Posted on 03/07/2019 9:14:22 PM PST by Perseverando
Just before heading off to Ireland a couple of weeks ago, I linked to a discussion between John Batchelor and Stephen F. Cohen about the “Sovietization” of American political culture in recent years. By this term, Professor Cohen referred to the increasing use of social, political, economic, and legal pressure to cow and silence those who dissent from the accumulating theses of “Progressive” orthodoxy. (A particularly worrisome aspect of this is that those theses are in constant leftward motion, so that one never knows, based on what was sayable yesterday, what is unsayable today — the effect of which is to make it safest simply to say nothing.)
Writing at at PJ Media, Richard Fernandez has taken up this topic in a brief item about the possibility of a new kind of civil war. After listing some examples of deepening political viciousness, he brings up the idea of “hybrid warfare”:
While one explanation for the fractiousness is a reversion to our primitive natural tendency to mistrust outsiders, the other possibility is that it is now the way modern warfare is waged. The Russians have ascribed events unfolding in Venezuela to an American Trojan Horse strategy. It “would rely on ‘protest potential of the fifth column’ to destabilize the situation in the countries with unwanted governments … using the technologies of color revolutions.”
The Russians, whose Soviet empire was overthrown by the color revolutions, have been experimenting with similar strategies known as hybrid warfare. As the NYT reported:
(Excerpt) Read more at malcolmpollack.com ...
EXCELLENT article. Captures the profound tension of our country teetering on the edge of chaos. That’s how I see it, too.
Bookmark
pingarooo
a couple of side comments. Cohen is a communist. Always has been as far as I can trace his work/statements, but he is a slick, scholarly-type smear and diversion artist.
He has been the top academic protecting the old Soviet Union and now Russia from real scrutiny as to what is really going on there, in their foreign adventures, and what they have planned for the West.
Cohen wrote a piece for his wife’s Marxist rag, “The Nation” in 1983 roughly entitled “The Soviet Union is No Economic Basketcase”. Six years later someone should have shoved his disinformation piece up his red ass (whilehe was teaching at either Princeton or NYU).
His wife is red propagandista Katrina van Den Heuvel, the protégé of the protector of the Communist Party USA’s history, esp. in Hollywood (his book “Naming Names” was a cover-up of Communist proven and sometimes admitted penetration and control of some of Hollywood (i.e John Howard Larson, the Commissar of Hollywood, the Soviet CPUSA member chosen to lead the infiltration there, which he admitted).
Batchelor, who is very educated, was totally snookered by Cohen’s academic demeanor and suave voice, to the point that he (and Tucker Carlson too), believed his Marxist disinformation crap.
Michael Vlahos - Taught at the Naval Academy and over the years, he became a leftist. He too, was on the John Batchelor Sho. I wondered why he was ever allowed to teach at the Naval Academy, but with a Secy of the Navy like Ray Mabus, the head of the “Queens’ Navy” under Obama, it explained a lot about the neutering of the military academies (Air Force Academy, the worst; West Point graduated an avowed communist cadet and did nothing to oust him over the years; Navy - turning out poor ship commanders whose hobby seems to be colliding with their own fleet ships or having deplorable social behavior - not all but enough to have a major scandal for years).
If you don’t follow some of these people for years (Cohen and Vlahos, for example), you can easily fall under their “scholarly, patronizing” manners and bullshit. That is what happened to both Batchelor and Carlson and it shouldn’t have if they had been aware of who they were dealing with and how communist psychological warfare/disinformation propaganda/ist programs work.
Great post to you, and article ping.
Cohen is a modern more presentable version of I.F. Stone, assigned to a different area of operations.
CW2 Ping?
Not so fast.
Her Thighness won the popular vote but thank God and our fore fathers for the electoral college.
CWII Ping!
“A particularly worrisome aspect of this is that those theses are in constant leftward motion, so that one never knows, based on what was sayable yesterday, what is unsayable today — the effect of which is to make it safest simply to say nothing.”
The trick for us normal, patriotic and decent citizens to preserve our heritage and be able to pass it on to our children and grandchildren, is to help the Left fracture itself before elections are not allowed anymore. They naturally fracture, owing to their hunger for power, but they have to be TOTALLY fractured, fighting like the Bolsheviks and Menshevniks that they are, for us to win.
A long war deserves a long range solution . Compete, varmint hunt !
“...so that one never knows, based on what was sayable yesterday, what is unsayable today...”
One shouldn’t CARE what is “Unsayable” to the Left. Say it anyway, and follow it with a middle finger.
If they go rough, we go rougher. By a magnitude of 10.
F’em.
Thanks, Max. Appreciate the heads up.
Concur. But I'm away from keyboard [mostly] for a bit.
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