G. Edward Griffin (born November 7, 1931) is an American author, lecturer, and filmmaker. He is the author of The Creature from Jekyll Island.
Thanks to Jean from Co-Creating Our Future on Planet Earth, I stumbled upon a very enlightening piece of information in the wake of last week’s terrorist attacks in Paris.
Back in 1984, G. Edward Griffin conducted a lengthy interview with Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov. During this interview, Bezmenov clearly explained the 4-step psychological warfare program envisioned by the KGB to take down a country:
- Demoralization
- Destabilization
- Crisis
- Normalization
Bezmenov insisted that the United Sates were already way past the demoralization step and already in the destabilization phase by the mid-eighties.
Yuri Alexandrovich Bezmenov (1939 – 1993), also known as Tomas David Schuman, was a journalist for RIA Novosti and a former KGB informant from the Soviet Union who defected to Canada in 1970.
I contend that the crisis step was implemented in 2001 with the 9/11 terrorists attacks, which were used to propel the United States into the normalization process, the creation of a police state in a perpetual state of war and marked by collectivism (a.k.a socialism or communism) and new-speak (a.k.a political correctness).
I further contend that the same process has been implemented in Europe, and that once demoralization was accomplished to their satisfaction, the powers that be used the so-called refugee crisis to speed up the destabilization phase.
France has now experienced its crisis phase with the Paris terrorist attacks, which are quickly propelling this country into the normalization phase. The French government wasted no time, while the French are in a state of shock like the Americans were after 9/11 (see The Shock Doctrine) to start implementing this “normalization” phase: a police state in a perpetual state of war.
What I find most disturbing and intriguing about Bezmenov’s allegations is that they eerily echo other allegations I have come across over the last few months, for instance those attributed to Dr. Richard Day, as well as a mysterious document entitled Silent weapons for quiet wars. And then we have the cryptic and somewhat ominous message inscribed on the Georgia Guide-stones…
The video I am including in this report was uploaded to YouTube on June 21, 2009 by Kevin Gallagher. It contains excerpts from the interview by G. Edward Griffin with Yuri Bezmenov, with French subtitles. A transcript of these excerpts follows below.
You can find the full interview on YouTube. A full 3-part transcript of the entire original interview was also posted online by Useless Dissident. This transcript includes screen captures of Bezmenov’s slides, which were shown during his interview.
Henri Thibodeau 
Transcript edited by Henri Thibodeau using a transcript prepared by Don McAlvany
Interviewer, G. Edward Griffin
Our conversation is with Mr. Yuri Alexandrovich Bezmenov. Mr. Bezmenov was born in 1939 in a suburb of Moscow. He was the son of a high ranking Soviet Army officer. He was educated in the elite schools inside the Soviet Union and became an expert in Indian culture and Indian languages. He had an outstanding career with Novosti, which was the, and still is, I should say, the Press arm or the press agency of the Soviet Union. It turns out that this is a front for the KGB. He escaped to the West in 1970 after becoming totally disgusted with the Soviet system, and he did this at great risk to his life. He certainly is one of the world’s experts on the subject of Soviet propaganda and disinformation and active measures.
When the Soviets use the phrase ideological subversion, what do they mean by it?
Yuri Bezmenov
Ideological subversion is the process which is legitimate, overt and open. You can see it with your own eyes. All you have to do — all American mass media has to do — is to unplug their bananas from their ears, open up their eyes and they can see. There is no mystery. There is nothing to do with espionage.
I know that espionage — intelligence gathering — looks more romantic. It sells more deodorants through their advertising, probably. That’s why your Hollywood producers are so crazy about James Bond type of thrillers.
But in reality, the main emphasis of the KGB is not in the area of intelligence at all. According to my opinion and the opinion of many defectors of my caliber only about fifteen percent of time, money, and manpower is spent on espionage as such. The other eighty-five percent is a slow process which we call either ideological subversion, or active measures, (~Activitia perionachia, in the language of the KGB), or psychological warfare. What it basically means is to change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite of the 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.
It’s a great brainwashing process which goes very slow and is divided in four basic stages. The first one being demoralization. It takes from fifteen to twenty years to demoralize a nation. Why that many years? Because this is the minimum number of years which requires to educate one generation of students in the country of your enemy exposed to the ideology of the enemy. In other words Marxist-Leninism ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of at least three generations of American students without being challenged or counter-balanced by the basic values of Americanism, American patriotism.
Most of the activity of the Department was to compile huge amount, volume of information on individuals who were instrumental in creating public opinion: publishers, editors, journalists, actors, educationalists, professors of political science, members of Parliament, representatives of business circles. Most of these people were divided roughly in two groups: those that would toe the Soviet foreign policy. They would be promoted to the positions of power through media and public opinion manipulation. Those who refused the Soviet influence in their own country would be character assassinated or executed physically, counter-revolution.
Same way, as in the small town of Hue, in South Vietnam, several thousands of Vietnamese were executed in one night when the city was captured by Vietcong for only two days. And American CIA could never figure out, how could possibly Communists know each individual, where he lives, where to get him and would be arrested in one night, basically, in some four hours before dawn, put on a van, taken out of the city limits and shot? The answer is very simple. Long before Communists occupied the city there was extensive network of informers, local Vietnamese citizens, who knew absolutely everything about people who are instrumental in public opinion, including barbers and taxi drivers. Everyone who was sympathetic to the United States was executed.
Same thing was done under the guidance of the Soviet Embassy in Hanoi, and same thing I was doing in New Delhi. To my horror, I discovered that in the files were people who were doomed to execution. There were names of pro-Soviet journalists with whom I was personally friendly.
G. Edward Griffin
Pro-Soviet?
Yuri Bezmenov
Yes. They were idealistically-minded Leftists who made several visits to USSR and yet the KGB decided that counter-revolution or drastic changes in political structure of India, they would have to go.
G. Edward Griffin
Why is that?
Yuri Bezmenov
Because they know too much. Simply because, you see, the useful idiots, the Leftists who are idealistically believing in the beauty of Soviet socialist or Communist or whatever system, when they get disillusioned, they become the worst enemies. That’s why my KGB instructors specifically made a point, never bother with Leftists. Forget about these political prostitutes. Aim higher. This was my instruction. Try to get into wide circulation, established conservative media. Reach filthy rich movie-makers, intellectuals, so-called academic circles, cynical, egocentric people who can look into your eyes with an angelic expression and tell you a lie. These are the most recruitable people, people who lack moral principles who are either too greedy or too… suffer from self-importance, they feel that they matter a lot. These are the people who KGB wanted very much to recruit.
G. Edward Griffin
But to eliminate the others, to execute the others, don’t they serve some purpose? Wouldn’t they be the ones to rely on?
Yuri Bezmenov
They serve purpose only at the stage of destabilization of a nation. For example, your leftists in the United States, all these professors, and all these beautiful civil rights defender, they are instrumental in the process of the subversion, only to destabilize the nation. When the job is completed, they are not needed any more. They know too much. Some of them, when they get disillusioned, when they see the 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. But, they may turn into the most bitter enemies of Marxist-Leninists when they come to power. And that’s what happened in Nicaragua. You remember, most of the former Marxist-Leninist were either put to prison, or one of them split and now he’s working against the Sandinistas. It happened in Grenada, when Maurice Bishop, he was already a Marxist. He was executed by a new Marxist, who was more Marxist than this Marxist. The same happened in Afghanistan, when first there was Taraki, he was killed by Amin, then Amin was killed by Brabak Karbakil with the help of the KGB. The same happened in Bangladesh when Mungi Burackman, very pro-Soviet Leftist, was assassinated by his own Marxist-Leninist military comrades. It’s the same pattern everywhere. The moment they served their purpose, all these useful idiots are either to be executed entirely – all the idealistically minded Marxists – or exiled, or put in prisons, like in Cuba, many former Marxists are in Cuba… I mean in prison.
So, basically, America is stuck with demoralization. And unless, even if you start right now, here this minute, you start educating a new generation of Americans, it will still take you fifteen to twenty years to turn the tide of ideological perception of reality back to normalcy and patriotism.
The result? The result you can see. Most of the people who graduated in the sixties, dropouts or half-baked intellectuals, are now occupying the positions of power in the government, civil service, business, mass media, educational system. You are stuck with them. You cannot get rid of them. They are contaminated. They are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern. You cannot change their mind even if you expose them to authentic information. Even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still cannot change the basic perception and illogical behavior. In other words, these people, the process of demoralization is complete and irreversible. To get rid society of these people you need another twenty or fifteen years to educate a new generation of patriotically-minded and, and common sense people who would be acting in favor and in the interests of United States society.
G. Edward Griffin
And yet these people who have been programmed and as you say, in-placed, and who are favorable to an opening with the Soviet concept. These are the very people who would be marked for extermination in this country?
Yuri Bezmenov
Most of them, yes. Simply because the psychological shock when they will see the future, what the beautiful society of equality and social justice means in practice – obviously, they will revolt. They will be very unhappy, frustrated people. And a Marxist-Leninist regime does not tolerate these people. Obviously, they will join the leagues of dissenters, dissidents. Unlike in present United States, there will be no place for dissent in future Marxist-Leninist America. Here you can, you can get popular, like Daniel Ellsberg, and filthy rich, like Jane Fonda, for being dissident, for criticizing your Pentagon. In future these people will be simply squashed like cockroaches. Nobody is going to pay them nothing for their beautiful, noble ideas of equality. This they don’t understand, and it will be greatest shock for them, of course.
The demoralization process in the United States is basically completed already. For the last 25 years… Actually, it’s over-fulfilled because demoralization now reaches such areas where previously not even comrade Andropov [1911-1984] and all his experts would even dream of such a tremendous success. Most of it is done by Americans, to Americans, thanks to lack of moral standards.
As I mentioned before, exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who is demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him. Even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents, with pictures. Even if I take him, by force, to the Soviet Union and show him concentration camp, he will refuse to believe it until he is going to receive a kick in his fat bottom. When the military boot crashes his, then he will understand, but not before that. That’s the tragic of the situation of demoralization.
The next stage is destabilization. This time, the subverter does not care about your ideas, and the patterns of your consumption, whether you eat junk food and get fat and flabby. It doesn’t matter anymore. This time, and it only takes from two to five years to destabilize a nation, what matters is essentials: economy, foreign relations, defense systems. And you can see it quite clearly that in some areas, in such sensitive areas as defense and economy, the influence of Marxist-Leninist ideas in the United States is absolutely fantastic. I could never have believed it fourteen years ago when I landed in this part of the world that the process would go that fast.
The next stage of course is crisis. It may take only up to six weeks to bring a country to the verge of crisis. You can see it in Central America now. And after crisis, with a violent change of power, structure, and economy, you have the so-called period of normalization – it may last indefinitely. Normalization is a cynical expression borrowed from Soviet propaganda. When the Soviet tanks moved into Czechoslovakia in ’68, Comrade Brezhnev said, ‘now the situation in brotherly Czechoslovakia is normalized.’ This is what will happen in the United States if you allow all these schmucks to bring the country to crisis, to promise people all kind of goodies and the 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 fulfilled or not.
He will go to Moscow to kiss the bottoms of the new generation of Soviet assassins. Never mind. He will create false illusions that the situation is under control. Situation is not under control. Situation is disgustingly out of control.
Most of the American politicians, media, and educational system frames another generation of people who think they are living at the peace time. False. The United States is in a state of war, undeclared, total war, against the basic principles and the foundations of this system.
And the initiator of this war is not comrade Andropov of course. It’s the system. However ridiculous it may sound, the world Communist system, or the world Communist conspiracy, whether I scare some people or not, I don’t give a hoot. If you are not scared by now, nothing can scare you. But you don’t have to be paranoid about it. What actually happens now, that unlike myself you have literally several years to live on unless the United States wake up. The time bomb is ticking. With every second, the disaster is coming closer and closer. Unlike myself, you will have nowhere to defect to, unless you want to live in Antarctica with penguins. This is the last country of freedom and possibility.
G. Edward Griffin
OK, so, what do we do? What is your recommendation to the American people?
Yuri Bezmenov
Well, the immediate thing that comes to my mind is, of course, there must be a very strong national effort to educate people in the spirit of real patriotism, number one. Number two, to explain [to] them the real danger of socialist, Communist, whatever welfare state, big brother government. If people will fail to grasp the impending danger of their development, nothing ever can help [the] United States. You might kiss goodbye to your freedoms, including freedoms to homosexuals, prison inmates, all this freedom will vanish, evaporate in five seconds, including your precious lives.
The second thing, the moment at least part of the United States, population is convinced that the danger is real, they have to force their government – and I’m not talking about sending letters, signing petitions and all this beautiful noble activity. I am talking about forcing the United States’ government to stop aiding Communism.
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