“USEFUL IDIOTS” AT THE UNIVERSITIES
In 2019, Hamas leader Fathi Hamad said their goal is to "… attack every Jew possible in all the world and kill them.” On October 7, 2023, Hamas crossed over from Gaza to murder, rape and torture 1200 Israelis – mostly civilians – in their homes. They beheaded babies and murdered parents in front of their children. The Hamas charted states that negotiation isn’t an option. Their goal is to obliterate “the Zionist entity.”
It seems like a black and white issue: one group wants to exterminate the other. The other group defends itself. Yet hundreds of thousands of people around the world, most notably, in American universities, protest in favor of terrorists who joyously toss live babies into fires. “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” they chant, meaning the Jews must be eliminated from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean.
It sounds like genocide.
Protestors call for “the end of occupation” of Gaza as, “the only way to peace.” (Note to protesters: Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005. You need to update your chants).
Since Israel was responding to the Hamas attack, it’s hard to understand the protestors’ rage against Israel. What is going on? The answer, in part, is that the protestors are “useful idiots,” a phrase attributed to Vladimir Lenin after the Russian Revolution of 1917. Lenin meant that these passionate true believers, dedicated themselves to the Bolshevik cause without really understanding it.
John Williams, a former consultant at Cambridge University, described the blindness of “Western intellectuals who were starry-eyed about the executions, purges and mass starvations of Communist rule and excused these barbarisms because it was all done for the good of ‘the people.’” It seems that no matter what barbarity the Bolsheviks inflicted, no matter how many millions they murdered, the useful idiots, flushed with a transcendent cause, and energized by the camaraderie of shared purpose, would polish their halos and say, “well yes, it’s true that we starved three to five million Ukrainians to death in the Spring of 1933, but it was worth it to create a better world.”
Useful idiots are blind, empty souls looking for meaning. They are willing to believe absurdities; they are not interested in facts or obvious evils. They are actors in search of a play. They have been called “naïve, revolutionary tourists.”
These people would rather believe than know. They want to believe the simplistic, Marxist binary paradigm of oppressors and oppressed. Taking the side of the weak is an ego-bloating, self-created fantasy in which the dominant power must be evil. If protestors oppose a perceived evil, they become heroic saints. Therefore, they go out of their way to demonize the enemy. Israel is winning therefore Israel is the oppressor. Hamas’ stated goal is genocide, yet the useful idiots, in their need to be courageous warriors for the weaker side, turn the whole thing upside down. It’s an easy and naive paradigm for lazy thinkers who jump on the bandwagon without first knowing where it is going. Writing in the mid-twentieth century, philosopher, Bertrand Russell, found it “curious” that so many “believe in the superior virtue of the oppressed…” They believed it because they wanted to believe it.
Our universities are peopled by intellectuals – students, professors, thinkers and writers who don’t punch a clock, who don’t produce, who don’t make corporate decisions, who don’t innovate, or as George Will put it in another context, never have run so much as a Dairy Queen.
Eric Hoffer, the brilliant and eccentric longshoreman / philosopher, wrote,
The intellectual goes to the masses in search of weightiness and a role of leadership. Unlike the man of action, the man of words needs the sanction of ideals and the incantation of words to act forcefully. He wants to lead, command and conquer, but he must…” fool himself into thinking he is doing it for the oppressed, when in reality, he does it for himself. “…the militant intellectual…” he wrote further, craves “superiority and social usefulness.” Marching for the underdog, gives him both.
Maybe it all comes down go this simple statement:
I’m for the downtrodden, therefore, I’m a good person.
Lenin and Stalin went on to murder and starve to death, tens of millions of people, while imprisoning millions more in the frozen labor camps of the Siberian gulag.
And the useful idiots cheered before they too were swallowed-up by the revolution.