Adam Riggio: The Persistence of the Useful Idiot
Releasing information about Russian interference in the Sanders campaign is a textbook example of the most effective propaganda: turning a political movement suicidally paranoid.
Written by: Adam Riggio
Progressive political movements face another terrible danger, even worse than the factionalism that I described last week. That danger is a paranoia that can all too easily set in to our minds, when we spend so long fighting regressive and racist forces.
When that paranoia clouds our judgment, we lose our ability to tell a real enemy action from the flashes and spectres of enemies that crackle and linger in the corners of our perception. The humming anxiety of knowing that we live, inescapably, in a system where we dissidents and people of conscience are vulnerable in so many ways to the traps of the powerful.
When it breaks us, it’s a small shift in our thinking, so small that we rarely notice it as it’s happening. But we’ve become ourselves, then, the biggest danger to any progressive movement. In harsh terms, we’ve become useful idiots.
What Exactly Is a Useful Idiot?
The first thing anyone should do when investigating some matter, is figure out what you want to find. You become a useful idiot when some power that’s hostile to your interests can manipulate you into advancing their interests.
Unpack this idea. The concept contains some confusing reflections. Imagine yourself, and think about your interests, how the world would have to be for you to be happy and prosperous. Now imagine some enemy whose happiness and prosperity depends on your poverty and hopelessness. But even though this person is your enemy, he manipulates and tricks you into actions that advance his own interests. You think you’re working toward your happiness, when in fact your actions are ruining you.
Essentially, becoming a useful idiot is to have been conned, but in a political context. But instead of selling you a lemon of a car for full price, you end up in a fascist authoritarian regime that you think is a democracy.
My favourite term to describe this is that you’ve been bamboozled. But it’s not that simple, of course. Our question now is how a dedicated progressive such as ourselves might end up among the hoodwinked. We have to identify each path to our self-destruction.
The Irony of a Term’s Origins
It’s typically said that V. I. Lenin himself first coined the term useful idiot. But really, the first clear instance of the idea occurred in America. The otherwise ordinary conservative politician Ed Derwinski referred, in a 1959 speech when he was Congressional Representative, to peace activists who visited the Soviet Union as “useful idiots.”
At the height of the Cold War, American intelligence offers and politicians understood propaganda in a very straightforward way. Propaganda, for them, was about convincing people to believe in specific ideologies. Those ideologies didn’t have to be all that narrow: a belief as straightforward as “Capitalism creates happiness!” or “Free markets means free people!”.
On the surface, it sounds simple. But when you look at what actually has to happen in this propaganda process, it actually involves a lot of steps.
Before propaganda outreach starts, you already hold robust beliefs about what is politically right and wrong. So your enemies first have to break those beliefs down. There are a lot of different ways to do that, depending on context. You break an individual’s will to believe in his own values one way if he’s alone in an interrogation room, and another way if he’s overworked at an underpaying job and overcome with stress keeping his family afloat.
The problem that American Cold Warriors faced was that they didn’t even bother breaking down their enemies’ political beliefs. Their propaganda methods early in the Cold War largely just broadcast catchphrases and advertising about how wonderful it was to live in capitalist societies.
It’s a deep irony of this history that the idea of the useful idiot is an American invention, to describe the type of person typically targeted by Soviet propaganda, when Americans took decades longer to figure out how it all worked.
Historic Innovations in Confusion
Russian intelligence agencies in the 20th century were the true innovators. They understood that propaganda, when most effective against your enemies, doesn’t aim to convert anyone to some particular ideology. That propaganda model of conversion is a kind of proselytizing, like a missionary at your door.
The most effective kind of propaganda is about breaking the will and the values of millions across a society. We understand this better when we speak of it as information warfare, and military theory is the science of organizing destruction. We all know clearly what a conventional military campaign of organized destruction is. Ask anyone who’s lived in Tripoli, Aleppo, Fallujah, or Taiz.
What would a campaign of organized destruction look like when conducted with information warfare? Well-organized destruction breaks up infrastructure: it tears down the ability to communicate, ship goods, or provide services among your targets. So information warfare must aim to do the same, but with what information itself can attack.
The purpose of information is to organize the world, to give people the frameworks of thinking that we use to make sense of our experience at an everyday and a global level. So the most effective information warfare disrupts this purpose.
Sources of information that could previously have been trusted become suspicious and corrupt, pushing fake news to hide secret agendas. You hear rumours that trusted political leaders are actually corrupt. All that you hear about your enemies makes them appear omnipotent, able to interfere in secret to sabotage your life and your country. You’re no longer able to act politically; your purpose is sapped; you can only flail and collapse with exhaustion.
Suicide by Paranoia
This paranoia is rife in all our populations today, but especially among progressive activists. One advantage that a Trumpist holds over a progressive is his absolute faith in Donald Trump, dismissing all the facts about his crimes and corruption as lies. Yet the Trumpist also holds to the same paranoia about any information originating with what he sees as the conspiratorial liberal media. Trumpists are just as paranoid as we progressives can be; they simply give their Leader an exemption.
Progressive movements today are visibly vulnerable as political alliances because we give no exemptions from the possibility of corruption. One dangerous rumour about Sanders is the recent leak that Russian Intelligence’s information warfare marines at the Internet Research Agency are trying to boost his campaign.
It’s a perfect missile for information warfare because it can spark suspicion and paranoia in so many people for so many reasons.
Undecided liberals: “Could the Russians be guiding the Democratic Party to an unelectable candidate and we get four more years of Trump?”
Trumpists: “Damn right that Sanders is a communist! Even the Russians are with him!”
As a result of this one rumour, many paths of suspicion have opened up in the thoughts of many people. There is no longer anything approaching consensus about the truth of the world, so if the truth of the matter does float through all the chatter, it will be practically indistinguishable from the most deranged concoction of conspiracy.
In such chaos, the members of a political movement can no longer agree on who can be trusted. Any leader, media outlet, even day-to-day allies can be compromised in our eyes. When we take that risk so intensely as we often do now, we’re open to breaking trust with anyone. That’s the case for me and for you as well.
When you become a useful idiot, your enemies have made you so doubtful and confused that you’re weaponized against your own movement and yourself.
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