Not to be missed: the first of a two-part series of radio broadcasts detailing the West’s suicidal love affair with Soviet communism and the role the “useful idiots” — otherwise smart people who for whatever reason fell under the spell of the God That Failed:

The phrase ‘useful idiots’, supposedly Lenin’s, refers to Westerners duped into saying good things about bad regimes.

In political jargon it was used to describe Soviet sympathisers in Western countries and the attitude of the Soviet government towards them.

Useful idiots, in a broader sense, refers to Western journalists, travellers and intellectuals who gave their blessing – often with evangelistic fervour – to tyrannies and tyrants, thereby convincing politicians and public that utopias rather than Belsens thrived.

In part one John Sweeney looks at Stalin’s Western apologists.

You can listen to part one, available for only five more days, here. (more…)

A blast from the past, and a warning for the future.  There’s some typical KGB boasting here — and remember that, in the end, they lost — but it’s worth watching and paying heed to:

Maybe it’s also time we brought ourselves up to speed on the Soviet illegals program, the results of which are still with us.  The Soviets spent a great deal of time and money identifying possible collaborators (whether witting or unwitting) in the homeland of the Principal Enemy — that was their name for the United States — and then gliding the recruits along their support networks of fellow travelers and sympathetic “useful idiots” (especially journalists) through the elite universities and into high governmental positions.

The U.S.S.R. may be gone, but its handiwork lives on, and the struggle for the soul of the West that Marx began in London continues.

Your thoughts welcome here.