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.
