Useful idiots in Tel Aviv

Sarah Honig
Another Tack
25 August '10

Among my more esoteric possessions is an English-language translation of a forgotten volume, People and Portraits: A Tragic Cycle, published in 1966. It was authored by artist Georges (Yuri) Annenkov, innovator of grand scale settings for gargantuan Soviet parades and street extravaganzas. In 1921 he painted Lenin’s official portrait. Three years later, after Lenin had been dispatched to the great politburo in the sky, Annenkov was put to work illustrating books about the departed communist icon and was given access to his papers at Moscow’s Lenin Institute.

Annenkov claimed he had copied some of Lenin’s handwritten notes, including the following gem: “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 toil to prepare their own suicide.”

Essentially Lenin expounded on the theme of the “useful idiot,” ascribed variously both to him and to Stalin. Whether or not either of them actually coined the phrase, it entered the political lexicon to describe Soviet sympathizers in the West, who despite being ardent – if naïve – boosters of the communist cause, were in fact held in contempt by the very Bolsheviks who cynically exploited them.

THE USSR is gone, but not the useful idiots. Their latterday duplicates still support malevolent causes via gullible attempts to supposedly be a force for good. The progeny of old-time communists, along with fashionable new-recruit sidekicks, still willingly submit to manipulation by an unseen though powerful world force, characterized by radical political correctness and spouting human-rights slogans. Despite the moral superiority they claim, they’re in fact useful idiots in the service of political movements – from outright anarchists to jihadist terror-mongers.

They possess greater clout than the 20th century’s original useful fools ever achieved. They set the tone in the mass media and academia. They are the trendsetters who determine what’s acceptable and respectable. They mold minds. Anything they like is bon ton. Whatever they disapprove of is verboten.

Israel isn’t sanely immune to useful-idiot shenanigans. It’s in fact one of the most afflicted of democracies.

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