For starters, there must be a rule that we all set our Armageddon clock forward a minute or two when the Washington Post’s very own in-house communist-slayer reflects on the 90th anniversary of the Russian revolution from a celebrity perspective:
In honor of the anniversary, I reread " Ten Days That Shook the World," the famed account of the revolution by John Reed, the American journalist and fellow traveler. Then I reread last week's press reports of the recent encounter between Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan president, and Naomi Campbell, the British supermodel.Yeah, hi. Anne Applebaum has come to this. What bothers me isn’t so much that the comparison is off base. I mean nobody actually doubts that Venezuela’s political process has about as much in common with Bolshevik-era Russia as a long-dead revolutionary historian has with “British supermodel Naomi Campbell.” So kudos, Anne, for your PoMo “look at us; we are the art” funhouse mirror jab at the foreign policy reporting world or whatever the hell you were trying to do there.
No, dear readers, the problem is that Anne fucking Applebaum, who has published two books and seventeen kazillion columns this topic—her only topic—“the Soviet Union,” restates the myth that “useful idiot” was somehow coined, frequently stated, or even once uttered by Vlad Lenin. Which anyone with access to Google knows is bullshit. And she surely knows it and wrote it anyway. Which makes her a hack. Which is why I barely even read the paragraph that hilariously psychoanalyzes celebrities like Sean Penn or the one where she makes fun of all of us for thinking about the world from a non-Cold War prism because that’s what she studied. God she’s a twat.
