Note:
Please note. Bezmenov was talking about Soviet society and propaganda in the 1960s and 1970s. That means his analysis of the general dynamics of propaganda has to be cautiously reconfigured, when it comes to specifics. The US and USSR he described then (prior to the 1980s) had clearly differentiated economic/political systems. In the 30 years that have passed since, the ideological convergence he mentions elsewhere, has in many ways occurred, or is in the process of occurring. [I describe this in much greater depth in “The Language of Empire.”]
The USA hasn’t been free-market capitalist in any real way for some 20-30 years, at the very least. Instead, we’ve had ever-accelerating state intervention and crony capitalism that has turned into the final danse macabre of casino capitalism and pure plunder.
Thus the terms that Bezmenov uses in discussing the totalitarian communism of the Soviet system now actually apply to the US, albeit incompletely.
Bezmenov didn’t know, or perhaps chose not to express, since this was the country he defected to, that US propaganda and psyops were far more subtle, and thus in the long run more effective, than Soviet propaganda.
He also doesn’t acknowledge that at many levels “capitalist” and “communist” leaderships were/are symbiotic and that they have ultimately led to the globalized kleptocracy, in which the two ideological forms, while retaining different emphases, copulate and spawn the “third way” of corporatized politically-correct social democracy, which is the benign face of the corrupt neo-liberalism that has always been the power behind the throne of the multilateral institutions, such as the World Bank, IMF, EU, UN, and others…
There is no longer a west versus east polarity. The division is really between centralizers (neoliberal globalizers, central bankers) and decentralizers, in which, however, some of the decentralization is orchestrated to promote the globalizers’ agenda. One has to know the specifics of every situation. They can’t be understood ideologically.