THE KREMLIN’S USEFUL IDIOTS
Economist, UK
Oct 29 2007
Our correspondent meets yet another bearded Brit
THE Old Theatre at the London School of Economics is a hotspot for
demagoguery. Fiery student orators have honed their rhetoric there
before going on to jobs in investment banking; mobs denouncing
dictatorship have hounded hapless visiting speakers from the podium.
Notoriously poorly ventilated, the air can be thick with everything
from the smell of wet clothes (LSE is too cramped to provide a
convenient cloakroom) to flurries of paper darts directed at speakers
that the audience finds boring or annoying. On one memorable occasion,
a gigantic inflated condom came floating down from the gallery to
disconcert a notoriously adulterous politician who was trying to give
a talk on privatisation. In 1980, when your diarist arrived there as
an undergraduate, it was gripped by the issue of Soviet beastliness at
home and abroad. At one end of the political spectrum were the ardent
anti-communists, soon to be reinforced by refugees from martial law
in Poland. They denounced the persecution of Soviet Jews, collected
signatures for Czechoslovakia’s Charter 77, and celebrated the West’s
renaissance under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. At the other
end were the Spartacists, a weird group of Stalinist Trotskyists
(yes, you did read that correctly), whose slogans included "Workers’
bombs are bombs for peace!
Capitalist bombs are bombs for war!" and "Smash NATO, defend the Soviet
Union!" A slightly less bonkers approach by the Kremlin’s useful idiots
was to match every Soviet crime with a real or imagined western one. It
was called "whataboutism": "So you object to Soviet interventions in
eastern Europe? Then what about the American assault on the Nicaraguan
Sandinistas?" "You mind about Soviet Jews? Then what about blacks
in South Africa?" So an evening debate on the death of Russian press
freedom (where your diarist was putting the case for the prosecution)
produced a sense of deja vu. Two Russian journalists, putting the case
for the defence, centred their case not on the rights and wrongs of
Russia’s laws on extremism, but on the shortcomings of the British
media for superficiality, double-standards, and craven obedience to
its political and commercial masters. How dare we criticise Russian
public broadcasting after the way the BBC had bowed to government
pressure on so many occasions? Had not the newspaper coverage of the
Litvinenko murder been a farrago of exaggeration, misunderstanding and
hypocrisy? Well perhaps it had. But the debate was about Russia. The
shortcomings of the British press are widely discussed, not least by
its own journalists; though it gets most things wrong most of the time,
the errors are not directed by weekly meetings at Number 10, Downing
Street at which a prime ministerial aide lays down the line to take
in the coming days. Soviet propagandists’ overuse of "whataboutism"
provided the punchline for subversive jokes. For example: A caller to a
phone-in on the (fictitious) Radio Armenia asks, "What is the average
wage of an American manual worker?" A long pause ensues. (The answer
would have been highly embarassing to the self-proclaimed workers’
paradise, which was proving to be lots of work and no paradise). Then
the answer comes: "u nich linchuyut negrov" [over there they lynch
Negroes]. By the late 1980s, that had become the derisive catchphrase
that summed up the whole bombastic apparatus of the Soviet propaganda
machine. Yet "whataboutism" attracted vocal support from some parts
of the audience. A student from Pakistan passionately denounced
democracy as a sham. Someone from Malaysia praised the Kremlin for
standing up to America. A bearded Brit came up with a predictable,
"Who are we to judge?".
Others, including what seemed (from their accents) to be a good
sprinkling of Russians, disagreed, denouncing the Kremlin line and
bemoaning the loss of media pluralism (not quite the same as freedom,
but still worth having) since the Yeltsin years. Most did not give
their names before speaking. "The embassy is watching us" explained
one of them afterwards. Plus ca change.