‘Useful idiots’ equally present on the left and right – Richard Mills

2023.07.07

In 2013, then-Liberal Party of Canada leader Justin Trudeau was asked which nation he admired most. His response, “There’s a level of admiration I actually have for China. Their basic dictatorship is actually allowing them to turn their economy around on a dime,” caused an uproar among Asian Canadians who had been imprisoned or tortured by the Chinese government for speaking out for democracy. Others marveled at Trudeau’s naivety.

Despite showing himself to be a “useful idiot” for Beijing, two years later, Trudeau was elected Prime Minister.

The term goes back over 100 years to Vladimir Lenin, who not only wanted communism to take hold in Russia, but around the world. Lenin thus created the Communist International, or Comintern, which comprised all the communist parties of Europe and Asia.

The Bolsheviks’ success in Russia expanded the ranks of the Comintern, as did the pots of money Moscow shoveled out to its members, including the Communist Party U.S.A., writes Investor’s Business Daily.

(In the 1940s and ’50, there were Communists on the fringes of the Democratic Party, especially in the Henry Wallace wing.)

“Moscow was handing out money to all kinds of people, millions of gold rubles, dollars, pounds, marks, lire, crowns and so on, all raised by selling off the tsarist gold reserves, the valuables looted from the churches and confiscated from the bourgeoisie,” Russian historian Dmitri Volkogonov wrote in his ‘Lenin: Life and Legacy’ (1994).

The article notes the cash didn’t come without strings, with 21 conditions for membership to be met by unquestioning obedience by socialists wanting to be associated with the organization.

And so, Investor’s Business Daily writes, in founding the Comintern, Lenin realized he had an echo chamber in the West to rationalize any of the Kremlin’s actions. Hence, the moniker “useful idiots.”

The term was adopted in the mid-20^th century to describe social democrats who entered into popular fronts and electoral pacts with Stalinist communist parties.

Fast forward to the present day, we find useful idiots in all walks of political life, as well as in schools, the media, unions, and especially, at universities, a traditional bastion of the left.

Mark Herring from Carolina Journal says useful idiot is now short speak for anyone who attributes to a given cause its positive effects only, while ignoring its derogatory ones.

An obvious example is the prevalence of so-called progressive thinking in schools, such as teaching sex education to children and an almost messianic adherence to inclusion, whether the included students are gay, non-white, or mobility-/ intellectually-challenged.

Many conservative Americans are lashing back at so-called “woke” agendas, believing the school to be an inappropriate forum for discussing gender issues. Herring writes:

What this should alert every parent to is the devolution of education has declined so far that every avenue is open to indoctrination. Public education has become a swamp of left-wing wokeism to the extent that it may well be impossible to find a public school that isn’t seeking to indoctrinate your children. 

This madness is everywhere one turns: church, state, school, retail, television, movies, and theatre. That we are in a battle for the soul of this country should be evident by now, but the struggle is much more difficult than trying to correct this or that feature. Because useful idiots are everywhere, and they move forward with wokeism in unthinking but highly effective ways. They ignore the damage that wokeism is wreaking and will even argue with you that it cannot be all that bad.

This month alone, we incessantly celebrate new agendas for human sexuality, but only after we dispensed with celebrations of the birthdays of some of our founding fathers. Argue against limits to this trend, and you’re racist, homophobic, and bigoted—and that’s just the beginning. What may have begun as a fad has turned into fanaticism.

Idiots on the left

Authoritarian governments since the 1917 Russian Revolution have depended upon useful idiots in the West to disguise their true motives of dominating their neighbors and fellow citizens.

Useful idiots in the media were exemplified by the New York Times’ Walter Duranty, who according to Princeton Progressives, explained away Stalin’s mass murders by gun and starvation as “simply breaking eggs in order to make an omelet.”

Accomplished writers such as H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw and Beatrice Webb, were in the 1920s and ‘30s all leading lights in Britain’s socialist movement. Despite the grim realities of Stalinism, a form of oppressive dictatorship that collectivized farms leading to mass starvation, and either shot or sent enemies of the state to gulags, where they were worked to death, across the West and especially in the UK, the Soviet Union was praised as a workers’ paradise.

Sensing a propaganda opportunity, the Russian leadership invited the above group of left-leaning intellectuals to tour Soviet cities and rural areas. In towns they were shown new public works, gleaming hospitals and humming factories turning out manufactured goods. In the countryside, the group saw bountiful harvests and happy peasants toiling in the fields.

Of course, it was all a sham. According to one source,

Elaborate Potemkin villages had been filled with carefully selected, ideologically sound residents. Their houses had been specially painted and grain and produce were shipped in from the surrounding countryside to give the impression of plenty. Starvation was the true product of collectivisation, misery the norm.

North Korea uses the same tactic of shielding Western visitors from the dictatorship’s uglier elements. Visitors are assigned “minders” who watch their every move. Basketball star Dennis Rodman became North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un’s useful idiot, in 2014 infamously leading a crowd gathered to watch a game between North Korean players and some retired NBA players in singing “Happy Birthday” to Kim who was in attendance. (The Washington Post, June 12, 2018)

Russian President Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, has nurtured a coterie of useful idiots that have helped him to consolidate power and expand the Russian empire following the humiliating loss of territories that came with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989.

No country better exemplifies this useful idiocy than Germany.

As Politico notes, while Berlin recently halted the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project, sent arms to Ukraine, embraced sanctions against Russia, and even announced it would start putting substantial funds into its own army, this was after 16 years of being on the wrong side of the divide over how to handle Russia:

Germany’s stubborn insistence on engaging with the Russian leader in the face of his sustained aggression (a catalog of misdeeds ranging from the invasion of Georgia to assassinations of enemies abroad and war crimes in Syria) was nothing short of a catastrophic blunder, one that will earn [former Chancellor Angela] Merkel a place in the pantheon of political naiveté alongside Neville Chamberlain.

Slowly but surely, it’s begun to dawn on Germans that Merkel’s soft-shoe approach to Russia — which reached its zenith with the 2015 decision to green light the Nord Stream 2 pipeline despite Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its role in the separatist war in eastern Ukraine — didn’t just open the door for Putin to go further, it effectively encouraged him to do so.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is not just a repudiation of Merkel’s chancellorship, however, but of a whole generation of German politicians from across the spectrum blinded by nostalgia for Ostpolitik and Wandel durch Handel, the 1970s-era détente policies championed by Chancellor Willy Brandt that according to German legend led to the end of the Cold War…

While Merkel deserves most of the blame for falling into the Russian leader’s trap, the truth is that Germany’s entire political class is guilty… From Germany’s veto of NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia in 2008 to its pursuit of gas deals with Moscow to its resistance to send arms to Kyiv — the country’s leaders have served as Putin’s useful idiots.

Scotland too, bears some of the blame in caving in to Putin. The Herald Scotsman describes Putin’s useful idiots in that UK region as “a mix of old leftists stuck in the 1970s, half in love with the Red Flag of the USSR, who see CIA plots everywhere; and authoritarians who admire Putin’s Christian fascism. This is the type who cheered on Franco’s Falangists during the Spanish Civil War.”

The publication notes the West must reflect on its failings when it comes to Putin, such as invading Iraq in 2003. The invasion showed the Russian leader what was permissible in terms of foreign wars, making him think, “If they can do it, why can’t I?”

When Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad crossed Obama’s “red line”, by using chemical weapons against his own citizens, the US did nothing. Putin saw in the West’s weakness an opportunity to ally with Assad and unleashed the Russian military against the Syrian people. 

Idiots on the right

Donald Trump made it very clear from the beginning of his presidency that he was more interested in going after China than Russia, which had helped him get elected in 2016.

A lengthy GOP-led Senate report found that Russia conducted a sophisticated campaign to influence the US election to help Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton and that folks on Team Trump were more than happy to accept help from the Russians. (NPR, Aug. 18, 2020)

According to Princeton Progressives, there are a number of useful idiots on the right. They include “Idiot-in-Chief” Donald Trump, FOX TV, right-wing radio, and rantings by Steve Bannon.

While at some point in time these right wingers constituted a fringe element, that is no longer they case; they currently occupy the core of today’s Republican Party in Congress and the Senate.

Princess Progressives notes some of the worst idiots in the service of destroying democracy and the rule of law can be found in the NRA (National Rifle Association):

The blood of innocents shed at so many churches and schools nowadays, is on their heads as much as on the amateur and professional hate mongers who demagogue the demented into spewing real bullets from automatic weapons to match rhetorical bullets spewing from their speeches, Emails and Facebook platforms.

But what of Trump’s expressed admiration for Putin, along with his former secretary of state, Mike Pompeo? In the book ‘American Horror Show’, author Douglas Kellner writes about a 2017 bombshell of a report that included allegations that Russian operatives had compromising personal and financial information about Donald Trump.

The dossier was composed by Christopher Steele, a former spy who had served undercover in Moscow and who later was the top expert on Russia at the London headquarters of MI6.

According to the book,

The dossier began with descriptions of Trump’s allegedly salacious behavior during a trip to Russia where it was claimed that Russian security agents watched Trump engaging in “perverted sexual acts” that were “arranged/monitored by the FSB,” the Kremlin’s
leading spy agency. The FSB, it said, “employed a number of prostitutes to perform a golden shower (urination) show in front of him.” Not only that, according to the report’s anonymous Russian sources, Trump deliberately chose for his escapade “the Ritz Carlton hotel, where he knew President and Mrs. Obama (whom he hated) had stayed on one of their official trips to Russia and defiling the bed where they had slept.” More incriminating, the dossier was full of material suggesting that there had been ongoing contacts between members of Trump’s inner circle and representatives of Moscow during the election and that Moscow was exerting itself on behalf of Trump’s presidential campaign.

Trump, of course, quickly denied the report, tweeting “FAKE NEWS – A TOTAL POLITICAL WITCH HUNT!” In a January, 2017 press conference, DJT compared the US intelligence service to Nazi Germany, and he insisted that the story about Russian prostitutes could not possibly have been true as he is a well-known “germaphobe”.

While Trump is now out of power, on the sidelines he tacitly supports Russia viz a viz its war in Ukraine.

In 2022, The Atlantic reported Trump saying that “Putin is playing Biden like a drum,” and also, “I know Vladimir Putin very well, and he would have never done during the Trump Administration what he is doing now, no way!” Yet at an event at Mar-A-Lago last night, Trump, like Pompeo, praised Putin’s strategic genius: “I mean, he’s taking over a country for $2 worth of sanctions. I’d say that’s pretty smart.”

Seattle Times cartoonist David Horsey adds some text to his political imagery in a Feb. 25, 2022 column in which he states:

It is not hard to imagine that the words “useful idiot” entered Putin’s mind on those occasions when he met with ex-President Donald Trump. Trump fawned over Putin like a fanboy when he was in the White House and, now that he sits sulking amid the chintzy opulence of Mar-a-Lago, he continues to express wonder at Putin’s mastery and guile.

Rather than recoiling from the murderous treachery of Putin’s brutal invasion of sovereign Ukraine, Trump seems absolutely giddy about the Russian autocrat’s cleverness, calling Putin a “genius” and describing the invasion as “a wonderful move.”

Mike Pompeo criticized Biden for failing to deter the attack on Ukraine but paradoxically serves as a mouthpiece for the Kremlin when he says things like, “I have enormous respect for [Putin].” In an interview with the Kansas City Star, via The Atlantic, Pompeo called the Russian president “very savvy” and “very shrewd,” adding, “I consider him an elegantly sophisticated counterpart and one who is not reckless but has always done the math.” In January, he said, “He is a very talented statesman. He has lots of gifts … He knows how to use power. We should respect that.”

The Atlantic’s David Graham and Seattle Times’ David Horsey both called out former Fox News host and conservative pundit Tucker Carlson for his pro-Putin, anti-China views.

“Why do Democrats want you to hate Putin?” Carlson tweeted in early 2022. “Has Putin shipped every middle-class job in your town to Russia? Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked your business? Is he teaching your kids to embrace racial discrimination? Is he making fentanyl? Does he eat dogs?”

Conclusion

Whether on the left or the right, there appear to be no shortage of useful idiots for Russia’s Putin or China’s President Xi to exploit, as they go about re-working international relations in their favor.

At the same time, the users are being used.

Putin has been co-opted by the right as an authoritarian figure to be respected, not loathed. It doesn’t hurt that Russia’s traditional views against gays, for example, dovetail with the religious right in the Republican Party.

Germany’s soft-shoe approach to Russia is an example of useful idiocy on the left, albeit for economic reasons not political or social ones. German politicians have been looking eastward since the Second World War ended (“ostpolitik”) and for Angela Merkel, courting Putin and his steady supply of Russian natural gas was good foreign policy. Until the leopard showed its spots and invaded Ukraine, prompting a U-turn in Germany’s approach towards Russia.

Germany’s Merkel and America’s Donald Trump, along with Mike Pompeo and Tucker Carlson, are just the latest in a long line of Russia’s useful idiots, dating back to a trio of British writers and Lenin’s Comintern.

Arguably, however, history is useful in understanding “we’ve been here before” and can guide us toward a more enlightened approach to our former Cold War enemies, one that doesn’t involve us becoming their useful idiots.

Richard (Rick) Mills
aheadoftheherd.com
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