A short history of useful idiots
Mussolini: you might think he was just a blustering fool in a fez, but once upon a time many people took him very seriously. I remember my shock when, aged 15 or so, I learned from my history teacher that Churchill had spoken approvingly of the black shirts in the 1920s. This week however I was reading a biography of the first Fascist and learned that Winston was not alone. Franklin Roosevelt praised the Italian dictator as a gentleman; Chiang Kai-shek asked for a signed photograph; and even Gandhi (yes lovely, non-violent, vegetable-munching Gandhi) described him as the “Savior of Italy.” Hmm. That’ll be the guy who let his soldiers use live Ethiopians for target practice and ended his political career shipping Jews to Hitler for extermination? All right then!
“Hm? Wha? Mussolini? Oh, he’s awesome!”
The phenomenon of intelligent people saying stupid things about tyrants is a constant of 20th century history. The USSR under Stalin is a Klondike of intellectual embarrassment and/or mendacity, ranging from the reporting of Walter Duranty, the Pulitzer Prize Winner who defended Stalin’s show trials and denied the Ukrainian famine, to the bumptious witterings of George Bernard Shaw who in 1932 declared (as millions were starving) that reports of a famine in the USSR were “nonsense.” How did he know? “I have never eaten as well as during my trip to the Soviet Union.”
It was Lenin who first identified the genus of Western intellectual known as “the useful idiot,” but it was Stalin who showed how incredibly easy it was to seduce them: a free holiday, dinner, a little flattery and wa-hey- the knickers are off! But then Stalin died, the USSR became much less violent and the useful idiots lost interest.
Searching for a new utopia, many pinned their hopes on revolutionary Cuba, where a bearded mega-bore named Fidel Castro was in the process of transforming a corrupt satellite of America into a corrupt satellite of the USSR, even poorer and less free than before. Like Papa Joe, Fidel knew how to flatter and soon he had the likes of Picasso, Norman Mailer and Susan Sontag (“the Cuban revolution is astonishingly free of repression”) eating out of his palm. My favorite Castro quote comes from Abbie Hoffman, a justly forgotten 60s radical bed-wetter who compared Castro to… well, read for yourself:
“Fidel sits on the side of a tank rumbling into Havana on New Year’s Day… girls throw flowers at the tank and rush to tug playfully at this black beard. He laughs joyously and pinches a few rumps. .. He is like a mighty penis coming to life, and when he is tall and straight, the crowd immediately is transformed.”
Ahem. Then there was Castro’s pal, Wee Ernie Guevara, a totalitarian loon who praised Mao, invaded the Congo and died in Bolivia after attempting to inspire revolution among people he knew nothing about. Sartre declared him “the most complete human being of our age.”
Speaking of Mao, he had his celebrity admirers, too. In 1973, Shirley MacLaine, who was very good in The Apartment with Jack Lemmon, went on a tour of some Potemkin villages in China and wrote a glowing report afterwards. She was especially approving of the absence of advertising billboards, and the general atmosphere of calm which left her feeling “serene.” She never thought that perhaps China was quiet because 60 million people had just been murdered and everyone was very, very scared. Mao was a big hit among 60s students and one of his erstwhile fanboys, Jose Manuel Barroso, is today president of the European Commission.
But Mao and Castro weren’t the only totalitarian despots considered groovy in the 60s and 70s. Eldridge Cleaver, a prominent Black Panther leader, declared that while America was a hell-hole of oppression, North Korea under Kim Il-sung was the best place in the world. In the run up to the Iranian revolution, Michel Foucault, a Frenchman, paid several visits to Iran and later praised the “political spirituality” of the Ayatollah Khomeini who, given the chance, would have had him executed for his homosexuality.
And so on, and so on. These days, it’s not quite as bad though I hear Hitler has his fans in the Middle East and Hollywood morons, inspired by 60s nostalgia, still show up in Cuba from time to time. But it’s hard to find the pure strain of tyrant admiration, though for a while I was fascinated by a blog entitled Reflections on the Ruhnama, written by “Steve from Wisconsin” who apparently took at face value all the gibberish the deceased Turkmen tyrant Saparmurat Niyazov had scrawled with a colored crayon in his notorious book.
Maybe it has something to do with the loss of religious faith. You know, these intellectuals no longer believe in paradise, so they project their yearning for redemption onto some exotic place, then climb through the wardrobe of their imaginations and emerge in magical lands governed by wise talking lions. Yes, I like that, though surely vanity also comes into it. It pleases certain intellectuals to adopt counter-intuitive positions, believing it gives them “depth” and “sophistication.” And thus clever people are often the easiest to fool.
Originally published at RIA Novosti, the home of awesome
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Well, being smart doesn’t mean being right, especially when “right” can turn into “wrong” after a decade or two, or a change of government, etc. You’re judging from your own era, that’s like saying all ancient civilizations were retarded for believing in so many gods.
I’d like to see you make a list of all the intelligent people who WERE right or who weren’t fooled, that’ll make for a longer-than-ten-paragraphs article.
Thanks for your comment.
Am I judging from my own era? I don’t think so. There was plenty of evidence for the crimes of Stalin, Mao, Mussolini and even Castro during the periods when they were active. Some people chose to ignore it, for the reasons I suggest above, and no doubt some others.
It would be very easy to make a list of intelligent people who weren’t fooled by the tyrants of the 20th century. For instance, even as Walter Duranty of the NYT was whitewashing Stalin, Malcolm Muggeridge of the Guardian was criticizing him for his mendacious reporting.
But that wasn’t the point of the article, nor was it my point to bash intelligent people per se. I was criticizing useful idiots, a particular sub-category, that stills exist today (see Thomas Friedman’s initial reporting on Egypt, for instance).
So much to learn from history yet even more that is lost in secrecy.
Today you call them “crimes”, back then they were ways of government, a leader who couldn’t control its people was considered weak and pusillanimous. You board this topic with a strong subjective manner, but do not respect these people’s right to be subjective. Like I said being intelligent does not mean being correct, they are still human beings with flaws and preferences.
Reinforcing my argument stating your judgment is era based, “counter-intuitive” and “intuitive” is only defined after the outcome (and Schrödinger comes out again).
Your article is still interesting though.
If it reads as subjective that’s because it began life in another venue as a column, a very personal type of writing. The tone is subjective, but the facts are not.
EG I disagree with you on your reading of history. Yes, Lenin attacked “bourgeois morality” and advanced a new form of Bolshevik morality, which was actually very old- “the ends justify the means”, and most revolutionaries have done likewise. But they were all well aware of what that morality was. More to the point, they acknowledged the force of that morality by continually lying about what they were doing.
If Gulags and death camps were normal, or acceptable, Stalin and Hitler would not have hidden their crimes and lied about them, which they did, repeatedly. They were well aware of the lines they were crossing, and so, naturally would their peers have been had they been paying attention.
Actually, virtuous though it may be, that argument is unnecessary. Even if Stalin saw crushing dissent and running slave labor camps as necessary, George Bernard Shaw was a moralizing 19th century style socialist who saw them as horrors, as most people did.
Your argument would be watertight if I was applying these types of criticisms to the behavior of Genghis Khan, but in the 20th century, enlightened Western opinion no longer approved of murderous strong men, and those who praised Stalin/Castro attacked their own governments for much lesser crimes.
And that’s it.