Thank you for your thoughtful reply, but I'm just now heading out, and I don't have time to give it the response it deserves. I will reply more completely when I get back home. For now, thank you!

Thank you! That's a great quote from President Regan, and it does resonate with me. As for Classics, as you said, you "have lots of time for discovery." I encourage you to take up the subject. Latin is very rewarding, particularly since you like reading history. Also, it isn't as hard as people make it out to be. Anyway, I look forward to hearing more from you as time goes on, and once again, thank you for your kind reply.

Yours,
Quentin

Thank you for your warm reply. But I would like to point out that I was not a professor. That is an academic rank to which I never aspired. I was a lowly lecturer, and, formerly, it was my custom to refer to myself as a university teacher, which is what I was. Now, I just call myself Quentin. Students would call me professor as a courtesy, or perhaps as a habit, but I never liked it. Anyway, I am pleased to hear that you've learned some Koine. I assume you learned it to study the New Testament. That's an excellent accomplishment. Well done! I am not religious, per se, but I work with the Greek New Testament and the Latin Vulgate very frequently. Perhaps we could discuss what you are reading when you have time.

Yours,
Quentin

Thank you, James. I'm happy to read your thoughts. I find it mildly depressing to think that free speech is considered right-wing, or any-wing for that matter, since it is the heart, soul and life blood of any democracy worthy of the name. As for the left, I was a solid left-wing lefty when I flew the coup and left the US in the late 90's. My views have certainly changed, as I said, but not that much, and relative to where the left is now, I seem like Barry Goldwater! Anyway, I had asked what must be done in defending our Western Civilization. When you have time, I'd like to hear your views.

I will Sir and thank you. I have to give that question more thought in order to give you a reply that I won't regret in the morning LOL.

@DavidQDauthier In response to your question, it is necessary to realize exactly what is and has been going on before the question of what can be done to protect our Western Civilization can be answered.

I see allot of what Yuri Bezmenov describes in the following video going on right here, right now. Unless it can be diverted before it goes further down this rabbit hole, the only way it can be stopped is through military intervention. This according to the ones who came up with it:

It would seem that the Q movement represents an attempt to restore our Republic without destroying the system in the process or resorting to military intervention. I hope that is what they really are and if so, I pray that they succeed.

Beyond that, forums where the ideas can be discussed like this one can be a great defense for the next generation and for the undecided among us. But "the revolution will not be televised" thus the huge push towards censorship we are seeing.

@James

Dear James,

Thank you very much for your kind and well considered reply. I watched the video that you posted, and I seem to remember Yuri Bezmenov (a.k.a Tomas D. Schuman) from when I was a kid, but I had never really looked into him until just now. I am not one to rush to any sort of definitive judgment about a person or his ideas without considering them carefully. To that end, I’ve managed to get hold of three of his published works: Love Letter to America, World Thought Police, No “Novosti” is Good News, and until I have had a chance to read them, and consider them, I won’t make any major statements about my estimation of the man or his views.

Anyway, based only on my viewing of the video you posted, I would say that Mr. Bezmenov is clearly a man of his time. That video is from 1983, a year I remember very well. I was 12 years old at the time. I remember being continually worried about getting vaporized in a nuclear holocaust. My friends and I used to talk about it over lunch. Such was the life of an American kid at the height of the Cold War. This video brought back some of those memories. Thirty-six years is a long time no matter how you look at it, and I think it’s important to put what he was saying into that historical context. The topic of his presentation was subversion i.e. subverting the socio-political institutions of one’s adversary, and I would like to consider some of his points and a few of his positions—based, as I said, on that video.

He listed several key targets of subversion: religion, education, social life, power structure, law & order and labor relations. He argued that by destabilizing these institutions one might cause the collapse of an adversarial society. Of course, he was speaking in more concrete terms—he was talking about the USSR’s attempt at destabilizing the US. He argued that one way to fight against this attempted subversion was the “restriction of some liberties for small groups” (49:32). He then says, “Okay, if you allow criminals to have civil rights—go on and bring the country to the crisis [sic]” (50:00). Well, criminals do have civil rights in this country, and I am very glad of that. Furthermore, he argues that the ultimate way to fight having one’s society subverted is “by bringing back the society to religion” (58:52). I would like to take a look at each of these points in a bit of detail.

First, “Restriction of some liberties for small groups” and his assertion that criminals shouldn’t be allowed their civil rights:” Immediately following his first statement about restricting liberties, he says that liberals will say that this is against the Constitution. Ok, so I am going to validate his point—it is against the Constitution. In particular, Mr. Bezmenov was arguing that certain groups should not be afforded the freedom to express themselves, and he was talking about American citizens. In response to his suggestion, I would say that it wasn’t for nothing that the Founding Fathers of our country wrote these words into our Constitution: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

As revolutionaries themselves, who subverted their ruler, King George III of Great Britain, and in doing so, established this country that, I believe it is fair to say, we are all deeply committed to, they understood better than anyone that if one is not free to speak then one is not free! Of course, they were not so foolish as to believe that in the marketplace of ideas the truth always prevails, but they understood that there was no real alternative to that open and free exchange if one’s goal was to remain free—and not just politically free but free from the benightedness of a servile and ignorant mind.

With rare exception, our founding fathers had an advantage which is now lacking in the vast majority of us today; they were classically educated i.e. they acquired a formative education that molded them into the people that they were. Thankfully, I don’t have time to go into great detail about what that means here in this reply, but I can recommend an excellent book that would make all of these things clear. Mr. Tracy Lee Simmons, then an employee at National Review and to some extent a protégé of Mr. William F. Buckley, published a book in 2002 entitled Climbing Parnassus: A New Apologia for Greek and Latin. Mr. Simmons does an excellent job of explaining how our very nation sprung from the minds of these men in Philadelphia and how their thinking was a product of their liberal education, which, of course, he explains in clear detail.

As usual, I can feel myself heading toward a tangent, so I will try to reign myself in a bit, but I must include these points. First, this quotation of Benjamin Franklin: “Freedom of Speech is a principal pillar of a free government; when this support is taken away, the constitution of a free society is dissolved, and tyranny is erected on its ruins.” Second, and I don’t know where this comes from or if I am even quoting it exactly, but here it is: “If basic rights are denied any one in society; then, those basic rights may be denied anyone in society.” Mr. Bezmenov suggests that we might preserve our society by ripping at the basic fibers of the Constitution; I humbly suggest that if we were to rip up the Constitution, there would be no society left worth saving.

These days, there is little respect for these hard-won rights that our Founding Fathers provided us—not merely through their blood and sweat but also by the sheer power of their minds. The hard of thinking today gleefully pounce on Thomas Jefferson. Pointing out what is certainly true i.e. that he was a major slaveholder, but they do this to cast him as a hypocrite in order to, I think, denigrate what he said. In point of fact, it matters not a whit who Thomas Jefferson was or what he did—it has no bearing on the power of the statement he made! It cannot be overestimated the shockwave that the Declaration of Independence sent throughout the world at that time and reverberates to this day. There is not a single line in the second paragraph of that document that was not controversial, awe-inspiring or destructive to virtually every despotic power on earth at the time. It would be well for us to have a look, so that we may see what some today actively disparage.

He begins by saying that since they are declaring their independence from Great Britain, it is reasonable that they should explain to the other nations of the earth why they were doing so. This leads to the start of paragraph two and what is surely one of the most famous political sentences of all time: “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.” Mr. Bezmenov disparages this concept (26:28.), but it would be wrong to assert that he is alone in failing to understand this basic tenet of our national being. When Thomas Jefferson wrote this premise, upon which every other assertion in his argument hung, he was not talking specifically about race or religion or anything like that. He was making the treasonous assertion with this “self-evident truth” that King George III of Great Britain, specifically, and monarchs and nobles in general were in no way, shape or form, intrinsically better-than simply by virtue of their birth. He went further by saying that people were “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” By “unalienable,” he meant that if you restrict any of these rights, then that person ceases to be in his/her natural state i.e. s/he becomes a slave. The Romans believed that the natural state of humans was freedom and that slavery was something artificially imposed upon them. Mr. Jefferson is, in a sense, making reference to this idea. Now, if this were not revolutionary enough, he goes on to define government itself.

“That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, …”. Mr. Jefferson explains why governments exist. They exist solely for the purpose of securing and protecting our rights. He explains where a government derives its power: “deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, …” Notice, please, that he says “just Powers.” A government may well draw immense power unto itself, but if this power does not serve the original purpose or actively begins to work against that purpose, He says this: “that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect [sic] their Safety and Happiness.” Very few ever, in the history of the world, talked like this so directly into the face of naked power and lived to tell the tale. Indeed, Mr. Jefferson knew all too well that he was taking his life into his own hands and so did everyone else when they signed that document and sent it off to Great Britain and the rest of the world. They understood that if they failed in this endeavor that the Declaration will little more than a signed suicide note. These men were nothing if not brave.

Notice, though, that Mr. Jefferson offers a very interesting logical proposition: “…whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it,…” He is saying that if the government needs to be changed, the people—from whom the government derives both its power and purpose—have the right to alter or abolish it. This is a choice, not a course of action! In the remainder of the Declaration of Independence, Mr. Jefferson lists each and every time the colonists attempted to make changes, and he shows with concrete examples how each attempt was thwarted by King George. The result is this: Since we cannot alter it, this government must be abolished. Indeed, he say that it is not merely a right but a duty to throw off such government, which is, of course, exactly what they do. There are very few countries on earth that enshrine in their founding documents the People’s right to Revolution, but this is America. Mr. Bezmenov may have written a “Love Letter to America,” I have yet to read it, so I don’t know what he said, but I believe I can make this assumption rather safely: Mr. Bezmenov may have known a great deal about the USSR, the KGB and subverting societies, but I get the distinct feeling that he didn’t understand America and what makes us who we are, which brings me to my final point.

I want to talk a bit about Mr. Bezmenov’s claim that the ultimate way to fight having one’s society subverted is “by bringing back the society to religion.” Our Founding Fathers believed in God—they were largely Deists—but it is very clear that they distrusted organized religion. Indeed, Thomas Paine didn’t simply distrust it; he openly disdained it. One has only to read his The Age of Reason to understand him very clearly on the matter—he wasn’t subtle. Mr. Paine says, “I believe in one God, no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life. I believe the equality of man, and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy. But, lest it should be supposed that I believe many other things in addition to these, I shall, in the progress of this work, declare the things I do not believe, and my reasons for not believing them. I do not believe in the Creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish Church [NOTE: he means Islam], by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church. All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit. I do not mean by this declaration to condemn those who believe otherwise; they have the same right to their belief as I have to mine.”

Like I said, there is no mistaking what this man is saying. I find myself thinking that this is profoundly American. Like Mr. Paine, I would guess that many of us are not religious in a traditional sense or, perhaps, in any sense, which is perfectly fine in our country. Why? Thomas Jefferson. Drafted 13 years before the First Amendment to the Constitution went into effect was the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and in it, Mr. Jefferson brings out a very important point:

“whereas, Almighty God has created the mind free; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments … or by civil incapacitations tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy … That our civil rights have no dependents on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry… Be it enacted by General Assembly that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened [burdened] in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or beliefs, that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinion in matters of religion, and that the same shall in nowise diminish, enlarge or affect their civil capacities.”

This is a very difficult document to quote because it is essentially one very long, uninterrupted sentence from start to finish. Indeed, extracting portions, as I have done, diminishes the power of this document. I suggest you look it up and read the whole thing. It doesn’t take long, and it is well worth the effort. That our Founding Fathers believed in religious freedom is unquestionable; however, what is also unquestionable is that they did not want “religious opinion” infringing upon civil rights. The Statue also alludes to something that I think is perhaps a counterpoint to the idea of using physical violence to combat systems of beliefs, which can, I think, be extended to ideologies. It says, “temporal punishments … or by civil incapacitations tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy…” One may well stop one’s opponents thinking by decapitation—despots have tried this since the dawn of time, and if history is any teacher at all, we should be able to know that it simply doesn’t work. The only thing that changes ideas is ideas, but that can only work if those engaged in disagreement can first agree on the premises of the argument, which, I think explains a lot of what we see now in America. The left and right spend all their time talking right passed each other. As far as I am concerned, the far left and far right dichotomy can be united into one group, namely people spewing nonsense at each other’s feet—I would say over each other’s heads, but I have seen nothing that deserves to be described in elevated terms. The moment I see some tweeting “DemocRATS” or “tRump,” I stop reading. I know that I’ll only be wasting my time. Anyway, let me get to some kind of conclusion.

So here it is: where I disagree with Mr. Bezmenov, at least in terms of what he said in that video, and where I disagree with a few of the posts I see here on IDW and most of the posts I see on Twitter is when it comes to limiting the rights our Forefathers established for us American citizens. People being silenced by either the Left or the Right is just simply un-American. Of course, at this particular time, it seems that it is the Left who are most guilty of deplatforming and going after people’s livelihoods because they bind themselves brainlessly to false narratives and mythologies of injuries in the past and a longed for undiscovered future, but there are just as many on the Right who mindlessly cling to ideology and false narratives of a glorious past and a future return to glory. Accepting a dogma of any sort, is to simply become a willing slave to the ideas of previous generations, and that is not what, at her founding, America was about. We are all waist-deep in this mess right now and if we want to get back to our roots, then here, I think, they are:

1. Healthy skepticism of power structures—religious and governmental, included.
2. Humanism, a belief that our problems are created by us and are solvable by us and that religious opinion should not infringe upon our civil lives.
3. Education that is focused on developing the human potential—not just training us to be tools of the economy—by placing the learner in a historical context and providing him/her with tools for thinking critically about what has come before and what is happening now, and
4. Preserving—at all costs—the freedoms that were secured by our Forefathers.

When our Forefathers bequeathed this freedom to us, they understood it was like handing off a hot potato. When Benjamin Franklin was asked what form of government we were to have, he quipped famously, “A republic if you can keep it.” One may keep it only so long as one is willing to go through the trouble of juggling that “hot potato” from one hand to the other. Preserving these freedoms comes at a high cost and it is a serious burden, but when so many in this world are starving, it is a fine thing to have a hot potato, and I wouldn’t compromise the slightest part of it for any reason, but I wouldn’t expect Mr. Bezmenov to understand that.

I look forward to your comments.

Yours,
Quentin

PS: Apparently, I can’t say anything is less than a few thousand words. I will no longer apologize for the length of my posts—apparently, I don’t mean it.

Wow! Gimme some time to digest all that Sir! Please don't misunderstand; I do not agree with what Yuri is saying about his ideas of fixing the problem, just that the subversion he describes is real and ongoing.

I do tend to agree with his common sense opinion that in fact all men are not created equal and why. It is true; some of us are big and dumb and others are short, bald and intelligent (LOL). However, I do believe we should all be equal 'in the eyes of the law' and with regard to the protections guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.

I definitely agree with your points 1 - 4 above. However, I am not so sure it will work when you have disingenuous Communists working against us from within. Those with a globalist agenda do not share our beliefs about the sanctity of the Bill of Rights or our very form of government. The problem is they are entrenched in positions of power and it is possible that they cannot be removed from same without using force. I think the Q movement represents that attempt; to remove them without bringing down the house in the process.

I will read the rest of your post in detail as soon as I have a chance. Thank you for the reply Sir, it is a pleasure!

Thank you. I'm happy to be here.