Useful Idiots: The Fate of Americans in Stalin’s Russia. Does it Apply Today with the “Occupy Wallstreet” Protestors?

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From ReviewJournal:

***OPINION from the Las Vegas Review-Journal**

November 11, 1997

On Dec. 27, 1929, 12 years before Hitler ordered the extermination of the Jews, Joseph Stalin — Hitler’s mentor — ordered the “liquidation” of the kulaks or “wealthy peasants.” By the time that pogrom was over, scholars estimate that Stalin had murdered, starved to death or sent to wither in the gulag at least 11 million people.

Some of those eventually caught in Stalin’s terror were Americans, and their fate is just now being revealed.

By the early 1930s, Stalin had built a massive system of slave camps — some 10 million people labored without pay under horrific conditions to build the wondrous creations of Stalinism, including dams, factories, canals, gold mines, forestry projects, railways and roads. [Emphasis added]

“The arrests, the prisons, the camps, the scope, the brutality and violence of social engineering — nothing like it had ever been seen or imagined before,” writes historian Paul Johnson.

But that was only the beginning. No one was safe in Stalin’s Russia. Even the Communist Party faithful and the officer corps of the Red Army were decimated by Stalin’s scythe. In the end, Stalin murdered upwards of 20 million of his fellow citizens — more than Hitler — and was engaged in another round of bloody purges when he died in 1953.

But the long reign of terror never silenced Stalin’s admirers abroad. Leftist intellectuals in the United States and Great Britain swooned over Stalin and the communist utopia he was building. Even in the midst of state-ordered famine, mass executions and show trials, New York Times correspondent Will Duranty wrote glowing accounts of Soviet life in the 1930s. He won a Pulitzer Prize for it. H.G. Wells called Stalin “fair, candid and honest … nobody is afraid of him and everybody trusts him” at a time when even Stalin’s closest associates and family cowered in fear of imminent execution.

Some Americans were so enthralled with the great Stalinist experiment that they traveled to Russia to take part. Many of these ex-patriot Americans flourished for a time under Stalin, who employed them as “useful idiots” — tools of his crude propaganda machine — in high-profile professions.

Until now, little was known about the fate of these Americans, many of whom simply disappeared into thin air. But now, The Associated Press, using the newly opened secret police archives, has managed to track the fate of 15 Americans who took up residence in Stalin’s Soviet Union in the 1920s and ’30s. Of the 15 — which included artists, teachers, engineers and factory workers — eight were executed, two were worked to death in Soviet labor camps, and the other five spent long years in prison.

Their crime was having seen the West. Stalin, apparently, could not tolerate the presence of people who had first-hand knowledge of conditions in the United States which, bad as they were during the Great Depression, could not help but compare favorably to life within the terroristic slave state Stalin was building.

Stalin treated with the same murderous callousness his own victorious soldiers who returned from World War II with first-hand knowledge of Western Europe.
It is difficult to muster much sympathy for these misguided Americans who served to reinforce Stalin’s regime and lend it credibility abroad. They wanted to experience the essence of communism, and they succeeded in that.

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From the Guardian(UK)

Occupy Wall Street: the protesters speak

Casey O’Neill had no regrets. He had travelled thousands of miles across the country – and gave up a well-paying job as a data manager in California – to sleep rough in a downtown Manhattan public square, enduring rain and increasingly chilly nights. Police keep a close eye on him every day.

But O’Neill was happy to be part of the “Occupy Wall Street” protests that have transformed New York‘s Zuccotti Park from a spot where Wall Streeters grab a lunchtime sandwich into an informal camp of revolutionaries, socialists, anarchists and quite a lot of the just-plain-annoyed.

“Regrets? No. God, no,” said O’Neill, 34. “It is a little scary for sure. Somebody had to make a stand to do this. It is kind of amazing right now.” O’Neill is even happy to sleep on the park’s concrete benches. “It’s OK, actually,” he said.

O’Neill is part of an encampment in the square that looks ramshackle but in fact is highly organised, and looks rapidly on the way to becoming a fixture of downtown Manhattan life – if the police let the protesters stay there.

[…]

***Note in the following video the laptop computers on the picnic table.  Also Thorn Caristo’s statement of he “GAVE UP HIS JOB” (0:43 to 0:54 min) to come to the protest.***

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Wall Street protester Becky Wartell

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There is a broad range of opinion on display. Some are travellers who have made protesting into a lifestyle. Some are students. Others are working people, like O’Neill and Wartell, who have taken time off to join in. No one knows how long they are going to be in Zuccotti Park.

As with much of the protest, things appear likely to just evolve as they go along. The same goes for the protesters’ aims too. “We don’t have a precise goal. We want to stay a month. That’s a loose goal. Or maybe longer. We want to be here until we have entered a worldwide dialogue about transparency and accountability in the financial system,” said Caristo.

One thing many of the protesters do know is their facts and figures. For every hippy talking about world peace or traveller wanting to heal the world, another will mention the exact tax rates that rich Americans pay, or that 20% of the US population now control 84% of the wealth. Or that the richest 400 families have the same net worth as the bottom 50% of the entire nation.

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IN THE PAST:

Stalin, who employed them (Americans) as “useful idiots” — tools of his crude propaganda machine.

 Leftist intellectuals in the United States and Great Britain swooned over Stalin and the communist utopia he was building. Even in the midst of state-ordered famine, mass executions and show trials, New York Times correspondent Will Duranty wrote glowing accounts of Soviet life in the 1930s. He won a Pulitzer Prize for it. H.G. Wells called Stalin “fair, candid and honest … nobody is afraid of him and everybody trusts him” at a time when even Stalin’s closest associates and family cowered in fear of imminent execution.

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In the PRESENT:

Occupy Wall street protestors “schooled” on leftists talking points, yet cannot seem to portray what they are actually protesting while they wear glasses, have laptop computers and can GIVE UP THEIR JOBS to protest Wall street.

Useful Idiots for the Socialists/Anarchists/Revolutionaries?

YOU DECIDE.