Yuri Bezmenov: Psychological Warfare Subversion & Control of Western Society

This is the transcript of a lecture by Yuri Bezmenov (alias Tomas Schuman), a Soviet KGB defector. He "explains in detail his scheme for the KGB process of subversion and takeover of target societies at a lecture in Los Angeles, 1983." The transcript was generated by OpenAI whisper and manually verified and improved:

Subversion is the term, if you look in a dictionary or criminal code to that matter, usually is explained as a part of activity to destroy things like religion, government, system, political, economical system of a country. And usually it's linked to espionage and such romantic things as blowing up bridges, sidetracking trains, cloak and dagger activity in Hollywood style. What I'm going to talk about now has absolutely nothing to do with the cliche of espionage or KGB activity of collecting information. So the greatest mistake or misconception I think is that whenever we are talking about KGB for some strange reason, starting from Hollywood movie makers to professors of political science and "experts on Soviet affairs" or criminologists as they call themselves, they think that the most desirable thing for Andropov and the whole KGB is to steal blueprints of some supersonic jet, bring it back to Soviet Union and sell it to the Soviet military industrial complex. This is only partly true. If we take the whole time, money and manpower that the Soviet Union and KGB in particular spends outside of USSR border, we will discover-of course there are no official statistics unlike with CIA or FBI-that the espionage as such occupies only 10 to 15 percent of money, time and manpower. 15% of the activity of KGB. The rest 85 percent is always subversion. And unlike a dictionary of English, Oxford dictionary, subversion in Soviet terminology means always a destructive aggressive activity aimed to destroy the country, nation or geographical area of your enemy. So there's no romantics in there, absolutely. No blowing up bridges, no microfilms in Coca-Cola cans, nothing of that sort, no James Bond nonsense. Most of this activity is overt, legitimate and easily observable if you give yourself time and trouble to observe it. But according to the law and law enforcement systems of the Western civilization, it's not a crime because [it's only] misconception and manipulation of terms. We think that subverter is a person who is going to blow up our beautiful bridges. No, subverter is a student who comes for exchange, a diplomat, an actor, an artist, a journalist like myself was ten years ago.

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Stephen Kotkin on Collectivization

Stephen Kotkin at 47:00:

And in the process of doing it, [Stalin] caused famine and was undermining, potentially, the party's own rule. He just kept going all the way through because he had the courage of his conviction. And then when they complained about him he made a mental note of that and he enacted his version of revenge on them a few years later for their criticisms of him when he did this. So he did this because he believed in the Marxist/Leninist fashion that this had to be done. He himself felt a man of destiny and therefore he could do this and he was looking to find the shock troops to galvanize the half-educated youth to take violence out on these gulags and to force the villagers into these collective arrangements. And so what he did and so this is what totalitarianism is: he galvanized people's agency and those people using their agency destroyed their own agency. They disempowered themselves by by taking up this call.

Peterson on podcasting

Jordan Peterson at 1:14:16: “The honest podcasters they’re trying to get smarter and they are bringing their audience along for the ride.”

How to Stop the West’s Decline

Very interesting speech by Konstantin Kisin about the West: https://youtu.be/7mpaW6G9Bzk.

Jan Terlouw about "touwtjes uit de brievenbussen"

In honor of Jan Terlouw who passed away today. The first part of a famous story he told in the Netherlands (English below):

Toen ik een kind was, was het oorlog. De tweede wereldoorlog was van mijn 7e tot mijn 13e jaar. En toen het voorbij was, toen ik student was, toen ik mijn dienstplicht vervulde, toen ik mijn eerste onderzoeksbaan kreeg, toen was Nederland wat je noemde in wederopbouw. De huizen werden hersteld, de kerken, de andere gebouwen. Maar vooral waren we de welvaardstaat aan het bouwen. AOW kwam op stand. Ouderdomspensioen voor iedereen. En het ziekenfonds ofwel ziektewet. Medische zorg voor iedereen. Dat gebeurde. En in die tijd zat ik met mijn jonge gezin, we woonden in een single-huis in Utrecht. En overal hingen touwtjes uit de brievenbus. De kinderen konden gewoon de voordeuren opentrekken en bij mekaar binnenlopen. Volwassenen ook. We vertrouwden mekaar.

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Why I wrote fx

I used to always run my blog via a static site generator. For people unfamiliar with this, it essentially means that you modify files locally and then send these files to a static site hoster like GitHub Pages or Cloudflare. This worked fine but it wasn't very fast. Uploading a blogpost would take me a few minutes. I would need to modify the files locally, verify that it looked good, and then send them to the server.

The alternative was to setup Wordpress, but somehow that didn't feel good to me. Wordpress servers always felt too bloated. I just wanted exactly the things I needed and nothing more. No plugins. No styling options. No intricate menu's. Social media doesn't have those things either. On social media sites like X/Twitter, you can only made a profile banner and add posts. And it works. Isn't this what writing is about anyway? You write articles/blogs/letters/memos, or whatever you want to call it and publish it. Social media is widely used so it must work.

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Grading Historians

I've listened to many podcasts with historians over the years and I just realized one thing that my favorite historians all have in common: you can just watch/listen to a talk from years ago and it will still feel accurate.

You basically can't hear which year it currently is. Great historians talk about long lasting and persistent phenomena instead of ephemeral ones.

Misinformation

There is this common narrative that social media promotes misinformation since you can end up in a bubble. But non-social media also doesn’t have to be correct, does it? So then it’s about which of the two publishes more misinformation? It probably depends on what bubble you might end up in.

At least you could say bubbles are more diverse. One person can be inside one bubble and another in another so for society overall they might cancel out? Or maybe new ideas might start to arise?

Maybe the argument should be that mass (social) media may lead to misinformation since both correct and incorrect messages would be amplified.

Stephen Kotkin's Hopeful Future for the West

In 2017, Stephen Kotkin gave a 5 hour long talk about Spheres of Influence at the IWM Vienna. The talk is long not because he repeats the same ideas, but because he doesn't give conclusions. As I see it, his talks clearly step through both sides of an argument and then leave it up to the audience to decide what to believe; largely in-line with the Socratic method. One part of the talk stood out to me: he said that the West does not have a clear hopeful picture for the future anymore.

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Never again

After World War II, people introduced the phrase "never again". Never again should the whole world fight a war against each other. Never again should Germany, Japan, and Italy attempt to get rid of people from other countries. Or as Elie Wiesel wrote: "Never again' becomes more than a slogan: It's a prayer, a promise, a vow ... never again the glorification of base, ugly, dark violence."

As a thought experiment, how can we ensure that this never happens again? "territorial integrity" seems to me like a great start. Allowing nations (read: groups of people) defend their border to me seems to go a long way in protecting people from each other. Sovereignty also plays an important role. It ensures that people are allowed to rule themselves. What is the point of a fixed border if someone else makes decisions for you?

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