In May of 2015, a Houston-based draw Mohammad contest caused a national uproar with protests quickly developing outside the event. “On one side stood people drawn by a Facebook group called Heart of Texas. It had 250,000 followers. The group’s tagline was folksy – homeland of guns, barbecue and your heart. They were there to demonstrate against the purported Islamization of Texas. On the other side were people who were also drawn by a Facebook group – United Muslims of America. It had 328,000 followers. Tagline – I’m a Muslim, and I’m proud. They were on the streets to save Islamic knowledge.” Sure, that sounds fairly normal. Except the organizers of both protests weren’t in Houston, or even the United States. They were at a state-sponsored troll farm in St. Petersburg, Russia.
How could this happen? Let’s back up. In 1970, KGB agent Yuri Bezmenov defected from the Soviet Union, moving first to Canada and then the United States. His KGB career was spent supporting news and information operations in India, manipulating and coercing the media and local politicians into supporting Moscow’s policies. After defecting to the west, he wrote a series of books under the pseudonym Tomas Schuman that discussed the psychological and information operations the KGB was conducting against the US. In his writings and associated interviews, Bezmenov warned of a complex, decades-long campaign to undermine the US from the inside. He called this method Active Measures.
Active Measures
Aktivnye meropriyatiya (active measures), are “covert and deniable political influence and subversion operations, from corruption and disinformation to outright assassination and even sponsorship of coups. They have a long and inglorious tradition in Russian foreign operations and reflect a permanent wartime mentality, something dating back to the Soviet era and even Tsarist Russia.
Active measures seek to influence citizens of a state such that they cannot tell what is objectively true and real, even if it is placed right in front of their eyes; a square does not have four sides, a circle is not round, black is not black and white is not white, etc. According to Bezmenov, 85% of the KGB’s manpower, funding, and effort was placed on active measures with only the remaining 15% being placed on espionage – the typical spy activities that we see in movies.
Soviet bloc disinformation operations were not a rare occurrence: more than 10,000 were carried out over the course of the Cold War. In the 1970s, Yuri Andropov, then head of the KGB, created active measures courses for operatives, and the KGB had up to 15,000 officers working on psychological and disinformation warfare at the height of the Cold War.
Fortunately, after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990, its various institutions and associated practices fell away with it.
Or did they? Could it be that only the names on the buildings changed, but the heart of the organization along with its various tactics, techniques, and procedures persisted? Russian President Vladimir Putin, himself a former KGB officer, certainly seems to think so. If active measures were being conducted by the Russian Federation against the US today, what would they look like?
Modern Ideological Subversion
An excellent example of the modern use of active measures would be the 2016 US Presidential Election. To wit: Russia manipulated both campaigns. The Trump campaign was so unethical as to actively court Russia’s help finding Clinton’s deleted emails. Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager, was so closely associated with a Russian intelligence officer that a Senate intelligence report called their relationship a “grave counterintelligence threat.”
Meanwhile, the Clinton campaign knowingly published a false report on Trump known as the Steele Dossier that was authored by a Russian citizen and foreign analyst named Igor Danchenko. A 306-page report by Justice Department special counsel John Durham released in May 2023 states that investigators did not corroborate a “single substantive allegation” in the dossier of Democratic-funded research.
The outcome? Both sides made excuses for their actions and simultaneously pointed their fingers at the other for receiving help from Russia. The only meaningful result was the further degradation of trust and confidence in our democratic process, exactly what Russia wanted.
However, there could be a deeper and more culturally subversive tactic at play. Remember Bezmenov’s words, the goal of active measures is to make people believe a circle is not a circle, a square is not a square, and that it relies on, “misperception, a manipulation of terms.”
Enter Critical Race Theory or CRT. Schools across the country are increasingly assigning the book “How to be an Antiracist” written by activist and writer Ibram X. Kendi. Kendi writes that “the most threatening racist movement is… the regular American’s drive for a ‘race-neutral’ society.” Kendi has admitted what “antiracism” really means in practice: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination” (emphasis added). In other words, supporting “antiracism” actually means supporting racism.
With CRT, it is not enough to merely be against racism, but rather we must be racist to not be racist; a circle is not a circle, a square is not a square. Martin Luther King Jr. would be appalled. His timeless declaration that people should be judged, “not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,” stands in direct opposition to CRT. He wanted African Americans to be treated equally, to repair and elevate our system. Instead, CRT seeks to destroy that system.
It’s not a coincidence that CRT originated from Critical Theory (CT), a philosophical movement introduced by a Marxist group called the Frankfurt School in the 1920s. At the time, Marxism was in crisis. The workers of the world were not uniting to overthrow their bourgeois overlords like the Communist Manifesto prescribed. The founders of CT felt that workers were too dumb to understand their struggle and that traditional Marxism required an adjustment. Instead of a global struggle centered around economic status, CT made the struggle about power.
Bruce Pardy writes, “They broadened Marx’s tight focus on economic oppression of the working class and developed the doctrine known as critical theory, which is premised on the ideas that power and oppression define relationships throughout society, that knowledge is socially contingent, and that unjust Western institutions should be collapsed and reconstituted.”
Of note, this philosophy was specifically targeted to degrade and subvert the west, particularly the United States. Nevermind that Stalin was in the middle of conducting his Holodomor genocide in Ukraine (where roughly an equal number of people were killed in one year by Stalin as Hitler killed during twelve years of the holocaust).
Ultimately, the writhing and twisting meanings of these word-salad ideas take us to one common theme: CT/CRT is not about emancipation, equality, or egalitarianism. It is a destructive, anti-western sentiment designed to pit diverse groups against each other, fuel rhetoric, and incite violence that will inevitably erode the US from the inside out. Its Marxist roots only further help to identify it as an active measure.
Cut Through the Bullshit Using Logic
One method of arming ourselves against these tactics is to not only focus on logical arguments, but to learn to recognize false logic. A logical fallacy is a pattern of reasoning rendered invalid by a flaw. By recognizing and avoiding fallacious reasoning, we can improve our critical thinking skills, make more informed choices, and engage in more effective discussions and debates. I’ll give you an example.Years ago, I took a research methods class as part of my undergrad, and the one thing our professor insisted we take away from her class (if nothing else) was that correlation does not equal causation. This is also known as a false cause fallacy. For example, “Every time I go to the beach, the weather is hot. Therefore, going to the beach causes the weather to be hot.” In this case, though the two things may be correlated, one is not the cause of the other.
The famous nineteenth century philosopher John Stuart Mill outlined the three required criteria for establishing a causal relationship: (a) temporal precedence (i.e., the cause precedes the effect), (b) covariance (i.e., the cause and effect are related), and (c) disqualification of alternative explanations (i.e., no third variable accounts for the observed relationship).
Armed with this knowledge, core tenets of CRT fall well short of reason. And while proponents of CT may argue that the assertion of reason, logic, and evidence is a manifestation of privilege and power (making you a bigoted oppressor), this attitude should be rejected at every turn. It should be rejected not only because it is false, but because it offers a destructive prescription for our society. People not educated to use reason, logic, and evidence should be elevated to a higher intellectual ground, as opposed to denying all use of reason, logic, and evidence by lowering everyone else into an abysmal chaos.
Fight Ideological Subversion by Reducing Exposure
We can help mitigate the damage from foreign influence by getting off the internet and thereby denying these purposefully designed disinformation campaigns access to your brain. Just prior to the 2020 Presidential election, troll farms were reaching 140 million Americans a month on Facebook. “We have empowered inauthentic actors to accumulate huge followings for largely unknown purposes … The fact that actors with possible ties to the IRA (the Internet Research Agency, a Russian troll farm founded by recently deceased Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin) have access to huge audience numbers in the same demographic groups targeted by the IRA poses an enormous risk to the US 2020 election.”
Furthermore, moderate internet consumption mitigates risk from algorithmic radicalization. Social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube are monetarily incentivized to show people increasingly inflammatory information based on their interests. This keeps people online and boosts the ad revenue collected by the platform. But for you, it leads to a positive feedback loop that is unhealthy, biased, and frequently out of touch with reality.
So, get off the internet. Go outside, touch grass, and get some vitamin D. Share a beer with your neighbor and actually get to know them. When you consume content on the internet, do so with intention. Don’t doomscroll, and don’t live more of your life online than you do in person.
We Are At War
The Kremlin views our technologically enhanced information environment as one in which “an entire battle could be conducted in the information domain and the results would appear in the physical domain.” Furthermore, the Russian minister of defense recently acknowledged the existence of their cyber warriors in a speech to the Russian parliament, announcing that Russia formed a new branch of the military consisting of information warfare troops.
In the classic saying, if your only tool is a hammer, all of your problems start looking like nails. Our preoccupation with maintaining a strong military has led our opponents to look for other weaknesses that they can exploit. And while a free and open society is a feature of any western state, it comes with an inherent weakness and inability to deal with tactics such as active measures.
It is time we read the writing on the wall: Russia is at war with the United States. As the landscape of conflict continues to evolve across both physical and virtual domains, we must take an accounting of the evidence before us; the warnings of Bezmenov and other defectors, documents proving the extent of Russia’s historical activities, and the ever growing list of activities recently and currently being carried out against the US. Only by first understanding this reality can we begin to bolster our defenses, both individually and as a nation. Failure to do so will lead us to a point where liberal values cease to exist and our country becomes truly unrecognizable.
Notable Quotes:
The KGB’s official definition of intelligence was “a secret form of political struggle which makes use of clandestine means and methods for acquiring secret information of interest, and for carrying out active measures to exert influence on the adversary and weaken his political, economic, scientific and technical and military positions.”
From a report created for the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, active measures sought to take advantage of pre-existing fissures to further polarize the West. As Colonel Rolf Wagenbreth, long-time head of active measures operations for the East German Stasi, reportedly said, “A powerful adversary can only be defeated through . . . . sophisticated, methodical, careful, and shrewd effort to exploit even the smallest `cracks’ between our enemies . . . and within their elites.”
James Lindsay, an independent American critic of critical theory and social justice, calls it (CRT) a “kafkatrap.” “Notice race? Because you’re racist. Don’t? Because you’re privileged, thus racist.” If you deny that you are a witch, then you are a witch. And if you do not deny it, then you are a witch for sure.
Modern Russian strategic perspective discussed by Alexander Vladimirov, a retired major-general who then chaired the military experts’ panel at the Russian International Affairs Council, an influential think tank close to the Russian Presidential Administration wrote that “modern wars are waged on the level of consciousness and ideas” and that “modern humanity exists in a state of permanent war” in which it is “eternally oscillating between phases of actual armed struggle and constant preparation for it.”
“Exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who is demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him. Even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents, with pictures. Even if I take him by force to the Soviet Union, and show him a concentration camp, he will refuse to believe it, until he is going to receive a kick in his fat bottom. When the military boot crushes his balls, then he will understand, but not before that. That is the tragedy of the situation of demoralization.”
Gearset | Skillset 