Lenin and the Saints of the Cause: Activists and Useful Idiots

Lenin had a singular talent: getting seemingly intelligent people to do stupid things in the service of a stupid cause. He himself had a very concise and precise term for such creatures: useful idiots.

The concept is simple: mediocre but well-intentioned citizens, usually well-established in bourgeois comfort, convince themselves that by supporting dubious causes and regimes, they are serving "progress" and "good." Their motivation is moral vanity and an unshakable faith in their own ethical superiority.

Imagine a common man, a fluke graduate from ISCTE, incapable of stringing together a sentence longer than six words, who read half a book in high school and is ignored even by his undemanding neighbor on the second floor to the left. What should he do with so much frustration?

To join a cause. And, as a result, to instantly transform into an indignant being, convinced of being morally superior.

It works with the climate, with capitalism, with the planet, with Gaza, and with all the fashionable “phobias” and “causes.”

Incidentally, it also serves to try to hook someone up at the next demonstration. From the " frifripalestine " demonstrations to the Climáximo eruptions, including the marijuana and jambé sunsets on the decks of the fleets, revolutionary libido is an anthropological constant among activists and useful idiots.

In ilo tempore , the fauna was populated by artists of dubious crafts, who celebrated the Russian Revolution while the peasants starved. Then came the Cambridge intellectuals, who believed Stalin and the dictatorship of the proletariat were necessary paths to the bright future. Today, the model is the same, but the immediate target of the "global intifada" is the Jew, as the privileged path to revolution.

The contemporary useful idiot no longer quotes Lenin, in fact, he doesn't even know who he is, but he memorizes the headlines of The Guardian, Haaretz, and the New York Times, the UN "reports" and the activist NGOs funded by Qatar and European taxpayers. He no longer raises his fist for the Soviet model, but screams for the climate, shouts for Hamas, or for any occasional "oppressed" person, as long as they're conveniently distant. He's not taking any risks, but he feels heroic. He believes that Hamas is a "resistance" movement, that Israel is "colonialist," and that oppression is always Western.

If reality insists on contradicting it, so much the worse for reality. The formula is quite simple: the enemy is the West, the culprit is capitalism and "Zionism," the victim is always the "other," whoever that may be, as long as the Western "heteropatriarchy" and/or the Jews are on the other side of the equation. The rest (truth, logic, facts) is just bourgeois noise.

It is with naturalness that the activist shouts tremendous nouns and quotes the sacred numbers of the “Gaza Ministry of Health”, in a more reverent way than the verses of the Koran in a madrassa, or the speeches of Francisco Louçã in a BE meeting.

He swears he fights for peace, but cries with rage when someone proposes it, especially if it's Trump. In truth, peace is unbearable to him, because he doesn't give selfies, demonstrations, subsidies, or virtue signaling.

Note that there is no anti-Chinese activism for the occupation of Tibet, nor anti-Russian activism for the occupation of Ukraine. Why? Because targeting Jews alone confers moral prestige and poses no physical risk.

Disillusioned with the working class, which prefers the iPhone and soccer to their historic mission of overthrowing capitalism, activists have shifted their faith to various "oppressed minorities," particularly jihadists and Islamic extremists, who are consistently violent and sincerely anti-Jewish.

Contradictions don't matter. That's why there are " gays for Palestine ," and Mariana Mortágua didn't hesitate to champion the cause, alongside those who would have thrown her off a rooftop without hesitation.

It's not an inconsistency. The "causes" (Palestine, climate, gender, race) are just disposable banners, pretexts for emotional mobilization for those who need to feel useful but suffer from impostor syndrome.

Both the activist and the useful idiot (different, but sometimes indistinguishable) consider themselves supremely informed. They confidently repeat what they heard in the "resistance" bubble, cite "sources from the United Nations" and obscure NGOs, share X quotes and TikTok videos, all with the solemnity and humorlessness of someone who has discovered the secrets of the Universe.

They don't even realize that they are just a recent version of the same specimen Lenin described: a disposable utensil, not particularly smart, enthusiastic in supporting causes he barely understands and which would crush him if they won.

The useful idiot, also driven by a kind of bourgeois guilt, is basically someone who hates himself.

As he lacks the courage to punish himself, to renounce his iPhone , his iPad , his Cerelac and his comfort, he seeks to expiate his guilt by supporting foreign tyrants, terrorism, or failed ideologies, anything that goes against what he thrives on, as an armchair revolutionary.

The creature always militates in the tiny bubble of the urban left, particularly on certain university campuses where they study things like “ Climate Justice, Gender and Post-Zionist Liberation in Palestine ,” “ Intersectional Epistemologies: Race, Climate and Identity on the Borders of Gaza ,” etc. This schizophrenic left has a pathological admiration for movements that, deep down, despise it.

Lenin needed useful idiots to give a moral veneer to Bolshevik brutality. Today, the ayatollahs of Iran, Hamas in Gaza, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Emir of Qatar, or the nomenklatura in Beijing need them for the same reason: to make violence seem virtuous and terror seem like justice.

And, since there is an inexhaustible supply of idiots eager to show virtue, appear on television and feel like they are on the right side of history (see, for example, the cases of Sofia Aparício and Greta), the trick continues to flourish.

The symbiosis between the far left and Islamic fanaticism would be comical, if it weren't tragic. On one side, feminists march alongside those who stone women; on the other, environmentalists funded by oil-supported regimes; on the other, anti-Semites indoctrinated by primitive and ancient narratives. Both sides unite in the same moral crusade: to destroy the only political and economic system that allows them to exist.

Over time, the slogans change, the corpses change, but the mechanism is the same: someone kills, someone justifies, someone applauds, and everyone sleeps peacefully.

Here, the colony thrives. There were times when they wore Che Guevara t-shirts and revolutionary berets. These days, they appear—women in marrafa, men in dreadlocks or hoods—shouting "frifripalestine ," bathing monthly, and wearing kufyas around their necks and iPhones in their hands, the twin symbols of their moral "coherence."

Basically, they're easy to recognize: they always appear in groups when there's a murderer to justify and an innocent person to blame. The difference between Lenin's useful idiot and today's is merely technological. The former used posters, the latter uses selfies and hashtags . But both serve the same purpose: to give stupidity a respectable air.

When it's all over, when the horrors they defend come knocking on their door, they'll swear they didn't know. And, like those of 1917, they'll be remembered not for the evil they fought, but for the evil they helped grow.