“There is no evidence of “pretending to collapse” in the late 20th century USSR. There is evidence of an actual collapse. There is also evidence of attempt at reform (glasnost and perestroyka) that got out of Kremlin’s control, but that is not the same as pretending.”
Like I said- perhaps they screwed up and actually collapsed. I think it not beyond possibility. The best laid plans of mice and men, and all that.
“People who lead us to serfdom are not agents of Komintern. They are homegrown idiots, community organizers with lust for power, and apparatchiks who enable them, who might occasionally borrow an idea or two from Lenin and Trotzky.”
The ones that exist now, perhaps. I find it not impossible that the ones who they got their ideas from had an altogether more insidious agenda. For example, we know FDR’s administration had actual communists in it (Alger Hiss, anybody) and Yalta was a full-on sellout. We know that Marxism is and has been pretty prevalent in academia for decades- where it was placed to influence our elite classes to the point where it would become their ideology. My theory is that Stalin’s dissolution of the Comintern was a smokescreen, and that it simply went underground to infiltrate the West. Then the original infiltrators died off, went rogue, or otherwise began to deviate from the plan, but not entirely. Like robots, they continued the course they set out on, and when the Soviet Union collapsed, they simply continued onward. The useful idiots they created are still with us, indeed, they are the dominant orthodoxy in academia and the media now.
“For example, many, possibly a majority, of Americans want socialized medicine, banking and education, a solid majority wants the pension system run by the state, nearly all want separation of church and state. These are all building blocks of marxism, but people who want them are not marxists, let alone agents of a foreign power. They simply want a free lunch, a naturally occuring human condition.”
Marx’s ideology is no less dangerous or evil regardless of what fools are being manipulated with it. I also see no reason to separate the stooges from the manipulators. This is all assuming I am right of course. I would greatly be pleased to be wrong, but as the years pass I think that less likely.
Yes, with that I agree. Indeed, there is a leftwing culture that now has a life of its own. It exists because it caters to an instinct, just like prostitution of thievery exist because they cater to certain instincts. The people in the leftwing institutions do not need to plot or get the morning fax from the Komintern: it is organic to them.
What I disagree is the scenario suggested by Golitsyn, that the KGB had a secret meeting and decided, “let’s pretend we collapse and through that take over the world”. Instead there were forces both inside and outside of the KGB that produced the collapse.
How do I know? Well, I don’t have a fly on the wall somewhere but I grew up in the collapsing Soviet Union and I observe it genuinely collapse. It collapsed ideologically, but it also collapsed on some elemental level: electricity stopped, water ceased to be drinkable, no work was done anywhere unless stimulated by the black market, 90% of the male population was fall-down drunk by 5 pm. You cannot fake that.
And we know why: because socialism cannot work. It is an economic fact that it should fail. So it failed. It is not complicated.
There is another trasformation that occurred in the 70s and 80s: the ideological state of the USSR became instead an imperial state. The roots of it are in the victory in the Second World War: an empire fell into Stalin’s lap thanks to FDR’s and Churchill’s graces. Gradually, the ideological marxist edge was gone. The marxist ideology was supplanted by military imperialism. Now THAT part is alive and well under Putin. It is probably stronger now than in the 70’s because Russia has lost so much of its geopolitical power, so people do genuinely believe that they are under a military threat. This Russian imperialistic nationalism is not going anywhere. There was an opportunity to cure it with a form of international trial for crimes of the Soviet System, similar to the Nuremberg trials, but that opportunity was missed.