Chorus of Useful Leftist Idiots
By Bruce S. Thornton
FrontPageMagazine.com | November 1, 2002
Lenin called them "useful idiots," those people living in liberal democracies who by giving moral and material support to a totalitarian ideology in effect were braiding the rope that would hang them.
Why people who enjoyed freedom and prosperity worked passionately to destroy both is a fascinating question, one still with us today. Now the useful idiots can be found in the chorus of appeasement, reflexive anti-Americanism, and sentimental idealism trying to inhibit the necessary responses to another freedom-hating ideology, radical Islam.
Sheer ignorance is a tempting explanation for the persistent
willingness of the free to attack the foundations of their own
freedom and to ignore or rationalize the forces that would
destroy them.
Totalitarian societies are masters of
disinformation, propaganda, and outright lies, the bigger the
better. How many generations of starry-eyed leftists made
pilgrimages to the old Soviet Union to gawk at any number of
Potemkin villages and other cardboard-and-tinsel stage-sets
for the socialist paradise?
So too today ignorance of Middle Eastern history and the true
nature of Islamic society and values makes it easier for many
to misinterpret the motives of Islamic terrorists and thugs
like Hussein.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in many
people's interpretation of the conflict in Israel. All we hear
about is a "Palestinian homeland," that simple solution that
will bring peace to Israel and end the terrorist slaughter. A
brilliant propaganda campaign since 1967 has sold the whole
world on this specious explanation for the murder of Israelis.
Yet the history of the conflict and the words of most Middle
Easterners themselves tell us that the real issue is not the
Palestinians, but simply the existence of Israel itself.
Long
before the so-called "occupation" of the West Bank and Gaza,
Israelis were subjected to incessant guerilla and terrorist
assault, not to mention two full-scale military attacks. Or
look at the maps adorning textbooks, insignia, and web-sites
from all over the Middle East.
You will not find Israel
anywhere, the whole state having been erased as thoroughly as
Trotsky from an old Soviet May Day photograph. Some argue
persuasively that even Arafat's keffiyeh or head-dress is
carefully arranged to hang in the shape of an envisioned state
of Palestine that occupies all the territory now part of
Israel.
Israel in any shape or form is unacceptable to many in
Islam, for it is an outpost of the infidel West and an
intruder on lands conquered with the help of God to further
his designs.
But ignorance alone can't explain "useful idiocy." As early as
the twenties the true nature of Soviet communism, along with
its penchant for terror, assassination, show trials, and
gulags, was known in the West, and that didn't cut down on
Communism's admirers.
Today anyone with a computer can go to
the Middle East Research Institute web site and read the
vicious anti-Semitic and anti-Western drivel produced by
state-run presses in the Middle East.
Or those with a
satellite dish perhaps can tune in Egyptian state-controlled
television's miniseries dramatizing the absurd slanders of the
"Protocols of the Elders of Zion."
The facts are there, and the facts tell us that a sizable
number of Islamic people see the West and its proxy Israel as
its ancient enemy whose destiny is to be conquered by a
spiritually superior Islamic civilization.
That struggle may
be waged by a secular maniac like Hussein, a homicide-bomber
in Israel, or a terrorist in Manhattan, but they all are
fighting the same fight, a struggle that began in the 7th
century AD and whose ebb and flow must be understood from the
perspective of God's time and purposes, not ours.
More factual information, then, will not help people whose
beliefs are based not on reason but on a debased religious
impulse. The decline of religion does not mean that the "need"
for religion disappears.
Most of us still crave a meaningful
picture of the world and our place in it, an identification of
the good and the evil, and an assurance that in the end the
good (i.e. people like ourselves) will triumph.
For years
Communism was the opiate of the secular materialists, an
apocalyptic creed which filled the chosen with assurance of
their righteousness and election.
So too with anti-Americanism, a sect of that old-time Marxist
religion. This doctrine knows the font of evil in the world —
the West and especially America — whose deadly sins of
"imperialism" and "colonialism" and "racism" have created a
fallen world of suffering and exploitation, a world whose
redemption depends on battling the power and influence of the
wicked militarists and global capitalists.
Or as one sign from
last week's "anti-war" rally in New York succinctly put it,
"Bush is a Devil."
America is guilty and must atone for its sins by abandoning its power and pouring vast sums of money into its Third World victims, for only then will the golden age of peace, equality, and universal tolerance come about.
Recognizing these attitudes as a species of religion makes it
easier to understand their illogic and incoherence. Hypocrisy,
for example, the failure to live the doctrine one preaches, is
a perennial bugbear of religious belief.
So too with the
anti-Americanists, the vast majority of whom have no intention
whatsoever of living anywhere other than in the West, where
they enjoy the freedom and prosperity that subsidizes their
beliefs. Yet this is a minor cavil when one is so passionately
concerned with the salvation of the oppressed, not to mention
one's own righteousness.
Likewise with the utopian perfectionism that lurks behind most criticism of America and the West. Only a quasi-religious eternal standard of human happiness--the sort traditional religion once promised for believers after this life--could explain the nit-picking, ever more minute dissections of presumed American injustice and evil that typify the "leftist" attack on the United States.
Consider, for example, the
following, from a New York Times story about some videos the
government has produced documenting the prosperity and
tolerance enjoyed by Muslim Americans.
In response to a
comment by the Muslim director of the National Institutes of
Health commending America's unique tolerance of diversity, a
recent Harvard graduate disagreed, responding that at a rally
at Harvard Square last year "I heard young people saying very
hard things about Muslims."
Think about it. Days after a murderous attack by 19 Muslims
driven by nothing other than sheer intolerant hatred, a time
when in most human societies people would have burned, looted,
and murdered in rage and vengeance, the Harvard grad thinks
that people saying "hard things" about Muslims is somehow
evidence of intolerance and xenophobia.
In actual fact, that
hard things were only "said," rather than large numbers of
Muslims being beaten and murdered, is testimony to the truth
of America's remarkable tolerance of cultural and religious
difference.
But when the standard of judgment is a religious
belief in a perfect world, a world in which conflict and hurt
feelings "never" occur, then America falls short.
Freedom of religion in America, however, means freedom for
pseudo-religion as well. Useful idiots have a Constitutional
right to display and parade their useful idiocy.
But what
should disturb us all is the prevalence of this sort of
irrationality in what are presumably the bastions of critical
thinking and healthy skepticism, our universities. It is there
that the pseudo-religions of Marxism and anti-Americanism not
only flourish, but choke out other alternatives.
An
ideological conformity redolent of the medieval church
permeates everything from who gets hired to what gets taught.
And that betrayal of the intellectual's calling means that
fewer and fewer venues exist in which the irrational and
dangerous delusions that blind us to reality — the idiocy
useful to tyrants and dictators — can be exposed.
Bruce Thornton is a professor of Classics at Cal State Fresno and author of Bonfire of the Humanities (ISI Books) and Greek Ways (Encounter).
Copyright 2004 FrontPageMagazine.com
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