Ayaan Hirsi Ali on Yuri Bezmenov and Subversion

Long, but important. 

Comments

[jim Soriano]

Solid observations from Hirsi Ali on Bezmenovian subversion, but I think the essay falters towards the end starting with the paragraph about “Who is trying to unravel America and the West?”

She gave three answers: American Marxists, Islamists, and the Chinese Communist Party. Russia’s in the mix, she said, because it supports the other three, but she didn’t give it a stand-alone category.

Is subversion, in Hirsi Ali’s sense, something that originates from the outside and burrows its way into American society, or is it something primarily home-grown, something we’ve done to ourselves?

I lean toward the latter. The de-moralization of society is primarily something that has originated within Western culture, even as the West has contended in the past with religious heresies and religious wars.

I got the impression that Hirsi Ali gives much weight to external forces. She cites the CCP-controlled Tik-Tok, China’s connections with BLM, the recent wave of Muslim immigration, and she even used the analytical model of Yuri Bezmenov, a Soviet era operative, as her template, which promotes the foreign element in her thesis.

If Hirsi Ali gave a powerpoint, the arrows of subversion would start from the outside and point towards a circle denoting Western Civilization. But I think the arrows start from inside the circle and point outward. The de-moralization of Western society is something we’ve done to ourselves, and our left-leaning elites are so enamored of their achievement they want the rest of the world to look like us, too.

[BV]

Good comments, James.

>>Is subversion, in Hirsi Ali’s sense, something that originates from the outside and burrows its way into American society, or is it something primarily home-grown, something we’ve done to ourselves?

I lean toward the latter. The de-moralization of society is primarily something that has originated within Western culture, even as the West has contended in the past with religious heresies and religious wars.<<

You need to spell this out for us. Are you headed in a post-liberal direction (Deneen & Co.)? Do you mean to say that the seeds of our destruction are already present in the Enlightenment?

It is interesting to note that the commie "arrow of subversion" originated in the West unlike the ChiCom and Islamist arrows. No Marx without Hegel, no Hegel without Kant, etc.

Or should we say that Islam is a Christian heresy which presupposes Judaism and is therefore itself coming at the West from the West?

By the West I mean the Judeo-Christian, Graeco-Roman tradition.

But even the ChiComs, to the extent that they are commies, are derivative from the West.

[james soriano]

Four radical Western ideologies are in circulation today, on race, sex, climate, and more broadly, liberal hegemony. This last best describes the “arrows of subversion” radiating outward from the US and Europe to the wider world. Liberal hegemony does not have the programatic specifics of the first three, but is rather a general outlook of world affairs and entails them. It is a project to spread liberal values throughout the world. It is expansionist. It claims to be on the right side of history. It is backed up with military might and has used force to promote its ends. It is liberalism without breaks.

Another missing piece in Hirsi Ali’s essay is the opinion of the so-called Global South. What does it have to say about the social and political subversion she’s talking about? To her credit, Hirsi Ali acknowledges she’s analyzing only that part of the elephant she can see and pat down; but she sees only the American part.

Broadly, the Global South consists of traditional and patriarchal societies that in the main are friendly to China and Russia, the heavies in Hirsi Ali’s story. Also broadly, they are wary of the spread of American influence and its dominance in several spheres of life. From the South’s perspective, if the subject is “subversion” what comes into view is a string of Western-backed coups, “color revolutions,” and Western “rights talk” about gender and climate and a “rules-based order” and all the rest. These are parts of the elephant Hirsi Ali missed.

And you don’t have to be a member of the Global South to have the same apprehensions. Drop in on Hungary’s Viktor Orhan and see what he has to say about the EU’s pressuring Hungary to adopt a more liberal policy towards illegal immigrants.

I’d have to spend time tracking down the speeches of Vladimir Vladmirovich, but would it be difficult to find texts in which the Russian leader publicly values religion, tradition, family, culture, and language?

Compare to elite opinion in the West, which denigrates religion, prefers innovation to tradition, has bent the definition of family to the breaking point, is self-loathing of their own cultural inheritance, and subverts language in the service of ideology.

Lenin asked, “Who, Whom?” Exactly. In the world today, who is subverting whom?