The Soviets had an entire “active measures” department devoted to churning out anti-American dezinformatsiya. A classic example is the rumor that AIDS was the result of research aimed at building a ‘race bomb’ that would selectively kill black people.
On a different level, in the 1930s members of CPUSA (the Communist Party of the USA) got instructions from Moscow to promote non-representational art so that the US’s public spaces would become arid and ugly.
Americans hearing that last one tend to laugh. But the Soviets, following the lead of Marxist theoreticians like Antonio Gramsci, took very seriously the idea that by blighting the U.S.’s intellectual and esthetic life, they could sap Americans’ will to resist Communist ideology and an eventual Communist takeover. The explicit goal was to erode the confidence of America’s ruling class and create an ideological vacuum to be filled by Marxism-Leninism.
From 2006, an essay that deserves wide distribution.
Via Instapundit.
and, nothing new under the sun. communism has been gaining steadily as the intellectual ability of the average citizen decreases. the old wanting something for nothing and taking what others have worked for is strong in the western world these days.
The difference between Active Measures (aktivnye meropriatia) and disinformation (dezinformatsiya):
Active Measures (AM) have been a significant weapon in the Russian and Soviet arsenal for
over 100 years. By active measures is meant the coordinated direction by the centralized
authoritarian hierarchy of a combination of overt and covert techniques that propagate Russian,
(formerly Soviet) ideas, political/military preferences and undermine those of their democratic
adversaries. Disinformation – intentionally disseminating false information such as forgeries – is
just one of the many overt and covert influence techniques used by the Russian/Soviet leadership
in what they call “active measures.”
Homeland Security Digital Library,
Naval Postgraduate School, Center for Homeland Defense and Security.
A short primer on Gramsci:
https://fee.org/articles/antonio-gramsci-the-godfather-of-cultural-marxism/
Of course, that was back when western “progressives” loved the Soviet Union. Now they long for its return. A POTUS who had Soviet help to be elected would be a good thing. One with imaginary Russian help, not so much. Which was more likely?
Funny how the Democrat’s and Russia’s social and economic goals for America kinda line up.
To me, the single most bizarre lie that has still gone unchallenged in the entire Trump/Russia Collusion hoax is that Putin would in any imaginable way have preferred a Trump presidency over a Clinton one. Trump absolutely epitomizes American pride, strength and power while the Dems are already literal partners with Russia in undermining and sabotaging what is Putin’s greatest competition. The Dems created the “pee dossier” because they knew blackmail was the only conceivable way people could be conned into believing that Trump would betray the country he so obviously loves.
I think the next biggest unanswered question is since there never was any credible evidence pointing at Trump and his campaign, why did a 2+ year investigation into collusion and Russian meddling of American elections completely and entirely ignore any and all Democrat connections to the Russians? The entire Mueller smear job was so clearly a partisan hit piece on Trump, it was never about anything else.
I hope the GOP is highly aggressive in it’s upcoming questioning of Mueller and they rip him an immense new one. Unbelievable that the Dems are still so delusional and naive as to expose Mueller to a Republican interrogation. It could go spectacularly bad for them.
I also hope that these multiple ongoing hoax investigations started by the GOP eventually bare some fruit. If some prominent swamp creatures don’t go to jail over this, then the American justice system truly is beyond redemption.
The reason Putin would prefer Trump to the Democrats is because Hilary Clinton was of the neo-con war-monger crowd and Trump was an isolationist America firster.
Remember when Clinton laughed about Gaddafi? “We came, we saw, he died! HAHAHAHAHA”
Putin doesn’t want the anti-Russian globalists coming for him. That’s why he supports Trump.
(beware of source):
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/07/16/putin-trump-win-election-2016-722486
and all those freedom luving progressives worried about the brown babies joined ranks with the NEo-con war mongers to support HRC killing brown babies.
(read somewhere that joint chiefs of staff didn’t support the Libya thing).
That strategy is sure paying dividends in Calgary. Blighting art all over the place from Cowtown Kremlin
Speaking of Antonio Gramsci:
“[Joseph] Buttigieg specialized in modern European literature and theory. He was translator and editor of the three-volume English edition of Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, published from 1992 to 2007 with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He was a founding member of the International Gramsci Society and served as its president.”
– “Joseph Buttigieg”, Wikipedia, 2019 July 21, 6:33 am PT
Who is Joseph Buttigieg?
Pete Buttigieg’s father.
It fits and is not in least surprising.
3. “There are no objective standards by which we may judge one culture to be better than another. ”
We know Prime Minister Apology believes in #3 as he would not condemn FG Mutilation.
8. “When confronted with terror, the only moral course for a Westerner is to apologize for past sins, understand the terrorist’s point of view, and make concessions.”
We know PM Coward stated that returning ISIS pieces of shit would be “powerful voices in the community”.
Canada has been defeated and Marxism has won.
Very few Canadians believe in individual rights.
Only the US is capable of saving us.
(F**king recaptcha had a picture of radial boom derrick truck, called it a bus and I was forced to click those squares. Somebody needs to be slapped, forehand and backhand.)
Let us see now…..
“an essay that deserves wide distribution”
The sentiment of course is common sense. The problems here are manifold and varied.
The education today precludes any intellectual acceptance of facts.
There is no history, period.
The history is being rewritten, as we speak, in the “academia”, by the media cartel and basically anybody that has an ideological mouthpiece. Note the recent article by NYT “How the Soviets Won the Space Race for Equality” and other such nonsense.
History is washed away, not by the government of the day but the ruling class that include “academia”, the “news” media and popular “entertainment”.
These control the meme and simply having the massive presence can say that the moon is made of cheese and other then themselves, the plebeians will believe it after few reinforcing “news” stories.
You will note that they don’t even pretend that they are telling the truth.
The scene is, in fact, continuation of communist propaganda and misinformation.
This may change with the information that those that are interested in the affairs of man available on the web.
It remains to be seen if there are enough people interested in truth, for it is much easier to glide into nothingness while having rather easy living in nihilism.
There is so much to be written though one must hold onto oneself and make it brief.
PS;
More on the subject here:
Tired of Fake News? Washington Post Publishes Fake History of Soviet Union
https://sputniknews.com/analysis/201710111058145604-washington-post-fake-history-USSR/
“The education” – there is no such concept as “the education.”
Until two months ago I was a (gasp) public-school teacher.
Fifty years ago I was in Viet-Nam.
I have fronted Communists in the flesh and have taught; you have done neither; all you do is recycle internet gossip. You are a Miz Grundy.
How would you know?
I see you were a teacher, you know things.
Everyone else is just not up to being a teacher.
In this context, you being in Vietnam has no effect on anything.
I was born and grew up in a country run by communists and know communism first hand.
Since you brought it up.
Not that it matters.
Well said Lev. Yuri Bezmenov and others warned us and now it is too late. We will have to go through the fire.
OK, Mack was fighting them and now we allow them power. Being born in a communist country was something no one had no control over but allowing communists to gain power here is both your fault and mine.
I was 3 years old when that happened. Get hold of yourself
Author self-identifies as a liberal (assume in the classical sense) who has been fighting communism since he was conceived. Christianity is anathema to the classical liberals and so Christianity gets lumped in as an evil equal to that of the Islamists (see comments in article) along with nativism/populism.
The classical liberals are Utopians no different that the Marxists are Utopians. The irony is that the cultural Marxists of today who the author laments are the result of the success of the classical liberals.
It was the Christian tradition of America that gave people vales to live by cohesively…a tradition that has been under attack by the liberals including the author in this article. Having rejected values that bind, those free thinking liberated plebs have turned into an unruly mob & we can’t grow the state fast enough big enough to satisfy the whims of the mob.
Many of the yesterdays “textbook” classical liberals themselves have morphed into the socialists and cultural Marxists the author laments. These sycophants of the plantation owners buy into the liberal ideology cuz its cool & progressive and they can virtue signal to each other at cocktail parties. They are stooges of the globalists.
Putin says, the liberalism of the west has failed and so we witness the convulsions.
Others concur. The question is what do we replace it with?
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/patrick-deneen-classical-liberalism-strikes-out/
I agree completely. Classical liberalism is what brought us to the point where this dude feels the need to write this essay. His solution?
Do more of the same…only harder.
He laments the adoption of a Francoist fascism, but really…that’s a proven solution. We need Pinochet helicopters running 24-7, because otherwise we get constant progressive advancement.
Two people without a clue agreeing with each other.
There are classic liberal types among the conservative fold also. They tend to be the anti-Trump “Resistance-Never Trumpers” who like HRC, have nothing but contempt for dirty unwashed populists.
https://www.michiganreview.com/bill-kristol-falls-short-conservative-voice/
Who is this man “esr” who wrote the excellent essay?
Eric S. Raymond, the author of “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”, the seminal essay on why all software (wait for it) ought to be free and unencumbered by intellectual property rights.
In his dotage he’s become quite the McAfee-esque figure.
Russia is about to get interesting. Not long ago, they had to increase the retirement age to accommodate economic shortfalls. It wasn’t popular. Then, just the other day…local elections were tampered with by the removal of a large number of opposition candidates. This resulted in the biggest on the street protests since 2012. The living conditions of Russia have dipped significantly. It’s mostly due to being so dependent on petroleum markets. Additionally, sanctions are still in effect from the US.
The conventional wisdom inside Russia is that these protests (while on the surface reflect the immediate displeasure of how the elections are being fixed) are actually an indirect protest against Putin. The rumor talk is that they are a precursor to a “revolution.”
One word: “Popcorn”
and all this time I’ve been figuring that modern art is ugly because the artists who do it lack talent and now I’m being told it was all part of the Russi plan to make western civilization look ugly. I think it’s working.
The author sez (sic): “Lenin and Stalin wanted classical-liberal individualism replaced with something less able to resist totalitarianism, not more. Volk-Marxist fantasy and postmodern nihilism served their purposes;”
Then he sez: “Religions are good at filling that kind of nothing.”
In fact it actually is the other way around, in so far that the religion is replaced by the communist ideology.
(it is volk-Marxist fantasy that is in high fashion propagated by B. Sanders, AOC and most of the “Democratic” candidates for the president of the US, the media cartel, the humanities disguised as “academia”, the popular indoctrination disguised as “entertainment”.)
Classical liberal is non-political, it is a way one choses to live not necessarily telling others how to live, though he may comment if asked.
Aristotle described it as:
“In accordance with the doctrine of the mean regarding wealth, aiming for the balance of giving generously to the right people while not depleting one’s own resources or taking from improper sources, creates the possibility of making one a liberal, and therefore virtuous, man…”(paraphrased)
https://wlu.edu/Documents/mudd-center/journal-vol-1/virtuenomics-aristotles-liberality-and-the-creation-of-a-sustainable-economic-system.pdf
In a later era, the liberal came to forth in renaissance. It was in fact the Christian church that took the initiative to liberate Europe from the dark ages.
This idea is complete heresy to the ideologues because they can’t argue against that.
It is understandable that this will outrage many, though that was where relatively very recent western civilization was at its highest.
Unfortunately, it has been on downhill slide in current decades.
Because of the ‘isms of all shades, that are akin to looking at one’s belly button and contemplating the mechanics of the world and how to control them, one becomes absolute in the rightness of ones utterances and completely intolerant to anything else that may be argument against, to the extreme demand of shutting everyone else up by any means necessary.
Why do you think it was necessary to have a tranny (Caitlyn Jenner) nude on the cover of Sports Illustrated?
And as centrefolds in Playboy (or is it now Playxim/xer/xit)?
(Hey, Captcha! A streetcar isn’t a bus!)
There’s always a few things missing from these accounts.
Without financial assistance from its alleged enemies in the west—especially towards the end—and a willingness by western Deep State with socialist and globalist sympathies to look the other way while KGB agents and dupes had the run of western institutions, the Soviet Union would not have had the ability to carry out such disinformation campaigns.
Crude disinformation campaigns by corrupt and incompetent Russian governments, headed by that point by only nominally Russian kings of mostly German ancestry whose sympathies were with Russia’s enemies to the west (Nicholas II spoke English to his wife), pre-date the Soviet Union by quite a stretch. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were a Tsarist creation. They would have been forgotten long ago had western intelligence agents not made a point of translating it into all major European languages, to provide an excuse to blame Europe’s Jews for the crimes of their own governments.
Now that Russia is now governed by Russians for the first time in her modern history, Russians are almost alone in helping to expose the disinformation campaigns of the globalists who used their motherland as a lab rat for 75 years. For this, they are rewarded with a new disinformation campaign, smearing Russia and Russians as the authors of all the failures of our globalist elite.
“””But if the Islamists achieve their dream of nuking “crusader” cities…,bla bla bla… destroy entire populations and fuse Mecca into glass.”””
Last time the Saracens FROM MECCA flew planes into tall buildings the enlightened classic liberals of the Neo-con faction pushed for a war against the wrong country. Conservatives are asking:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/why-are-these-professional-war-peddlers-still-around-tucker-carlson-max-boot-bill-kristol/