Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

KGB Defector Yuri Bezmenov 1985 Interview – Idealogical Subversion

youtube.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 189 posts

Re: KGB Defector Yuri Bezmenov 1985 Interview – Idealogical Subversion

#111

Post by wil421 »

philwelch wrote: post #69
dale_glass wrote: post #41

This sounds pretty silly. Now fuck Russia and all, but this guy is convinced that Russia managed to worm into American consciousness in the mid 80s, to the point of raising an entire generation of people who believe what Russia wants them to believe. That just doesn't add up to me. Now not being American I don't know what things were over there, but at least I can recall that in the 80s and 90s, Russians were the sta…

If you listened to the entire interview, I don’t know how you managed to mentally substitute the term “Russia” for the term “Marxism-Leninism” for 15 entire minutes. The man is talking about ideological subversion. It’s not about nationalism. It’s about the propagation of leftist ideology. McCarthyism was in the 1950’s and by the 80’s had already been “discredited” as some sort of witch hunt. Bezmenov already says in…

He literally said Communism and USSR are going to take other the world unless the last free country (USA) stops them. 4 years later his entire country fell apart. Almost all of the satellite countries have ran from Communism and Russian ideology except Belarus.

He also said we had serval years to live on until we would have no where to defect to, except maybe Antartica.

Another comment was all the wealthy businessmen are hanging themselves by trading with USSR and they would pray to be killed but probably sent to Alaska, presumably to a Gulag after USSR takes over.

Re: KGB Defector Yuri Bezmenov 1985 Interview – Idealogical Subversion

#112

Post by teachrdan »

yencabulator wrote: post #98
mopsi wrote: post #32

This ties well into the "three days to Kyiv" expectation at the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Russians really did think that Ukraine had been subverted to a degree that it would just roll over and die; that leadership would run away and local resistance would be limited to disorganized pockets that riot police could suppress, but their informants and agents just stole the money and reported what the Kreml…

History sure does rhyme. They did the same thing in 1940, expecting to hold a parade in Finland with their front line troops: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Raate_Road

The US had many of the same expectations about victory in the second Iraq war.

Re: KGB Defector Yuri Bezmenov 1985 Interview – Idealogical Subversion

#113

Post by sorokod »

watwut wrote: post #89
sorokod wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because "almost every night" I assume he is not mobilized. Why would that be so?

He might simply live in region that mobilized less. Of live abroad. Most of mobilization happen in poor peripheral regions. Moscow and surrounding mobilizes much less.

For sure, but a person with principles should act on them, otherwise they are just words.

Re: KGB Defector Yuri Bezmenov 1985 Interview – Idealogical Subversion

#115

Post by yucky »

mopsi wrote: post #32

This ties well into the "three days to Kyiv" expectation at the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Russians really did think that Ukraine had been subverted to a degree that it would just roll over and die; that leadership would run away and local resistance would be limited to disorganized pockets that riot police could suppress, but their informants and agents just stole the money and reported what the Kreml…

  > This ties well into the "three days to Kyiv" expectation at the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
This is actually a great example of our own propaganda at work. This "Three Days" quote came from one of our Generals, not from Russia.

Putin's statements from early on are all widely available (with English transcriptions) and they do not in anyway sound like the words of someone expecting to annex Ukraine into Russia in short order.

Which raises the question - why were we all fed this story? To what end?

Re: KGB Defector Yuri Bezmenov 1985 Interview – Idealogical Subversion

#116

Post by dale_glass »

philwelch wrote: post #69
dale_glass wrote: post #41

This sounds pretty silly. Now fuck Russia and all, but this guy is convinced that Russia managed to worm into American consciousness in the mid 80s, to the point of raising an entire generation of people who believe what Russia wants them to believe. That just doesn't add up to me. Now not being American I don't know what things were over there, but at least I can recall that in the 80s and 90s, Russians were the sta…

If you listened to the entire interview, I don’t know how you managed to mentally substitute the term “Russia” for the term “Marxism-Leninism” for 15 entire minutes. The man is talking about ideological subversion. It’s not about nationalism. It’s about the propagation of leftist ideology. McCarthyism was in the 1950’s and by the 80’s had already been “discredited” as some sort of witch hunt. Bezmenov already says in…

> If you listened to the entire interview, I don’t know how you managed to mentally substitute the term “Russia” for the term “Marxism-Leninism” for 15 entire minutes. The man is talking about ideological subversion. It’s not about nationalism.

He's an ex-KGB spook talking about the actions of a foreign government. Of course it's about nationalism. Said ideological subversion is there to serve the needs of the USSR. He even talks about the "Soviet military complex" that will take over if the US doesn't realize what's happening quickly enough.

So said ideology is being propagated to create a crisis that would then allow a foreign state with hostile interests to take over.

> Bezmenov already says in 1985 that the ideological program had succeeded beyond all expectations and that Americans were doing most of the work for them.

Yes, and living in 2023, we can see he was full of it. Nothing had succeeded. The USSR fell apart, and the current US doesn't have anything approaching a proper left wing, let alone anything resembling Marxism.

Soon after that interview, Gorbachov went to the US and had his jaw drop watching a normal supermarket. Even the highest of positions in the USSR had little clue of what was happening in the US back then. They were very far from having the access needed to spread any kind of ideology through entire generations.

> That, coupled with the collapse of the USSR, would allow that leftist ideology to mutate into the forms we see today.

No, that's the evidence of that he was wrong.

Re: KGB Defector Yuri Bezmenov 1985 Interview – Idealogical Subversion

#117

Post by xenospn »

hellothere1337 wrote: post #76

Whenever I interact with russian or pro-russian elements the story remains the same. They deny that they're doing any wrongdoing. If you give them video evidence that they're doing something wrong they deny the evidence is real. If the evidence has undeniable proof they either say the victims deserved it (like the video where they killed civilians around hostomel or the one where a ukrainian family and their dog gets…

Israelis are very similar. That’s nationalism for you!

Re: KGB Defector Yuri Bezmenov 1985 Interview – Idealogical Subversion

#118

Post by tokai »

stuckinhell wrote: post #67
abecedarius wrote: post #57

Summary of near-14-minute video, since I certainly wished someone else had posted one to help me decide whether to watch: Says the KGB works mainly at ideological subversion of the enemy society, not James Bond stuff. This has 4 stages: - Demoralization. Slow, takes at least a generation to take hold or be reversed. U.S. is 3 generations in, graduates have positions of influence, and now it's mostly done by Americans…

It would certainly explain how "political correctness" a soviet concept made it into the american public consciousness far more than other nations of the world. Edited: Since I'm being downvoted. Political Correctness wasn't really a thing until around the 80's, the same time period as the cold war. It really is acommunist term. The term "political correctness" first appeared in Marxist–Leninist vocabulary following…

The two PC terms are not related. In the start of the last century political correctness was about the correct adherence to ideology. The modern PC is a describer coined by us conservatives to label progressive political goals.

Re: KGB Defector Yuri Bezmenov 1985 Interview – Idealogical Subversion

#119

Post by dragonwriter »

dale_glass wrote: post #41

This sounds pretty silly. Now fuck Russia and all, but this guy is convinced that Russia managed to worm into American consciousness in the mid 80s, to the point of raising an entire generation of people who believe what Russia wants them to believe. That just doesn't add up to me. Now not being American I don't know what things were over there, but at least I can recall that in the 80s and 90s, Russians were the sta…

> Now fuck Russia and all, but this guy is convinced that Russia managed to worm into American consciousness in the mid 80s,

It was a mid-80s interview; he us saying USSR did that 2-3 generations prior to the interview, which would be about the birth of the USSR. Most plausibly, the Soviet influence in the early 20th century international labor movements would be the main channel, though there would be other avenues where this was attempted. There certainly were in the 1980s influences from that that had become self-sustaining and organic, reinforced by continuing influence efforts, but I wouldn’t describe it as an overwhelming success.

It’s possible that the internal perception (whether top-down propaganda or just the result of Soviet intelligence community resume-burnishing by self-promoting bureaucrats) overstated the success, such that the perceptions of a defector would be that they were stronger than they were – or its possible that an defector who was ideologically opposed to his old regime would deliberately overstate the case to try to marshal the US against it before it actually got as bad as he described it.

(Its pretty clearly a strategy the USSR had, and that Russia continues with, arguably, more success than the USSR ever had, but that’s…well documented in other sources which don’t have nearly as dire a description of the level of success it had in the 1980s.)

Re: KGB Defector Yuri Bezmenov 1985 Interview – Idealogical Subversion

#120

Post by rasz »

cpursley wrote: post #72
ImHereToVote wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a quote of link to the "three days to Kyiv" comment from the Russian Federation?

There’s not, it was actually General Milley who put this number out there and the media and social media ran with it as if it were an official Kremlin statement. https://www.foxnews.com/us/gen-milley-says-kyiv-could-fall-w...

and CIA Director Bill Burns https://www.npr.org/2022/03/08/1085155440/cia-director-putin...

TV propagandist Olga Skabeeva claimed two days, so did Margarita Simonyan and many others:

https://twitter.com/ruinwanderer/status/1622142324015878144

as for russian invasion plans, good old potato man leaked them live on national TV https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/moldova-next-belarus-president-ma...

Post reply on HN