Epistemophilia: useful idiots and a buggering Amis

I listened to Part II of a BBC documentary on useful idiots, which is what Lenin supposedly called people in the West who unquestioningly supported his regime and parroted his propaganda. Part II dealt with more recent examples of the phenomenon. People in the British and US governments upheld the Pinochet regime in Chile and apartheid in South Africa because they were supposed bastions of anti-communism. They also interviewed a journalist who had written about China under Mao. He said anyone who lived in Hong Kong during the early 1960's would have known how severe the famine caused by Mao was because bodies would regularly float downstream to Hong Kong. He said that he and select other journalists were invited to tour China during the Cultural Revolution and were taken to schools and shown smiling children in classrooms. The only problem was there WERE no children going to school during this period in China. He reminded himself then of the bodies in Hong Kong. He said Mao probably killed or directly caused the deaths of 40 million people. That defies imagination. Who could top that number? Stalin, maybe?

They also interviewed some journalists from Focus, an Iranian English language news agency. They had until recently been given free reign but during the elections last year, the government cracked down on what and how they could report. One reporter quit and then during the protests he called his old office and asked if they were covering the protests. For that, he was sentenced to 117 days in prison. Over 100 of those were spent in solitary. He was subjected to torture and was forced to apologize to the Supreme Leader. While he was there, he was interviewed by a reporter from Focus. The BBC reporter was clearly offended by the notion of a journalist interviewing another journalist in a prison where they were being tortured and not reporting it.

I wonder was there any real value we gained by supporting Chile and South Africa. The Soviets were a general threat to us (and the rest of the world) certainly-we're only now learning how close we came to war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It's easy to look back and blame but I wonder if there was any genuine good that came out of turning a blind eye to a bad thing or was this just more venal stupidity bereft of benefit like the McCarthy hearings? Then again, look at that story about Iran again. Democratic values are useless if they are only sustained by supporting bullshit like that. You end up like the deluded Richard Nixon, criticizing Carter's treatment of the Shah who had been a "real friend" to the US. A real friend to us he may have been but to his own people, not so much. And look how much both the US and Iran has suffered because of our support for him.

It's so hard to get to the real truth of world issues. Science is much easier. Sometimes. I guess the question of whether a Goldilocks planet was really found orbiting Gliese 581g continues and will for some time as more data is analyzed.

Speaking of Stalin, here's a happier story from the BBC about Russia's women fighter pilots during WWII. The Germans called them night witches and spread rumors that they had been injected with some drug that allowed them to see better at night. One German pilot who was shot down by one supposedly refused to fly again when he found out a woman had shot him down. 


On The Guardian Books, they discussed authors who make appearances in their own works. Examples were Milan Kundera, Will Self and Martin Amis. The last one was funny because Kingsley Amis said this was a way of "buggering the audience." I knew vaguely that Kingsley was critical of Martin's work but some didn't realize the extent of it till I googled. The quote is funny but really, poor Martin.