How Putin’s “Useful Idiots” Blame “the West” for Russia’s Rape of Ukraine
Not all of Putin’s propagandists know they’re working for him
Right now, Vladimir Putin’s Russia is committing war crimes in Ukraine, a peaceful neighbor whom it attacked without provocation. The Russian military is targeting civilians, including children, with bombs and starvation in its effort to end the Ukrainians’ resistance to annexation by democidal kleptocrats.
As always, Russia’s crimes are staged with a smokescreen of false propaganda, both within Russia — where independent journalism has been shut down and calling the war a war can fetch 15 years in prison — and across the globe. And as always, Russia counts on “useful idiots” to fan the flames.
Originally, the term “useful idiot” or “useful innocent” was used by European Communists in the aftermath of the Second World War to denote democrats who agreed to collaborate in the hopes of achieving a democracy which the Communists had no intention of delivering. In Putin’s Russia, useful idiots are an integral component of the political calculus of state propaganda, spreading the Kremlin’s output of official manure across the ripe fields of their own home nations under a homegrown label.
