In interviews with Russian citizens, street reporters asked how the Ukrainian invasion had affected living conditions in Russia. A couple of responses caught my attention; here are some paraphrases: “It hasn’t made a difference [pause]…Well, I can’t buy jeans…”; “It affected my work; I lost my job on an international project”; “I can’t use Apple Pay, Visa, or Mastercard; I can’t buy foreign products”; “We we’re poor; we’re still poor [shrugging shoulders]”; “We’ll figure out how to make things better.” The preponderance of statements from people on the street some three months into a war that might have cost some 20,000 to more than 30,000 Russian lives, had one focus: The Self. There were no comments about the loss of life, Russian or Ukrainian, no comments about the destruction of cities. Except for effects on the individuals themselves, no one seemed to care much about the war next door.
I noted in some interviews that some Russians hinted at what they were thinking without criticizing the government because, you guessed it, there are consequences for taking a stand in opposition to the Russian ruling class, specifically, imprisonment, fine, maybe worse. How did the Russians become so fearful of speaking out against their government?
So, fear of a government quiets people. It has done so since civilization arose, possibly reaching its ancient peak in the trial of Socrates and in the practice of Roman proscriptions. Conform, or pay a price. In Russia and China today, that price ranges from imprisonment to death. In the United States, it amounts to ostracism by social media and defamation by the Press. The “silencing” has begun as anyone who has been “cancelled” knows and as more words fall onto a proscription list as, for example, team names have already fallen.
Silencing is the product of propaganda manufactured by Marxists and Socialists. The best explanation of this process lies in a decades old (1984) video interview of Yuri Bezmenov, a KGB defector. * The former intelligence agent says that there are four stages to change a country from a free-thinking society to a controlled mass of humanity afraid of their government. The stages occur in broad daylight, but people just don’t pay attention to the insidious subversive ideology.
1. The first stage is a long-term process of “demoralization” that requires 15 to 20 years, the time it takes to educate a generation. Note here that the effort has been underway for a few generations already, so that the recent attempts to tell kindergarten children that they are neither boys nor girls is more a culmination than a first step. With regard to Marxism and Socialism, the process involved in this country a pattern of thinking in the ideology. That first generation of “social justice warriors” will then teach the ensuing generation. Ironically, Bezmenov says, the very people who push this demoralization will themselves be the first to be eliminated when the full implementation of Marxism occurs.
2. The second stage is “destabilization” of the society. Destabilizing both an economy and a military is key, and the process takes less time than the first stage, maybe on the order of just five or six years.
3. The third stage is crisis. One method for achieving a crisis is the promise of equity, a “false illusion” that the “situation is under control, when, in fact, nothing is under control: Foreign relations, cost of goods (food shortages) and services, and inflation (for example, gasoline prices). This is exacerbated by the failure of the citizenry to notice that a free nation is at war with a subversive enemy.
4. The fourth stage is the overturning of power and the “normalization” of the new ideology. In this stage there will be “benevolent dictators” who will lead utopian societies in which a promised equity is a guiding principle. After a society is “normalized,” the citizens will be like those current Russians who are self-silenced because they fear retribution by the government.
Bezmenov says that Americans do not realize they are involved in a war, a “total war.” The fundamental way to win the war is through education, but that takes the same amount of time that the first stage takes. The end product of that war without counter steps is the destruction of a free society and the quieting of free-thinking citizens capable of recognizing threats to their way of life. The quashing of freedom has already begun with the aid of broadcast and social media companies and government agencies that unwittingly act as agents of a subversive ideology.
Interestingly, the Bezmenov interview occurred in 1984. Unfortunately, if you were to point that out to many Americans who were educated in the last three decades, you would probably find few who might understand the significance of that year. They have been “normalized.”
* You can find the full interview on YouTube. If you see the original version, you’ll need to skip to 1:07 in the interview to get the list of four stages. It has also been excerpted by Doc Rich on his YouTube channel.
I noted in some interviews that some Russians hinted at what they were thinking without criticizing the government because, you guessed it, there are consequences for taking a stand in opposition to the Russian ruling class, specifically, imprisonment, fine, maybe worse. How did the Russians become so fearful of speaking out against their government?
So, fear of a government quiets people. It has done so since civilization arose, possibly reaching its ancient peak in the trial of Socrates and in the practice of Roman proscriptions. Conform, or pay a price. In Russia and China today, that price ranges from imprisonment to death. In the United States, it amounts to ostracism by social media and defamation by the Press. The “silencing” has begun as anyone who has been “cancelled” knows and as more words fall onto a proscription list as, for example, team names have already fallen.
Silencing is the product of propaganda manufactured by Marxists and Socialists. The best explanation of this process lies in a decades old (1984) video interview of Yuri Bezmenov, a KGB defector. * The former intelligence agent says that there are four stages to change a country from a free-thinking society to a controlled mass of humanity afraid of their government. The stages occur in broad daylight, but people just don’t pay attention to the insidious subversive ideology.
1. The first stage is a long-term process of “demoralization” that requires 15 to 20 years, the time it takes to educate a generation. Note here that the effort has been underway for a few generations already, so that the recent attempts to tell kindergarten children that they are neither boys nor girls is more a culmination than a first step. With regard to Marxism and Socialism, the process involved in this country a pattern of thinking in the ideology. That first generation of “social justice warriors” will then teach the ensuing generation. Ironically, Bezmenov says, the very people who push this demoralization will themselves be the first to be eliminated when the full implementation of Marxism occurs.
2. The second stage is “destabilization” of the society. Destabilizing both an economy and a military is key, and the process takes less time than the first stage, maybe on the order of just five or six years.
3. The third stage is crisis. One method for achieving a crisis is the promise of equity, a “false illusion” that the “situation is under control, when, in fact, nothing is under control: Foreign relations, cost of goods (food shortages) and services, and inflation (for example, gasoline prices). This is exacerbated by the failure of the citizenry to notice that a free nation is at war with a subversive enemy.
4. The fourth stage is the overturning of power and the “normalization” of the new ideology. In this stage there will be “benevolent dictators” who will lead utopian societies in which a promised equity is a guiding principle. After a society is “normalized,” the citizens will be like those current Russians who are self-silenced because they fear retribution by the government.
Bezmenov says that Americans do not realize they are involved in a war, a “total war.” The fundamental way to win the war is through education, but that takes the same amount of time that the first stage takes. The end product of that war without counter steps is the destruction of a free society and the quieting of free-thinking citizens capable of recognizing threats to their way of life. The quashing of freedom has already begun with the aid of broadcast and social media companies and government agencies that unwittingly act as agents of a subversive ideology.
Interestingly, the Bezmenov interview occurred in 1984. Unfortunately, if you were to point that out to many Americans who were educated in the last three decades, you would probably find few who might understand the significance of that year. They have been “normalized.”
* You can find the full interview on YouTube. If you see the original version, you’ll need to skip to 1:07 in the interview to get the list of four stages. It has also been excerpted by Doc Rich on his YouTube channel.
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