useful idiot
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English[edit]
Etymology[edit]
The earliest known usage in Western media is in a 1948 article in the social-democratic Italian paper L'Umanità – as cited in the New York Times article on Italian politics (see quotations). Often misattributed to Vladimir Lenin.
Noun[edit]
useful idiot (plural useful idiots)
- (historical, derogatory, political jargon) Communist sympathizer in Western countries, from the perspective of the political right.
- 2020 August 7, Kurt Andersen, “College-Educated Professionals Are Capitalism’s Useful Idiots”, in The Atlantic[2]:
- During the 1930s and ’40s and ’50s, the right had derided liberal writers and editors as Communists’ “useful idiots,” unwittingly doing the Communists’ propaganda work; it looks in retrospect as if, starting in the 1970s, a lot of them—of us—became capitalists’ useful idiots.
- (derogatory, political jargon) One who is seen to unwittingly support a malignant cause through their 'naive' attempts to be a force for good.
- 2009 January 22, Alex Knepper, “Obama's cabinet appointments contradict with message”, in The Mirror (Fairfield University)[3], volume 34, number 15, page 3:
- But what should the Obama Cult do now? The man has turned off the switch on the "Hopenosis" and has revealed the "Change Brigade" for the useful idiots they were.
- 2020 September 14, Jeffrey Goldberg, quoting Alexander Vindman, “Alexander Vindman: Trump Is Putin’s ‘Useful Idiot’”, in The Atlantic[4]:
- “President Trump should be considered to be a useful idiot and a fellow traveler, which makes him an unwitting agent of Putin,” he says.
Translations[edit]
political sense
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Further reading[edit]
- useful idiot on Wikipedia.Wikipedia