The term 'Useful Idiot'

[Red Menace]

I was reading about this, and I guess it means someone in the west that sympathized with the Soviet Union and its policies. But what I don't get is, that Lenin is that first one who coined this term, and he used it to describe reporters in the west that indorsed the Soviet Union. Why did he feel this way towards those embracing and supported his ideology?

[RedCommieBear]

Useful Idiot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot)


The term is purported to have been coined by Vladimir Lenin, sometimes in the form "useful idiots of the West", to describe those Western reporters and travellers who would endorse the Soviet Union and its policies in the West. However, no reference to a communist sympathizer or political leftist as a "useful idiot" was made in the United States until 1948, and not until decades later would the phrase be attributed to Lenin. In 1948, the phrase was used in a New York Times article in relation to Italian politics, and was not mentioned again in print until 1961. Critics of the term allege that the expression "useful idiot" has never been discovered in any published document of Lenin's, nor that anyone has claimed to have heard him say it. In the spring of 1987, Grant Harris, senior reference librarian at the Library of Congress, said "We have not been able to identify this phrase [useful idiots of the West] among [Lenin's] published works."[1]


So, apparently he never used the term at all.

[Janus]

There are no clear references in any of his works though the reason for that could be attributed to the translation divide. It's also high likely that it was used by another Marxist and then later attributed to Lenin.