The BBC World Service recently broadcast a two-part investigative documentary, hosted by John Sweeney, on the useful idiot, a concept that Lenin didn’t invent so much as expropriate to denote the semi-witting accomplices of Western imperialism. Although more frequently employed in the service of deriding apologists of the totalitarian system Lenin created, the phenomenon to which useful idiocy alludes is transferable to any and all modern tyrannies. (The closely related concept of ‘fellow traveler’ is not nearly as fungible because it still retains the definition Trotsky intended in Literature and Revolution—that of being a halfway-there Bolshevik whose political future was as yet undecided by historical circumstances.) The Sweeney documentary examines the Soviet Union, Red China, apartheid South Africa, and Ba’athist Iraq, and while all interviewees and case studies are well chosen, one is still left feeling unenlightened as to the etiology of this troubling condition. What causes useful idiocy, and how is it that so many sufferers are eventually cured?
A common precipitant is a broad ideological sympathy with the long-term goals of a tyrannical state matched by an incuriosity about measuring its touted claims with tangible reality. Very often this isn’t entirely the sympathizer’s fault as the state makes every effort to mask its deformities and keep the fantasy in tact. “I was taken around and shown things,” a very candid Doris Lessing tells Sweeney. “I can’t understand why I was so gullible.” The Potemkin dupe may have begun with Catherine the Great, but it is a more rampant species in the twentieth century. None has grimly excelled or exceeded the category better than Maxim Gorky.
