I was a loyal Soviet citizen until the age of twenty. What that meant was: to say what you are supposed to say, to read what you are permitted to read, to vote the way you are told to vote, and at the same time, to know it is all a lie. – Natan Sharanskii

A propagandist is not simply a person propagating an agenda; a propagandist is someone attempting to convince you that their agenda is unstoppable. The ultimate purpose of propaganda is not to persuade, but to dissuade, to demoralise, in two primary ways. To demoralise an individual, convince that person that they are the only sane person in a world full of madmen. To demoralise a group, convince them that there is nothing that they can do, no matter how much support they may have. Getting people to actually believe the narrative of the propaganda message (in other words, creating useful idiots) is merely a bonus happenstance for the propagandists; in the modern internet vernacular, the propagandists don’t care if you take the blue pill, they are more interested in making you take the black pill.

In some ways, the demoralised are useful idiots in their own way. These are the people who know that the mainstream narrative is complete bollocks, but they go along with it anyway out of fear: fear that they will lose their job, their friends, or in extreme cases, their lives. I would therefore define a useful idiot as “a propagandist who is not clever enough to get paid,” because this definition includes both the blue-pilled and black-pilled. Again, the cathedral doesn’t care if anyone believes them, they just want to make sure no-one pushes back against their agenda. In rare candid moments (otherwise known as “gaffes”), servants of the cathedral will even outright admit that they know what they say isn’t true, but it is important that they keep repeating the message, because they need people to believe that it is true. The truth, the real truth, is dangerous to the cathedral, and they know it. Part of the reason that they need to keep “reminding” their subjects that they are powerless is because it isn’t true!

When strong, appear weak, and when weak, appear strong. – Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Part of the reason that authoritarian regimes are obsessed with order and stability is because they have none; the more power rests in a centralised institution, the more prone the entire system is to collapse. Top-heavy systems are inherently unstable. Corruption will very frequently be excused as long as the corrupt individuals are holding the system together. Removal of corrupt officials in an authoritarian regime is predicated not on maintaining morality, but on maintaining stability, and therefore enforcement of any sort of “code” is not done based on principle, but on a trade-off between the individual’s efficacy and party loyalty. When authoritarians use the word “integrity,” they mean structural integrity, not moral integrity, as many people likely assume. People looking at the system from the outside, however, usually don’t see any of this, because the rot is very carefully hidden behind a well-maintained façade.

In his infamous 1984 interview, Soviet defector and former KGB agent Yuri Bezmenov mentioned that he believed that demoralisation of the United States was already complete. While the will of the American people may not have yet been broken, the will of the American institutions certainly was. Various academics and scientists with YouTube channels have done investigations into the origins of postmodernist, pseudoscientific ideas that have been propagated throughout universities since about 1970. Among these individuals include Ivan Karamazov (which is as much his real name as “Oleksandr Varyazhskii” is mine), a.k.a. King Crocoduck, who has a PhD in physics from UC Santa Barbara, and whose series The Science Wars is sourced from several books that were written by scientists who were caught in the thick of this ideological subversion. My adoptive mother graduated from high school in 1974, and when she was in college, she already saw a lot of pseudoscientific nonsense being propagated in fields such as psychology, but couldn’t understand why until I directed her to the books Higher Superstition by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt and Intellectual Impostures (a.k.a. Fashionable Nonsense) by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. Between her experience and also some things I had learned about Soviet pseudoscience from another defector named Natalia Vinogradova, we put the pieces together, and finally understood what Bezmenov meant. The leaders of American institutions had bought into “proto-wokeness” made from an unholy marriage between Soviet Communism and French postmodernism, and would not allow something as silly as methodological naturalism to stand in their way. It wasn’t until after the proliferation of “Web 2.0,” otherwise known as social media, that these ideas became commonplace outside of the university system. Though light has finally been shown on the subversion, it is not slowing down. The hard sciences, which had previously remained untouched, are now being infested with ideologues as well.

Some say that the wrong side won the Cold War. I don’t entirely agree, but I can see why one might have that sentiment. Although the Soviet Union is gone, Soviet subversion of western institutions is complete, and China is now funding the subversive academics that were once propped up by the Soviets. The Cold War was analogous to The Mountain and the Viper, if you catch my drift, and I don’t just mean the ending. The Cold War was decades in the making when the western banking cabal conspired to poison Russia with Marxism in order to turn the country into a captive market, and prevent such a vast country, extremely rich in natural resources, from overtaking the west in terms of economic success. In doing so, the cathedral manufactured its own worst enemy, which poisoned the west in turn before its own collapse into oblivion. If you couldn’t gather, Russia is Oberyn Martell, and America is Gregor Clegane in this analogy. The economic and propaganda war has since begun anew, with the west engaging in primarily economic warfare, and the east engaging in primarily ideological warfare, as if that weren’t already obvious.

There is only one way in which the collapse of the Soviet Union doesn’t fit my analogy; contrary to popular belief in the United States, rampant military spending under the Reagan administration didn’t bankrupt the USSR, rather it was Mikhail Gorbachëv’s economic policies. Gorbachëv pulled back the veil, showed the system for the fake that it was, and broke all the CPSU’s toys in the process. The complete collapse of the Russian economy was just an extremely unfortunate side-effect, and for that reason, Gorbachëv remained one of the most hated men in the entire country until his death in 2022. Prior to 1989, what Natan Sharanskii said was true, and it was the psychic illusion that held the Soviet Union together, i.e. a demoralised population. Gorbachëv did precious little besides shatter this illusion, and should the same happen in China, then China will collapse in the exact same fashion. I remain unconvinced that the illusion has even taken hold in the Americas, however.

Whether in the US, Canada, or Brazil, it is abundantly clear that the majority of the population does not trust their institutions. To call protesters “fringe minorities” is a divisive and demoralising tactic; divisive because it is meant to stifle support for the protestors, and demoralising because it is meant to propagate the message that the state will not heed any objections to its tyrannical diktats. It is a common two-pronged attack to spread the message that “opposition to state policy is unpopular, but also it doesn’t matter how popular opposition is, because we the state know best.” One prong is meant to demoralise the individual, the other prong is meant to demoralise the group, as I mentioned in the beginning of this article.

I have more to say on the subject of demoralisation, specifically from the perspective of academia, but it will require a long tangent about postmodernist philosophy and social constructionism beforehand, which I still need to cross-post from my old blog and edit appropriately. Until then, I think I’ve provided enough supplementary material for you to chew on, should you choose to investigate for yourself.