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."

Useful Idiots

R. Emmet Tyrell writes an epitaph for liberalism in today's Wall Street Journal, but it's less than convincing, given the nation's steady (if sometimes fitful) drift toward Euro-Socialism. The problem isn't self-described liberals or leftists, but (as with the former Soviet Union) the fellow travelers -- those who don't openly espouse a doctrine but consciously or unconsciously advance the agenda, because it serves their interests or lines their pockets.

The problem isn't the zealots -- it's the "useful idiots," in Lenin's words. And liberalism has an army of those marching with it.

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.