Useful Idiots

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I have used the above phrase several times in various discussions here. So I found the following article in The Sunday Times interesting and thought I would share it. It talks about a man Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn has just appointed to his inner circle.

Putin Never Dreamed of Such a Useful Idiot at the Heart of Our Government:

There aren’t many of us in Britain watching everything that comes out of the Kremlin. We’re a pretty small circuit, we Putinologists. But we have a lot in common. We’re reading the news in Russian and English. We’re reading not only columns in The Guardian but also every verbose statement to come out of the Kremlin.

For years we have been gawping at Seumas Milne, the Guardian columnist newly anointed as Jeremy Corbyn’s head of strategy and communications — who so often rushes to defend the Kremlin. Especially over its wars. But there’s something even stranger we see, clicking back and forth between Kremlin sites and his columns. He not only systematically defends the Kremlin; he also defends it with much the same arguments, and in nearly the same tone.

I knew Boris Nemtsov, a Russian opposition leader and former deputy prime minister. He was a tireless investigator of the hideous corruption of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. When he was murdered in February, minutes from Red Square, he was working on a report exposing Putin’s dirty war in Ukraine, whose heavy casualties are hidden from the public. Nemtsov was a man of high standing and fame. But the Kremlin spokesman dismissed his family’s accusation that Putin was responsible for the killing: “He was just a little bit more than an average citizen.” And then there was Milne: “Nemtsov was a marginal figure.”

Putinologists see this time and time again. Take the Kremlin line on the occupation of Crimea: it was the West’s fault, Milne writes supportively. Or the Kremlin’s line on the Ukrainian revolution: overrun by “fascists”. Milne writes the same. Now the Kremlin line on geopolitics: Milne is right on. Milne is a full-time castigator of American, British and Israeli oppression, but not once have his columns raged against Putin’s crimes. Weird.

The argument Milne makes and the words he uses matter. Because his new job with Labour means he’s not only delivering the message for our national opposition; he’s shaping it. Director of strategy and communication sounds as important as it is. This is Alastair Campbell’s old job, and it means that Milne will be pushing these views into the ear of the old moralist Jeremy Corbyn all day. Every day.

The Russians have a name for men such as Milne: useful idiots. There have been many of them in this country in the past. Gifted. Privileged. Doctrinaire. They are men such as the Cambridge spies, aesthetes so outraged that the West had become ugly that they refused to see the monstrous smile of its enemies. Often they are children of the establishment, as is Milne: he is the son of Alasdair Milne, a former director-general of the BBC.

Milne is not only a Wykehamist, but he also read PPE — at Balliol College, Oxford, of course. You can still hear the posturing of a student Marxist in his voice when he makes one of his regular appearances on the news channel Russia Today (RT). He sounds so very, very clever. But what he is doing is stupid.

Whenever I see him there I remember what the controller of RT told me when I was last in Moscow: there is no such thing as objectivity or truth. Does Milne realise he is on a propaganda station as he sits chatting to George Galloway on the latter’s RT-produced show Sputnik: Orbiting the World with George Galloway? Is he a fool?

Milne claims to abhor violence and oppression, but he doesn’t seem to mind much when certain people are hurt. When Fusilier Lee Rigby was murdered in Woolwich, south London, he wrote that it “wasn’t terrorism in a normal sense” because Rigby had served in Afghanistan and Iraq. Days after 9/11 he wrote furiously how America failed to see that its foreign policy — and not Osama bin Laden — was the root of this vile atrocity. Worryingly, the Corbyn campaign’s Facebook page states: “Seumas shares Jeremy’s world-view almost to the letter.”

Why is Milne only “on leave” from The Guardian? Is he not convinced he will enter No 10 in 2020? Watching him chatting away on RT leaves me in no doubt of his intentions: he is hoping for a purge. Milne has talked of this for years. “Purge the professionals and let party democracy breathe,” he boomed in 2009.

Those of us regularly watching RT know his dream is no secret. “There will be some shake-up in the existing shadow cabinet — this is a kind of stabilisation shadow cabinet,” he told the channel in the summer. “The Tories are planning boundary changes around the country and that will mean there will have to be reselections [of MPs].” He made it clear he foresees civil war. “What [Corbyn is] facing, and what the campaign is facing in September, is quite ferocious,” he told Galloway in his RT studio in August. “And battle will have to be joined in a serious way.”

That’s ugly. But there’s worse. Every year Putin’s regime hosts a pseudo-conference called the Valdai Discussion Club. Big-name westerners who write on Russia are invited (all expenses paid by the Kremlin, of course) to participate in a piece of television propaganda beamed out to the Russian public the next day.

Last year my name surfaced on a leaked list of potential invitees: I publicly signalled I would refuse to participate in a piece of theatre serving to legitimise the Putin regime. So you can imagine my reaction when I watched clips of the conference. There was Seumas Milne. Not only was he there; he was sharing a platform with Putin, respectfully asking softball questions.

Now hold on a minute. Milne claims to hate “imperialism” — Iraq! He claims to fight against spy machines and surveillance — the CIA! He claims to loathe “war criminals” — Blair! And yet there he was gazing respectfully at Putin. I will not bore you with what you already know: that the master of Russia is an imperialist, spymaster and, in my view, a war criminal, too. One thing he is not is a socialist.

Everything Milne hates in America he excuses in Russia. Illegal wars in Georgia, Syria and Ukraine. Thousands dead from bombing and artillery from Donetsk to Aleppo. An opposition strangled by a junta-like secret service with the same tools Seumas hated so much in Latin America. But this never comes up in his writing.

Intellectually, he has refused to engage with the Russian opposition, the Ukrainian revolution, oligarchic corruption or FSB (federal security service) rule. He campaigned passionately against western strikes in Syria, but this passion left him when Putin struck. There have been no fiery columns condemning the Kremlin’s attacks.

What is driving this? Is it arrogance, his public-school boy’s conviction he knows better than everyone — better even than the dissidents and activists who were there? This Putin-shaped blind spot exposes Milne for what he is: an eloquent, even erudite, fool. Sadly, Corbyn cannot see this apologist for Russian imperialism for what he is. The most dangerous fools are the ones who sound clever.

[Space Tycoon]

Whatever respect I had for Putin has diminished over the past few years, due to Russia's ongoing actions in Ukraine and Syria.

And yet, I always have to remind myself that we could have had much worse, considering the extremists we all feared could seize power in the chaotic years following the dissolution of the USSR.

Not to mention the assortment of maniacs who make up portions of the anti-Putin movement--anarchists, racists, old-school Leninists and Stalinists.

Perhaps history will look back at Putin with some measure of understanding; as a reasonable--or rather, the least unreasonable--response to an unreasonable situation.

[Space Tycoon]

I hope that last sentence wasn't too clunky.