A Bridge Too Far

There may come a point, maybe in your later years, when curiosity and the desire to develop a worldview become more important than some concern about what other people think about you. Without some framework all that gratuitous life input is but noise in search of a pattern.

Take politics. Good people, smart people, have voiced opinions or taken actions over the years that just seem to smack of nihilism. Does anyone, for example, seriously believe we could remain a nation other than in name only without effectively managing our borders? Defund the police? And now in some corners comes this slow dance with socialism. Such an embrace, some might say, amounts to a wanton ignorance of history (MM 3/11/19 The Socialist Seduction). What’s going on?

Enter Yuri Bezmenov who gave a remarkable interview that shined a light on and provided a framework for some of the otherwise inexplicable events and movements over the past few decades (Yuri Bezmenov Interview). (Okay, cue conspiracy theory, but judge for yourself (after watching the thirteen-minute interview, linked at the bottom of the piece) and ask what possible motivation would he have to shade the truth?)

This one-time Soviet journalist and former KGB informant defected to the West in 1970 with warnings about ideological subversion and psychological warfare by the Soviet Union, particularly targeting the United States. After resettling in Canada, he gave lectures and wrote books throughout the 1980s outlining that four-stage Soviet plan to undermine Western societies from within: demoralization, destabilization, crisis, and normalization.

Fast forward from that 1984 interview as we embark on the use of cyber and information warfare (by Russia among other nation states) aimed at undermining social cohesion as a means of eroding Western democracy (Disinformation Tactics). For some context, marxist-like movements have actually reached back well before the current Mamdani campaign to include a 1966 article in The Nation, describing what’s known as the Cloward-Piven strategy, named after two (married) professors in sociology and political science at Columbia as they advocated for the use of political activism to create a crisis by overwhelming the welfare system as a tactic to spur social change.

We might then skip over the next six decades to the remarkable victory of Zohran Mamdani, a so-called Red Diaper Baby, i.e. a child of parents dedicated to radical leftist movements, as were they (here, again, with connections to Columbia). You will find examples in that referenced article of other prominent politicians with similar connections (may we please engage in a sober discussion without hysterical references to Joe McCarthy’s Red Scare of the 1950s?).

The working hypothesis for discussion, then, is that the “progressive” wing of the Democratic party may have managed to have taken the entire party so far to the left that it simply became unpalatable to the electorate, thereby giving rise to the Trump era. In other words, perhaps the origin of our current societal “disquiet” may have some roots from afar rather than being entirely home-grown.

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