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In political jargon, a useful idiot is a derogatory term for a person perceived as a propagandist for a cause the goals of which they are not fully aware, and who is used cynically by the leaders of the cause. The term was originally used to describe non-Communists regarded as susceptible to Communist propaganda and manipulation. The term has often been attributed to Vladimir Lenin, but this attribution is controversial.

Origin of the term

The phrase "useful idiot" has often been attributed to Vladimir Lenin, although it was not found in his written published works. In a 1987 article for The New York Times, American journalist William Safire noted that a senior reference librarian at the Library of Congress had been unable to find the phrase in Lenin's works, and concluded that instead of telling As Lenin said... one must try "As Lenin was reported to have said ... or In a phrase attributed to Lenin...".

The expression is frequently discussed in connection with two other related quotations attributed to Lenin, which are also about Western "idiots" being manipulated by the Soviet communists. The quotations are known as "the rope" ("The capitalists will sell us the rope with which to hang them") and the "deaf, dumb and blind". For example, William J. Bennett wrote that "'Useful idiot' was the term Lenin had used for credulous Western businessmen", giving as an example Armand Hammer "who helped build up the Soviet Communist state". Bennett recounted a famous story wherein Lenin was asked, "How will we hang the Capitalists, we don't have enough rope!" Lenin was reported to have "famously replied" with the rejoinder, "They will sell it to us — on credit." However, according to William Safire, these quotations, which were "making the rounds ... since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917" were not found in published written works by Lenin.

The wording from written works by Lenin about the "rope" was as follows

They will furnish credits which will serve us for the support of the Communist Party in their countries and, by supplying us materials and technical equipment which we lack, will restore our military industry necessary for our future attacks against our suppliers. To put it in other words, they will work on the preparation of their own suicide.

and the "dumb and blind" version of the quotation (from handwritten notes by Lenin) was the following:

To speak the truth is a petit-bourgeois habit. To lie, on the contrary, is often justified by the lie's aim. The whole world's capitalists and their governments, as they pant to win the Soviet market, will close their eyes to the above-mentioned reality and will thus transform themselves into men who are deaf, dumb and blind. They will give us credits . . . they will toil to prepare their own suicide.

According to book The Words of Others: From Quotations to Culture, even if the origin of these quotations might not be reliably established, they are not misquotations because these phrases belong to the public image of Lenin, define exactly his ideas, and use wording that would be actually used by Lenin and his comrades, such as the "ropes", "idiots" or "deaf, dumb and blind".

In her book, Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got it Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First, Mona Charen comments that "Lenin is widely credited with the prediction that liberals and other weak-minded souls in the West could be relied upon to be 'useful idiots' as far as the Soviet Union was concerned," and argues that although Lenin may never have used the phrase, it would have been consistent with his "cynical style."

The term is first documented to have appeared in print in a June 1948 New York Times article on contemporary Italian politics ("Communist shift is seen in Europe"), citing the centrist social-democratic Italian paper L'Umanità. L'Umanità wrote that left-wing social democrats, who had entered into a popular front with the Italian Communist Party during the 1948 elections, would be given the option of either merging with the Communists or leaving the alliance. The term was later used in a 1955 article in the American Federation of Labor News-Reporter to refer to Italians who supported Communist causes. Time first employed the phrase in January 1958, writing that some Italian Christian Democrats considered social activist Danilo Dolci to be a "useful idiot" for Communist causes, and it has recurred thereafter in the periodical's articles.

A similar term, useful innocents, appears in Austrian-American economist Ludwig von Mises' 1947 book, Planned Chaos. Von Mises wrote that the term was used by communists for liberals, whom von Mises describes as "confused and misguided sympathizers". The term useful innocents also appears in a 1946 Readers Digest article titled "Yugoslavia's Tragic Lesson to the World," written by Bogdan Raditsa, who had served the Yugoslav government-in-exile during WWII, supported Tito's partisans (though not a Communist himself) and briefly served in Tito's new Yugoslav government before leaving for New York. "In the Serbo-Croat language," says Raditsa, "the communists have a phrase for true democrats who consent to collaborate with them for 'democracy.' It is Korisne Budale, or Useful Innocents."

Use of the term

In 1959, U.S. Congressman Ed Derwinski of Illinois entered an editorial by the Chicago Daily Calumet into the Congressional record, referring to Americans who traveled to the Soviet Union to promote peace as "what Lenin calls useful idiots in the Communist game." In 1961, American journalist Frank Gibney wrote that Lenin had coined the phrase "useful idiot." Gibney wrote that the phrase was a good description of "Communist follower" from Jean-Paul Sartre to left-wing socialists in Japan to members of the Chilean Popular Front. In a speech in 1965, Spruille Braden, an American diplomat stationed in a number of Latin American countries during the 1930s and '40s and later a lobbyist for the United Fruit Company, said the term was used by Joseph Stalin to refer to what Braden called "countless innocent although well-intentioned sentimentalists or idealists" who aided the Soviet agenda.

In their book, Dezinformatsia: The Strategy of Soviet Disinformation, by Richard H. Shultz, professor of international politics at Tufts University, and Roy Godson, professor emeritus of government at Georgetown University, the authors detail the tactics of information warfare used by the KGB during the Soviet era as part of their active measures. The Soviets were able to bring agents of influence into their fold and do their bidding, through social influence as unwitting agents.

Writing in the New York Times in 1987, William Safire discussed the increasing use of the term "useful idiot" against "anybody insufficiently anti-Communist in the view of the phrase's user," including U.S. Congressmen who supported the Sandinistas against the Contras in Nicaragua, and Dutch socialists. After U.S. President Ronald Reagan concluded negotiations with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev over the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, conservative political leader Howard Phillips declared Reagan to be a "useful idiot for Soviet propaganda."

In 2007, professor of political science Peter W. Sperlich labeled George Bernard Shaw and Lion Feuchtwanger "useful idiots" for their comments on the Soviet famine of 1932-33 and the Moscow Trials, respectively. In 2012, Guardian correspondent Luke Harding wrote that Walter Duranty, a New York Times correspondent in Moscow during the 1930s, allowed himself to be "duped" by Soviet authorities, and is depicted in a play by contemporary reporter Malcolm Muggeridge as a "quintessential 'useful idiot.'"

The label "useful idiot" was applied both to supporters and opponents of the Iraq War. Conservative political commentator Monica Charen applied the label to liberal U.S. Congressmen who had toured Iraq before the war, arguing that they had been manipulated by the Iraqi government. Tony Judt wrote that liberal supporters of the Iraq War and the War on Terror had made themselves "useful idiots" of George W. Bush's foreign policy. Judt argued that liberals saw these wars through an altruistic lens that Bush's neo-conservative allies did not share, and provided an "ethical fig-leaf" for "brutish policies."

At the end of 2016, the former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and the Editorial Board of The New York Times applied the term to President-elect Donald Trump. Michael Morell, former acting CIA director, wrote: "In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation." Michael Hayden, former director of both the US National Security Agency and the CIA, described Trump as a "useful fool, some naif, manipulated by Moscow, secretly held in contempt, but whose blind support is happily accepted and exploited."

See also

• Agent of influence
• Anti-Communism
• Fellow traveller
• McCarthyism
• Political warfare

References

1. ^ "useful idiot". Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford University Press. 2017.
2. Holder, R. W. (2008), "useful fool", Oxford Dictionary of Euphemisms, Oxford University Press, p. 394, ISBN 978-0199235179, useful fool – a dupe of the Communists. Lenin's phrase for the shallow thinkers in the West whom the Communists manipulated. Also as useful idiot.
3. ^ Safire, William (12 April 1987). "On Language: Useful Idiots Of the West". The New York Times. Retrieved 19 July 2017.
4. ^ Boller, Paul F.; George, John H. (1989). They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes. Barnes & Nobles Books. ISBN 9781566191050.
5. ^ Bennett, William J., America: The Last Best Hope (Volume II): From a World at War to the Triumph of Freedom, Thomas Nelson, p. 618, ISBN 978-1595550576
6. They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, and Misleading Attributions
7. ^ Safire, William (12 April 1987). "On Language: Useful Idiots Of the West". The New York Times. Retrieved 19 July 2017.
8. ^ The Words of Others: From Quotations to Culture by Gary Saul Morson, Yale University Press, 2011, page 98.
9. Charen, Mona (2003), Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got it Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First, Regnery Publishing, p. 10, ISBN 978-0895261397
10. ^ Cortesi, Arnold (21 June 1948). "Communist Shift is seen in Europe; Tour of Two Italian Leaders Behind Iron Curtain Held to Doom Popular Fronts". The New York Times.
11. Stogel, Syd (1955). "'Useful Idiots' Keep Italy Reds Strong". American Federation of Labor News-Reporter.
12. "Italy: From the Slums". Time. 13 January 1958.
13. "WORLD: The City as a Battlefield: A Global Concern". Time. 2 November 1970.
14. Lamar, Jr., Jacob V. (14 December 1987). "An Offer They Can Refuse". Time.
15. Poniewozik, James (3 November 2009). "TV Marks Obama Anniversary with Documentaries, Aliens". Time.
16. Klein, Joe (26 November 2010). "Israel First, Yet Again". Time. Retrieved 12 March 2018.
17. "Wednesday Words: Useful Idiots, Don 'Draping' and More". Time. 14 March 2012. Retrieved 12 March 2018.
18. Ludwig von Mises, Planned Chaos, Foundation for Economic Education, 1947, p. 17 in electronic document.
19. "Yugoslavia Run by Russia, says Ex-Aide of Tito". Chicago Daily Tribune. 24 September 1946. p. 6.
20. Raditsa, Bogdan (1946). "Yugoslavia's Tragic Lesson to the World". Reader's Digest Service. Vol. 49.
21. 1959 Congressional Record, Vol. 105, Page A5653 (30 June)
22. Gibney, Frank (1961). The Khrushchev Pattern. Duell, Sloan and Pearce. p. 8.
23. Braden, Spruille (1971). Diplomats and Demagogues: the Memoirs of Spruille Braden. Arlington House. p. 496.
24. Charters, David (1985), "Richard H. Shultz and Roy Godson, Dezinformatsia: Active Measures in Soviet Strategy", Conflict Quarterly, 5 (4), The Journal of Conflict Studies: 79, OCLC 5127078304
25. Sloan, Stephen (January 1985), "Dezinformatsia: Active Measures in Soviet Strategy", Society, 22 (2): 84
26. Mickiewicz, Ellen (1984), "Review – Reviewed Work(s): Dezinfomatsia: Active Measures in Soviet Strategy. by Richard H. Shultz and Roy Godson", Political Science Quarterly, 99 (4), Academy of Political Science: 770–771, doi:10.2307/2150750, JSTOR 2150750 – via JSTOR
27. Smith, Hendrick (17 January 1988). "The Right Against Reagan". The New York Times Magazine. Retrieved 12 March 2018.
28. Sperlich, Peter W. (2007). The East German Social Courts: Law and Popular Justice in a Marxist-Leninist Society. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 17.
29. Harding, Luke (22 May 2012). Expelled: A Journalist's Descent into the Russian Mafia State. St. Martin's Press. p. 104. ISBN 9781137048387.
30. Charen, Monica (October 2004). "Useful Idiots: Then and Now". St. Croix Review. Retrieved 12 March 2018.
31. Judt, Tony (21 September 2006). "Bush's Useful Idiots". London Review of Books. Retrieved 12 March 2018.
32. Ryan, Maria (2011). "Bush's "Useful Idiots": 9/11, the Liberal Hawks and the Cooption of the "War on Terror"". Journal of American Studies. 45 (4): 667–693. doi:10.1017/S0021875811000909.
33. von Hoffman, Nicholas (23 October 2006). "Useful Idiots". The Nation. Retrieved 12 March 2018.
34. Albright: Trump fits the mold of Russia's 'useful idiot' by Madeleine Albright
35. The Editorial Board (15 December 2016), "Donald Trump's Denial About Russia", The New York Times, retrieved 12 March 2018, There could be no more 'useful idiot,' to use Lenin's term of art, than an American president who doesn't know he's being played by a wily foreign power.
36. Morell, Michael J. (12 August 2016). "Opinion - I Ran the C.I.A. Now I'm Endorsing Hillary Clinton". The New York Times. Retrieved 10 March 2018.
37. Hayden, Michael (3 November 2016). "Former CIA chief: Trump is Russia's useful fool". The Washington Post. Retrieved 12 March 2018.

External links

• Useful Idiots: The Documentary, BBC World Service, 2010

• Soviet phraseology
• Pejorative terms for people
• Jargon
• Political terminology