Bear Watch ’14: Useful idiots and the slo-mo Anschluss
In George Weigel destroys Eugene Robinson.
I doubt that Eugene Robinson has any patriotic feeling for Russia, but his evident vulnerability to Russian propaganda suggests that he, like other members of the left-leaning commentariat, continue to read the politics of the West vs. Russia through the prism of the anti-anti-Communism on which they were weaned. The willingness to be “understanding;” the suggestion that Muscovite paranoia is not really, well, paranoid, but the product of complex historical factors; the readiness to countenance Russian imperialism while concurrently fretting about the assumed ambitions of the West — all of this has simply shifted from the old USSR to Putin’s Russia, as anti-anti-Communism is transmuted into a strange sympathy for classic Great Russian imperialism. Vladimir Putin does not strike me as a man with an overly developed sense of historical irony. But he surely appreciates what the Leninists termed “useful idiots,” and in left-leaning Western scribblers, he has found himself a bushel barrel of the type.
Don’t ask impertinent questions like that jackass Adept Lu.