While the timid West squeaks at Russia over the Ukraine crisis, how ironic that hardman Vladimir Putin now claims that his country is the new moral compass of the world, as political correctness and decadence rules the West with an iron fist.

Consider what the late, former Soviet Union KGB subversive agent Yuri Bezmenov (aka Tomas Schuman) said during the Iron Curtain era some 30 years ago in a 1984 interview.

Bezmenov escaped to the West because he was sick of what he saw under Communism (had he been alive today, he would probably flee back to ‘conservative’ Russia!).

He said in order to achieve the Communist goal, a country has to be first demoralised. Why? Because a demoralised people cannot tell right from wrong and are more easily manipulated by an elite regime hell-bent on power and control.

Second, he said, a country must be destabilised. Third, there follows a crisis. And fourth, there comes ‘normalcy’, when elite-controlled citizens act like puppets and conform.

Here’s how the aforementioned tactics work according to Bezmenov: The State seeks the emptying of churches; the control and dumbing down of the media with an anti-Christian bias; the undermining of schools and teachers’ authority; continual change to create confusion and the teaching of sex to very young children, thus destroying their innocence; the promotion and normalisation of pornography, abortion and sexual promiscuity; the promotion of excessive drinking; an unreliable legal system with bias against victims of crime; dependency on the State or State benefits; the encouragement the breakdown of the traditional family; attacking the authority of the father, denying the specific roles of father and mother; and the wresting away from families their rights as primary educators of their children. The State will abolish differences in the education of boys and girls; and declare women to be an ‘oppressed class’ and men as ‘oppressors’; infiltrate the Church, corrupt it and preach a false, Marxist Gospel.

The question is, have versions of these goals been acted out in the West over the past 50 years? Our schools have certainly been dumbed down and teachers are losing their authority (Minister Ruairi Quinn wants Junior Leaving Cert history to be optional and he wants to relegate religion as a subject, and Economist Morgan Kelly has said the “dumbing down” of the Irish education system will “screw up” the Irish economy in the longer term, adding that the quality of the education at UCD, where he is professor of economics, had decreased markedly in recent years).

The legal system is soft on crime and indifferent to its victims. Pornography on the internet is widespread. (The HSE-run youth website SpunOut gives advice on how to have an enjoyable ‘threesome’).

Opposing abortion or non-traditional sexual morality is seen as bigotry and narrow-mindedness.

Our drinking and drug ‘culture’ are legendary. Ireland is one of the biggest alcohol consumers in Europe, and according to the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, Ireland remains among the biggest users of cocaine in the EU.

There is a growing denial that the role of the mother and father are complementary and different (even, oddly, as there is growing demand for gender quotas in politics and the corporate world).

There is a left-leaning, anti-conservative consensus in the mainstream media; and even within the Catholic Church there are strong relativising tendencies.

It now seems the Communism of old Russia has transformed into a cultural Marxism in the West, influenced by the ideas of a group of Marxist ‘intellectuals’ from the German Frankfurt School in the 1920s. The Communist Willi Munzenberg summed up the Frankfurt School’s long-term operation: “We will make the West so corrupt that it stinks.”. Doesn’t this look like a perfect recipe for a demoralised people?

Could George Orwell’s words come true when he said over 60 years ago that the future will be like the State’s big boot stamping down on us? Or will the State rule with a nanny, happy-smiley-type authoritarianism in the guise of nice, ‘progressive’ liberalism, but intolerant of any opposing ideas?

According to Michael Walsh, a former associate editor of Time magazine, in his book ‘The People V the Democrat Party’: “What’s left of the mainstream media is a pretty hard-core group of leftists whose life’s work and ambition is to promote their agenda. And they’re doing a good job of it. It’s just that they’re losing their influence, and I think they’ll continue to lose it as the public realises they’re not playing straight with them anymore.”