USEFUL IDIOT

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

[PHOTO SOURCE: http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/from-the-archive-blog/2011/may/28/guardian190-stalin-death-1953]

INTERNET SOURCE: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Useful+idiot

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

• S.E. Cupp - The atheist who hates atheists. She is frequently considered a useful idiot of the Religious Right, as an atheist who talks in detail about how atheists are sexist or evil or silly or unreasonable.
• David Frum - An American conservative blogger, he is thought by many on the left to be "the reasonable one" and many on the right to be a useful idiot of liberals.
• Kent Hovind - A creationist and evangelist with a diploma mill doctorate and a 10-year jail sentence, his tactics were met with scorn by more respectable creationist agencies like Answers in Genesis, who considered him well-meaning but a useful idiot for the villainous Darwinists.
• The Tea Party - Many of the people who participate in "teabagging" protests have low incomes and might benefit from many policies supported by Democrats like Obamacare, and would mostly be hurt by Republican policies such as Paul Ryan's "Path to Prosperity," even though quite a few of them are opposed to cutting government programs such as Medicare and Social Security. (GOP strategists are aware of it.)
• Edward Snowden - After striking a blow against the abuse of civil liberties by the Bush and Obama administrations, Snowden allowed himself to get manipulated into a transparent public relations stunt by his ostensible protector, Vladimir Putin.
• Henry A. Wallace - The former Vice President under Franklin Roosevelt, who ran on a third party platform in 1948 that was pro-Soviet. While it is widely agreed Wallace himself wasn't a communist, it's also largely accepted that the party itself (the Progressive Party of 1948) had been infiltrated by genuine fellow-travelers and communists. Partly as a result of this the Socialist Party ran their own candidate rather than endorse Wallace.

INTERNET SOURCE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot

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.