Of the Term "Useful Idiots"

The term "useful idiots" to denote a person whom a cynical operative dupes into supporting a political agenda not their own apparently dates back to the article "Party Spirit in France" in the June 11, 1864 edition of Britain's The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science, and Art. The usage specifically referred to "a supremely foolish" citizen who gave Olivier Émile Ollivier, a formerly republican statesman increasingly siding with Napoleon III in these years of the "Second Empire," a convenient chance to defend his (to many, treacherous) actions.

However, the term has since been almost universally treated as a coinage of the Russian revolutionary and Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin, and in the associated memory used as both exemplifying the view of leftist leaders as vile cynics whose only motive is gaining, holding onto or increasing their personal power, and anyone who not merely followed them but was simply "soft" on the left as at best the dupes of such.

All of this, of course, is in spite of the inconvenient fact that there is no evidence whatsoever that Lenin ever said any such thing, or even anything from which such a meaning could be extracted. However, as the ubiquity of the belief that he did indicates the attribution is almost never questioned. Equally, anyone who says that Margaret Thatcher called any man riding a bus past the age of twenty-five is likely to have a right-winger immediately screaming in their face that "She never said that!" Not that "There's no proof that she ever said that," but a very confident "She never said that!" (Indeed, even when Thatcher was so obviously on the record as having said something similarly callous and insulting to working people, as with her notorious "There is no such thing" remark in reference to the existence of society her supporters, unable to say "She never said that!"--indeed, the Margaret Thatcher Foundation itself has the full text of the relevant interview up on their web site--insist "She never meant that!" when the easily checkable context, evident in the transcript on the web site, makes it all too clear that she meant exactly what she sounded like she meant, and indeed came off as even more sneering toward the disadvantaged when we do check the context and see her mocking the homeless for expecting help.)

One cannot call this respect for the facts, only respect for the piety of the politically orthodox, and the prejudices that go with that, making for an easy attitude toward the difference between fact and fiction in the one case, and pseudo-sticklerism for the facts in the other, each equally propagandistic.