Posted on 12/01/2022 9:42:37 PM PST by george76
Decades ago, KGB spy Yuri Bezmenov defected to America and exposed a four-step plan the Soviets engineered to bring down the United States: demoralization, destabilization, crisis, and normalization. Demoralization was the first and most critical step, and it involved infiltrating the institutions upon which our society was built.
Although the Soviet Union is long gone, demoralization is still occurring in the United States, but it’s coming from within, especially from our academic institutions . I know this firsthand because I almost became another demoralized, nihilistic American youth until I learned to turn my left-leaning college experience to my benefit.
I attended the University of Colorado Boulder—in a place so far ideologically left that Coloradans jokingly refer to the town as “The People’s Republic of Boulder.” On the surface, it looked like a typical college campus with sororities, fraternities, and students busily rushing around campus trying to get to their destinations. Students had that adventurous attitude that comes with being away from home for the first time.
However, I was able to quickly pick up on the subliminal messaging in my introductory classes intended to push students toward the left. And the messaging became increasingly more blatant and extreme as my undergraduate career progressed.
For example, my Sociology 101 professor delivered his lectures as if he were matter-of-factly lecturing on various theories, thinkers, and ideas of the field, but he skillfully and ever so cunningly was steering 400 students to think as Marx did.
I specifically remember how he got almost the entire class to agree with his proposition that employees and employers are inherently in conflict with each other because while one group is interested in trying to increase its compensation, the other is actively attempting to lower it. Of course, there was absolutely no mention of thinkers such as Thomas Sowell who thoroughly debunked that Marxist viewpoint.
What was most alarming to me as a 19-year-old college student was just how unthinkingly my peers accepted the professor’s argumentation without much, if any, challenge.
By the time I became a senior in college , I witnessed a professor declare to the class his allegiance to Foucauldian ideology (i.e., an oppressor versus oppressed worldview expressed by power dynamics) by stating, “I’m a Michel Foucault fanboy.” When this professor suggested that being white automatically made a person a racist, my classmates simply nodded their heads, accepting such nonsensical statements as truth.
What solidified all this indoctrination in such young impressionable minds was when my fellow students were generously rewarded with high scores for their repetition and slow acceptance of the leftist worldview. This is how the process of demoralizing thousands of young people at just one of the many “places of higher learning” throughout our nation takes place.
With the nonstop bombardment of woke messaging coming at college students, how can they possibly hope to maintain the will to keep pursuing their degrees, let alone keep their sanity?
The answer lies within a human being’s power of interpretation. According to the ancient stoics, the only things in the world that we have total control over are our own actions, our reactions to outside stimuli, and the way we interpret our experiences. This wisdom is directly applicable to—and necessary for—the survival and thriving of an open-minded college student.
Although I had a choice to view my college experience as a dreadful slog through the thick mire of extreme leftist ideology with its divisive messaging, I decided to treat this experience as an opportunity to learn as much as I could about what makes people so possessed with such a negative worldview. In other words, I treated my college years as an observational research project.
I attended each class with this mindset, and, in a very short time, I was able to make my classes significantly more interesting—all because of how I chose to think about them.
This is what my advice is to students sitting in a classroom right now, trying to keep their eyes open because they’re so bored of being on the receiving end of incessant propaganda: Remain critically engaged without becoming sentimental about well-crafted messaging directed to arouse feelings of guilt or inadequacy. Also, view your experience as an opportunity to get a behind-the-scenes look at how the process of demoralization works in practice.
For those who reject this extreme ideology because of its destructive nature that divides people into “us versus them” categories, treat this as an opportunity to learn about how and what your ideological opponents think and what their plans for the future are.
In other words, do what the ancient Chinese warrior-philosopher Sun Tzu would do: The more you look at it from their perspective, the more you are preparing yourself to effectively counter your opposition—and the better you are preparing yourself to win on the ideological battlefield.
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“Decades ago, KGB spy Yuri Bezmenov”
Yuri was not a spy. Espionage was not his forte.
It was similar in the University of Texas system in the early 70’s, though it came from a minority of professors. It took some years to throw off the brainwashing. Years of exposure to the real world was the cure.
Too late for me!
Our oldest grandchild is graduating from UC this semester. I’ll send her this article nonetheless.
She was already a liberal when she graduated from high school in Fort Collins.
Now, on to reality. At least she has a job.
Interestingly, while there was various survival collaboration among Korean War and Viet Nam War US pow’s the ideological propaganda attempts were an almost complete failure. From what I have read, the nork approach was of such a simplistic one that the generally literate (and in the case of Viet Nam almost all POW’s were officers with STEM degrees) target populations found inculcation with propaganda geared to illiterate peasants to be totally unconvincing if not silly.
The Chinese have only gotten more sophisticated over the years and I would expect if they capture a number of US personnel in the next war that they will try a more subtle and persuasive approach as is described here. That along with the decay of US culture should produce a good many real collaborators. Separation of POW’s into ethnic and sexual groups and segregating officers and career enlisted personnel will also be done.
No way we're going to unring that bell.
Pinochet and Franco would have ideas on what to do.
This would be the time to listen to them, it may already be too late.
"social" gospel = misplaced compassion
Jesus commanded:
"Let the dead bury their dead. Come, follow me."
The totally dedicated leftist college professors are figuatively dad, and creating student zombies to staff our public schools to kill the souls and spirits of our devejoping children, IMHO.
You are right.
And spiritually dead. They are dead in their sins.
Like cancer it spreads
Excellent read this morning. This guys parents did good. I hope this essay gets distributed far and wide.
If I could make every student read a book it would be 1984.
If I could make every student and American watch a video it would be Yuri Bezmenof. It explains almost everything happening with the left…nothing else really makes sense.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9TviIuXPSE&t=525s
It’s amazing to see your blood transmogrified by the public school system. It happened to my youngest daughter in high school. When she left for college she was a full blown communist according to her.
I didn’t give her a dime for tuition. By the time she graduated and got a j-o-b she started the slow process of finding truth in life or as I like to think, the natural common law life that has served society from the beginning.
I wish we would have homeschooled her. I couldn’t quit work or reduce my workload without severe consequences to the family’s well being and my wife said she was a mother not a teacher and was afraid to try.
Times are different now. Homeschooling has many more success opportunities than what was available in the 90’s and early new century. I encourage every parent to consider homeschooling and pressuring our representatives to change how public educational monies, in Washington State each student receives almost 17k per year, give the money to the parents.
Let them decide what school to send their kids to, our education system would become the best in the world overnight. It’s a must actually. Like Ted Danson likes to pontificate that the climate has 10 years before doomsday, the public education system is on the same course. It’s dooming society and we must stop it.
Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn points out that education is fundamental, a foundation of society, if the foundation changes, everything else changes too. The growth in our public schools from 2000-2019 is a huge problem and it explains a lot about the ruddy complexion of today’s public schools.
During this period student enrollment grew by 7.6%. Teacher increases 8.7%, however the real growth is in district administrators which grew 87.6% during the same period! No wonder schools have failed and are going to continue to fail.
This is the most important political fight we must engage and win. It won’t be easy, the unions are liars and will use every ounce of their life’s energy defending their fiefdoms, but we will prevail…for the children, and western society too.
Similar to the U. of Oregon in the nineteen seventies where Sociology and the Education departments became home to the most ignorant and inept educators and students imaginable. It apparently has just continued the downward spiral from that time
I graduated from CU in ‘82. I attended eight years after graduating HS, after four years of army service and two years of community college. Needless to say, my perspective was much different than the 18 to 20 year olds in my classes. I did have positive experiences with a few professors but most were leftists. The take home for me was that independent thought was largely forbotten.
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