interview with G. Edward Griffin titled “Deception Was My Job”, he laid out the four stages of “ideological subversion” created by radical Marxists to indoctrinate and weaken nations from within.” – Nicholas Marshall