The Art of Subversion

Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting. – Sun Tzu

Grand strategy is a term familiar to generals and statesmen; it conjures up visions of smoke-filled rooms and military officers crouched over world maps moving armies like chess pieces. Yet there is another kind of grand strategy — one familiar to politicians and philosophers: It is the grand strategy of political subversion.

Political subversion is typically when you demoralize, destabilize, economically and societally shatter a nation in order to put the pieces back together in a configuration more amenable to the subverter. Contrary to popular conception, it is not a formless art conducted in the shadows. In free societies, it can easily be carried out in the open.

It has been the goal of authoritarian countries like Russia and China during the entire post-World War II era to facilitate (not necessarily orchestrate) the ideological subversion of the United States.

Why? Because both countries acknowledge freedom and capitalism to be superior to dictatorship and command economy; but neither want to relinquish authoritarian control over their peoples. Both states have used world bodies, and particularly the United Nations, as a means to erode the sovereignty of America in the world and Americans’ influence over their own government. All the while, they have undermined the economic and military strengths that make America so formidable.

The “communists” (who call themselves anything but communists) have sought to achieve this end through  aiding and abetting self-destructive political ideology. The subverters of America, as it was founded, can be referred to as the political left.

What are the goals of the political left? To capture the Democrat party; to neuter, destroy or co-opt the Republican party; to turn the United States into a single party socialist democracy; and to implement a “global transformation” from a capitalist order to an internationalist-fascist “new world order” where America can be sucked dry like marrow from a bone.

Why do I say “fascist”? Because fascism feigns to acknowledge “property,” but it commands how it is utilized (as in the name of the “greater good”). Some believe communism and capitalism to be anathema to one another. This is an illusion. Communist countries throughout history have always used capitalist devices such as currency, banking, and trade to run their economies. The crucial difference between communist countries and free market capitalist countries is who controls the economy.

A country can be capitalist, in other words, it can use capital for economic transactions; yet the state can control the labor, the wages, and the goods and services available to the “worker.” A free market capitalist country must have the characteristics of private property and other individual rights, such as free speech and personal freedom. It lets the citizens who comprise the economy run the economy, negotiating amongst themselves for the trade of goods, services, and labor.

In essence, all nominally communist and socialist countries are fascist; and to anticipate an objection, there are no truly “internationalist” regimes — only regimes that are more or less nationalistic in their preferred forms of propaganda. Russia and China have indirectly formed ideological alliances with leftists in the United States, who unknowingly (and rarely, knowingly) cooperate with their designs. Both countries are nationalistic, but in the past have spouted cosmopolitan rhetoric. American leftists bought it hook, line, and sinker.

Why do leftists in the United States knowingly and unknowingly cooperate with the plans of these “communist” countries? Because leftists believe that the collapse of “capitalism” is inevitable. To bring about the left’s imagined socialist utopia (or dystopia as some of us would have it), the strongest capitalist country, the United States, must be destroyed.

The United States is too powerful a country (ironically due to the same capitalist system that the leftists condemn) to directly attack. Indeed, this is not only pointless but counterproductive. As Sun Tzu noted, “In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy’s country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is the inferior way.”

Deception is therefore a key for the leftists. There is no lie a leftist won’t tell, no moral bridge he will not cross, in order to accomplish his goal of the complete destruction of the old, whether the old be Western “civilization” itself.

Indeed, after the Frankfurt School arrived and set up shop at Columbia University after World War II, it helped to devise critical theory, historical revisionism, and post-modernism to inculcate in the students that all aspects of the culture were negotiable and truth was purely a subjective matter.

The floodgates were thrown open for the type of unabashed lying we see today in our culture. The left has enacted the Gramscian grand strategy of capturing the institutions of popular culture and promoting democracy (while relegating the Constitution to nothing more than a dusty museum piece).

The Frankfurt School scattered like a prism the cultural marxist program into dozens of fracturing agendas: Gay rights, women’s rights, civil rights, animal rights, world peace, environmentalism, the list goes on and on.

It is key to recognize that the United States has been declining as a world power for decades; and this is despite its potentially high levels of skilled labor, population growth, natural resources, technological prowess, industrial capacity, real economic growth, and military expenditures.

Instead, America has been weakened due to a campaign carried out by the political left to demoralize Americans culturally while creating as much economic inefficiency and chaos as possible.

The left has targeted America’s work force by:

1. raising corporate taxes to the highest in the world, forcing companies overseas;
2. draining the treasury for public education, and then producing minds ill-suited for superior performance in a high-tech, industrialized economy;
3. effectively importing tens of millions of underskilled illegal aliens, who undercut wages and deplete (morally repugnant) social welfare programs;
4. fostering an entitlement mentality that deteriorates productivity, especially for manual laborers;
5. promoting unions, which generally create more inefficient and more costly laborers by design; and
6. incentivizing joblessness and laziness through mandatory unemployment insurance and public welfare programs, which are routinely abused and create a drain on the economy.

The left has sought to curb population growth in the United States by:

1. promoting the practice of abortion, through groups like “Planned Parenthood” (a leftist organization that veils its agenda though its deceptive label);
2. promoting gay, lesbian, and transgender causes; including gay marriage and adoption of children and
3. overpopulation alarmism (recently tied into the “global warming” agenda through the suggestion of incentivizing the practice of forgoing children through non-child credits, similar to carbon credits).

Relatedly, the left has sought to destroy healthy families by:

1. providing incentives for divorce
2. promoting the idea that women should work rather than raise children, leaving children in the hands of state-run child care centers
3. making it easy for children to be removed from families for numerous reasons, even if unfounded
4. the sexualization of youth, which is linked to early rebelliousness
5. the promotion of lawlessness and drug use and
6. the subsidization and even encouragement of single mothers, no matter how many children she has out of wedlock.

The left has targeted America’s use of its natural resources by:

1. enacting laws to prevent drilling for oil and natural gas by American companies (not Chinese ones, apparently);
2. the creation of strict environmental regulations, to the point that no oil refinery has been built in the United States since the 1970s
3. the fear-mongering over nuclear power, even though countries like France receive much of their power from uranium
4. global warming and climate change hysteria, which impacts all fossil fuels, from coal (one of America’s most abundant resources, and one that Obama specifically targeted) to shale to oil and natural gas and
5. the creation of giant wildlife reserves where many of the best natural resources are located.

The left has greatly reduced America’s potential technological prowess by:

1. providing extremely substandard mathematical and scientific education to American students; and
2. compromising secrets to countries like China (supercomputer technology, for example, which was compromised directly by President Clinton).

Industrial capacity in America has been greatly reduced by the left due to:

1. numerous environmental regulations;
2. punitive lawsuits, replacing the legal concept of caveat emptor with a nanny state mentality;
3. economic zoning and restrictions; and
4. the promotion of tedious and expensive trade unions, all making American companies less competitive abroad.

The U.S.’ economic growth has been impressive, but not nearly as impressive once you factor in that:

1. seventy percent of the American economy is consumption
2. consumption is mainly debt-driven, the average household having about $100,000 in personal debt
3. the Fed’s inflation of the money supply makes the economic numbers bigger (on the stock market for example), but the numbers may not reflect actual added productivity, or additional goods or services provided (in fact, money supply is so huge a factor once can almost chart one to one charts of money supply and stock market gains side by side); and
4. the national debt, much-financed by China and Japan, is in the order of trillions, and financial obligations of the U.S. government, all told, on the order of several tens of trillions of dollars.
5. Obamacare will effectively crush one-sixth of the U.S. economy, load Americans with immense amounts of debt.

Military expenditures since 1970 have been robust in terms of actual dollars, but not nearly as much so in terms of percent of GDP (the early Cold War era was nearly twice as high). Nevertheless, the U.S. military is well-funded. But it is also overstretched. The U.S. has military bases across the globe, and is currently engaged in tedious wars and skirmishes.

The drain on the military is real. How is the political left involved? Nearly every Democrat voted to authorize the war in Afghanistan, and the great majority voted for Bush to carry out war in Iraq. Of course, the Democrats now feign that the now-ended Iraq War was all Bush’s idea and fault. In Afghanistan, leftists can have their cake and eat it too: They can stretch the military thin and erode its morale; all the while pretending that they are the “party of peace.”

The manner in which the political left demonized Bush and lets Obama completely off the hook for pursuing the same military policies or worse is a testament to the effectiveness of the left’s brainwashing program. Another sign is the fascistic reaction to the pro-marriage statements of Chick-Fil-A president Dan Cathy, which is a reflection of the left’s cultural marxist plan to undermine Christianity and capitalism; or in Gramscian terms, the cultural superstructure and the economic base.

One litmus test to gauge how much the U.S. has been weakened due to the policies of the Democrats is to assess the United States’ raw war-making capability. This is a rough statistic America’s ideological enemies abroad would be interested in. The Correlates of War data-set, second edition, carries such data up to 2001. The statistic that we would be interested in to assess how much the U.S. has been damaged by Democrat policies is the Composite Index of National Capability (CINC).

Upon investigation, the U.S.’ CINC declined from .3838 in 1945 to a startling .149 in 2001. The CINC is derived from a number of statistics, including: Energy consumption, iron and steel production, military expenditure, military personnel, total population, and urban population. It is an imperfect statistic, yet one that buttresses the overall point: The U.S. has been subverted from within.

The Art of Subversion

The greatest form of subversion is ideological, because once you implant the seeds of such corruption in a nation, it becomes a conspiracy with no identifiable acting conspirators. It acts of its own accord; it takes on a life of its own.

The key for the agent of subversion is to demoralize a people, to get them to choose “self-sacrifice” as a virtue, and altruism as the highest ideal – once this is accomplished, you are well on the way to causing the nation’s collapse. The plausible deniability is nearly infinite because the damage becomes self-imposed.

Thus the trouble with Joseph McCarthy is that he saw communist corruption everywhere, and conflated willful treason with philosophical corruption. The communists had indeed infiltrated the U.S. government, but through legal means; several red professors from Russia and Germany intoxicated British and American professors and students with their socialist criticisms of Western civilization in the early twentieth century; and the education system, the news media, and the court system simply came to sympathize with socialist causes (though perhaps not always in the name of socialism).

It is an undeniable fact that the Democrat Party adopted much of the socialist program under the false flags of liberalism and progressivism. The Marxist recommendations for destruction of “capitalist” countries of ushering in a central bank, a graduated income tax, the destruction of private property, and the promotion of democracy were incrementally taken up by Democrats over the course of decades.

Our society, which is tolerant and embraces freedom of conscience, thus became the fertile soil for growing an enemy that one can only fight with words and ideas. If your opponents are liars, are intellectually dishonest, and systematically deceptive you have a slight problem under our Constitutional system. But if you have a majority faction that rises to power with access to unconstitutional machinery like a central bank, with no design to adhere to the Constitution, and with the strategy of impoverishing the country through destroying its purchasing power and fostering welfare paid for with imaginary money, then you have a serious problem. The country will be pulled ahead to collapse by people who think collapse was “inevitable” to begin with.

Those who are the greatest threat to America are mostly dead and gone; pragmatists like William James and John Dewey; socialists like Norman Thomas and Earl Browder; transcendentalists like Immanuel Kant; ultra-statists like George Hegel; philosophical corrupters like Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Fromm, and Chomsky; revolutionaries like Marx, Gramsci, and Alinsky.

To claim that such men are destroying the country in a myopic culture with conditioned attention deficit disorder is often akin to feinting at ghosts. As John Maynard Keynes wrote, “The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” Most men are not apt to believe that ruin is impending until the foundation is buckling, the support beams are cracking, and the roof is splintering above their heads.

In many ways the modern leftist sucks the oxygen out of such claims that the nation is indeed on the verge of economic and moral collapse by fabricating fake crises out of whole cloth and justifying them in their minds as Platonic noble lies, Goebbelesque big lies, or Sorelian/Nietzschean myths.

When Khruschev banged his shoe on a podium and garbled out, “We will bury you!” in Russian (“Мы вас похороним!” or My vas pokhoronim!), note that he did not say he would destroy us. Khruschev was more accurately saying that he would “shovel dirt over our graves.”

Once you corrupt the nation’s moral system at the foundational level of ideological assumptions, then you have successfully defeated your enemy, as Sun Tzu lauded, without going to war. Those who care about saving freedom in this country better know the left and know themselves in order to seize on the shifting information terrain and exploit it to maximum effect.