Offensive Freedom
1 HN recommender · recommended in 5 months, 2020–2022
6:50 · 2.9M views · Jun 27, 2020
A short clip of former KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov in 1984 describing Soviet ideological subversion of Western societies. It is a political commentary excerpt from his longer lecture.
HN commenters cite it in political and disinformation threads as a source on Soviet psychological operations, a contested claim.
6 comments from Hacker News
> What’s the point, to achieve paralysis? Yes. Here's a one hour lecture from a KGB defector who's explains what's going on: 15 min lecture: this video 1 hour lecture: [LINK] TL;DR: It's intentional, it's going to get way worse, and if you get too loud in opposition you will find yourself ostracized and possibly without a job.
Many conspiracies can be just explained through emergent behavior. For example, there could be demand for that music, and the labels are just creating content to respond to that demand... without any ethical considerations about what they're promoting, that is. But to be honest, a conspiracy of some kind could be an explanation, who knows. For some people, there are substantial tangible, material benefits to dumbing down society. For example, the "gangster rapper" stereotype is pushed aggresively by the music industry. The popularity of "gangster rap" results in "gangster" aesthetics becoming fashionable, even among law abiding people who are not gangsters. However, when people see a person that resembles the "gangster" stereotype (purely based on their attire) pushed by the entertainment industry, they will be more likely to call 911, eventually resulting in an innocent person being killed for no valid reason. Is this a racist conspiracy? who knows. Likewise, oversexualization results in people having unplanned kids, causing them to ultimately become poor, and more susceptible to predatory loans, low wages, political manipulation and all the machinery that exists only to abuse the poor. Similar to anti-intellectualism. And then, glorification of violence, competition, non-compliance, etc... this just makes people very divisive, and in order to dominate a large population you want them to be as divided as possible, and constantly distracted with immaterial disputes while you
Most definitely cia has a history with manipulating information. But at the point of information, how do you know what to even trust at any level? Evidence can be provided for anything. Information and disinformation all at the same time. This is only increasing - how will anyone be able to sort themselves out? I’m not so sure it’s possible. this video Also 60 seconds of video is a ton of information. And it’s not just one video at a time. The total session aggregated per user per active user is way higher than that. These are behaviors where users use the app all day. Their entire worldview is based on the content within the social network experience.
> sponsored Why the past tense? Seems to me like someone is still "sponsoring" racial tensions in the US. This has been in the works for quite some time, and it's paying dividends now: this video . The entirety of the US media apparatus, as well as the entirety of the political establishment is happy to play along.
This goes back to Soviet cold-war-era psy-ops. They planted the seeds in the US and now the US is exporting it to the rest of the world. this video