Comment by abecedarius | Hacker News Reader

Comment by abecedarius | Hacker News Reader

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Summary of near-14-minute video, since I certainly wished someone else had posted one to help me decide whether to watch:

Says the KGB works mainly at ideological subversion of the enemy society, not James Bond stuff. This has 4 stages:

- Demoralization. Slow, takes at least a generation to take hold or be reversed. U.S. is 3 generations in, graduates have positions of influence, and now it's mostly done by Americans to Americans.

- Destabilization. 2 to 5 years.

- Crisis. 3 to 6 weeks. E.g. in Central America at that time.

- Normalization.

KGB considers it total war, and we should too. Americans should unify behind stopping their government from aiding communism. Education system especially important.

(There wasn't really anything more specific, it was TV. I would've liked specifics on not just the claimed strategy, but how much real effect they had on mid-20th-C. U.S. education and culture. Of course there's only so much one defector would know.)

It would certainly explain how "political correctness" a soviet concept made it into the american public consciousness far more than other nations of the world.

Edited: Since I'm being downvoted. Political Correctness wasn't really a thing until around the 80's, the same time period as the cold war. It really is acommunist term. The term "political correctness" first appeared in Marxist–Leninist vocabulary following the Russian Revolution of 1917.

Yuri is saying the KGB was enacting total war decades ago, and that it takes several generations to see the change. When you can see over the course of 30 years, how political correct seeped into the american consciousness, yet somehow skipped over many other parts of the world. I think it's worth looking into, and thinking critically.

I think it would explain even better why everyone tries to shoehorn their least favorite thing about "the other side" into every conversation about manipulation by state actors. Case in point.

The two PC terms are not related. In the start of the last century political correctness was about the correct adherence to ideology. The modern PC is a describer coined by us conservatives to label progressive political goals.

I guess I'll weigh in with my lived experience as a teenager at the time of the interview. I would've told you (maybe a few years later) "political correctness" in the U.S. started as an ironic term among lefty types with a sense of humor about their own milieu, which resonated more widely and got taken as ammunition and shortened to "PC" by more righty culture warriors.

I think this was originally a kind of joke but referencing a real phenomenon in soviet-style regimes. Like http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/ha-ha-only-serious.html

Now just how much this Western lefty culture was influenced by deliberate influence ops, that's the question I was hoping to learn about from this interview.

> I would've told you (maybe a few years later) "political correctness" in the U.S. started as an ironic term among lefty types with a sense of humor about their own milieu, which resonated more widely and got taken as ammunition and shortened to "PC" by more righty culture warriors.

Similar to "woke". A term used with semi-seriousness, later coopted and weaponized by political opponents.

Actually they are very related.

Political Correctness in the soviet union was very similar to what we have today. The "Girl Boss" stuff pushed by Sheryl Sandberg is eerily similar to Stalin's "New Soviet Woman".

Soviet "political correctness" was about protecting the state from any criticism, American "political correctness" is about understanding systems of oppression from the standpoint of the oppressed.

Couldn't be more different.

In 2023, disagree heavily. Political Correctness is a way prevent open conversation and debate. The Biden admin constantly reorients attacks on them as attacks on women or the LGBT community.

Political Correctness is used to shut down criticism of the modern American State. Wars are now pitched as femininist, see afghanistan.

That is the right wing perspective, yes. And i'm sure PC is used at times cynically to deflect real criticism, that doesn't change the origins or original meaning I described. This alongside "wokeness" is simply acknowledging how much of our everyday speech and action rob certain members of society of their voice and agency, and trying to address it. Addressing it is a hard and imprecise process, but it's worth doing imo.

If even it engenders a near constant stream of culture war backlash. America wasn't great for far too many Americans in the past, that needs to change.

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