Article by Janet Levy in The American Thinker
An Explanation of Tactics to Fundamentally Transform America
In 1984, former KGB officer Yuri Bezmenov, who defected to the West in the 1970s, alerted Americans to the methods the Soviet secret service was using to subvert our political system. The aim of the agency, he said, was gradual "ideological subversion" or "psychological warfare."
Using ample video footage of the late Bezmenov, Brainwashed America — the latest documentary from filmmaker, radio host, and author Brannon Howse — exposes how dangerously far this process of undermining American culture has advanced. Howse's conclusions are based on thirty years of study of the history, utilization, and advancement of brainwashing in America. He defines brainwashing as "a method that manipulates and modifies a person's emotions, attitudes, and beliefs" and indoctrination as a subtle, pedagogic process "to induce someone to give up basic political, social, and religious beliefs and attitudes, and to accept contrasting regimented ideas."
In the mid-1980s, the former spy had delineated the phases of the Soviet operation in America: demoralization, destabilization, chaos, and normalization (when communism takes hold). This came to be called Bezmenov's "Soviet subversion model." As early as 1984, he had claimed that the process of demoralization — turning youths against traditional American values — was complete and that destabilization was well under way to subvert the economy, foreign relations, and defense. He had warned that Americans may believe it's peacetime, but they are really "in a state of undeclared war against the basic principles and the foundations of this system."
Howse's documentary contemporizes Bezmenov's warning. It sets out the twelve-step process of brainwashing aimed at effecting a Marxist revolution in America and illustrates it using events from the coronavirus pandemic. The twelve steps are: 1) removing principled leadership; 2) encouraging the questioning of values, convictions, and the American worldview; 3) presenting a revisionist history that portrays the free market system as oppressive; 4) propagating moral relativity to cloud the distinction between right and wrong; 5) extolling consensus and collectivism while declaring individualism dangerous; 6) focusing on emotions over facts, reason, and context; 7) fostering anxiety, confusion, social turbulence; 8) concealing the ultimate agenda; 9) using trusted individuals and institutions to enhance credibility; 10) using informants to zero in on those who don't comply; 11) rewarding compliance and punishing dissent; and 12) winning public trust by manufacturing chaos to lay the groundwork for a benevolent-seeming rescue.
With the advent of the Chinese-origin coronavirus, many of those steps were played out as if from a manual — all in the name of "flattening the curve" and ensuring that hospitals are not "overwhelmed." First, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a pandemic. In the U.S., leadership for managing the situation was delegated to the National Institutes for Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) — essentially to scientists and doctors who followed "the science." Then the virus was used as a means of political, economic, and social control to transform the American way of life. Such was the fear and anxiety the virus generated that citizens gave up their freedom and willingly obeyed mandates that would have been unthinkable the year before. With fake news, constantly changing "science," and factitious numbers, Americans were manipulated into closing businesses, giving up travel and socializing, and accepting restrictions on marriages and funerals. They even surrendered their right to congregational worship under threat of fines and arrests.
Ironically, Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Antifa protesters were allowed to march for "social justice" without social distancing and without the de rigueur masks. Rioting, arson, the looting of businesses, and assaults on civilians and police — ostensibly to protest "police brutality" — were allowed. The mainstream media described them as "mostly peaceful" while condemning conservative political rallies as "irresponsible, dangerous, selfish and a threat to public health and safety." Those who attended anti-lockdown demonstrations were deemed terrorists, but those who took part in radical-left riots were said to be fighting "fascism." To illustrate the incongruity between radical activities that were celebrated and those that were verboten for the general population, Howse includes a wry comment from Laura Ingraham of Fox News: "Going to a restaurant is prohibited but ransacking a restaurant is permissible. Going to church is forbidden but burning down a church is fine."
Howse elaborates on the abounding hypocrisy. Small businesses and churches — the quintessence of ordinary American life — were closed on orders of tyrannical politicians and self-declared medical and scientific experts, while multi-national corporations, abortion clinics, liquor stores, marijuana dispensaries, and casinos were free to operate. Prison doors were thrown open.
It doesn't take exceptional perspicacity to recognize some of the steps identified by Howse being put into effect. Leaders and the media promoted a sense of uncertainty by peddling contradictory information, leaving people unsure of whom and what to believe. Nonsensical, inconsistent orders were issued. The chaos led to a surrendering of values. It engendered fear, anxiety, a herd mentality, and an inability to think and reason clearly. The imposition of masks, distancing rules, temperature checks, restrictions on entry to supermarkets, and so on imposed a regimentation of the kind used at China's infamous "re-education" centers. Some politicians, including New York mayor Bill de Blasio, announced that snitches would be rewarded and thanked people for turning in fellow citizens who did not comply with the arbitrary rules. Dissenters were ostracized and labeled selfish, narcissistic, fascist, racist, white supremacist, and mentally ill. Through these means, Americans were made to accept a more controlled existence and give up some of their privacy and sovereignty. The process continues even as the pandemic fades away.
Howse's film also presents an enlightening scenario that seems to presage the pandemic. It's from the chapter titled "Lock Step" in a 2010 Rockefeller Foundation document called Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development. As part of regular scenario-building exercises, experts at the Rockefeller think-tank imagined a pandemic set in 2012, in which a virus kills 8 million people in seven months. The storyline runs remarkably close to events of the coronavirus pandemic — the crippling of international economies; tourism and supply chains; and, worst of all, a willingness on part of people to accept curtailment of the liberties they enjoy for the promise of returning economies to normal.
Concluding this illuminating documentary, Howse laments the success of this brainwashing operation, carried out during more than a year of the pandemic by globalists and cultural Marxists — also referred to as the "Deep State." He shines light on the gravely distressing reality of Americans who now reject their history, heritage, heroes, and patriotism as a result of an operation engineered to advance revolution. He also identifies the insidious infiltration of American institutions and power centers, the propaganda disguised as entertainment or education, the maligning of dissenters with 'woke' rhetoric and "cancel culture." The operation is the scourge of our time, designed to hide the truth, discredit history, protect the enemies of America, and conceal their globalist agenda.
America is now at a point where its free market system, constitutional republic, Judeo-Christian values, and national sovereignty are seriously threatened. The techniques of disinformation, brainwashing, and indoctrination, contrived to make citizens willingly submit to authoritarian control, are the precursors to the collapse of America from within. Brainwashed America does an excellent job of elucidating how this is happening, and warns patriotic Americans to wake up to combat this insidious assault.
Will we succumb to the reality described by Bezmenov — a change in perception so extensive that Americans will give up the foundational ideas of their country? Or will we red-flag the communist-authoritarian onslaught and work to renew respect for American history, freedom, and limited government, as Howse proposes?
Being born free is a privilege our forefathers fought for and won. Now, more than ever, it must become our eternal battle to remain free.
