This week’s post is a bit of a departure. 

It is composed of snippets that, although not directly about Venezuela, they do apply in that they reflect thinking that takes hold on societies that lose their moorings.

The first link is to a 6-minute excerpt of an interview with Yuri Bezmenov (1939-1993), a KGB defector who after years of work with the Communist regime in the Soviet Union during which he grew to love the liberty of the West, defected in 1970, disguising himself as a hippie. His comments will not surprise you but will, nevertheless, disturb you as he details the focus of our countries enemies to demoralize us by creating chaos in our thinking and questioning our moral foundations. 

The next link is an interview of Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) by Mike Wallace in 1958. If you sit through the entire thirty minutes you will, first, in today’s sensitive era, be a bit amazed at an interview where the host is smoking a cigarette; second, you will appreciate the superior intellectual conversation that was not only tolerated a generation ago, but encouraged and enjoyed; and, third, you will also see that men who were not easily pegged as conservative or liberal, nevertheless saw the direction we as a free people were taking: a direction to slavery by bamboozlement. He believed that the “Brave New World” that he wrote about can and will “come to these shores.” 

That world arrived in Venezuela, with a vengeance. But we are not immune to it. “Why is it that you think that the wrong people” will use these instruments for evil ends? Huxley’s reply comes close to the Calvinist understanding. Yet, he was an atheist. 

There is much more in the interview and it is healthy to challenge yourself to listen to a man and go through the exercise of refuting his errors while agreeing with some of his insights. Somewhat like the Apostle Paul when he quoted a pagan poet in Acts 17. 

It is also bracing to hear Mike Wallace speak of the Soviet Union in 1958 as a successful society despite its lack of freedom. There was plenty of alternative reporting back then which, had he been a bit more curious, would have caused him pause before declaring the Soviet Union a success.

In his letter to George Orwell in 1949 congratulating him for his book, 1984, Huxley wrote:

“Within the next generation I believe that the world’s leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narcohypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of governments, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience.”

And the last link is a reenactment of a lecture given by C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) on the BBC in 1941. He went on to give lectures on the BBC for about three years, during a time when the city of London was being bombed. Civilians and soldiers looked forward to these lectures because, as many of them expressed it, they gave them a sense of order and meaning at at time when it was easy to believe all was chaos. Pubs would suddenly come to a hush, when Lewis came on the radio. These lectures became the foundation for his great book, Mere Christianity.

This first lecture is about right and wrong. And, if you find it compelling, I would recommend reading Lewis’ The Abolition of Man where he develops these thoughts into a challenging and rewarding read.

Contrary to Huxley, Lewis was a Christian. One thing they had in common was that they both died on November 22, 1963. Their deaths were overshadowed by the death of another famous man on that same day: John F. Kennedy.

I believe you will find these three links to be challenging yet engaging and provocative. I recommend you set times aside throughout this coming week to listen to each. They not only help us understand what has been, and what is happening in Venezuela, but also what has been happening in the United States for generations now.

Model for Destruction.