In 1952 Doris Lessing, a British writer who has since won the Nobel Prize for Literature, was part of a delegation visiting the Soviet Union. Her memories of the trip are clear and unforgiving:
“I was taken around and shown things as a ‘useful idiot’... that’s what my role was. I can’t understand why I was so gullible.”
She was not the only one. The Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw and American journalist Walter Duranty were some of those people who also visited the Soviet Union.
They mingled with political leaders, were escorted into the countryside by Joseph Stalin’s secret police, and returned home to speak and write of ‘a land of hope’ with ‘evils retreating before the spread of communism’.
However as stories mounted of mass murder and starvation in parts of Russia and the Ukraine, reporters such as Gareth Jones and Malcolm Muggeridge investigated and reported on ‘the creation of one enormous Belsen’.
Duranty responded with an article in the New York Times headed ‘Story of the famine is bunk’, and got an exclusive interview with Stalin.
Soon after, Jones died and Muggeridge’s career nose-dived. Duranty was awarded a Pulitzer.
How can intellectual curiosity transform into active promotion of a dangerous lie? Why so many ‘useful idiots’?....
h/t Irene
Cartoon credit: http://deathby1000papercuts.com/2010/06/useful-idiots-a-helping-hand/
This would be the same corrupt and deceitful BBC that you say sat on the AGW "scam", the corporation you describe as "CBC's twin", the corporation you've tagged as "Biased BBC".
ReplyDeleteWhy should I listen to them? Are they not part of the "MSM"? Are they not "Leftish"?
Brian - did you think I would go "Ouch that hurts.... you got me pardner... you got me good" like Peter Sellers in The Party? Won't happen!! This is the BBC Radio not the BBC TV. They have a completely different set up I have been told and the above documentary proves it.
ReplyDeleteIf you don't believe my take on biased BBC, visit the blog Biased BBC on the listing at the bottom right of this blog. That blog is dedicated to the bias found at the BBC TV and hardly ever at the BBC radio.
Maria, I think you're thinking of Lolita. In any case, I wasn't expecting to a reaction such as you describe.
ReplyDeleteI am chuffed by your defence of BBC Radio.