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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 poi

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 standard bad guys in Hollywood movies, and the Cold War, and McCarthyism is somewhere in that timeline as well. Nothing much seems to indicate this "demoralization" step got anywhere close to actually happening. It also seems very unlikely that at that point in history, USSR would have enough access to the US to raise entire generations that thought the things the USSR wanted them to. I think it's more likely he was just opportunistically feeding the fears prevalent at the time he was speaking.

CalChris 4y ago
I agree about the 80s. If anything, we viewed them as a bigger threat than they really were, our defense industry in particular. But the USSR fell apart in 1989 and Russia was a spent force in the 90s. We bought Ukraine’s nukes with money because we could. But we, George W Bush really, then underestimated Russia in the 2000s.
- selectodude 4y ago
  Obama far more than Bush.
- sweetbacon 4y ago
  Absolutely. As s teen in the 80s I was shocked the USSR collapsed as everything around me made them out to be this huge Russian bear that could kill us at any moment. Granted I was in the Midwest then away from 24h news cycle, and much closer to missile silos and military bases so perhaps that made a difference.
- KptMarchewa 4y ago
  >But we, George W Bush really, then underestimated Russia in the 2000s. True, but then Obama really fucked it up with "reset". And that was after Georgia War.
  - CalChris 4y ago
    So I suppose that getting Putin to sign off on Gaddafi’s removal was part of that fuckup. Libya was a Russian satellite and Russia has a veto at the UN Security Council. Given the two dumb wars that Obama was saddled with, I thought he navigated things pretty well.
philwelch 4y ago
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 1985 that the ideological program had succeeded beyond all expectations and that Americans were doing most of the work for them. That, coupled with the collapse of the USSR, would allow that leftist ideology to mutate into the forms we see today. I’m not entirely convinced Yuri is telling the truth here, but I thought it would be useful to clarify and perhaps steelman what he is saying, and what that would imply to us in 2023.
- wil421 4y ago
  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.
- dale_glass 4y ago
  > 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.
etiam 4y ago
You're misrepresenting that conviction you allege he has though. (Commonly called out as a "straw man" argument here.) The original post here is pretty vulnerable to both misunderstanding and misinterpretation of that sort. Something like the lecture video rglover linked (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35099311 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35099311) gives a clearer and more concrete description of the subversion process, and to some extent Bezmenov's view on how far it had progressed in a few nations at that time.
wil421 4y ago
To say the American people were full of Marxism in the 80s and 90s is completely made up. I would say today is closer to what he was taking about than the 80s every were.
- norwalkbear 4y ago
  He says it takes three generations to reveal, so 80/90s being the start of subversion makes perfect sense.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > He says it takes three generations to reveal, so 80/90s being the start of subversion makes perfect sense He was saying it takes 2-3 generations to the point where it is internal and self-sustaining, and that that had already been achieved in the 1980s in America.
  - wil421 4y ago
    He said the subversion was already planted in the 60s counter culture stuff and it was coming to fruition in the 80s.
dragonwriter 4y ago
> 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.)
tlear 4y ago
I think it is more of a coincidence. It is was not and is not KGB fault that US colleges are filled with every stripe of "ist" from your garden variety Maoist to Trotskyiest to some normalized now America is DEVIL repent NOW types. Whoever was responsible for what he says if he is still alive is probably completely dumfounded by Americans taking down Lincoln statues and destroying monuments to abolitionists who fought against slavery. I mean holy shit did we do KGB good job or what? (for the record I do not think they had anything to do with it, empire rots from the core)

CalChris 4y ago

I agree about the 80s. If anything, we viewed them as a bigger threat than they really were, our defense industry in particular. But the USSR fell apart in 1989 and Russia was a spent force in the 90s. We bought Ukraine’s nukes with money because we could. But we, George W Bush really, then underestimated Russia in the 2000s.

selectodude 4y ago
Obama far more than Bush.
sweetbacon 4y ago
Absolutely. As s teen in the 80s I was shocked the USSR collapsed as everything around me made them out to be this huge Russian bear that could kill us at any moment. Granted I was in the Midwest then away from 24h news cycle, and much closer to missile silos and military bases so perhaps that made a difference.
KptMarchewa 4y ago
>But we, George W Bush really, then underestimated Russia in the 2000s. True, but then Obama really fucked it up with "reset". And that was after Georgia War.
- CalChris 4y ago
  So I suppose that getting Putin to sign off on Gaddafi’s removal was part of that fuckup. Libya was a Russian satellite and Russia has a veto at the UN Security Council. Given the two dumb wars that Obama was saddled with, I thought he navigated things pretty well.

philwelch 4y ago

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 1985 that the ideological program had succeeded beyond all expectations and that Americans were doing most of the work for them. That, coupled with the collapse of the USSR, would allow that leftist ideology to mutate into the forms we see today. I’m not entirely convinced Yuri is telling the truth here, but I thought it would be useful to clarify and perhaps steelman what he is saying, and what that would imply to us in 2023.

wil421 4y ago
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.
dale_glass 4y ago
> 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.

etiam 4y ago

You're misrepresenting that conviction you allege he has though. (Commonly called out as a "straw man" argument here.) The original post here is pretty vulnerable to both misunderstanding and misinterpretation of that sort. Something like the lecture video rglover linked (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35099311 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35099311) gives a clearer and more concrete description of the subversion process, and to some extent Bezmenov's view on how far it had progressed in a few nations at that time.

wil421 4y ago

To say the American people were full of Marxism in the 80s and 90s is completely made up. I would say today is closer to what he was taking about than the 80s every were.

norwalkbear 4y ago
He says it takes three generations to reveal, so 80/90s being the start of subversion makes perfect sense.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > He says it takes three generations to reveal, so 80/90s being the start of subversion makes perfect sense He was saying it takes 2-3 generations to the point where it is internal and self-sustaining, and that that had already been achieved in the 1980s in America.
- wil421 4y ago
  He said the subversion was already planted in the 60s counter culture stuff and it was coming to fruition in the 80s.

dragonwriter 4y ago

> 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.)

tlear 4y ago

I think it is more of a coincidence. It is was not and is not KGB fault that US colleges are filled with every stripe of "ist" from your garden variety Maoist to Trotskyiest to some normalized now America is DEVIL repent NOW types. Whoever was responsible for what he says if he is still alive is probably completely dumfounded by Americans taking down Lincoln statues and destroying monuments to abolitionists who fought against slavery. I mean holy shit did we do KGB good job or what? (for the record I do not think they had anything to do with it, empire rots from the core)