Thomas Sowell
August 31, 2000
'Useful idiots'
Lenin is supposed to have referred to blind defenders
and apologists for the Soviet Union in the Western
democracies as "useful idiots." Yet even Lenin might
have been surprised at how far these useful idiots
would carry their partisanship in later years --
including our own times. Stalin's man-made famine in
the Soviet Union during the 1930s killed more
millions of people than Hitler killed in the
Holocaust --
and Mao's man-made famine in China killed more
millions than died in the USSR. Yet we not only hear
little or nothing about either of these staggering
catastrophes in the Communist world today, very
little was said about them in the Western
democracies while they were going on. Indeed, many
useful idiots denied that there were famines in the
Soviet Union or in Communist China.
The most famous of these was the New York Times'
Moscow correspondent, Walter Duranty, who won a
Pulitzer prize for telling people what they wanted to
hear, rather than what was actually happening.
Duranty assured his readers that "there is no famine
or actual starvation, nor is there likely to be."
Moreover, he blamed reports to the contrary on
"rumor factories" with anti-Soviet bias.
It was decades later before the first serious scholarly
study of that famine was written, by Robert Conquest
of the Hoover Institution, always identified in
politically correct circles as "right-wing." Yet when
the Soviets' own statistics on
the deaths during the famine were finally released,
under Mikhail Gorbachev, they
showed that the actual deaths exceeded even the
millions estimated by Dr.
Conquest.
Official statistics on the famine deaths in China under
Mao have never been
released, but knowledgeable estimates run upwards of 20
million people. Yet,
even here, there were the same bland denials by
sympathizers and fellow
travellers in the West as during the earlier Soviet
famine. One celebrated "expert"
on China wrote: "I saw no starving people in China,
nothing that looked like
old-time famines." Horrifying as the pre-Communist
famines were, they never
killed as many people as Mao's famine did.
Today, even after the evidence of massive man-made
famines in the Communist
world, after Solzhenitsyn's revelations about the
gulags and after the horrors of
the killing fields of Cambodia, the useful idiots
continue to deny or downplay
staggering human tragedies under Communist
dictatorships. Or else they
engage in moral equivalence, as Newsweek editor and TV
pundit Eleanor Clift did
during the Elian Gonzalez controversy, when she said:
"To be a poor child in
Cuba may in many instances be better than being a poor
child in Miami and I'm
not going to condemn their lifestyle so gratuitously."
Apparently totalitarian dictatorship is just a
lifestyle, like wearing sandals and
beads and using herbal medicine. It apparently has not
occurred to Eleanor Clift
to ask why poor people in Miami do not put themselves
and their children on
flimsy boats, in a desperate effort to reach Cuba.
Elian Gonzalez and his mother were only the latest of
millions of people to flee
Communist dictatorships at the risk of their lives.
Some were shot trying to get
past the Berlin wall and hundreds of thousands of "boat
people" were drowned
trying to escape a Communist Vietnam that many useful
idiots were celebrating
from inside free democracies. Many who escaped from the
Soviet Union to the
West during the Second World War were sent back by
American authorities,
except for those who committed suicide rather than go
back.
Yet none of this has really registered on a very large
segment of the intelligentsia
in the West. Nor are Western capitalists immune to the
same blindness. The
owner of the Baltimore Orioles announced that he would
not hire baseball players
who defect from Cuba, because this would be an "insult"
to Castro. TV magnate
Ted Turner has sponsored a TV mini-series on the Cold
War that has often taken
the moral equivalence line.
Turner's instructions to the historian who put this
series together was that he
wanted no "triumphalism," meaning apparently no
depiction of the triumph of
democracy over Communism. Various scholars who have
specialized in the
study of Communist countries have criticized the
distortions in this mini-series in
a recently published book titled "CNN's Cold War
Documentary: Issues and
Controversy," edited by Arnold Beichman.
Meanwhile, that moral-equivalence mini-series is being
spread through American
schools from coast to coast, as if to turn our children
into the useful idiots of the
future.
©2000 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
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