Lenin's "Useful Idiots" Will Always Be With Us

The Soviet collapse came swiftly and surprisingly, following decades of slow internal rot, and the "useful idiots" (Lenin's term) in America who were overt or covert enablers of the evil empire -- America's legion of fellow-travelers -- just faded into the woodwork, almost overnight. Most glommed onto "climate change" as the next available tool for attacking capitalism and advancing eco-socialism, culminating in the Green New Deal, but let's save that topic for another day.

There was no Day of Reckoning for "Fifth Column" Westerners, like the crackpot from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, who carried water for an evil regime and its puppets. They never had to account for or apologize for their complicity in communism's crimes. This may be why so many younger Americans seem so forgetful and forgiving of the wrongs American fellow-travelers helped perpetrate under the banner of socialism. 

Mona Charen wrote one book, "Useful Idiots," attempting to hold these tools of tyrants accountable, but there was no appetite for such retrospectives after the Berlin Wall fell. All was quickly forgotten and forgiven. All that sordid history was just brushed under the rug. 

And so we have a situation today, here in (what Gore Vidal called) the United States of Amnesia, in which those who helped prop-up criminal totalitarian regimes not only can run for President, with absolutely no sense of shame, but can gain a rabid following among new generations of "useful idiots."

The Unforgiven

I used to sort of like Clint Eastwood but now, after the release of "J Edgar," I just think of him as another Hollywood half-wit, regurgitating revisionist "history" in a pander to the Left. Hoover, like Nixon and McCarthy, truly are America's "Unforgiven." Virtually everyone else who becomes notorious gets at least one shot at rehabilitation and redemption in America, sometimes even two, except for these perennial lepers. And why is that?

Is it because they conducted wiretapping? Is it because they were ruthless? Is it because they sometimes became rule-bending zealots in pursuit of political or personal demons? Not really. The same could be said of many American historical figures (Bobby Kennedy, to name just one) who are still held in relatively high esteem.

So what was their unpardonable sin? It was fighting the spread of Stalinism and Soviet tyranny. It was being correct about the evils of communism, at a time when so many Americans, especially fellow-travelers on the left, were ignoring or minimizing or actively enabling Soviet crimes.

You can be forgiven for anything in American, it seems, but for being a staunch anti-communist -- though it's by now beyond doubt that communism was a force for evil in the world. It's that, not Watergate or the Army-McCarthy hearings or Hoover's alleged abuses of power, that makes them the pariahs they remain.

Not everyone likes gleefully jumping on their graves, however. Some of us find their anti-communist crusading admirable, even heroic, given the Cold War context in which they lived. And they rise even higher in our esteem in response to the hatred and derision heaped on them by unreconstructed fellow-travelers and their useful idiots among opinion-makers. We understand that they are hated because they were honest about communism. We know they are doubly hated because they were effective anti-communists. And that, more than anything else, is why we can forgive them their other human foibles.

And what of Eastwood's motives? Why would this supposed Republican (though a Hollywood Republican) bastardize Hoover's biography (especially his alleged sexual history) the way he does in J. Edgar? It seems like just another bid for redemption by the former Dirty Harry, who made a fortune and sold out theaters in politically-incorrect shoot-em-ups that undoubtedly offended Tinseltown's liberal sensibilities, but who has in more recent films struck a notably softer tone, as if he is making amends for his former movie persona (not to mention his reputation for being one of the industry's few -- gasp -- Republicans).

This is a portrait of Hoover that's sure to win Eastwood the love of Hollywood's left-leaning establishment, which is what he still obviously craves. And it might also just win him a best director Oscar, since "the Academy" isn't above making political or social statements with the awards it hands out. That, in my view, explains it. It's a cynical, shameless, pandering move on Eastwood's part, which lowers his stature in my opinion. But no one ever went wrong, or broke, in contemporary Hollywood cranking-out Leftist propaganda.

Agent of Influence

The American Spectator has a thorough write-up on the recently-released FBI dossier on Howard Zinn, whose textbook, "A People's History of the United States," was widely used in many schools and undoubtedly left a lasting impression (the wrong impression, in many cases) on many a malleable young mind.

That Zinn appears to have been an active member of the Communist Party, or, at the very least, a fellow traveler and "agent of influence," shouldn't have disqualified him as a writer of books, in my opinion. In a truly free country, even Communists have the right to teach, write and propagandize to their heart's content. And academia is full of people like Zinn. Singling him out as an aberration is sort of silly. And I'm sure his advocates will use the files to paint Zinn as the victim of anti-Red hysteria and witch-hunting.

The really damning element of the Zinn saga isn't that he wrote books, but that these became textbooks, which were warmly and uncritically received by the public school establishment. That so many school administrators so enthusiastically inflicted his hard left interpretation of American history, which highlighted all the warts while downplaying the virtues, on so many young people, without blinking an eye, suggests that they shared his dark and distorted view of the American experiment -- that his view conformed with their own.

Then some wonder why so many kids coming out of public schools, if they know any history at all, need so much deprogramming.