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.

Now subversion is an activity which is a two-way traffic. You cannot subvert an enemy which doesn't want to be subverted. If you know history of Japan for example: Before the 20th century Japan was a closed society. The moment a foreign boat comes to the shores of Japan, the Imperial Japanese Army politely tell them to get lost. And if American salesman comes to the shore of Japan, let's say 60 or 70 years back, and says, oh I have a very beautiful vacuum cleaner for you, you know, with the good financing. He says, please leave us with a medium vacuum cleaner. If they don't leave, they shoot them to preserve their culture, ideology, traditions, values intact. You were not able to subvert Japan. You cannot subvert Soviet Union because the borders are closed. The media is censored by the government. The population is controlled by the KGB and internal police. With all the beautiful glossy pictures of Time Magazine and Magazine America which is published by the American Embassy in Moscow. You cannot subvert Soviet citizens because the magazine never reaches Soviet citizens. It's collected from the newsstands and thrown to garbage can. Subversion can be only successful when the initiator, the actor, the agent of subversion has a responsive target. It's a two-way traffic. United States is a receptive target of subversion.

There is no response similar to that one from United States to the Soviet Union. It stops halfway somewhere. It never reaches here. The theory of subversion goes all the way back two thousand five hundred years ago. The first human being who formulated the tactics of subversion was a Chinese philosopher by the name of Sun Tze 3,500 years BC. He was an advisor for several imperial courts in ancient China. And he said after long meditation that to implement state policy in a warlike manner, it's the most counterproductive, barbaric and inefficient to fight on a battlefield. You know that war is continuation of state policy, right? So if you want successfully to implement your state policy and you start fighting this is the most idiotic way to do it. The highest arc of warfare is not to fight at all but to subvert anything of value in the country of your enemy until such time that the perception of reality of your enemy is screwed up to such an extent that he does not perceive you as an enemy. And that your system, your civilization and your ambitions look to your enemy as an alternative if not desirable then at least feasible. Better red than dead. That's the ultimate purpose, the final stage of subversion after which you can simply take your enemy without a single shot being fired if the subversion is successful. This is basically what subversion is. As you see not a single mentioning of blowing up bridges. Of course Sun Tze didn't know about blowing up bridges. Maybe they were not that many bridges at that time but the basics of subversion is being taught to every student of KGB school in USSR and to officers of military academies. I'm not sure if the same author is included in the list of breeding for American officers to say nothing about ordinary students of political science. I had difficulty to find the translation of Sun Tze in the library of a university in Toronto and later on here in Los Angeles. But it's a book which is not available. [On the contrary,] it is forced to every student in USSR. Every student who is taught to be dealing further in his future career with foreigners.

What subversion is. Basically it consists of four periods time-wise. If we start from here and go this way time right this is the beginning point. The first stage of subversion is the process which is called basically demoralization. It says for itself what it is.

It takes from say 15 to 20 years to demoralize a society. Why 15 or 20 years? This is the time sufficient to educate one generation of students or children. One generation, one lifetime span of a person, a human being, which is dedicated to study, to shaping up the outlook, ideology, personality. No more, no less. Usually it takes from 15 to 20 years. What it includes? It includes influencing by various methods. Infiltration, propaganda methods, direct contacts, doesn't really matter. I will describe them later. Of various areas where public opinion is formulated or shaped, religion, educational system, social life, administration, law enforcement system, military, and labor and employer relations, and economy. Five areas.

Sometimes when I describe all the methods, students ask me a question, are you sure this is the result of the Soviet influence? Not necessarily. You see, the tactic of subversion, about which I'm talking, is similar to the martial art, the Japanese martial art. If some of you are familiar with that tactic, probably you will remember that if an enemy is bigger and heavier than yourself, it would be very painful to resist his direct strike. If a heavier person wants to strike me in the face, it would be very naive and counterproductive to stop his blow. The Chinese and Japanese judo art tells us what to do. First to avoid the strike, then to grab the fist and continue his movement in the direction where it was before, until the enemy crashes in the wall. You see? So, what happens here, the target country, obviously, does something wrong. If it's a free democratic society, there are many different movements within the society. There are obviously, in every society, there are people who are against the society. There may be simple criminals, ideologically in disagreement with the state policy, conscientious enemies, simply psychotic personalities who are against anything. And finally, there are a small group of agents of a foreign nation, bought, subverted, recruited. The moment all these movements will be directed in one direction, right? This is the time to catch that movement and to continue until the movement forces the whole society into collapse, into crisis, right? So, that's exactly the martial art tactic. We don't stop an enemy. We let him go. We help him to go in the direction we want them to go.

So, on the stage of demoralization, obviously, there are tendencies in each society, in each country, which are going to opposite direction from the basic moral values and principles to take advantage of these movements, to capitalize on them, is the main purpose of the originator of subversion. So, we have religion, we have education, we have social life, we have power structure, we have labor relations, unions, and finally, we have law and order. One, two, three, four, five, six, okay? These are the areas of application of subversion. What it means exactly? In case of religion, destroy it, ridicule it, replace it with various sects, cults, which bring people's attention, faith, whether it is naive, primitive, doesn't really matter. As long as the basically accepted religious dogma is being slowly eroded and taken away from the supreme purpose of religion, to keep people in touch with the supreme being, that serves the purpose. Therefore, replace it, accept it, respect it, religious organizations with fake organizations, distract people's attention from the real faith, and attract them to various different faiths.

Education, distract them from learning something which is constructive, pragmatic, efficient. Instead of mathematics, physics, foreign languages, chemistry, teach them history of urban warfare, natural food, home economy, your sexuality, anything, as long as it takes you away, okay?

Social life, replace traditionally established institutions and organizations with fake organizations, take away the initiative from people, take away the responsibility from naturally established links between individuals, group of individuals, and society at large, and replace them with artificially bureaucratically controlled bodies. Instead of social life and friendship between neighbors, establish social workers institutions. The people who are on payroll of whom? Society? No, bureaucracy. The main concern of social workers is not your family, not you, not social relations between groups of people. The main concern is to get the paycheck from the government. What will be the result of their social work? Doesn't really matter. They can develop all kinds of concepts to show them, to show to the government and to the people that they're useful. Okay, away from the natural links, power structure.

Okay, the natural bodies of administration, which are traditionally either elected by people at large or appointed by elected leaders of society, are being actively substituted by artificial bodies. The bodies of people, groups of people, who nobody elected, never, as a matter of fact, most of the people don't like them at all, and yet they exist. One of such group is media. Who elected them? How come they have so much power, almost monopolistic power on your mind? They can rape your mind. But who elected them? How come they have a nerve to decide what is good and what is bad for the elected by you, president, and his administration? Who the hell are they? Spiro Agnew, who was hated by the liberal left, called them a bunch of enfeebled snobs, and that's exactly what they are. They think they know. They don't. The level of mediocrity in a big establishment like New York Times, Los Angeles Times, major television network, you don't have to be an excellent journalist. You have to be exactly a mediocre journalist. That's easier to survive. There's no competition anymore. You have your good, nice income, $100,000 a year. That's it. Whether you're better or worse, it doesn't really matter anymore. As soon as you're smiling to the camera and do your job, that's it. No more competition. Power structure slowly is eroded by the bodies and groups of people who do not have neither qualification nor the will of people to keep them in power, and yet they do have power. Okay.

Together with that, there's another process. Law enforcement, law and order, organization and structure is being eroded. For the last 20, 25 years, if you see old movies and new movies, you can see that in new movies, a policeman, an officer of the United States Army, looks dumb, angry, psychotic, paranoid. A criminal looks nice, kind of, well, he smokes hash and shoots the whatever, drug, but basically he's a nice human being. He's creative, and he's unproductive only because society oppresses him, whereby a general of Pentagon is always by definition a dumb, a war maniac. A policeman is a pig, rude policeman. He abuses his power. No? A generality, generalization like that. The hatred, the mistrust to the people who are supposed to protect you and enforce law and order, moral relativity, the Angela Buona process lasted two years in Los Angeles, and yet there are still some lawyers who say, look, he's a nice character, as a matter of fact. There was some witness who said, also a criminal, who said, well, he's a nice guy. I asked him one day to burn a house of my enemy, and he wouldn't do it. A nice fellow. Erosion, a slow substitution of basic moral principles, whereby a criminal is not a criminal, actually. He's a defendant. Even if his guilt is proven, there is still a doubt to kill or not to kill, to be or not to be. Thy shall not kill, yes, but this line may not necessarily be applicable to a murderer. Thy shall not murder. That should be the presumption, not that thy shall not kill.

OK, labor relations. At this stage, within 15 to 20 years, we destroy the traditionally established links of bargaining between employer and employee. The classical Marxist-Leninist theory of natural exchange of goods. A person A has five sacks of grain, and person B has five pairs of shoes. And the natural exchange, without money, is when they bargain between each other. And only with the introduction of the third, fourth, C, an entirely third foreign stranger, who says, no, don't give him five sacks of grain. Give it to me, and you give me your five pairs of shoes, and I will distribute it accordingly, so that the economy will go. This is the death of natural exchange, death of natural bargaining. Well, trade unions were established 100 years ago. The objective was to improve working conditions and to protect the rights of workers from those employers who were abusing their right because they had more money. Objectively, at that time, initially, the trade union movement did work. What we see now is that the bargaining process is no longer resulting in the compromise, which is leading objectively to betterment of working conditions and increase of salary. What we see is that after each prolonged strike, the workers lose. Even if they have 10 percent increase of their salaries, they cannot catch up due to inflation and due to missed time. More than that, millions of people suffer from that strike because economy now is interdependent. It's intertwined like one body. If previously still workers, say 100 years ago, could strike and nobody would suffer, now it's impossible anymore. If a garbage collector strikes today, the rest of the multi-million city is stinking. I mean, there's no more service. In Quebec, for example, we had the electricians who were on strike. In the middle of winter, you can freeze your bottom, and they still were on strike. Did they catch up with the salary? No, they lost. Who benefited? The leaders of trade union. What is the motivation for strike? Improving a worker's condition? No, obviously, it's not. Then what is it? Ideology. To prove to these capitalists. And the obedient horde of workers, like sheep, follow these people, and they cannot disobey. Why? Because if they do, you know what happens to them. Pickets. Murders. Shooting truck drivers by picketers. In Montreal, for example, I saw with my own eyes, when I was correspondent of CBC, International Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, when the workers of aircraft factory destroyed computers and the equipment in the factory. And the administration employed strike breakers. Their cars were turned upside down and burned. Their houses were burned. Their kids were intimidated, and some victims were there. Of that, you can be sure. Why? To improve conditions of workers? No. Ideology.

Okay, so this is what happens, basically. It may or may not happen without the help of the Soviet Union, but the natural tendencies are being greatly taken advantage of and capitalized by the Soviet propaganda systems. How? Whenever trade union strikes, we have influx of propaganda, mass media, ideological dissemination. The worker's rights, and we repeat it like parrots. Yes, workers write. Who's right? Workers? No. The only freedom of worker to sell his labor, according to his own desired will, is taken away from him. By whom? By trade union boss. Unlimited power is given, responsibility. I want to sell my labor not for two fifty an hour, but for two dollars. I don't have right. My freedom is denied to me. I know that if I sell my work for two dollars an hour, not for three dollars an hour, I will compete better with the other guy who is lazy and more greedy.

I don't need three dollars. I need only two dollars. No. I was made to believe by media, by business, by advertising agencies that I need more and more and more. Have you ever heard any advertising on TV to consume less? No. No way. Whether you need a six-cylinder car or not, you have to buy it and hurry up. When I was driving here on the local radio station, an excited announcer said, you hurry up, rush and save, save, save. There is a plenty houses sale. Save by buying more. Of course, of course.

It would be too naive to expect that KGB makes that advertising agency to do such a crazy commercial. No, of course not. But what we did when I was working for Knowledge T. Press, we would snowplow editorial offices, student organizations, religious groups with literature of class struggle. If not directly Marxism and his propaganda, then a propaganda of a legitimate aspirations of working class, betterment of life, equality, equality, mind you. President Kennedy once said, we will make America to believe that people are born equal. Are people born equal? Is there any mentioning in the Bible or any other holy scripture in any religion, any religion? If you don't believe me, go to library and check it. There is not a single word about equality, just the opposite. By your deeds, God will judge you. What you do is important. The merit of your personality. You cannot legislate equality if you want to be equal. You have to be equal. You have to deserve it. And yet we build our society on the principle of equality. We say people are equal. We know it is false. It's a lie. Some people are tall and stupid. Others are short, bold and clever.

If we make them equal by force, if we put the principle of equality in the basis of our social political structure, it's the same thing as building a house on sand. Sooner or later, it will collapse. And that's exactly what happens. And we as Soviet propaganda makers are trying to push you in the direction which you go yourself. Equality. Yes, equality. People are equal. Land of equal opportunities. Is it true or not? Think about it. Equal opportunities. Should there be equal opportunities? For me and for a lazy bastard who comes here from some other country and immediately registers as a welfare recipient benefits. I never received a single job. No, sorry, I did this once. But I never applied for welfare. For the 13 years, I took any job, security guard, journalist, taxi driver, anything.

Well, I was restless, but some people don't like it. So why should we have equal opportunities? Why? Equal opportunity to excel. Equal opportunity in equal circumstances. Yes, but we know people are different. To excel, yes. Provided we reach the same level of excellency, perfection, which is hypothetical distant future. Yes, maybe. But we know perfectly well that even with the best intentions, people could not be equal.

Why should we have equality in the, say, legal system? Myself, I'm considering myself a law abiding citizen. And the person who comes here to rob and shoot, say, the United States Administration under Carter imported thousands of Cuban criminals. They were known criminals, yet they were accepted. Do you think it's fair if myself and my wife from Philippines who work like, excuse me, horse as a lab technician in the hospital, should have the same rights as a criminal from Cuba? Why? And yet we repeat as parents, equality, equality, equality. And the Soviet propaganda system helps us to believe that equality is something which is desirable. Democracy, as it was established by fathers of this country, of this system in the last century, is not equality. It's the system where different people, unequal people, have a chance to survive and help each other in constant competition, in constant perfection, not inequality, which is superimposed from a godfather or a nice person in Washington, D.C. And the absolute equality exists in Soviet Union, "equality". Everybody is equally in the dirt, except some people are more equal than the others in Politburo. So the moment you bring a country to the point of almost total demoralization, when nothing works anymore, when you are not sure if it is right or wrong, good and bad, but there's no division between evil and good, when even the leaders of church sometimes say, well, violence for the sake of justice, especially social justice, is justified in the countries like Nicaragua, El Salvador, well, maybe Rhodesia, and we listen to them and say, yeah, probably it's true. Is it true? No, it is not true. Violence is not justified, especially for the sake of "social justice" introduced by Marxist-Leninist, that is my former colleague from Novosti Press Agency. Okay, so where [were we]?

The next step is destabilization. Again, this word says for itself what it is, to destabilize all the relations, all the accepted institutions and organizations in a country of your enemy. How you do it? You don't have to send a battalion of KGB agents to blow up bridges. No, you let them do it themselves. The area of application is, again, it's narrower now, not like the previous case. The overt legitimate actions of the KGB in this case would be hardly noticeable. There is no crime if a professor who recently went to U.S.S.R. introduces a course of Marxist-Leninism in California in college, for example. Nobody is going to come to these doors and say, okay, mister, come, you are under arrest. No, it's not a crime. It's not even considered a moral crime against your country. So the area of application here is narrowing down to economy, again, labor relations, right? To law and order. Plus military. And economy, law and order. Yes, and again, the media, but wider scope, little bit different, I'll explain later. Okay, basically, three areas.

Economy. The radicalization of bargaining process. If on that stage we still could achieve, theoretically, some positive compromise between the negotiating sides with, say, the introduction of arbitrary, it judges the third side, objectively judging the demands of both sides. Here it's radicalization. On the stage of destabilization, we cannot come to compromise even within a family. The husband and wife couldn't figure out which is better. Husband wants his kids to eat at the table, and wife wants him, a child, to roam around the room and drop food all over the floor. They cannot come to compromise unless they start a fight. It's impossible to reach a compromise, constructive compromise, between neighbors. Some people say, I don't like you to work during your lawn at that time, because exactly at that time I'm walking my dog and he's getting nervous. He cannot pass his bowels, you know. So they cannot compromise. They go to a civil court or something like that. Radicalization of human relations. No more compromise. Fight, fight, fight. The normal, traditionally accepted relations are destabilized.

The relations between teachers and students in schools and colleges. Fight. The relations in economical sphere, between laborers and employers, are further radicalized. No more acceptance of the legitimacy of demands of workers. Unlike Japanese, with the theory Z, if you ever heard about it, where the workers are involved in decision-making process, therefore they don't have moral incentive to fight their bosses. In the United States, it's just the opposite. The harder is the fight, the better. The more heroic they look. When the Greyhound network was on strike recently, the correspondents of local TV networks all over the United States were approaching the strikers and they say, oh yes, we are doing something nice. They look like heroes and they were proud. There was some family. The husband was a bus driver. Now they decided in the protest against the bosses to camp somewhere in the forest. And they were presented to the audience as a heroic, nice people. You see? The violent clashes between passengers, picketers and the strikers are presented as something normal. 10, 15, 20 years ago, we would be angry and say, why? Why? Why so much hatred? Today we are not. We say, well, common place, radicalization, militarization sometimes. As I explained on that stage, I took a step a little bit further. Shooting people.

Okay. Law and order now also is pushed into the area where previously people settled their differences peacefully and legitimately. Now we are getting with this court cases in the smallest irrelevant cases. We cannot solve our problems anymore. The society at large becomes more and more antagonistic between individuals, between groups of individuals and the society at large. The media puts himself in the opposition to the society in general, at large, separate, alienated. Okay.

On that stage, you remember I was talking a couple of hours ago about the sleepers. That's when the students from, say, United States, if they are trained in Lumumba University or developing nations that the students I was dealing with, are being sent back from the Soviet Union here. Or if they were already in the United States, in the country, which is the object of subversion, they spring to action. The sleepers go up. They slept for 15 to 20 years. Now they become leaders of groups, preachers, I don't know, public figures. Prominently, they actively include themselves in the political process. All of a sudden, we see a homosexual. 15 years ago, he did his thing and nobody cared. Now he makes it a political issue, a political issue. He demands recognition, respect, human rights. And Fierral is a large group of people. And there are violent clashes between him and police, his group and ordinary people, no matter what. It's black against white, yellows against green. Doesn't matter where his division line goes. As long as this group come into antagonistic clash, sometimes militantly, sometimes with firearms, that is the stabilization process. The sleepers, many of whom are simply KGB agents, become leaders of the process of destabilization. Doesn't mean that comrade Andropov sends comrade Ivanov to the United States. The person who takes care is already here. He's a respected citizen of the United States. Sometimes he gets money from various foundations for his legitimate struggle for, I don't know, human rights, women rights, kid-lived, prison-lived, whatever. There are sympathetic Americans who donate their money to him. This stabilization process usually leads directly to the process of crisis.

In case of developing nations, there's the area where I was active. The process starts when the legitimate bodies of power, the social structure collapse. It cannot function anymore. So instead, we have artificial body injected into society, such as non-elected committees. You remember I was talking about them here. Social workers who are not elected by people. Media who are self-appointed rulers of your opinion. Some strange groups which claim that they know how to lead society forward. They don't usually. All they care is how to collect the nations and sell their own concocted ideology, mixture of religion and ideology. Here, we have all this artificial body claiming power. If the power is denied to them, they take it by force. In case of Iran, for example, all of a sudden we have revolutionary committees. What kind of revolution? There was no revolution yet. And yet, they had the committees. They were taking power of judgment. They had the power of execution. They had the power of legislation. And they had the power of judicial. All of them combined in one person who is half-baked intellectual, sometimes graduated from Harvard University or Berkeley. He comes back to his country and he thinks that he knows the answer to all the social-economical problems. Okay? Crisis is when society cannot function any more productively. It collapses, obviously. That's the word for crisis. So, therefore, the population at large is looking for a savior. The religious groups are expecting a messiah to come. The workers say, we have family to feed. Let's have a strong government, maybe socialist government, centralized, when somebody put their employers on their place and let us work. We are sick and tired of going to strike and missing overtime and all that stuff. We need some strong man, strong government, a leader, a savior is needed. Population is sick and tired already. And here we are. We have a savior. Either a foreign nation comes in or the local group of leftists, marxists, no matter what they call themselves, Sandinista, a reverend or some sort, Bishop Mozzarella, like in Zimbabwe, doesn't matter. A savior comes and says, I will lead you. So we have two alternatives here. Civil war and invasion.

Okay? See how it goes? Civil war, we know what it is. Lebanon is the best example. The civil war, which was artificially implanted in Lebanon by injection of force of PLO, Palestinian Liberation Organization. Invasion, we have in many other countries like Afghanistan. Name any East European country, it was invaded by the Soviet army. But the result is the same.

The next stage is normalization. Normalization is a very ironic word, of course. It is borrowed from 1968 situation in Czechoslovakia. When the Soviet propaganda and after the New York Times declared the country is normalized, the tanks moved into Prague, so there is no more Prague Spring, there is no more violence, normalization. At that stage, the self-appointed rulers of the society don't need any revolution anymore. They don't need any radicalism anymore. So this is the reverse from this destabilization. Basically, it is stabilizing the country by force. So all the sleepers and activists and social workers and liberals and homosexuals and professors and Marxists and Leninists are being eliminated physically sometimes. They've done their job already. They are not needed anymore. The new rulers need stability to exploit the nation, to exploit the country, to take advantages of the victory. So no more revolutionaries, please. And that's exactly what happens in a number of countries.

You remember Bangladesh? This is the crisis in which I was instrumental. First, they had Mujibur Rahman. In 1971, he was the leader of People's Party, Avani League with mustache-like Stalin. He was in Russia many times. In five years, he was shot by his former colleagues, Marxists. He fulfilled his function. In Afghanistan, it happened three times. Of course, there was Taraki, then there was Amin. Now there's Babrakkarmal. They killed each other successively, one after another. The moment he fulfills his duty, the first one demoralized country, the second destabilized, the third one brought it to crisis. Goodbye, comrades. Babrakkarmal comes from Moscow and put into the seat of power. Same thing happened in Grenada recently. Maurice-Bishop? Marxists was killed by Austin, what's his name, General, something. It was also a Marxist, right? So no more revolutions, please. Normalization now. From now on, no more strikes, no more homosexuals, no more women-led, no more kid-led, no more led, period. Good, solid, democratic, proletarian freedom.

Now, to reverse this process takes enormous effort when today the United States had to invade Grenada to reverse the process of subversion. Some people say, boy, this is not good, it's not kosher, to invade the beautiful country, island of Grenada. Well, why didn't you stop the process here when Grenada was just approached by leftists? Why not to prevent Maurice-Bishop to come in power in the first place? Did Grenadians want him? Very questionable. They didn't know who was Maurice-Bishop in the first place. He came to power by coup d'etat himself. Okay? Now we let the situation develop further and further and further until the crisis and normalization very soon, and then the United States decided to invade country, discovering that the country was absolutely a military base for the Soviet Union. Of course, it's a drastic measure. Of course, it's a pity that Marine Corps had to lose, what, 17 lives. Very bad. Why not to stop the process before it comes to crisis? Oh no intellectuals will not let you. It's interference into domestic affairs. They are very careful not to let American administration to interfere in domestic affairs of Latin American countries. They don't mind Soviet Union interfering in this affair. Okay. So to reverse this process from here, it takes only and always military force. No other force on earth can reverse this process at this point.

At this point [the point of crisis, so before normalization], it does not take military invasion of United States Army. It takes strong action like in Chile. A CIA covert involvement to prevent the savior from outside to come into power and to stabilize country before it erupts into civil war. Okay. Support. The right-wing conservative forces. Buy money. Buy crooks or love doesn't matter. Stabilize the country. Don't let the crisis develop into civil war or invasion. Oh no, your liberals will say it's against the law. The Congress will not appropriate money for covert actions of CIA. Why not? Should we wait till the normalization come and Soviet tanks land in Los Angeles Airport? Now, at that point, at the point of destabilization, also the process could be reversed. Again, easily than this. No CIA involvement at this point. You know what it takes here? Restriction of some liberties for small groups which are self-declared enemies of the society. As simple as that. Oh no, the media and liberals will tell you this is against the American Constitution. How can we by force deny the civil rights to criminals, for example? It's not good. Okay. So we allow them to, okay, if you allow the criminals to have civil rights, go on and bring the country to the crisis. This is a bloodless way to do. Curve the rights. I mean, not to put them in prison. No, no. I'm not talking about putting all the gays from San Francisco in the concentration camp. Do not allow them to take political force. Do not elect them to the seats of power, whether it is municipality level, state level, or federal level. It has to be bitten in the heads of American voters, that the person like that in the seats of power is an enemy. Do not be afraid of this word. It is an enemy. If he is not an enemy here, he will be here. Later on, he will be shot, of course. But at this point, he is an enemy. Okay. You are doing great service by denying him a right to capitalize on his own crazy ideas and become a powerful man, a man who uses the seat of power. Restriction of certain freedoms and permissiveness at that point would prevent sliding into crisis and probably will return the process of destabilization. To curb unlimited power, monopolistic power of trade unions here at that point would save economy from collapsing, to introduce a law to stop private companies of raping public opinions mined in the direction of consumerism. No company must have a right to force you into buying more unless you want it. There must be a law. You want to advertise your car? Okay. But not a single mentioning of buying it now and saving money. It must be against the law to force people to consume more. Self-restrain.

Previously, before this process started, the self-restrain was the business of church, religion, because our preachers, the fathers of church, would tell us: material values are good, but it's not the prime function of human being because you have to live with something. Obviously, the design for our life is not to consume more deodorants. There must be something greater. If such a complicated instrument as human body was created, obviously, there must be some higher purpose for that. And it's very easy to avoid destabilization by denying the greedy companies one little freedom, one little liberty, forcing you into turning yourself into processors of unwanted products and goods. They turn you into machines, like the worm who does inlets and outlets. How long an average appliance lasts these days? Less than a year. Why? Where's workmanship? We want you to buy more. Okay.

This stabilization process could be easily overcome if, as I say, the society, by its own will or after persuasion by the leaders, will come to the idea of self-restrain. It's so hard we want to consume more, but you have to, unless you will come to this stage, when, as we say in Russia, if the Sahara desert ever becomes a communist state, there will be shortage of sand. So you have to curb your expectations at this point before it's too late. But no, we don't want to do it. Demobilization process. Again, it's the easiest thing to reverse.

First of all, by restricting import of propaganda, the easiest thing to do, unlimited, unrestrained import of Soviet literature, Soviet journalists, giving Soviet propaganda and ideological agitators equal time on American TV network. It has to be stopped. And it's easy. They won't be offended, mind you. As a matter of fact, they will respect America more. But then my former colleague Vladimir Pozner appears on Nightline and Ted Kofil asks him, well, Vladimir, what do you think about this? And what can he think? He is an instrument of propaganda. He thinks what comrade Andropov tells him to think. He has just a nice, articulate mouthpiece of the Soviet subversion system. And Ted Kofil makes you believe that my friend Vladimir Pozner thinks.

The process of demoralization may not have started at all if at that point the country, which is a recipient of subversion, actively, not violently, but actively prevents importation of foreign ideology. I don't want America to follow the pattern of ancient Japan. You don't have to shoot every foreigner when it approaches the sacred borders of the United States. But when he offers you a junk in the disguise of very shiny something, you have to tell him: No, we have our own junk.

If at that point the society is strong, brave, and conscientious enough to stop importation of ideas which are foreign, then the whole chain of events could be prevented.

Recently I've been to the Philippines and I was shocked how in big cities like Manila, children listen to deafening music. A melodious nation with long traditions of good, nice, ethnic music introduced by Spanish a long time ago, maybe two centuries, three centuries ago. All of a sudden listen to musical garbage blasting their radios at full volume. Why? In India I spent many years watching the reactions of Indians walking out of movie theaters after seeing Hollywood production. They couldn't figure out why Americans are so wasteful. They smash their cars, their shiny cars, every five minutes. How come they shoot each other for half million dollars? Is it true that they are so obsessed with sex? Can you imagine showing a movie where each five minutes there's a copulation on the screen to a country like India with long traditions, tradition of respect to this private matter, or to Pakistan? And the United States expects these people to respect you? No way. Oh yes, they will see the movie. They'll pay five rupees to see that garbage, but they walk out and will tell their kids: don't respect Americans, don't be like Americans.

So the process of demoralization could be stopped right here, both as an expert and as an import. And that takes one step, one very important thing to do. You don't have to expel all the KGB agents from Washington DC. The most difficult and at the same time the simplest answer to the subversion is to start it here and even before. By bringing back the society to religion, something that you cannot touch and eat and put on yourself, but something that rules society and makes it move and preserve it. A Soviet scientist Shafarevich, who has nothing to do with religion, he is a computer scientist, did a very intensive research on the history of socialist countries. He calls socialist or communist any country with a centralized economy and the pyramidal style of power structure. And he discovered, actually he didn't discover it, he just brought to attention of his readers, that civilizations like Mahanjodaro in the river Hindu's area, like Egypt, like Maya, Incas, like Babylonian culture, collapsed and disappeared from the surface of earth. The moment they lost religion, as simple as that, they disintegrated. Nobody remembers about them anymore. Well, distantly. So the ideas are moving society and keeping mankind as a society of human beings, intelligent, moral agents of God.

The facts, the truth, the exact knowledge may not. All the sophisticated technology and computers will not prevent society from disintegrating and eventually dying out. Have you ever met a person who would sacrifice his life, freedom, for the truth like that? This is truth. I never met a person who said, this is truth and I'm ready to shoot me. To defend the truth. Right? But millions sacrifice their life, freedom, comfort, everything for things like God. like Jesus Christ. It's an honor. Some martyrs in the Soviet concentration camp died. And they died in peace, unlike those who shouted long live Stalin, knowing perfectly well that he may not live long. Something which is not material moves society and helps it to survive. And the other way around, the moment we turn into two by two is four and make it a guiding principle of our life, our existence. We die. Even though this is true, and this we cannot prove, when we can feel and have faith in it.

So the answer to ideological subversion, strangely enough, is very simple. You don't have to shoot people. You don't have to aim missiles and Pershing's and Cruz missiles at Andropov's headquarters. You simply have to have faith and prevent subversion. In other words, not to be a victim of subversion. Don't try to be a person who in Zudor is trying to smash your enemy and being caught by your hand. Don't strike like that. Strike with the power of your spirit and moral superiority. If you don't have that power, it's high time to develop it. And that's the only answer. Thank you.