Thursday, March 5, 2015

USEFUL IDIOT


            We, the comrades of Unit 1012, do research on different propaganda techniques and political terminology. We will talk about Useful idiot from different internet sources:


Soviet leader Joseph Stalin lying in state in the hall of Trade Union House, Moscow. Hulton/Getty

Useful idiot
Term invented in Soviet Russia to describe people who blindly supported the likes of Lenin and Stalin while they committed atrocity after atrocity.

Today, it refers to brainwashed liberals and leftists the world over (usually college students that aren't necessarily idiots, but just misinformed, naive, and ignorant of facts due to being indoctrinated with liberal/socialist propaganda through their public education) who believe that George W. Bush has committed more crimes against humanity than leftist darlings like Saddam Hussain, Yasser Arafat, and Osama Bin Laden, and still defend Communism, the cause of over 100 million deaths to this day.

See also, idiotarian
Hundreds of useful idiots gathered at their college campus to burn American flags, pass out Communist pamphlets that apologize for Stalin and Mao, and to pledge support to their hero, Saddam Hussain.

Useful idiots need to be shown the facts, mainly that the United States and Israel are the greatest defenders of freedom and justice in the world. Until then, rational people can have fun laughing at their ignorance.
by Dassh December 10, 2003


INTERNET SOURCE:

A useful idiot is someone who supports one side of an ideological debate, but who is manipulated and held in contempt by the leaders of their faction or is unaware of the ultimate agenda driving the ideology to which they subscribe. The term originated in early 1950s America in reference to members of the Socialist Party, allegedly promoted by the malevolent KGB to weaken America as a nation. The closely related term fellow traveller refers to one who sympathizes with and is willing to support the publicly stated goals of the Party, while not being a dues-paying, card-carrying member.

Misuse

As a subjective label, the term is often abused. There are reasonable differences on matters of rhetoric and tactics in any ideological movement, but these differences can be unjustly smeared as idiocy with this label. Nor are all poor representatives of a position necessarily useful idiots: a useful idiot is specifically a poor representative who is raised as a figurehead by a third party with malign intentions. VenomFangX might be a spectacular failure at Christian apologetics, but he's not a useful idiot because his popularity derives from other Christians, not atheists.

Alleged examples

In political jargon, useful idiot is a term for people perceived as propagandists for a cause whose goals they are not fully aware of, and who are used cynically by the leaders of the cause. Despite often being attributed to Vladimir Lenin, in 1987, Grant Harris, senior reference librarian at the Library of Congress, declared that "We have not been able to identify this phrase among [Lenin's] published works."

In the Russian language, the equivalent term "useful fools" (полезные дураки, tr. polezniye duraki) was in use at least in 1941.

The term has been used in a similar sense as fellow travellers and other Communism or Soviet Union sympathizers in Western countries during the Cold War. The implication was that, although the people in question naïvely thought of themselves as standing for a benign socialist ideological cause, and as valued allies of the Soviet Union, they were actually held in contempt and were being cynically used by the Communist Party of Soviet Union for subversive activities in their native Western countries. The use of the term in political discourse has since been extended to other propagandists, especially those who are seen to unwittingly support a malignant cause which they naïvely believe to be a force for good.

A New York Times article from 1948, on contemporary Italian politics, documented usage of the term in an article from the social-democratic Italian paper L'Umanita. The French equivalent, "idiots utiles", was used in a newspaper article title in 1946.

A similar term, useful innocents, appears in Austrian-American economist Ludwig von Mises's "Planned Chaos" (1947). Von Mises claims the term was used by communists for liberals that von Mises describes as "confused and misguided sympathizers". The term useful innocents also appears in a Readers Digest article (1946) titled "Yugoslavia's Tragic Lesson to the World", an excerpt from a, at the time, forthcoming book (no title printed) authored by Bogdan Raditsa (Bogdan Radica), a "high ranking official of the Yugoslav Government". Raditsa says: "In the Serbo-Croat language the communists have a phrase for true democrats who consent to collaborate with them for 'democracy.' It is Korisne Budale, or Useful Innocents."

A 2010 BBC radio documentary titled Useful Idiots listed among "useful idiots" of Joseph Stalin several prominent British writers including H. G. Wells and Doris Lessing, the Irish writer George Bernard Shaw, the American journalist Walter Duranty, and the singer Paul Robeson.


No comments:

Post a Comment