On Useful Idiots

 

I. 

 

Perhaps seduced by its cynical charm, I've always had a thing for the political term and concept of a useful idiot ...

 

That is to say, an individual - usually a well-intentioned idealist of some description - who promotes a cause without fully understanding what's in play or what's at stake and who can be easily manipulated by those who do. 

 

I believe the idea originated early on during the Cold War to describe those left-leaning liberals and communist sympathisers in the West regarded as particularly susceptible to Soviet propaganda. Although some like to give Lenin credit for coining the term, this attribution is unsubstantiated and it seems to have first been used in a New York Times article in June 1948. 

 

Prior to this, however, some were already speaking (in rather less brutal terms) of useful innocents to refer to those confused and misguided souls whose tears of compassion for the suffering of others prevented them from seeing clearly when it came to the reality of life under communist rule. 

 

Those like the British Labour MP Diane Abbot, to give a relatively recent example, who, in 2008, was still putting the case for Maoism and said of the Chinese dictator that, on balance, he did more good than harm, blithely ignoring the fact that he was responsible for tens of millions of deaths [1]. 

 

 

II. 

 

Unfortunately, Abbott is by no means alone in being a useful idiot. Contemporary politics is full of 'em, on all sides, and not necessarily just doing the work of the far left. For many of the most useful of idiots today belong to (supposedly) radical environmental groups, such as Extinction Rebellion, and are unintentionally serving corporate interests and those promoting a Great Reset and/or a new industrial revolution. 

 

To be fair, however, thanks to social media and the way that the world now operates, perhaps we are all in some sense being made fools of; thus it is that one commentator proposes "a new, analogous term more appropriate for the age in which we live: useful hypocrites" [2]. 

 

Again, whilst that sounds a bit harsh, one suspects nevertheless that it's pretty much how the masters of the digital universe do in fact view us (and they have the data concerning our behaviour to back it up).

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I'm not making this up: appearing alongside Michael Portillo on This Week (a politics and current affairs show hosted by Andrew Neil on BBC One), Abbott - who would stand for the leadership of the Labour Party in 2010 and eventually serve as Shadow Home Secretary under Jeremy Corbyn (2016-2020) - really did attempt to put the case for Mao: click here. 

      Twelve years later, in November 2020, Abbott was forced to apologise for appearing on a livestream with Li Jingjing, a journalist working for the state owned CGTN, who denied human rights abuses against the Uyghurs, suggesting they were a fiction invented by China's enemies in order to to try and provoke a race war. At no point did Abbott challenge these remarks.   

 

[2] John Naughton, 'Why the internet has turned us into hypocrites', The Guardian (16 Nov 2014): click here to read online. 

 

 

Evolution Needs Death More Than It Loves Life: Reflections on Extinction Rebellion

Poster by Extinction Rebellion Art Group

rebellion.earth/act-now/resources/art-group/

What does it mean to rebel against extinction?

Ironically, it means one is opposed to the driving force of evolution; which is to say, one is anti-life understood in the immoral terms of difference and becoming.

For whether we like it or not, mass extinctions periodically destroy up to 95% of life forms in giant orgies of death and scientists think that 99.9% of all species that have ever lived have now - like the Monty Python parrot - passed on, ceased to be, joined the choir invisible. It's simply pointless protesting the fact that evolution needs death more than it loves life.          

We used to think the sun revolved around the earth. Then we discovered it wasn't so. Now there are young people who sincerely believe the earth revolves around them. The overly-privileged and self-righteous children of generation snowflake who talk about saving the planet are, ultimately, only concerned about protecting their own future.

But alas, everything isn't all about them - anymore than it's all about the polar bears or coral reef - and their will to conserve and self-preserve has become a form of mania expressed as moral and political alarmism.

Whisper it quietly, but every species is ultimately endangered and will one day topple into the abyss of non-existence. And if, as certainly seems to be the case, humanity is giving profligate Nature a helping hand by rapidly speeding up the extinction rate and destroying the environment, it might be remembered that we too are part of the biosphere and our actions just as natural as those of any other species.

In other words, there's no need to feel guilty or sinful; the so-called sixth extinction event lacks moral significance, even if we're the causal agents. Besides, as biologist R. Alexander Pyron has pointed out:

"Unless we somehow destroy every living cell on Earth, the sixth extinction will be followed by a recovery, and later a seventh extinction, and so on. [...] Within a few million years of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, the post-apocalyptic void had been filled by an explosion of diversity - modern mammals, birds and amphibians of all shapes and sizes. This is how evolution proceeds: through extinction."

Professor Pyron also reminds us that whatever effort we make to stabilise and maintain present conditions, sea-levels and temperatures will continue to rise and fall and the climate as we know it today will eventually be "overrun by the inexorable forces of space and geology".

Finally, it should be noted that even the most rebellious of extinction rebels doesn't object to the planned eradication of deadly diseases such as HIV, Ebola, and malaria, even though these are "key components of microbial biodiversity, as unique as pandas, elephants and orangutans". As indicated earlier, the campaign to save the Earth is really a campaign to save the Earth for us: Extinction Rebellion is just another exercise in anthropocentric conceit and hypocrisy.   

Thus, whilst it's true that climate change may have certain dramatic effects - such as coastal flooding and widespread famines - and whilst it makes sense to take action to mitigate these things, I refuse to be lectured by adolescent eco-warriors, bandwagon jumping celebrities, or grey-bearded old hippies with an apocalyptic worldview.

In fact, push comes to shove, I remain more sympathetic to the arguments put forward by members of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, founded by Les U. Knight in 1991. For like Rupert Birkin, I regard people as an obstruction and a hindrance to the future unfolding of evolution and believe that only our self-extinction will allow life to continue perfect and marvellous in all its inhuman splendour.


See: R. Alexander Pyron, 'We don’t need to save endangered species. Extinction is part of evolution.' The Washington Post (22 Nov 2017): click here.

And click here for my post on Voluntary Human Extinction (published 12 October 2013).