USEFUL IDIOT

  

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: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Useful_idiot

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.

INTERNET SOURCE: https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/04/top-3-lies-socialists-tell-the-useful-idiots

Top 3 Lies Socialists Tell the ‘Useful Idiots’

By: Dan Bongino | April 04, 2016

I’m not a morning person. I used to be a morning person, but after years of early morning shifts at the White House, something changed and I became much more efficient in the evening hours. My wife knows this about me and I recently remarked to her that with all the lying and deception going on in politics, some entrepreneurial politician should run on a platform to “ban mornings.”

We laughed about it, but it sparked a thought. What’s the difference between the stupidity of claiming to have the ability to “ban mornings” versus the equally outrageous claim that socialist and far-left politicians make when they claim that they are going to make things “free”? Nothing is “free.” Even young children understand that everything has a cost and the only real question is “who is going to pay it?”

The corrupting nature of absolute power is inherent in a world full of fallible men and women.

But the lie about making things “free” is only one in a series of lies told to impressionable men and women eager to be manipulated by disingenuous politicians desperately craving power over their lives. Lenin and Stalin are alleged to have used the descriptor “useful idiots” to describe people like this who are lied to, and then become willing accomplices in the destruction of their own freedom. 

Here is a short list of the three lies I hear most often told to Lenin’s “useful idiots” to convince them to play along:

1. “It’s not socialism, it’s democratic socialism.” Huh? I hear this absurd statement all the time and cringe in horror. When a “useful idiot” repeats this he is really saying that he either has no understanding of what the critical components of socialism are (with or without the “democratic” modifier) or he does understand what socialism is and is lying about it to disguise his real intentions. Folks, this really isn’t complicated. The resources and means of production in an economy are either owned by the people or they are owned by the government, and the critical component of socialism is the government’s ownership of the resources and means of production. Of course, the lying political-class socialists don’t want you to know that they have eyes on your money, your healthcare freedom, and your business, so they add modifiers to the word “socialism,” hoping to transform you into a “useful idiot” propagandist by taking the edge off of the word “socialism” and gleefully watching you repeat it with a smile. “But what about Denmark?” the “useful idiots” frequently ask in response, to the delight of the lying politicians selling them this snake-oil. Denmark is a MARKET ECONOMY, not a socialist country. The resources and means of production in Denmark are owned by DANES, not the government. Don’t believe me? Just ask Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen who, after growing tired of his country being slandered with a false “socialist” label, said, “I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.”

2. “Socialism is about sharing.” Sharing? Sharing is a voluntary act where individuals donate their time or resources to other people whom they choose. Socialism is the exact OPPOSITE. Socialism is the government TAKING other people’s time or resources, against their will most of the time, and often by force, and giving them to people whom the government chooses, not you. Again, calling this process “democratic” by disingenuously referring to it as “democratic socialism” does absolutely nothing to change the fact that socialism is, by definition, the theft of your time and resources by government. Also, calling it democratic socialism because people can vote for the people who will then confiscate their time and resources does nothing to change the fact that this is neither “sharing” nor “democratic.”

3. “Socialism works when the ‘right people’ are in charge.” The “right people”? This lie is the most dangerous of all of them because it makes a rational person wonder what the body count has to be before the “right people” are eventually found. After 65 million deaths in China, 20 million in the Soviet Union, two million in both North Korea and Cambodia, and millions more dead all over the world, one wonders how many more have to die before these elusive “right people” are found? Can you imagine how public opinion would change if the sell-out mainstream-media, and the sheltered academics in our university system, reported honestly on this topic? The bottom line is that there are no “right people.” The corrupting nature of absolute power is inherent in a world full of fallible men and women. The only solution to the corrupting nature of power is to limit it, not to expand it, hence the genius of our founding fathers. Don’t be a useful idiot!