KGB Defector Yuri Bezmenov 1985 Interview – Idealogical Subversion

It's crazy. I know a Russian guy who is exactly like this; I debate with him all the time. Almost every night. About the war. Bluntly invested in winning, regardless of what the system looks like; even admitting that it's a terrible system; using weak arguments for why people need structural dominance, while simultaneously arguing in favor of "the people" - (and using a historical American failings as a way to draw false equivalences). It's all chess when you grow up somewhere with nothing to gain. Or another way of saying it is, it's possible for a polity to never improve itself but give the illusion of relative improvement, if it can poison its enemies down to its own level or lower. This, unfortunately, is the same mentality we're dealing with now.

[edit] Even so, he still betrays that curious overconfidence in the power of central planning...

For e ti's shocking how much people are in denial about this. In spite of us seeing with our own eyes that this strategy is being deployed and it works, it works depressingly well. In spite of that, many people I know try to dismiss the video, the speaker, and the main message conveyed by it. It is as if we got blind by our own request.

Right now, Russia is at war.

They hate that Western countries are providing intel and armaments to the defense of Ukraine.

There's only one realistic thing they can do to slow those.

FSB poisoning our public discourse by any means necessary.

The over-confidence in clearly irrational positions, the bluster and bluffing and bullying are all coping mechanisms for what their brains detect as cognitive dissonance. "How can my life be so bad, dreary, miserable, and inadequate?" "It must not be my situation, but it must be everyone else, so I will fight everyone else, as I can't change my situation." Rather than improve their own lot, they seek to destroy other's, because improvement is so difficult, if not impossible, and destruction is just so much easier.

This interview keeps coming up, and I don't really understand why. It's utterly uninteresting. Bezmenov had an inconsequential role in the KGB. He was not privy to any large-scale details.

Bezmenov defected in 1970. After his defection would not be privy to any new information. The interview is from 1984 and not 1985 as the title purports. Ultimately, the claims in this video are categorically false. We can observe this in two ways.

First, after the collapse of the USSR no information on these efforts was revealed. Bezmenov claims 85% of the KGB's efforts are spent on this supposed program of ideological subversion of the American public. And yet, we have seen no documents. No intelligence from the US side. Nothing.

Second, he claims the subversion was put in place to change the schooling system and thus indoctrinate the next generation. Keep in mind that this program would've had to be in place by 1970. And quite a few years earlier than that too since, again, Bezmenov was not a particularly privileged member of the KGB. And if we were to assume the program is real the changes should blindingly obvious in hindsight. But in fact, there are none.

So we must look a little closer at Bezmenov - why would he claim these things, and why does the interview keep resurfacing?

At the time of the interview there was a great panic around communist influence across the country. We're in the middle of Reagan's first term as president. Reagan was hawkish on perceived communist sympathies, just like the rest of the Republicans and the mainstream American right-wing. The market for people claiming that the ideological foundations of their political rivals is grounded in communist indoctrination. They wanted to hear how homosexuality becoming more accepted, a call for racial equality, and a general anti-establishment attitude was, in fact, Soviet indoctrination of the schooling systems.

Bezmenov earned his living peddling what this large group of conservatives wanted to hear, and that is where his lectures and this interview come in.

Today we see claims of "cultural marxism" and "post-modernism" infecting universities, and thus infecting the minds of the very late cohort of millenials and the early cohort of Gen Zs. It's the same dance of comfort we saw in the 80s playing out again. The interview isn't someone predicting the future because of some special insight. It's someone playing into the 80s "culture war" and people recognizing that a similar "culture war" is happening again today. A "culture war" that will continue to happen as long as societies continue to evolve and re-evaluate their collective values.