Sunday, October 08, 2006
USEFUL IDIOTS
I'm reading Niall Ferguson's The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West. The book is a history of mass violence in the last century. Last night I read the chapter on the vicious violence practiced by the Bolshevik regime from the moment of the October, 1917 revolution up through World War II. At least ten million people were killed intentionally by the Communists during this time, through famine, the inhuman conditions of the Gulag and outright political murder.
What really struck me was the discussion of what Lenin called the "useful idiots," Westerners who expended oceans of ink in the 1920s and 1930s to defend the comminist regime in their own countries. Two stand out. One is the "saintly" George Bernard Shaw, who went to his grave praising Stalin as a saviour of the Russian people, despite the mounting evidence of his sadistic crimes. The other is the New York Times' Walter Duranty, who won a Pullitzer Prize for his series of articles as the Times' Moscow bureau chief covering the glorious progress being made by the communist regime.
The same kind of willful, ideologically-driven blindness to political sadism exists today. People like Karen Armstrong and Juan Cole, who propagate the myth of Islam as "the religion of peace" serve the same function that people like Shaw and Duranty did -- as anaesthetics against the shock of truth about horror and threat.
It's too easy to think of what people like George Bernard Shaw and Walter Duranty did as a kind of small embarassment of history, a footnote that you can safely miss if you blink or look away quickly. They played an essential part in granting the Bolshevik terror a free pass in the west for a very long time, and in making "anti-communism" into a kind of "right-wing pathology." That mentality still exists today, in which anti-communism is seen as some kind of dangerous, or at best commical obsession of the General Jack Rippers and Buck Turgedson's of the world. Likewise, the Karen Armstrongs and Juan Coles -- today's useful idiots -- turn the process of developing a realistic view of Islam into "islamophobia," the 21st century equivalent of McCarthyism.
Well, all I have to say to that is, "good night, and good luck."
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 7:58 AM
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