“Progressive” ideology always rests on a conviction that the current “regressive” system is comprehensively unjust and must be destroyed by exploiting its weaknesses. The most famous proponent of such tactics in recent years has been the late Saul Alinksy, the intellectual godfather of the modern Democrat Party, but former Soviet journalist and KGB informant Yuri Bezmenov laid out an even more concise strategy for subversion in a 1984 interview. Alinksy’s seminal book specified 13 Rules for Radicals, but Bezmenov had only four “stages of ideological subversion,” and they will sound very familiar to anyone following the current wave of left-wing riots, or the politicized final stages of the coronavirus panic before it: Demoralization, Destabilization, Crisis, and Normalization. Bezmenov defined ideological subversion, or “active measures” as the KGB preferred to call it, as a “slow brainwashing process” to “change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite their abundance of information, no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interests of defending themselves, their families, their community, and their country.”
Stage 1: Demoralization Bezmenov said the first stage, Demoralization, could take 15 to 20 years to complete because “this is the minimum number of years it takes to educate one generation of students.” “Marxist-Leninist ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of at least three generations without being challenged or counterbalanced by the basic values of Americanism, American patriotism,” he warned in 1984, judging that the demoralization process had been “basically completed” by that point. “Actually, it’s over-fulfilled, because demoralization now reaches such areas where previously, not even Comrade Andropov and all of his experts would even dream of such tremendous success,” he added, referring to former KGB head and Soviet leader Yuri Andropov. “Most of it is done by Americans to Americans, thanks to a lack of moral standards.” Bezmenov explained that demoralization is important because it robs the targeted population of its ability to process valid information. Even when demoralization targets are “showered with authentic proof” of contrary positions, they simply “refuse to believe it.” Demoralization is quite obvious among today’s young people, whose faith in their country has been systematically destroyed throughout their lives by the education and media establishment. To take a recent high-profile example, the New York Times’ fraudulent “1619 Project” argued that “American history” actually began with the arrival of black slaves in North America and the Revolutionary War was fought by the colonists to preserve slavery. Although comprehensively debunked by actual historians, and even the original author has admitted her core thesis was not true, the 1619 Project is now part of some school curricula. Another word for demoralization is guilt. Americans are routinely compelled to feel guilty about their society and national history. Guilt is the most powerful force in left-wing politics and academia. People will not accept the radical expansion of punitive government power unless they feel guilty and deserving of punishment. Stage 2: Destabilization The second stage, Destabilization, is much faster, requiring only two to five years under KGB doctrine. In this stage, the fundamentals of the targeted population’s economy, political system, and culture would be attacked, while the demoralized population could not mount much of a defence. Bezmenov in 1984 found it “absolutely fantastic” how much influence Marxist-Leninist ideas had developed in the American economy and military. In essence, a demoralized population becomes willing to believe the worst criticisms of its own society, while learning to see defenders of that society as their enemies, while avowed enemies become natural allies. The defenders are held to strict standards, while anything goes for the most strident critics. Whatever Bezmenov saw in the destabilized American society of the early 1980s with respect to the Soviet Union, it’s easy to see how the American Left has destabilized entire segments of modern society after demoralizing them. They see enemies everywhere, while no pro-American authority can be trusted. It’s hard to imagine a better illustration of demoralization followed by destabilization than hordes of anti-capitalist activists texting each other on their iPhones. Not coincidentally, hostile foreign powers like Communist China and Iran are reaching out to destabilized American communities and offering themselves as guides and allies. Their sales pitches aren’t exactly smooth, but they definitely are making an effort. A destabilized population becomes obsessed with hypocrisy as the ultimate political sin. They believe the best ideas – individual liberty, sovereign rights, capitalism, even the rule of law – are presented insincerely by sinister powers who seek to exploit and manipulate them. The precious resource of goodwill disappears from society as everyone comes to believe their neighbors hate them and cannot be trusted. Demoralized people lose faith in their nation, history, and ideals; destabilized people lose faith in each other. Stage 3: Crisis Once a society has been destabilized, Bezmenov said the time would be ripe to create a Crisis, which he estimated would take six to eight weeks in the Eighties. With turbo Internet speed, the modern era can punch out a crisis much faster than that. A crisis has the obvious benefit of panicking demoralized, destabilized people into abandoning their legal protections and constitutional ideals. During the coronavirus panic, people who brought up those ideals were treated like lunatics. The pendulum swung the other way with blinding speed during the riots. In the span of one week, the right to peaceable assembly went from a crazed defiance of common-sense lockdown rules to an urgent matter that utterly transcended the deadly pandemic. Suddenly, angry political demonstration magically cured the coronavirus, or made the projected wave of sickness and death into a purely secondary concern. If you wanted to work at the store so you could feed your family in late March, you were selfishly trying to “kill my Grandma to pad your bank account.” If you wanted to burn the store down in early June to protest white supremacy, nobody mentioned their imperiled grandmothers. The more subtle benefit of a crisis is that it tends to de-legitimize aspects of the existing system that have already been softened up by the long process of demoralization and destabilization. Those who control the organs of public communication have the power to decide which aspects of the system are supposedly indicted by the crisis. For example, the dominant media Left will go to great lengths to avoid painting the coronavirus as an indictment of the flabby, blinkered, bureaucratic Big Government that grew over the past few decades, and it will not discuss the failures of left-wing mayors and governors. On the contrary, the pandemic was used to attack the competence of Republican governors who turned out to be entirely correct in their actions, as in Florida and Georgia. During the riots, the media is completely uninterested in discussing the incompetence of left-wing officials who allowed violence to rage out of control with deadly consequences. Somehow the lesson of wanton violence that killed people and destroyed countless livelihoods became “let’s get rid of the police altogether.” The threat of a crisis is essential for terrorizing the middle class into accepting a political agenda that is actively hostile to its interests, which leads to the fourth stage of subversion: the offer to make the pain and fear go away by accepting political domination. Stage 4: Normalization “After a crisis, with a violent change of the power structure and economy, you have a so-called period of Normalization that may last indefinitely,” Bezmenov said, arriving at the fourth stage of subversion. “Normalization is a cynical expression borrowed from Soviet propaganda,” he explained. Interestingly, it also happens to be the core theme of the 2020 Democrat presidential campaign. “When the Soviet tanks moved into Czechoslovakia in 1968, Comrade Brezhnev said, ‘Now the situation in brotherly Czechoslovakia is ‘normalized.’ This is what will happen in the United States if you allow all the schmucks to bring the country to crisis, to promise people all kinds of goodies and a paradise on Earth, to destabilize your economy, to eliminate the principle of free-market competition, and to put a Big Brother government in Washington, D.C. with benevolent dictators like Walter Mondale, who will promise lots of things – never mind whether the promises are fulfillable or not,” Bezmenov cautioned. As things turned out, Walter Mondale never got his chance to be a benevolent dictator, and to some extent Bezmenov’s four-step model of subversion could be applied to almost any political campaign. They almost all begin with telling voters things are awful, crises have erupted, and normality can be restored only by voting for the challenger (or preserved only by voting for the incumbent). Bezmenov, however, was insistent that American left-wing professors and civil-rights leaders were deliberately running Andropov’s strategy with a conscious effort to achieve destabilization, the step that truly distinguishes ideological subversion from the usual promises to put a chicken in every pot. “They are instrumental in the process of subversion only to destabilize a nation,” he said of the academics and activists. “When their job is completed, they are not needed anymore. They know too much. Some of them, when they get disillusioned, when they see that Marxist-Leninists come to power, obviously they get offended. They think that they will come to power. That will never happen, of course. They will be lined up against the wall and shot.” The American version of this process probably would not end with the mass execution of inconvenient intellectuals, but there is a parallel in what would happen to the intellectual supporters of the current riots if the Democrats win in 2020. They would discover that the victorious Democrat Party is not at all interested in their systemic criticisms of public union employees, such as police officers. Many bones would be thrown to activist groups to purchase their loyalty – and, much more importantly, the loyalty of their leaders – but not the one concession they ostensibly care about the most: a system that makes it easier to discipline and fire government employees. This metaphorical lining up and shooting of intellectuals is already happening with Lockdown Forever enthusiasts, who only a few days ago were hammering out passionate arguments that American businesses must remain shuttered for weeks or months to come, and anyone who dared to question their dire warnings was a selfish monster willing to kill other people’s grandmothers to pad out their 401k accounts. In the blink of an eye, Lockdown Forever went from the vital engineers of a politically useful crisis to inconvenient obstacles for the new crisis, nationwide riots. Most of the lockdown gurus sensed this shift in the political winds and quickly trimmed their sails, hammering out new screeds that claimed protesters are probably immune to the coronavirus somehow, or even more incredibly, that another outbreak would be a small price to pay for righteous political activism: These are the same medical activists who were shrieking in March that the coronavirus could kill millions of Americans if lockdowns were not imposed immediately, and just a few weeks ago, left-wingers were obsessed with calculations that showed COVID-19 is exceptionally deadly to the black community. But suddenly the risk of millions of deaths, 70 percent of them purportedly likely to be black Americans, means nothing compared to the vital urgency of protesting against “white supremacy.”
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SIHANOUKVILLE, July 13 -- An ongoing massive influx of Chinese into Cambodia's coastal city of Sihanoukville is generating mixed reactions among local residents. The Chinese began flocking to Sihanoukville about three years ago and their population is now estimated at the same number as Cambodian residents, or around 80,000, according to Mayor Y Sokleng. But other municipal officials suggested the number of Chinese is actually two or three times higher, with the city having been transformed from a sleepy beachtown into a bustling city complete with traffic jams. Sihanoukville, the capital of Sihanoukville Province, is located at the tip of an elevated peninsula in the country's southwest on the Gulf of Thailand. It is about 230 kilometers southwest of the capital Phnom Penh. Chuon Narin, the provincial police chief, said that almost 90 percent of business operations in the city, ranging from hotels, casinos, restaurants to massage parlors, are run by Chinese. Among the 71 casinos, 48 of them are operated by Chinese, and some 90 percent of 436 restaurants in the province are managed by Chinese nationals, he added. Currently, there are nearly 200 hotels and guesthouses in the province, of which 150 are run by Chinese. They also run 41 karaoke clubs and 46 massage parlors, the police chief added. These days, many Cambodians who travel to Sihanoukville wonder whether Sihanoukville can retain its traditional charm amid the sea of Chinese signboards seen everywhere in the city. Sim Vireak, strategic adviser of the Asian Vision Institute based in Phnom Penh, shared his view that the lack of Cambodian-ness is clearly evident in Sihanoukville. The signboards are mostly in red, with some feature misspelled Khmer characters that shop-owners seemingly took directly from Google Translate, he said. Sok Samnang, 49, a government civil servant who lives in Phnom Penh, said he could not believe his eyes when he went to Sihanoukville with his family recently. "I could see Chinese nationals everywhere. They are walking in the streets and are in restaurants as well as construction sites, making this city, the roads and beaches unclean," he said. The local authorities are not denying the fact that due to the rapid influx of foreign arrivals and investments, especially Chinese, they are facing a lot of challenges including water and electricity shortages. The collapse of a Chinese-owned building under construction in Sihanoukville last month that claimed 28 lives had led to calls for the Cambodian government to look into rumors of shoddy and illegal construction. Following the tragedy, former Sihanoukville Provincial Gov. Yun Min resigned, with his successor, Kuoch Chamroeun, vowing to improve sanitation and keep the environment clean in Sihanoukville. There are nearly 200 projects under construction in the city, mainly built by Chinese. In relation to security and social order, traffic police are reportedly tending to stop more Chinese nationals than Cambodians who break traffic laws in the town these days. In the meantime, more than 400 Chinese nationals, so far, have been arrested in the city and deported to China, mostly for involvement in online scams. While sentiments against the Chinese are divided, Nim Sothea, a social observer, said, "I'm not advocating for communism, but I think there's so much to learn from China. So much! And there's nothing wrong about being close to China." He pointed out the benefit of doing business "with whomever allows us to put food on the table." Vann Sokheng, president of the Sihanoukville Chamber of Commerce, said that in the past, Sihanoukville was a sleepy town, having just a dozen hotels, with a seven-story hotel on the beach being the highest structure. Now many are rising up to 30 stories or higher. He acknowledged some negative impacts on the local people resulting from the Chinese presence, saying some Cambodian families had to relocate outside of the city or to other provinces because of the cost of living. The land price, for instance, at his current office has risen from $50 to $3,000 per square meter in just a few years' time while leases for office space have skyrocketed. However, he also pointed out that some Cambodians regard those living in Sihanoukville are being the luckiest in the country due to having more chance of becoming rich overnight for just selling their land or leasing it to Chinese. "Many local residents are lucky enough to have $1 million, a few million or even tens of millions," he said. While ordinary Cambodians appear to believe that the rising luxury hotels are being built for Chinese tourists, the national government is viewing the town as a model of fast development. It plans to welcome leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations there in 2022. Sim Vireak said that the development of Sihanoukville should not become an example of failure, but to ensure the Cambodian-ness and inclusiveness of development. "To that end, the responsibility falls heavily on the Cambodian side in terms of law enforcement and concrete implementation of national development policies," he added. Author: Pete McGee |
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