From Sun Tzu to the USSR to the MSM
I have found online a copy of Yuri Bezmenov’s anti-Soviet tract called LOVE LETTER TO AMERICA. Yuri Bezmenov was the most highly placed KGB officer ever to defect to the West. His timely warning to the West against the means and goals of his Soviet masters were largely unheeded.
I have selected several choice passages. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine what parallels exist between these principles, and the attempts in the modern day to deconstruct America.
For ease of the eye, words originally emphasized by being written in all capitals here are italicized in bold.
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500 years before Christ, the Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu formulated the principle of subversion this way:
- Cover with ridicule all of the valid traditions in your opponent’s country.
- Implicate their leaders in criminal affairs and turn them over to the scorn of their populace at the right time.
- Disrupt the work of their government by every means.
- Do not shun the aid of the lowest and most despicable individuals of your enemy’s country.
- Spread disunity and dispute among the citizens.
- Turn the young against the old.
- Be generous with promises and rewards to collaborators and accomplices.
Sound familiar? About 2500 years later we can read this very same instruction in a secret document, allegedly authored by the Communist International for their “young revolutionaries”. The document is titled “Rules of Revolution”:
- Corrupt the young, get them interested in sex, take them away from religion. Make them superficial and enfeebled.
- Divide the people into hostile groups by constantly harping on controversial issues of no importance.
- Destroy people’s faith in their national leaders by holding the latter up for contempt, ridicule and disgrace.
- Always preach democracy, but seize power as fast and as ruthlessly as possible.
- By encouraging government extravagances, destroy its credit, produce years of inflation with rising prices and general discontent.
- Incite unnecessary strikes in vital industries, encourage civil disorders and foster a lenient and soft attitude on the part of the government towards such disorders.
- Cause breakdown of the old moral virtues: honesty, sobriety, self-restraint, faith in the pledged word.
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All you have to do to “screw up” the status quo of a free nation, is to borrow one false idea from the ideology of a communist or totalitarian government.
For the sake of simplicity, I have chosen the idea of “egalitarianism.” “People born equal therefore must be equal.” Sounds great. But look at yourselves. Were you born equal? Some of you weighed 7 pounds at birth, others 6 or 5… Are you now equal? In any way? Physically, mentally, emotionally, racially, spiritually? Some are tall and dumb, others short, bald and clever.
Now, let’s figure out what will happen if we legislate equality, and make the concept of “equality” a cornerstone and pillar of socio-economical and political system. All right? You don’t have to be a great economist or sociologist to foresee that some of the people who are “less equal” would demand as much as those who are “more equal” by law!
Aha, now you’ve got it. There will be some who get more for giving less and take advantage of those, who are even “less equal,” say, in the art of taking. And to avoid the squabble for “equal redistribution” you will have to introduce a third force — the State. Why? Because people were never equal, are not equal and if God wanted us to be equal He would probably have made us equal.
No. He provided a difference. “Vive la Difference!”– said the French before the French Revolution. And they were right.
The beauty of the best, most successful political-economic system, created by the Fathers of America has nothing to do with legislated or enforced equality. The American Republic is based on the principle of equal opportunities for unequal and very much different and diverse individuals to develop their abilities and to coexist in mutually beneficial cooperation. And that is entirely different story. That much I knew even from the Soviet textbooks of American history.
Now let’s move faster. People who have declared themselves to be equal will inevitably come to expect more for their individual needs, which sooner or later will tragically come to conflict with the “unequal” reality. That will automatically produce discontent. Unhappy and discontent masses are less productive than those who are happy being what they are and making the best of it. Decreased productivity, as we all know, leads to such unpleasant things as inflation, unemployment and recession. These, in turn, cause social unrest and instability, both economical and political.
Chronic instability breeds radicalism as a means of solving problems. Radicalism is the precondition of a power struggle which may (and has often) resulted in violent and forceful replacements of power structures.
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The American media is a willing recipient of Soviet subversion. I know this, because I worked with American journalists and correspondents in Moscow while on the Soviet side, and after my defection to the West. People habitually refer to the American media as ‘free,’ ignoring the obvious and commonly known fact that most of the most powerful media in the USA, is already monopolized both financially and ideologically by what are referred to as ‘liberals.’ American media ‘chains’ belong to fewer and fewer owners, who, do not seem to mind that the media is being almost totally ‘liberalized.’
Liberalism, in its old classical sense, means above all, respect to individual opinion and tolerance to opposing views. However, in my own experience, communist defectors who have requested and sometimes literally begged, to have stories of their life in the Soviet Union told to the American people via the major American media have been completely ignored.
One of the most devastating methods of Soviet subversion in American media is the discrediting of authors like myself and the information and opinion of those who come up with clear evidence of Communist crimes against mankind.
Introduction of non-issues is another powerful method of demoralizing at the level of ideas. It will take another full size book to describe in detail this method. Suffice it will be here to give a brief definition of non-issues. An issue, the solution of which creates more and bigger problems for majority of a nation, even though it may benefit a few, is a non-issue (civil rights of homosexuals is not an issue; defending sexual morality is the larger, real issue).
The main purpose of non-issues and the devastating result of their introduction is the side-tracking of public opinion, energy (both mental and physical), money and time from the constructive solutions. Soviet propaganda elevated the art of infiltrating and emphasizing non-issues in American public life to the level of actual state policy.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
