Subversion and Control

(This is a reposting of this entry, which originally overwrote the previous piece on Hill Fort Defence)

Somehow or other, my broadband connection seems to have started working a lot better over the past week or two, and so I’ve been watching lots of videos that I never used to be able to watch.

And today I got to look at a few of Dr Ian Dunbar’s face-to-camera talks. It’s kinda nice to hear a doctor say that smoking isn’t a bad habit. His line was that smoking is, for many people, a response to stress. And stress can produce all the heart disease and cancer and stuff that smoking is supposed to cause. And anyway, he went on (perhaps here) our ancestors lived in smoke-filled houses, so we must be adapted to survive smoke. These are both arguments I’ve used. But still it was good to see a doctor say the same.

A couple of his videos touched on the Cold War. He said that the Cold War hadn’t been just about the threat of nuclear annihilation. It had also been an ideological struggle, with the Soviet Union trying to subvert Western Civilisation. He didn’t go into any detail, but mentioned a Soviet defector, Yuri Bezmenov, who I’d never heard of before.

Intrigued, I hunted down Bezmenov. I found a number of YouTube videos featuring him. He was born in 1939 or so in the Soviet Union of a high status military family, worked as a journalist for Novosti, and joined the KGB, where he was posted to India and Pakistan. In 1970, disillusioned with the Soviet Union, he defected to the West, initially by posing as a long-haired hippy, before making his way to Canada and then America.

And then I watched him, using the name of Tomas Schuman, give a lecture in Los Angeles (probably in about 1984?) about the Subversion and Control of Western Society. It had only received 345 views.

In this he said that the aim of subversion was to defeat an enemy without having to fight a single battle. The idea was to so screw up the enemy’s perception of reality that they gave up without fighting a single battle. These principles hadn’t, he said, been developed by the Soviet Union or the KGB, but by a Chinese General called Sun Tsu several thousand years ago. But he said that the KGB studied the principles intensely, while Western societies did not. There were, he said, several phases of subversion. The first stage was Demoralisation. In religion, and education, and social life, and labour relations, and law and order, and so on. The process of demoralisation took 15 – 20 years, during which time everything gradually stopped working properly, and people ceased to know right from wrong. The next stage was one of Destabilisation during which conflict was encouraged to break out. This was followed by Crisis which led either to civil war or invasion. After that there came Normalisation, during which all the leaders of the radical movements of the previous stages were all shot, because they were no longer needed. He then went on to say what you could do to stop all this happening.

Listening to him, much of what he had to say about Demoralisation seemed to fit the UK experience almost perfectly. During Demoralisation, he said, religion was marginalised, and replaced with a variety of cults. And students weren’t taught anything useful, like maths and physics, but useless things. And natural social organisations were replaced by fake bureaucratic societies. Or by artificial bodies which nobody had elected.

And I thought: this is what’s been happening to us for a long time, but much more intensively in recent years than ever before. The Archbishop of Canterbury was complaining earlier this year that Christianity had been “denormalised”. And everybody knows that schoolkids lessons now consist in them being told that smoking causes all disease, and the planet is going to fry due to excess carbon dioxide. And what else is ASH but an unelected, artificial bureaucratic society?

I didn’t recognise the subsequent stages, so I figured that we probably hadn’t got there yet. But that we might not be too far away from them.

Now, I have a problem with people like Bezmenov, and it’s this: How do you know whether he’s still an active KGB officer or not? Who says that the KGB were ever closed down? When Yuri Bezmenov was delivering the lecture I’ve just described, was he doing so as an overt rather than covert Soviet agent? When the West “won” the Cold War in 1990, did they actually win, or did they fall victim to an elaborate hoax, whereby the Soviet Union apparently dismantled itself while actually remaining in place?

Tricky, eh?

But there do seem to be a lot of “defectors” who came over to the West during the last years of the Soviet era. I’ve even corresponded with a few of them. They all seem to have a lovely, ironic, Russian sense of humour. Which Bezmenov has got too.

I really have no idea whether Bezmenov actually did get disillusioned with the Soviet Union or not. I have no idea whether he actually did pretend to be a dope-smoking hippy in order to defect to the West. It seems to me not entirely implausible that it was an active, serving officer of the KGB who delivered the lecture I’ve linked to.

Towards the end of his lecture, he said something that made me think he was still KGB. He was describing how you could stop the process of Demoralisation and Destabilisation. And he said that one simple measure was to simply stop Soviet journalists being given equal time on TV. Yet here he was, an erstwhile Soviet journalist, getting equal time on TV! He almost seemed to be saying that he was just one of the Soviet journalists who should be banned from speaking.

And yet, at the end, I thought he said something that was profoundly true. He said that the cure for all of it was to bring society back to religion, and to the idea that there was more to life than just buying more deodorant. The historical evidence was that societies which lost their religions were ones which collapsed. He ended up saying

“You simply have to have faith.”

It’s a very strange thing to hear a KGB officer tell you something like that.

So much so, that I really don’t know what to make of it.