Just like old times: Russians still spying

Ron Radosh at PJ Media:

It seems that some things never change. A few moments ago, this breaking story came in from the website of the New York Times. It seems, as this early report informs us, that ten Americans have been arrested for spying on behalf of Putin’s new Russia.

Via Reynolds.

Just like old times

The State Department is still infested with spies. Communist spies, at that. Of course, they have to work cheap, now.

The Justice Department charged Friday that a former State Department analyst and his wife worked as spies for Cuba for nearly 30 years, using a short-wave radio to pass on secret diplomatic information to their Cuban handlers. Officials said the couple, Walter K. Myers, 72, and Gwendolyn S. Myers, 71, received little in the way of compensation from the Cubans except for the short-wave radio and some travel expenses. Rather, the officials said, the couple appears to have been driven by their strong affinity for Cuba and their bitterness toward “American imperialism.”

What, no cigars or rum? Communists do tend to be puritanical. Venona, Mitrokhin, nothing new here. This calls for an investigation into hiring and vetting, and a through screening of the remaining employees and appointees. Were I a betting man, I'd bet that we will not see one.

Spies, they're like cockroaches — where you find one, there are probably more that you did not find. As I said somewhere else a while ago, it's not too hard to confuse the vigilance that is necessary to maintain a country's — that would be our country's — security with an unseemly paranoia that does not go well with the nice clothes, polite talk and cucumber sandwiches.

CWCID (as TigerHawk would say) to Escort81, at TigerHawk's place, who links to this at Yahoo news.

More at Washington Post. They sound like standard-model academic lefties, thoroughly Gramsciated and demoralized*, like their neighbors. Good educations, elite backgrounds, accustomed for so long to the benefits of freedom and prosperity that they came to take those things for granted.

* Not demoralized in the usual sense of lacking morale, but in the sense of lacking a moral compass. To one with no compass, all directions are the same; to one with no moral compass, moral equivalence is the background of reasoning. The technical term used in this description of how a society is "demoralized."

KGB Psyops from the horse's mouth

Glenn Reynolds links to this at PJ Media.

"Former KGB agent and Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov explains how the KGB worked from within American universities to demoralize our society in a generation."

The manufacturing of "useful idiots:" a first-hand explanation of how and why they did it, which helps to explain why so many otherwise fine, nice, pleasant, even smart people seem so resistant to logic and even to facts, should those things contradict their negative views of "the power structure" or "bourgeois Amerika." Willi Münzenberg's old weapons of the Cold War are still working.

Here's a blogpost about Bezmenov and the documentary this clip is excerpted from, with links to other clips:

In 1984 G. Edward Griffin released a documentary titled Soviet subversion of the free press, a conversation with Yuri Bezmenov and through the magic of YouTube, snippets of that documentary are available on the web today. Now, as far as I can tell, G. Edward Griffin is a little bit odd. He's championed some questionable cancer cures and written books about monetary conspiracies and all sorts of odd stuff (there's a page about him here: G. Edward Griffin Totally Explained, but really, it doesn't do all that much explaining). Still, you can't deny the video and he lets Bezmenov rant in his own words.

Do read the rest, it's worth the click. The blogger, Rob Hafernik, talks about the documentary and also about an issue of Look magazine from 1967 that was a glowing account of the USSR and its glorious potential. That sounds a lot like those articles by Walter Duranty that the NY Times ran in the early 1930's, described in the Weekly Standard and Wikipedia, which brought the Times a Pulitzer, but which historians have concluded were pure propaganda. There is also a book about Duranty, Stalin's Apologist. (Those three are just from the first page of Google results.)

The YouTube user who uploaded these Bezmenov clips seems to be a Nazi sympathizer. I didn't like looking at his other clips, so didn't look at many, but that was the impression I got, from their content and from his descriptions. But the Devil can quote Scripture, as they say, and after the abrogation of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, even a real Nazi would have little love for Russians. Which make it a bit less likely that these are some sort of double-fake.

Click the label "psyops" for more on Münzenberg and meme-war.

Update: Youtube has, as far as I can tell, removed everything from the user mentioned above. I have changed the link to one that still works; the better audio, and Portuguese subtitles! are just gravy.

Another update: Yaakov Ben Moshe has posted a couple more Bezmenov clips. Ted Kennedy appears at 6:26 in the second one.