I’m a bit surprised that the modern BBC would do a piece on the useful idiots who did the Communists’ work for them:
The phrase ‘useful idiots’, supposedly Lenin’s, refers to Westerners duped into saying good things about bad regimes.
In political jargon it was used to describe Soviet sympathisers in Western countries and the attitude of the Soviet government towards them.
Useful idiots, in a broader sense, refers to Western journalists, travellers and intellectuals who gave their blessing – often with evangelistic fervour – to tyrannies and tyrants, thereby convincing politicians and public that utopias rather than Belsens thrived.
For instance, Walter Duranty, who served as the Moscow bureau chief of the New York Times from 1922 through 1936, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for a set of stories written in 1931 on the Soviet Union — stories denying the famine. It turns out he had been involved in sado-masochistic activities with Aleister Crowley’s “magickal” crowd, and he was probably being blackmailed by the Communists.
Useful idiots have also served Chairman Mao’s China, General Pinochet’s Chile, Apartheid-controlled South Africa, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and President Ahmadinejad’s Iran.
Why are smart people so consistently fooled by evil regimes?, Michael Moynihan of Reason asks. Borepatch answers, Intellectuals see in the mirror the very image of a Philosopher King:
Their entire intellectual training has led them to believe that it is the Intellectual Class that is fit to rule, by virtue of their very Smart thinking. After all, did not Plato himself say that only the philosophers were virtuous, and therefore fit to rule? And have not our Intellectual Elite been told their entire school lives that they are the “Best And Brightest?”
And so all a tyrant needs to do is to flatter this sense of entitlement, and the Intellectual will convince himself that this is indeed the New Jerusalem. No brainwashing is required; a light rinse will do.
But at every stage, the tyrant must appeal to the Intellectual’s sense of superiority. This is why rightist tyrants (say, Peronists) struggle with the Intellectual class. By allowing a more or less unfettered market to run as it will, he offends the vanity of the Intellectual. The Market is a very bad thing indeed, says the Intellectual, because it does not need
mea Very Smart Person to run it. The tyrant offers the illusion of access to the Control Room of society — indeed the very goal that the Intellectual has trained for all his life. How could he not be bewitched?Of course, the tyrant has no intention of actually letting the intellectual control anything; that’s why Lenin coined the term “useful idiots”. So the answer to Reason’s question is quite simple: it’s a cheap appeal to vanity. The more interesting question is why do Intellectuals fall for this so often?
I think that it’s because Intellectuals have been much more successful in the West, where they tend not to end up in Gulags, Re-education camps, or mass graves. In Europe in particular, and increasingly in the USA, they have captured the media and government, and actually have increasingly found themselves in the Control Room of society. It hasn’t been working out so well.