“If my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted, and there will be peace; if not, she will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred, the Holy Father will have much to suffer, various nations will be annihilated.” Our Lady of Fatima, July 13, 1917.
As distressing photos of migrants illegally crossing the southern U.S. border generate angst and empathy around the world, a darker reality is emerging. A reality associated with a strategy devised over half a century ago to force political change through deliberately orchestrated crises.
Known as the Cloward-Piven Strategy, the plan was first proposed in 1966 by Columbia University political scientists Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. It was a scheme to forcibly bankrupt the American welfare system to produce radical societal change and ultimately socialism. Sometimes known as the “crisis strategy” or the “flood the zone-bankrupt-the-cities strategy”, the Cloward-Piven scheme called for swamping welfare rolls with new applicants … more applicants than the system could bear. The hope was that by overloading the government bureaucracy with a torrent of impossible demands, political turmoil would result, leading to economic collapse, the fall of capitalism and the imposition of socialism – the long-sought goal of Marxist strategists.
The strategy gained much public attention during the two terms of the presidency of Barack Obama who’d promised “the fundamental transformation” of the U.S. on the eve of his election in 2008. “It’s time to fundamentally change the way that we do business in Washington,” he said. “To help build a new foundation for the 21st century, we need to reform our government so that it is more efficient, more transparent, and more creative. That will demand new thinking and a new sense of responsibility for every dollar that is spent.”
With the promise came an open southern border and the slogan “Never let a crisis go to waste”, which faded as Donald Trump entered the White House in January 2017 and immediately closed the border to the tens of thousands of illegals who’d been flooding in under Obama, bringing with them a host of destabilizing consequences. These included drug cartels, rampant prostitution, child trafficking, and general lawlessness along with tens of thousands of new inhabitants of unknown origins, allegiances and intentions.
Under Trump, much of the border chaos of the Obama years was beaten back. Then Joe Biden assumed the presidency in January 2017. And, within days, it seemed, the border was thrown wide open. Again. Without explanation. Which no amount of criticism could reverse.
By this time, however, a general awareness of the Cloward-Piven Strategy had slipped from view and the rampant chaos and abuse Trump had campaigned so hard to eradicate returned, this time much worse than under Obama.
Rules for Radicals
What also returned was the pattern of radical organizers hoping to reproduce ‘60s-style chaos, assisted further by the thuggish behaviour of certain elements of George Soros’ Shadow Party and leftwing unions guided by Rules for Radicals, the 1989 handbook by Saul Alinsky dedicated to Lucifer.
Yet even its earliest form, the Cloward-Piven strategy was already applying Alinsky’s principles to welfare entitlements, counselling activists to create what might be called Trojan Horse movements – movements whose outward purpose appeared to provide material help to the downtrodden, but whose real purpose was to draft poor people into service as revolutionary foot soldiers who would overwhelm government agencies with a flood of demands beyond the capacity of those agencies to meet. The flood of demands was calculated to break the budget, jam bureaucratic gears into gridlock, and bring the system crashing down. Accompanied, of course, by the fear, turmoil, violence and economic collapse that would accompany such chaos – providing perfect conditions for radical change. At least, that was the theory behind the strategy.
Over subsequent decades this was used by such front-groups as ACORN and Project Vote to lobby for improved voting laws which, today, are widely blamed for swamping voter rolls with invalid registrations signed in the names of deceased, ineligible or non-existent persons – opening the door wide to unprecedented levels of voter fraud claims in subsequent elections.
It’s hardly surprising, then, that all subsequent elections have been subjected to serious allegations of voter fraud, as seen most dramatically in the elections of 2020 and 2022, the former of which put former Obama Vice-President Joe Biden in the White House. And which got ever louder as Biden reversed, within minutes it seemed, every stabilizing measure imposed by Trump. Beginning with Biden’s shutting down the Keystone Pipeline and re-opening the border with no prior indication during his presidential campaign he would do so.
Indeed, not a single reference to the Cloward-Piven Strategy and some of its affiliated Soros-funded schemes have been heard anywhere as spokespersons for the Biden Administration continue to insist there’s no problem at the border where, it’s estimated, close to four million illegals have flooded in from 65 countries in the past two years alone – a number estimated to rise to 7 million by early next year, still facilitating the mass smuggling of lethal drugs causing high numbers of preventable deaths.
An Undeclared Strategy at Work?
No surprise either that, along with deep concerns over a government that appears not to be listening, Americans are deeply worried about a host of other issues they regard as serious threats to their country’s future, including Biden’s brinksmanship over raising the U.S.’s borrowing limit to an unsustainable $31.4 trillion, threatening default.
Politicians are complaining too that they’re receiving no assistance from the Biden Administration which is not consulting them before dumping busloads of new migrants into their districts. According to New York Mayor Eric Adams, 4,200 illegal aliens are arriving in New York City daily, though this is only a small fraction of the hundreds of thousands being released across the interior of the United States, many now housed in hotels and costing billions in lost tourism while, at the same time, being enrolled in state medical systems without proper documentation.
The rising number of terrorism suspects at the border is also a “clear national security risk”, says House Oversight Committee chairman James Comer. And, despite Title 42 (the pandemic emergency power) ending May 11, nearly 9 of 10 unauthorized migrants processed by Customs and Border Protection are still being released.
Nor does the widely suspected imposition of the Cloward-Piven Strategy early in the Biden presidency appear to be the only tactic applied to infrastructure as the U.S. continues to lose ever more of its sovereignty, piece by piece.
Unleashing Crime and Chaos
Has the installation of radically left District Attorneys in major cities by George Soros-funded programs – aimed at defunding local police and releasing violent criminals back onto the street with little or no bail – been intentional?
Or is it just one more of many that include ramping up measures to intensify race and class warfare; the ongoing sexualization of the entire society by promoting all manner of sexual deviance as “normal, natural and healthy”; the removal of God from government and the public square; the intentional perversion of the American education system towards totalitarian indoctrination; the push for total gun control intended to remove citizens’ ability to defend themselves from what might become a police state; and the catastrophic damage done to – some might say ‘weaponization’ of – the American health care system by the Covid-19 pandemic and its questionable management by coercive government bureaucrats? Is any of this accidental?
Obama’s Fundamental ‘Transformation’ of America
And is Obama’s 2008 promise of a fundamental transformation of America still in effect? Do the facts of life in 2023 America suggest that, under the thumb of his former vice president, the intended transformation has ramped up to another level?
Yuri Bezmenov would have thought so.
In 1985, fifteen years after the former KGB agent and Novosti journalist’s defection to Canada, Yuri Bezmenov gave a stunning interview. In it, he outlined the formula used by the international communist movement to spread Russia’s errors throughout the world, from one country after another, first by communizing its intelligentsia and then by conquering the targeted nation outright through propaganda, media manipulation and censorship as fundamental techniques for subverting and controlling its people’s thinking before Marxist progressives ultimately take over, usually by terror and violence.
The interview, given to Edward Griffin, occurred two decades after Cloward-Piven went public and four years before the fall of the Berlin Wall which purported to signal to the world the ‘fall’ of Russian communism. In that interview, Bezmenov outlined the four-pronged strategy used by Soviet communists to bring down the West – a process he regarded as already remarkably advanced – far more than he imagined before his defection in 1970.
The strategy is called “ideological subversion” which, according to Bezmerov, has been underway since Lenin took power in 1917, with particular intensity since 1960.
Ideological Subversion
“Ideological subversion is the process which is legitimate, overt and open,” he told Griffin. “You can see it with your own eyes. In reality, the main emphasis of the KGB is NOT in the area of intelligence at all. Only about 15% of time, money, and manpower is spent on espionage as such. The other 85% is a slow process which we call either ‘ideological subversion’ or psychological warfare. Which basically means to change the perception of reality of every American so that despite the abundance of information, no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community, and their country.
“This great brainwashing process which goes very slow is divided into four basic stages, the first one being ‘demoralization’ which takes from 15 to 20 years. Why that long? Because this is the minimum number required to educate one generation of students exposed to the ideology of the enemy. This means that Marxism-Leninist ideology has been pumped into the soft heads of at least three generations of American students without being challenged or counterbalanced by the basic values of Americanism.”
Bezmenov said most of the activity prior to taking over was devoted to accumulating a huge amount of information on individuals who shaped public opinion – publishers, editors, journalists, actors, educators, publicists, political scientists, members of parliament, representatives of business circles. Most of these were divided roughly into groups. Those who would toe Soviet policy would be promoted to the positions of power in media and public manipulation. Those who refused would be character assassinated or executed. This is what happened in Hue, he noted. Hue is a small town in south Vietnam where several thousand Vietnamese were executed in one night (February 28, 1968) after the city was captured by Viet Cong.
“The American CIA could never figure out how it was possible that communists could know each individual, where he lives, where to arrest him and in just one night put him in a van to be taken outside the city limits and shot. The answer is simple. Long before the communists occupied the city, there was an extensive network of informers – local Vietnamese citizens who knew absolutely everything about people who were instrumental in public opinion, including barbers and taxi drivers. Everyone sympathetic to the United States was executed. Same thing was done under the guidance of the Soviet embassy in Hanoi and same thing I was doing in New Delhi. To my horror, I discovered in the files people who were doomed to execution. There were names of pro-Soviet journalists with whom I was personally friendly. They were idealistically minded leftists who made several visits to USSR and yet KGB decided, due to massive change in counterrevolutionary structure, that they had to go.”
“Why”? Griffin asked.
“Because they knew too much,” Bezmenov replied.
“But why recruit them only to eliminate them later”?
“They serve a purpose only at the stage of destabilization of the nation. For example, all these leftists in the United States, all these professors, all these beautiful civil rights defenders, they are instrumental in the process of destabilizing the nation. When the job is completed, they are not needed anymore. Some of them think they will come to power. That will never happen, of course. They will be lined up against the wall and shot. It’s the same pattern everywhere, the moment the useful idiots have served their purpose, they’re either executed or exiled or imprisoned, like in Cuba where many former Marxists are in prison.”
Demoralization and Destabilization
Meanwhile back in the West the demoralization process continues apace, Bezmenov said. Here, hundreds of thousands of useful idiots, trained like Pavlovian dogs by the media, educators and political organizers to hate Christianity, remain in ignorance about the very Faith that once made their countries strong and which is the only thing that could save them. Its place has been supplanted by a series of false religions – from environmentalism and feminism to pan-sexualism. Add the human rights culture based on an utterly false notion of equality and the doctrine of the “inherent repressiveness” of self-restraint and you’ve got a self-indulgent, narcissistic generation of feral children inhabiting a culture fast descending into chaos.
“The result you can see,” Bezmenov said. “Most of the people who were educated in the 1960s – drop-outs or half-baked intellectuals – are now occupying the positions of power in governments, civil service, business, media, and the educational systems. You are stuck with them. You cannot get rid of them. They are contaminated. They are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern. You cannot change their mind, even if you expose them to authentic information. Even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still can’t change the basic perception and the logic of their behaviour. In other words, with these people the process of demoralization is complete and irreversible. So, basically, America is stuck with its demoralization.”
By mid-1980s, Bezmenov thought the demoralization process in the U.S., which he regarded as the last bastion of freedom, was already complete.
“Actually, it’s over-fulfilled because the demoralization now reaches such areas where previously not even Comrade Andropov and all his experts would even dream of such tremendous success. Most of it is done by Americans to Americans, thanks to lack of moral standards. As I said before, exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who has been demoralized is unable to process true information. The facts tell nothing to him. Even if I take him by force to the Soviet Union and show him concentration camps, he’s going to refuse to believe it until he receives a big kick on his fat bottom. When the military boot crushes him, then he will understand. But not before that.”
The next stage is ‘destabilization’ which Bezmenov said takes from two to five years. To destabilize a nation, what matters are essentials: economy, foreign relations and defence systems. “And you can see it quite clearly that in such sensitive areas as defence and economy the influence of Marxist-Leninist ideas in America is absolutely fantastic. I could never believe it when I landed in this part of the world that the process would go that fast.”
The next stage is ‘crisis’. “It might take only up to six weeks to bring a country to the verge of crisis. And after the crisis which comes with a violent change of power, structure and economy, you have the period of normalization. It may last indefinitely.
“Normalization’ is a cynical expression borrowed from Soviet propaganda when the tanks moved into Czechoslovakia and Comrade Brezhnev said: ‘Now the situation in brotherly Czechslovakia is normalized’,” he said. “This is what will happen in the United States if you allow all these schmucks to bring the country to crisis, to promise people all kinds of goodies and a paradise on earth, to destablize your economy, to eliminate free market competition and to put a big umbrella government in Washington D.C. with a benevolent dictator.”
Totalitarian Transformation
Fast forward thirty-five years and a majority of Americans now believe their government has fallen into just the sort of hands Bezmenov warned of. As for Bezmenov, he died in Windsor, Ontario in January 1993, from what the Windsor Star described as a “massive heart attack”.
“Most American politicians and media and educational systems are training another generation to think they are living in a peace time,” Bezmenov said. “This is false. The United States in living in a state of war. Undeclared total war against the principles and the foundation of this system. And the initiator of this war is not Comrade Andropov, of course. It is the world communist system, as ridiculous as that might sound, the world communist conspiracy. Whether that scares some people or not, I don’t give a hoot. The time bomb is ticking, the disaster is coming closer and closer. And unlike myself, you will have NOWHERE to defect to. Unless you want to live in Antarctica with penguins. This is it. This is the last country of freedom and possibility.”
The critical importance of Bezmenov’s testimony is that he was confirming to the whole world that there IS a communist conspiracy and much of its great success has been ensured by the useful idiots insisting no such thing exists as they push their nations, with increasing speed and desperation it seems, towards the edge of a cliff from where there is nowhere but down.
His testimony seems particularly relevant today as destructive events not only seem to be increasing but escalating in speed, suggesting great pressure emanating from the West’s political enemies to push faster and harder towards their undeclared goal.
The Biden Disaster
And it’s all deliberate, declared Town Hall columnist Mark Lewis in a recent column.
“Since becoming president, everything Biden has done has been a disaster,” Lewis writes. The economy is teetering. The border has effectively disappeared. The banking system and the dollar are crumbling. Government spending is without restraint as inflation soars and America’s middle class is being pushed to breaking point. Crime is out of control in many American cities. The education system is producing semi-literates. No patriot wants to join the military anymore. Traditional morality and decency are being widely rejected as children are being groomed for a cadre of sexual deviants as the media aids and abets the societal chaos Leftists have been brewing since the French Revolution.
Pius X and Fatima
Exactly as Our Lady predicted at Fatima. Yet for more than a century, the world has persisted in ignoring her warning that, unless Russia is converted, her errors will contaminate the entire world and even the Church itself.
Does any serious Catholic today think the ubiquity of so-called parish social justice committees, leftist leaning school board trustees and liturgical abuse is accidental?
Ten years prior to Fatima, Pope Saint Pius X foreshadowed Our Lady’s appearance in his encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis on the doctrines of the Modernists that were to infect the entire 20th century and beyond. “The partisans of error are to be sought not only among the Church’s open enemies; but … in Her very bosom, and are the more mischievous the less they keep in the open.”
St. Pius warned that these poisonous doctrines are taught by “the enemies of the Church” who put themselves forward “as reformers of the Church.”
“The Church has no greater enemies. For they put into operation their designs for Her undoing, not from without but from within. Hence, the danger is present almost in the very veins and heart of the Church, whose injury is the more certain from the very fact that their knowledge of her is more intimate. They seize upon professorships in the seminaries and universities, and gradually make of them chairs of pestilence. It is time to tear away the mask of these people and to show them to the Church such as they are.”
This same pattern of treachery has been repeated for more than a century by the international socialist-communist movement, first by turning against the Christian order of governance which they did gradually. Then with accelerating speed. Just as Ernest Hemingway observed in one of his novels with a character who, when asked how he went bankrupt, replied: “Gradually, then suddenly.”
In the U.S., the decay that started slowly decades ago is now metastasizing quickly as the Chinese Communist Party, sensing their advantage, simultaneously seek to turn the world order in their favor as the two millennia of the Christian culture that built the West methodically dissolve. This means that the West is entering a revolutionary period where the entire foundation of daily life – from abundant food and fuel, prosperous economies, sound education and a just application of the law are fast eroding. The decay is now in full force. Gradually has become suddenly.
Yet despite the warnings of Fatima and more than a century of genocidal communism confirming Our Lady’s warnings, the lessons dawning on those paying attention are far too few …. necessitating, it seems, the arrival of dire pain for the spiritual and moral awakenings now so dreadfully needed.