2009 - The Year of the Useful Idiot

I was watching the Beeb Canadian feed while making dinner tonight, and what to my wondering eyes should appear to comment on the Israeli Hammas dust up but renouned Middle East Political scholar Annie Lennox?!?! Yes, that Annie Lennox - Sweet Dreams, androgyny etc.... and I was thinking, what insight could she contribute to the discussion here. Then it occured to me, I was watching the 2009 edition of the Useful Idiot.

A complete discussion, set out much better than I could, can be found here at the Mackenzie Institute's site. The article, written by John Thompson, the institute's President, characterizes Useful Idiots (Progressives) thusly:

One cannot dispute that these "Progressives" mean well... for they do; it's just that they forget what the paving stones are on the express route to Hell. It's just that their good intentions come with the almost invariable beliefs laid out thusly:

1. That human beings and human society are perfectible, provided that the right instruction and guidance are provided to them.
2. The barrier to this perfection in our own flawed society needs some manner of sweeping change or revolutionary reform, some epochal transforming event, to bring us closer to perfection.
3. To achieve this change, the institutions and thinking that prevent this must be swept aside... slowly if needs must be, but preferably dramatically.
4. An outside power can demonstrate that change is possible and be worth emulating (for this was how they saw and embraced the Soviets), but failing this anybody who threatens our society must be supported for this might achieve Step 3, above.

And this is perhaps the real truth about Fellow Travellers and Useful Idiots. Their affiliation with the Soviets thirty years ago and their attraction to the Jihad now represent a desperate desire to somehow touch something that looks like a mass movement without actually joining it; to touch something that will change their lives and yet let them remain themselves. They are not honest enough with themselves to recognize this, or brave enough to do anything else

It should be instructive, over the next few weeks, to see who else gets paraded across the news screens trying to morally equivocate the sides, condemn the Israeli government for acting in their own self defence, or demand that the Israelis (you know, the ones who've had several thousand missles lobbed at them over the past few years) compromise. Well as Ayn Rand once put it:

"In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromiser is the transmitting rubber tube."

Useful Idiots are the rubber tubes here. For the sake of everyone, Israel should not compromise.