Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War’s debut trailer—which has already attracted controversy—gives a lot of airtime to Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov and his views. Views which have, in recent years, become a dangerous rallying cry for far-right conspiracy theories and the people who peddle them.
The teaser, which was released last week to hype up the more recent reveal, intersperses stock footage of major world events with a 1984 interview of Bezmenov, who claimed to have been an informant for the KGB before defecting to the United States. During the interview, he describes the Soviet Union’s alleged use of “active measures” that, in theory, are meant to destabilize opponents without direct military conflict by way of changing a society’s power structure and economy. In short, Bezmenov’s suggestion in the full interview is that extending equality to the United States’ non-white, non-male population made it ripe for Soviet invasion.
