The Syrian Tragedy: Western Foreign Policy and its ‘Useful Idiots’
by Adeyinka Makinde
Recent media focus on the humanitarian crisis in the Syrian city of Aleppo has revealed the government promoted propagandistic methods of the Western mainstream media, which shorn of context and rich in bias uncritically accepts the narrative presented by politicians and attempts to shape public opinion to suit the needs of a war agenda. An opinion piece in the UK Daily Mail by the historian Dominic Sandbrook which accused the leader of the British opposition Labour Party of ideological Left-inspired anti-American sentiment and lack of patriotism is part and parcel of the attempt to pathologize and demonize those who are critical of the West’s role in fomenting and sustaining the Syrian conflict. The disingenuous media blitzkrieg on Aleppo is designed to justify military intervention on the part of the United States starting with a ‘No Fly Zone’, which as the US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has plainly stated “will lead to war with Russia.” If such a catastrophic event were to ensue, it would have be the fault not of the supposedly Putin-worshipping Left, but of the hubris of American post-Cold War foreign policy and the ‘useful idiots’ in the Western press who have promoted American militarism.
( October 24, 2016, London, Sri Lanka Guardian) It was Vladimir Lenin who is claimed to have coined the phrase ‘useful idiot’. By useful idiot, Lenin is supposed to have been referring to those who did the bidding for the cause of Bolshevism in its propaganda war with the western capitalist nations. The term continued to be used as one to label those in the West who acted as mouthpieces for the Soviet Union by representing it as democratic when it was in fact repressive and as reasonable where its critics found it to be an inflexible monolith.
