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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (173957)	11/2/2005 1:30:27 PM
From: mistermj	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

Current usage: Useful Idiots In the United States, the term is currently often used as a pejorative by political conservatives against political liberals. The tone of usage implies that the target of this sobriquet is ignorant of the facts to the extent that they end up unwittingly advancing an adverse cause that they might not otherwise support. Since the 9/11 attacks, the term "useful idiot" has been used by some conservatives to describe those who they think would take a softer line against Islamist terrorism. For example, Anthony Browne wrote in Britain's The Times newspaper: Elements within the British establishment were notoriously sympathetic to Hitler. Today the Islamists enjoy similar support. In the 1930s it was Edward VIII, aristocrats and the Daily Mail; this time it is left-wing activists, The Guardian and sections of the BBC. They may not want a global theocracy, but they are like the West’s apologists for the Soviet Union — useful idiots. Similarly, Bruce C. Thornton, a professor of Classics at Cal State Fresno wrote in FrontpageMag.com: 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 en.wikipedia.org