In 1970 a Soviet KGB agent stationed in India disguised himself as a hippie and blended in with a crowd. He managed to escape detection and found his way to the West where he defected. Yuri Bezmenov took the name Tomas Schuman, and wrote a short book entitled “Love Letter to America.” In it he describes how he fell in love with the goodness of America and couldn’t go on promoting the deceptions and inhumane tactics that poisoned so many lives. Below is a 1984 interview with him “Deception was my Job” in which Bezmenov tries to warn Americans about the ideological subversion that is practiced on them by totalitarian actors, such as the Soviet KGB:
It’s a fascinating interview in so many ways. Bezmenov was a member of the privileged elite in the Soviet Union. He had nothing to gain materially by defecting, and certainly nothing to gain in terms of prestige. It was the weight of conscience that caused him to break free of a life of practicing deception — and to take the great risks involved in making a break for freedom. In his new life he resolved to do the best he could to help us understand how totalitarians play the game of ideological subversion, in which they push open societies to become closed societies. You should look at his book in the link above to get the full story. On page 22 of his book, he includes a chart to show the four stages of Soviet ideological subversion: 1.) Demoralization, which takes about a generation’s time, 15-20 years; 2.) Destabilization, which takes about 2-5 years; 3.) Crisis, which is a matter of months; and finally 4.) Normalization, basically the mopping up operation once an authoritarian system is in place.
It’s interesting that the demoralization phase in America began a whole lot longer ago than 20 years. I would guess at least 50 years or so. If Bezmenov’s theory is correct, I think there are several reasons why America would still be standing as a free nation with an intact — though much threatened — Constitution. A lot of unpredicted forces seem to have disrupted the demoralization and destabilization processes. The election of Ronald Reagan would be one disruption, especially with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Many would also put the election of Donald Trump into this category of an unpredictable black swan event. And there are a whole lot of cross currents in a free society that can foil the plans of even the most calculating totalitarians. Chief among them, in my opinion, are freedom of association and freedom of speech that serve to cross pollinate ideas and feed a ripple effect of freedom.
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