By JOHN SWEENEY [BBC World Service] – In political jargon it was used to describe Soviet sympathisers in Western countries and the attitude of the Soviet government towards them.

Useful idiots, in a broader sense, refers to Western journalists, travellers and intellectuals who gave their blessing – often with evangelistic fervour – to tyrannies and tyrants, thereby convincing politicians and public that utopias rather than Belsens thrived.

In 1952 Doris Lessing, a British writer who has since won the Nobel Prize for Literature, was part of a delegation visiting the Soviet Union.

Her memories of the trip are clear and unforgiving:

“I was taken around and shown things as a ‘useful idiot’… that’s what my role was. I can’t understand why I was so gullible.”

She was not the only one.

Continued at the BBC World Service | More Chronicle & Notices.

Also noted: Widespread idiocy.

By MICHAEL C. MOYNIHAN [Reason] – The mention of the Webbs and their book Soviet Communism: A New Civilization sent me to the academic database JSTOR to gauge the general reaction to the book, an almost comic hagiography of Stalin, amongst the intelligentsia. Here are samples from just the first page of results:

The Webbs – the name by which the authors will ever be remembered – have produced, on the threshold of their ninth decade, an astonishing book. The volumes are a most helpful survey of a vast body of literature, the sifting of which has been done with a care that makes the process more than merely one of scissors and paste. While confessing to a bias, the authors strive conscientiously to achieve objectivity.” – The Quarterly Journal of Economics (MIT Press), Vol. 51, No. 1 (Nov., 1936)

Continued at Reason | More Chronicle & Notices.