academia

In the early 1980s, former KGB operative Yuri Bezmenov (aka Tomas Schuman) elaborated on this message. Bezmenov defected to Canada in 1970 and later lectured in the United States about how the KGB was subverting America. The Soviets, he said, were waging total psychological warfare against the U.S., employing the strategy of the ancient Chinese military theorist Sun Tzu that subversion—destroying your enemy from within—was superior to military conquest.

Bezmenov explained that the ultimate purpose of subversion was to negate the common sense of American citizens so thoroughly that they could not protect themselves: “to change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite an abundance of information no one is able to come to any sensible conclusion in the interest of defending themselves, their family, their community and their country.” Subversion seeks to divide constituent social groups—blacks vs. whites, women vs. men, gays vs. heterosexuals—in order to spawn distrust, dissension and dysfunction (i.e., identity politics). But KGB agents were not responsible for most subversion. Rather, subversion occurs largely by U.S. members of academia, the media and Hollywood elites who have embraced Marxist dogma. (For a case study of the radical leftist playbook in action, see the sidebar “Venezuela: Communists’ Dress Rehearsal.”)