Harriett Crosby: A Useful Idiot

Taken from;

http://originalvelvetrevolution.com/2012/06/11/harriett-crosby-a-useful-idiot/

Harriett Crosby: A Useful Idiot

June 11, 2012 by Z

From time to time we will write about “Useful Idiots”.

The phrase Useful Idiot dates to the Cold War, when it was used to describe westerners who acted as Soviet propagandists, never understanding the true nature of the totalitarian genocide state they supported. The Idiot is Useful because he takes advantage of his rights to free speech and association to praise a system that utterly denies such rights to its own citizens. He is an Idiot because he believes he is Doing Good as he tells the world that Stalin is a Man of Peace.

Useful Idiocy didn’t end with the demise of the Soviet Union: Thomas Friedman is a most Useful Idiot indeed for the People’s Republic of China. Among the most prominent Useful Idiots back in the day were Walter Duranty of the New York Times, assuming Duranty wasn’t simply a Soviet agent, George Bernard Shaw, who encouraged naive Americans looking for work to emigrate to the Soviet Union, and industrialist Armand Hammer, who praised Felix Dzerzhinsky’s use of bullets as a negotiating tool in talks with striking Soviet railworkers.

This site was created, in part, to call attention to convicted terrorist bomber Brett Kimberlin’s misappropriation of the term “Velvet Revolution” (originally coined to describe the largely peaceful anti-Communist uprisings of 1989) to describe his “network of more than 100 progressive organizations reaching millions of people demanding progressive change through our various campaigns”.  Where the original Velvet Revolution was inspired by peaceful dissidents, Kimberlin’s Velvet Revolution is run by a bomber, a perjurer, and a serial vexatious litigant.  Where the original Velvet Revolution was an uprising from below, Kimberlin’s Velvet Revolution is funded by a very rich Useful Idiot.

Harriett Crosby, Useful Idiot

That Useful Idiot is Harriett Crosby.  Harriett Crosby is Brett Kimberlin’s aunt.  Harriett Crosby, through her tax-exempt Threshold Foundation, provided seed money of $60,000 to found Kimberlin’s Velvet Revolution.  Crosby has been quite active in Kimberlin’s Velvet Revolution through the years, trumpeting the Kimberlin Velvet Revolution’s allegations that the 2004 American Presidential election was “stolen” through electronic ballot manipulation, and claiming that Kimberlin’s Velvet Revolution somehow “deterred” Karl Rove from stealing the 2008 election for John McCain.

As if.

Of course, that Harriett Crosby is an indulgent aunt, funding her wayward nephew’s misadventures in conspiracy theory and lawfare to keep him from setting off more bombs, does not make her a Useful Idiot.  No, Harriett Crosby is a Useful Idiot from way back, the founder and primary funder of something that called itself the Institute for Soviet American Relations, later the Institute for Social Action and Renewal in Eurasia.

Today all that’s left the Institute for Soviet American Relations is a website domain that can be bought for “any reasonable offer”.  Back in the dark days of 1983, however, when the Soviet Union was run by former KGB chairman Yuri Andropov, Crosby and her pals conceived of ISAR as a means to promote friendship and cultural exchange between America and the people who brought us the Soviet Afghan War, imprisonment in mental institutions for the disease of criticizing government, and house arrest for those too famousto be shipped to Siberia.

All this took place well before Gorbachev,  гласность, and  перестройка. The Soviet Union with which Crosby sought accommodation and understanding was the old Brezhnev regime, with a fresh corpse atop the edifice, and thousands of corpses beneath.

Harriett Crosby was, and remains,  a classic Useful Idiot.