Talk:Fellow traveler

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In addition to the stub article, I would further categorise a fellow traveller as someone who ignores particular policies of a given political entity, precisely because it backs up other shared policies deemed more important in the immediate political debate.

Take, for example, the UK pressure group "the countryside alliance." The alliance is/was a mix-match of dozens of groups, many with central tenets in direct opposition to each other but focussed on on one principal cause, ie the disenfranchisement of the rural population by governmental legislation. In other words, each group in the alliance was fellow travelling with each other over the one issue.

Take further the extreme left's support of the Iraqi "insurgency" and refusal to acknowledge its constituency of baathists and islamists. The anti-imperialist agenda is viewed as more important than traditional socialist values such as solidarity and anti-fascism, hence the "fellow travelling."

[edit] Sputnik?

To what degree does the term "fellow traveller" (in reference to Russian-backed communism) owe much of its Cold War usage to Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, launched by Russians in 1957 and upstaging America? The "Sputnik" name is Russian for "fellow traveller" IIRC, and the term kept turning up in the McCarthy witchhunt of the era to refer to (alleged) Russian-communist sympathisers? --carlb 04:22, 30 March 2006 (UTC)