Today, as an autocratic leader is again sacrificing Russian lives on an industrial scale, a new group of Western supporters has emerged. These new hitchhikers may be better described by another phrase used during that time.
Often attributed to Lenin, the “useful idiot” describes a person who is believed to be promoting propaganda for a cause without fully understanding its goals, while being exploited by the leaders of that cause. .
Some of the original fellow travelers included Arthur Ransome, author of Swallows and AmazonsBeatrice and Sidney Webb, who founded New Statesman, and literary figures including Arthur Koestler and Ernest Hemingway. Today, useful idiots include Senator Marjorie Taylor Greene, who voted against the recently passed $95 billion foreign aid package, which included $61 billion for Ukraine.
The other is journalist Tucker Carlson, who recently went to Moscow to interview President Putin. Then there are former President Trump’s former chief strategists, Steve Bannon, and everyone from the Heritage Foundation, an American conservative think tank, who are campaigning to end US military aid to Ukraine.
There are similarities between the two groups. Both are motivated by disillusionment with their respective societies. Both see – or have seen – the realization in Russia of ideologies and values that they believe their own societies have abandoned. Both have been attracted to the Russian regime, believing it to be an ideological ally in a universal movement.
As a result, both have adopted a willful blindness to the fact that everything they claim to value is anathema to these regimes. Most cruelly, this blindness extended to the suffering of the people.
Webbs was an influential figure in the Fabian Society who participated in the founding of the Labor Party in 1900. Beatrice had inherited property and considered herself to belong to the class that commanded. To those in Britain’s upper class in the 1930s, it was clear that British imperial power was in decline as the social problems of industrial cities were increasing.
Webbs believed in the theory of progress, but while he had no doubt that Soviet collectivization represented the next stage in history, he was not a theoretical Marxist. Lenin told him “I too am a communist”.
Trotsky believed that many leftist intellectuals who had turned their eyes to the East were more focused on the opportunity to remake the world than on promoting those at the bottom of their societies. He saw the suffering of the Russian peasants as a fair price to pay for the social development he hoped for.
Ransom took a job with Daily News In Russia. In 1917 he was one of the few Western journalists left to see the revolution, which he defended in his dispatches. He saw the spontaneous revolt as a harsh blow to democracy, throwing off the yoke of the Tsar.
Yet, in support of this democratic blow, during the campaign of political repression and executions from 1918 to 1922, known as the Red Terror, they carried out censorship of the press, arbitrary arrests, and even executions without trial. Wrote in defense of.
Many at home considered Ransom a passionate Bolshevik, but when diplomatic relations were broken he was one of the few people on the ground, with MI6 recruiting him in 1918. Despite this, the following year he was arrested by the Special Branch under Defence. Area Act. It took until 1937 for MI5 to be satisfied with Ransome’s loyalty.
Released KGB files claim that Hemingway was also recruited as an intelligence asset in the 1940s, meeting with Soviet agents in Havana and London. During that time, reports suggest he repeatedly expressed his desire and willingness to help. However, the files show that he failed to deliver anything useful.
Today, Green does not think Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a threat to the rest of Europe. She also thinks we should all stop discussing it, claiming on Bannon’s TV show, “This whole incident is the most disgusting, disgusting incident, and the American people are writing checks…the reality is That Ukraine is not even a NATO member…”
The rant prompted former Representative Liz Cheney to ask, “Is she a useful idiot or is she deliberately spreading Putin’s lies?”
Senator Chris Murphy recently claimed that “[T]”There is actually a section of the Republican Party that is elevating Putin as an example to follow… claiming he is engaged in a noble fight.” Carlson attempted to find common ground between Putin’s conservative ethno-nationalism and the Republican Party’s Christian right, encouraging Putin to speak about his Christian faith and asking him if he had seen God at work in the world. .
Bannon claims Putin is the leader of a global anti-people war, while conspiracy theory websites linked to the QAnon movement link Russia’s war in Ukraine to a righteous broader war against a suspected corrupt elite of global sex traffickers.
The most obvious difference between fellow travelers of the past was that they were on the left – the current crop is on the far right. 20th century travelers thought their own countries were stuck in the past and that the Soviet Union represented a promising future that never came. In contrast, today’s useful idiots see Russia as representing a great, pure past to which they want to return – a past that, needless to say, never existed.
There are other differences too. While fellow travelers were driven primarily by ideological motivations, some of the modern-day Useful Idiots are more cynical, supporting a foreign rival in order to hurt a domestic political rival. The efforts that ultimately failed in Congress to block the military aid bill are an example of this.
For them it is worth the cost of damaging America’s reputation and relations with its allies and creating dangerous geopolitical instability – anything is worth it, as long as it hurts Biden.
Arthur Koestler eventually recognized the magnitude of the Soviet project. While traveling in Ukraine, he encountered the effects of the man-made famine engineered by Joseph Stalin, the Holodomor:
“At every station there were crowds of peasants clad in rags…women carrying their babies up to the carriage windows – pitiful and frightful babies with limbs like sticks, bloated bellies, huge dead heads rolling on thin necks. Without a doubt, I had reached the peak of the famine of 1932–33, which devastated entire districts and killed several million victims.
Koestler co-conceived the God That Failed, a collection of essays by writers who had lost their illusions about Russian communism. We are unlikely to hear Carlson’s concession one day that the Russian supermarkets he visited during his trip to Moscow were not as great as he reported.
Following the invasion of Ukraine, former UKIP leader Nigel Farage admitted that he was “wrong” about Putin, saying in 2014 that he was the politician he most admired. And yet Farage is still parroting Russian talk and has recently encouraged Western leaders to talk with Putin. These comments were described by former Defense Secretary Tobias Ellwood as “dangerous, defeatist and treasonous”.
Putin agreed to interview Carlson not to influence the political mainstream but to appeal to his ideological allies: Green, Bannon, Farage, and Trump. A second Trump presidency would likely further weaken the alliances that have provided the West with security since 1945. This will also deprive Ukraine of American support.
However, it would be wrong to view Trump as a sidekick or a useful idiot. Trump’s primary ideological driver is his own promotion.
Like Putin, he wears religious garb primarily for his own political gain, and he is not a believer. While he clearly admires Putin’s style, any relationship will ultimately be pragmatic and dependent on their respective goals.
Putin wants an America that is open to dividing the world into spheres of interest and control. Trump’s isolationist tendencies on foreign policy may match Putin’s ambitions.
20th-century travelers were more complex characters than their modern counterparts, perhaps none more so than Ransom, who fell in love not only with Russia but with a Russian. When he first met Evgenia Petrovna Shelipina, whom he later married, she was Trotsky’s personal secretary. Recently opened KGB files reveal that Evgeniya was involved in smuggling diamonds out of Russia to help fund the Communist Party, long after moving to England.
At various points, and sometimes simultaneously, Ransom was: an uncritical defender of the Revolution and committed to Bolshevik ideology; A spy for MI6, patriotic in his vision of the Britain described in his children’s books, which are reminiscent of simpler times; Dedicated to Evgeniya; And motivated by selfishness.
Despite the uniqueness of his well-organized life, Ransom’s journey bears striking similarities to the journeys of other fellow travelers. Driven by disillusionment with home, he traveled to the East in search of a better world. Their desire to see this world led them to turn a blind eye to much that conflicted with their values.
In the end, the gap between the reality he experienced and the reality he desired was too great. He returned home and went into an imaginary world of his own creation, a joyful utopia with a moral simplicity that he never found in the real world.
Today’s useful idiots do not have Ransom’s imagination, but instead live in their own imaginary dystopian world. Hopefully, as becomes clear from the reporting of Russia’s violent disdain toward Ukraine, domestic dissidents, and even its own soldiers, it is clear to see that these worlds are as far from reality as the old travelers. The dream of a Soviet utopia that never was.