How Those Using "Useful Idiots" Become "Useful Idiots"

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And that’s how totalitarian movements come to power: the citizens give up on the Establishment factions, as they’ve failed to solve the problems being exploited by extremist groups.

Useful Idiots describes those who support or encourage movements of mayhem in the misguided belief that these movements are positive or necessary. The classic example (and no, V. Lenin did not coin the phrase) are Western fellow-travelers who supported the totalitarian Soviet regime out of naivete, idealism or sentimentality.

But there is another class of Useful Idiots: when powerful factions are jockeying for supremacy in societies riven by chronic crisis (economic stagnation, social discord, etc.), some of these groups may cynically see extremist movements as Useful Idiots who can be directed to further the interests of the cynical group.

This is one of the implicit themes in the German TV series Babylon Berlin, a lavish, intricately plotted drama set in Berlin in the years before the Nazi rise to power in 1933. Netflix hosted the first three seasons for several years but gave it up a few years ago. The entire four seasons (season 4 was released in the US this year) are available on MHZ Choice, which serves up a wide range of European TV programming with subtitles.

Various factions are battling for influence in the wretched stew of poverty, political turmoil and postwar trauma of 1920s Berlin: there’s the Communists, suitably ruthless; the gangsters running the seamy, thriving Berlin Underworld, also ruthless but in a more calculated, nuanced fashion; the Militarists, who seek to restore the Monarchy and Germany’s military might by dispensing with Germany’s troubled experiment with democracy, and the nascent Nazis, represented by the SA Brown Shirts street thugs loyal to the ideals of the Nazi party who organize street mobs to beat up their enemies: Communists and Jewish shopkeepers.

Lastly, there are the embattled police, trying to keep order and treat every miscreant fairly under the law, and the government of the Republic, trying to maintain a weak, debt-burdened democratic state against the forces trying to tear it down.

The Monarchist / Militarist Industrialists view the Brown Shirts as Useful Idiots who helpfully weaken the Communists and labor unions threatening their profits and political power. The Nazis also generate a general sense of uncertainty and chaos which the Militarists intend to use for their own purposes: the more dire the economic and social situation becomes, the greater the appeal of a restored monarchy and a powerful military to “restore order.”

Unlike the characters in Babylon Berlin, we know how the struggle ends: it’s the Militarist Industrialists who were the Useful Idiots of the Nazis, not the other way around. This is how those trying to use Useful Idiots for their own purposes end up being the Useful Idiots of those fomenting extremism.

We can discern the dynamic underlying this reversal. Once extremism is normalized, extreme polarization is also normalized, and those Establishment factions who started out seeking to position themselves as the restorers of order and prosperity are increasingly viewed as no longer up to the task: stronger medicine is now needed to restore order and right the sinking ship of state.

The extremists who were once small thorns in the side of the Establishment are now viewed as the only groups capable of doing “whatever it takes” to end the chaotic decline of civic order and the economy.

The citizens’ loyalty to the Establishment factions is weak, while the fervent True Believers in the extremist camps are completely committed to the righteousness of their cause: only we can save the nation.

And that’s how totalitarian movements come to power: the citizens give up on the Establishment factions, as they’ve failed to solve the problems being exploited by extremist groups.

Note to those currently in power: be careful about who you’re encouraging as Useful Idiots: you might end up being the Useful Idiots in the endgame.

Play it as it lays, but play it carefully. Overconfidence and hubris can lead us into becoming unknowing Useful Idiots.

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