In 1984, a man in a grey suit sat across from a talk-show host and calmly declared that the United States was already at war. It was not a war of bombs or bullets, but of ideas. Yuri Bezmenov, a former KGB propagandist turned defector, warned that the West’s greatest danger was not invasion but decay, a slow process of ideological subversion. Marxist-Leninist doctrine, he claimed, had crept into American schools, media, and public life, leaving society hollow and uncertain.

Bezmenov’s four-stage model—demoralisation, destabilisation, crisis, and normalisation—offered a neat narrative of collapse. In his telling, radical ideas had been planted deliberately, eroding Western confidence and preparing the ground for revolution without violence. That interview was once obscure, but its claims are now invoked by those alarmed by identity politics, institutional distrust, and the fading of shared norms. His words feel prophetic.

But something in Bezmenov’s account does not fit. He was describing a West already in motion, shaped by forces far older and deeper than Soviet intrigue. He identified the symptoms but misdiagnosed their origin. His model assumed a conspiracy. But what if the rot was homegrown? What if the erosion of truth and cultural confidence came not from infiltration but from grief? What if the unravelling began not in Moscow but in the trenches of the Somme, in the ruins of Verdun, and in the silence that followed? To understand why Western institutions lost faith in themselves, we must look beyond propaganda to the wreckage left by two world wars.

The thinkers who emerged from that wreckage did not carry manifestos. They carried questions: about truth, about power, about coherence in the aftermath of catastrophe. This is not a story of sabotage. It is a story of a collapse so profound that it reshaped the West’s intellectual architecture. Postmodernism, not Marxism, redirected Western culture, and we mistook mourning for malice.

Philosophical Orphans of Modernism

The postmodern philosophers were not just French; they were French in the shadow of an unspeakable trauma. Born in the 1920s and 1930s, figures like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-François Lyotard grew up in a country scarred by the deepest wound of the modern age. France had lost nearly 1.4 million men in the First World War, while another four million returned maimed in body or mind. Entire villages vanished, and whole streets bore the mark of absence. Grief was not occasional; it was ambient and woven into daily life. Paris carried the scars openly: men without limbs, veterans with trembling hands and hollow eyes, women who would never marry, children raised in silent homes to which fathers never returned. The fabric of life—family, tradition, continuity—was torn open. And just as the nation began to rebuild, the Second World War arrived to extinguish what little hope remained.

It is difficult for us to imagine the weight of that trauma today, but French philosophy, long steeped in abstraction, became one of the first domains to metabolise it. In doing so, it did not reach for revenge but for understanding. These intellectuals were not zealots intent on a new order. They were mourners trying to make sense of ruins. They had inherited a civilisation that had believed too much: in empire, in reason, in progress. And what had those beliefs delivered? Mechanised slaughter, bureaucratic genocide, two civilisational implosions within a generation.

The postmodern project was born not from a desire to destroy the West but from an effort to shield it from future betrayal. By interrogating the grand narratives of truth, identity, power, and meaning, these thinkers sought to expose the conditions that had made such horrors possible. Foucault’s archaeology of power, Derrida’s deconstruction of language, and Lyotard’s assault on metanarratives were not instruments of conquest. They were philosophical antibodies—attempts to guard culture against utopian certainty and the idealism that had once sent millions to die in mud. This was not revolution in the Marxist sense. It was mourning in the form of critique. Postmodernism was not a conspiracy; it was cultural PTSD. And in France, the epicentre of belief and betrayal, that grief found its clearest voice.

A Cultural Unravelling

Postmodernism did not arrive with a manifesto. It drifted in like fog over a battlefield, less a program than a mood. It was not a call to arms but a growing silence around ideas once treated as sacred. There were no marches or leaders. It spread as a sensibility, seeping first into philosophy, then into literature, architecture, education, and eventually the language of public life. After the Second World War and the Holocaust, the assumptions of the Enlightenment—reason, progress, universality—no longer stood firm. Science had not delivered utopia; it had produced the gas chamber and the atomic bomb. Bureaucracy, once praised as rational governance, had become the machinery of mass murder. Institutions that had once anchored belief—the state, the university, the church—were now seen as compromised, complicit, or cowardly.

Into this landscape stepped the postmodern thinkers. They came with questions not solutions. Michel Foucault revealed how prisons, schools, and hospitals embedded power in their structures. Jacques Derrida dismantled language and argued that meaning was always deferred. Jean-François Lyotard announced the “end of metanarratives,” the collapse of faith in the grand stories that once gave history direction. These were not political proposals. They were acts of disassembly, and they were not just directed at capitalism or liberal democracy. Many postmodern thinkers distrusted Marxism as much as the Right. Marxism was itself a grand narrative, a teleology of history with an endpoint and a universal subject. Postmodernism rejected such totalising claims. It was sceptical of any system that promised certainty. Lyotard’s phrase—“incredulity toward metanarratives”—captured its essence.

How French Intellectuals Ruined the West

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The result was not a new worldview but the erosion of old ones. What began in Paris soon spread outward into novels stripped of plot, into architecture marked by irony, into classrooms where critique displaced content. What emerged was an atmosphere of doubt. Dogma yielded to suspicion, unity to fragmentation, the universal to the subjective. Where Marxism sought to remake the world, postmodernism taught us to distrust it. For those raised in absolutes, this shift felt like decay. For those who had seen certainty turn monstrous, it felt like honesty.

Why Bezmenov Got It Wrong

Yuri Bezmenov was no fool. He was a sharp observer of cultural decline, and he recognised that something in the West had shifted. Confidence in tradition, authority, and shared values was ebbing, while radical ideas were taking root in schools, media, and popular culture. His warnings about ideological subversion resonated because they captured a real anxiety: the sense that the West had lost its bearings. But his explanation—a Marxist plot carried out by Soviet agents and their dupes—was wrong. The decay was real, but he misread its source. The West was not being toppled, it was quietly unravelling.

Bezmenov’s four-stage model of demoralisation, destabilisation, crisis, and normalisation presumes design, intent, and a guiding hand. But the postmodern turn had no such architecture. No Marxist cabal engineered the rise of poststructuralist theory or the decline of civic trust. These developments grew out of grief and fatigue, not enemy action. Bezmenov’s mistake, which has been repeated ever since, was to conflate postmodern critique and Marxist revolution. Both spoke in the language of suspicion, but their purposes diverged.

Marxism is teleological: it sees history as directional, aimed at liberation through a universal class, driven by reason, and realised through political struggle. Postmodernism is the opposite. It rejects the idea that history has a destiny, doubts that liberation is possible or even definable, and distrusts every universal claim, including those of Marx. This is why so many Marxists despised postmodernism. They saw it as nihilistic, an aesthetic rebellion that weakened solidarity and offered no path to mobilisation. Where Marx saw progress, the postmodernist saw decay. Where Marx offered a blueprint, the postmodernist held up a cracked mirror.

What Bezmenov interpreted as ideological capture was actually civilisational confusion. The West’s institutions had not been seized, they had hollowed themselves out. The great myths of liberalism, nationalism, Christianity, and even socialism no longer provided inspiration. In their place opened a cultural vacuum where the sacred had once stood. And into that vacuum poured a thousand critiques, restless and destabilising. They were not the strategies of revolutionaries but the artefacts of a civilisation that no longer believed in itself, and no longer knew whether it should.

A Subversion Without a Subversive

The tragedy of postmodernism is not that it toppled the West’s foundations by design, but that it eroded them by default. It offered critique without cure and suspicion without synthesis. It dismantled the structures that had once bound society together—nationhood, religion, truth, even reason—but it left nothing in their place, only the endless questioning of what had once been sacred. This erosion was gradual. It seeped quietly into institutions. In universities, literature gave way to theory; in art, beauty yielded to irony; in architecture, coherence gave way to spectacle. Across disciplines, the very idea of a stable centre—moral, cultural, epistemological—was abandoned.

Relativism now displaced shared ethical ground. Truth became less something to discover than something to assert, tied more to perspective than to reality. Identity, once anchored in family or tradition, became fluid, performative, and detached from responsibility. The public square fractured into echo chambers; debate hardened into warfare; meaning itself came to feel less like inheritance than invention. To an outside observer, especially one trained in Cold War ideological warfare, this looked like infiltration. It resembled the very subversion Bezmenov had been taught to spread: a society losing faith in itself, unable to distinguish loyalty from betrayal or freedom from chaos.

But there was no architect or red star behind the collapse. What unfolded was the response of a confused and wounded civilisation trying to protect itself from further harm. Determined never again to repeat the errors of its past—totalitarianism, colonialism, fascism, war—it dismantled the very tools that had once held it together: shared values, common purpose, even belief in its own legitimacy. It chose paralysis over risk and ambiguity over false certainty.

And because postmodernism offered no vision of what should follow, its critiques gradually became the mainstream. Academia, journalism, popular culture—even law and government—began to speak its idiom. Power was everywhere. Truth was suspect. Identity was everything. What emerged was not ideology but cultural vertigo, a disorientation that stretched from the classroom to the cabinet room. People knew what they no longer believed, but not what to believe instead. They could dismantle anything but struggled to build something worth holding onto.

That is the West’s condition today. Not conquered. Not oppressed. Simply adrift— intellectually, spiritually, morally. And that is why Bezmenov’s warning still resonates. In a world without maps, even a flawed one can feel prophetic.

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Quillette podcast host Jonathan Kay speaks with The Identity Trap author Yascha Mounk about the role of Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, Edward Said, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in shaping today’s illiberal, identity-fixated political mantras—and how we can help lead progressives back to their liberal roots.

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From Misreading to Understanding

Yuri Bezmenov believed the West was under attack. In one sense, he was right: something had corroded its foundations, eroding trust in tradition, faith in truth, and confidence in itself. But he misread the cause. The enemy was exhaustion. The West’s unravelling was not a coup but a reckoning. Two world wars, the collapse of empire, and the betrayal of Enlightenment ideals by their own machinery of violence left a wound deeper than ideology could reach. Postmodernism arose from that wound. It was not an imported doctrine but a cultural immune response. Its aim was not destruction but protection—against blind certainty and the utopian visions that had already led to catastrophe. Yet in shielding the West from its past, it also stripped away the beliefs that made common life possible.

The thinkers we now associate with postmodernism were not saboteurs but orphans of a civilisation that no longer trusted its inheritance. Their work, radical as it was, grew out of hurt rather than hatred. It was an attempt to live with the trauma of belief betrayed. And like grief left unresolved, it seeped into every domain—education, politics, culture. This is why we should resist fighting shadows. The crisis of the West will not be solved by chasing infiltrators or reviving Cold War paranoia. It can only be met by recognising what truly collapsed, and why rebuilding has proved so difficult.

The decline of the West was not caused by sabotage. It was conviction slowly unwound in the face of horror. We not only forgot how to fight, but why: why to preserve, why to hope, why to carry forward what our ancestors built. Rebuilding will not begin with ideology. It will begin with meaning, by recovering the ability to believe in something beyond critique. To restore coherence, we must first confront the silence left by collapse. The loss of faith was not imposed on us; it was our own. And the real danger lies not in what others did to the West, but in what the West forgot to defend.