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 whocontrols 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:

raising corporate taxes to the highest in the world, forcing companies overseas;

draining the treasury for public education, and then producing minds ill-suited for superior performance in a high-tech, industrialized economy;

the creation of strict environmental regulations, to the point that no oil refinery has been built in the United States since the 1970s

the fear-mongering over nuclear power, even though countries like France receive much of their power from uranium

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

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:

providing extremely substandard mathematical and scientific education to American students; and

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:

numerous environmental regulations;

punitive lawsuits, replacing the legal concept of caveat emptor with a nanny state mentality;

economic zoning and restrictions; and

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:

seventy percent of the American economy is consumption

consumption is mainly debt-driven, the average household having about $100,000 in personal debt

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

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.

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.

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13 comments

John I leave it to you to blame Hungary for the Armenian slaughter. Did you graduate from Brown with a PhD in English lit or are you just a torts expert? Please continue posting, it is illuminating seeing the depth and extent of your knowledge. I keep expecting you to quote Zinn or some other expert like Cher.

I’m not going to comment on this whole piece (which lands on the crazy scale in an area you probably wouldn’t be comfortable with), but I think I will take exception to this section:

“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.”

I don’t remember Obama invading a country without provocation. Bush did that.

Also, no one no one no one is trying to undermine Christianity. But if the most visible way a man in a position to influence others demonstrates his Christianity is to prevent gay people from getting married, I would say he may be a Christian, but he isn’t very good at it. I think that Chick Fil A does a lot of good things. They seem to really respect their employees and encourage them to become better people. That is commendable. What is less commendable is that the company then donates money to organizations that would legally keep 10% of their potential employees from having a legally recognized partnership. Why? A book written thousands of years ago to ensure the survival of a nomadic desert people. To have that position is fine, I guess, but it does come with consequences. Also, when was the last time you went to a Sean Penn movie. Are you a fascist for boycotting that? No? Stew in your hypocrisy.

Attacking U.S. jets and expelling UN inspectors were not the reasons given for going to war if I recall. What I remember was the insistence that Iraq was creating weapons of mass destruction and harboring terrorists. The first, of course, was not true. The second became true when people who were not terrorists were radicalized after their country was invaded. Also, while I don’t condone the attacking of U.S. jets, I think a full scale invasion is not a proportionate response. Did we go to war with Israel when they attacked a U.S. navy warship in 1967? I don’t recall. As far as U.N. inspectors go, they were allowed back into the country in November of 2002 and worked right up until the invasion.

John says Saddam didn’t have weapons of mass destruction. You really should parade your ignorance. It has been documented that Saddam bought and imported 400 tons of radioactive materials and had stockpiles of sarrin, tabun, and various other gases regularly emitted by Marxists. Unfortunately he amassed thousands of tons of these weapons, which he used on his own people and threatened to use on his neighbors and Americans.

What pathetic tripe. The next thing I expect to hear is that the Rosenburgs weren’t spies.

I’m sorry, I forgot about the day that U.S. forces in Iraq triumphantly uncovered large caches of weapons of mass destruction. When was that exactly? Yes, he did use chemical weapons on his own people, but that was 15 years prior to the invasion of Iraq. I’m not saying time heals all wounds, but this surely did not constitute a clear and present danger to the United States, and there were other more mature ways of addressing that atrocity. That makes the invasion of Iraq a war of choice, or, to use the vocabulary of Christianity, a sin. By the way, of course Saddam was threatening to use those weapons on Americans. He was threatened with an invasion and deposition. That didn’t mean he had the weapons! What we learned shortly after the invasion was that Huessein was playing chess and President Bush was playing candyland. Huessein was killed, but we got stuck in a long, violent, expensive, and ultimately kind of pointless war whose winner seems to be Iran. What I find to be pathetic tripe is that you seem to still believe the defensive rhetoric of what made that war remotely justifiable, but several rungs down the list. A full scale invasion for a 15 year old crime is ridiculous. Are we going to invade Hungary for the Armenian genocide in 1905? Did we think about invading the Suddan for a genocide that was actually occurring? No? Okay. Pathetic tripe.

John demonstrates the Leftist technique of expressing intolerance for the beliefs of others, especially religious beliefs, while claiming only the enlightened do not support age old traditions and standards.

Displaying the same standard of truthfulness this expert forgets Obama’s intervention in Libya, Syria, and massive violations of national boundaries throughout the world with a a systematic assination program that is of questionable value.

How can anyone support the queer agenda while condemning what took place at Penn State, the Catholic Church or other nests of pederasts.

I looked on the Chick Fil A menu where they have both sausage egg and cheese as well as bacon egg and cheese biscuits. This is clearly in direct opposition to the book of Leviticus. But I guess it is Chick Fil A’s prerogative to pick and choose which age old traditions are worth following.

Just a quick reality check, we bombed Libya for a billion dollars as opposed to a full scale invasion of Iraq which cost trillions as well as thousands of American lives. Also, it was not an American but rather a NATO operation. As for Syria, I am not aware of any US military operations in that country. As for the assassination program, I do know that Obama seems to be much better at killing terrorists than Bush was…

Finally, the comparison of a homosexual couple that is in a loving monogamous relationship to a man in a religious institution using his influence over a child to make him or her a victim of sexual abuse, or to use their influence as a coach to do the same is false. That would be like saying a happy straight marriage is the equivalent of an ongoing sexually abusive relationship characterized by rape. Your decision to make these things mean the same thing says more about you than you are probably comfortable with.

More pathetic tripe from the master of the twilight zone. To justify Obama’s aggression in Libya is a joke since it was done prior to any consultation or agreement by NATO, but what does John care about the facts. Just as he tried to say bombing Libya isn’t aggression he carefully ignored small incidents in history like Pearl Harbor where no invasion followed bombing. But when a Marxist brays….

Yes Obama is so much better at assassinations. Just ask the 50,000 Mexicans Obama has killed by funding the cartels.

Come on John we are tsill waiting for you to tell us about all those loving members of NAMBLA providing moral upbringing to children. No doubt Rosie McDonald’s liter will be perfectly functioning human beings, like Chaz Bono. Have to hand it you John there is no linkage between queers at what happened in the Catholic Church or at Penn State. Magic thinking anyone?

As for the discovery of mass dumps I realize its really too difficult to google search the terms uranium and Afrifa and Saddam and why he imported 400 tons. And we can all realize that it was pure stupidity to spend millions to inculate hundreds of thousands of men against biological agents. These were simply ways to waste moneyala Obama’s GAO.

And since you are such a military expert care to fill me in on your MOS and extensive military experience. No doubt you worked in national security as well or are your opinions all formed by watching Jon Steward?

So you think that the US bombing of Libya to help rebels who were in the process of being overrun by the Libyan military is the same thing–or worse–than the full scale invasion of Iraq 15 years after the Iraqi military committed an atrocity?

Obama is not funding the cartels. That is incorrect. The US government is funding the Mexican government to combat the cartels, and the Justice Department, in building cases against the cartels, is laundering money. Would you say that a police officer who goes undercover as a prostitute is spreading prostitution? Carrying out operations like this is how the Justice Department can see how the cartels operate.

Yes, NAMBLA is an organization that exists. I think it deserves the horrible reputation it has. When did you hear me suggest that statutory rape was a good thing? Again, making the comparison that two adults in a loving monogamous relationship with pedophiles is false. It shows you do not understand. Did you mean Rosie O’Donnell? Why do you think she won’t be a good mother? Do you have any evidence of this? As for Chaz Bono, A) he seems very happy now, and B) he had straight parents. What is your point? Finally, your connection between the crimes in the Catholic Church and at Notre Dame are crimes because people used sex as a weapon. This, again, is no different than if a straight man were to commit a sexual act with a female minor. Would you say the problem was that he was straight? No, or at least I hope not.

Your paragraph following was indecipherable. I guess you think that I thought that taking measures to ensure that soldiers carrying out the invasion should be at a greater risk. When did I day anything even remotely like that?

I have no personal military experience, but I come from a military family. My father and uncles were in the Navy, my Grandfather on my father’s side was a mechanic in the navy and worked on the squadron that shot down Yamamoto. My Grandfather on my mother’s side was a Col in the Marines and fought in three wars. I don’t hate the military. I also don’t think loving it makes you a better person or a better patriot. I get my news from all over, and my opinions are my own.