Janan Ganesh - Maybe had one too many MJ candies before scribbling his FT piece?
Financial Times political columnist Janan Ganesh has often sought to be provocative in his various opinions, and in most cases met at least minimal standards of rationality and attention to reality. But in his latest column ('Liberals Can Be Cult Members Too') he appears to have lost all sense of proportion, reason and even common sense. Why else try to analogize liberals as "cult members" like Trump followers and QAnon? Ganesh writes of the global left:
"I was going to say that I have never encountered anything quite like the worldwide cult of Jacinda Ardern. But then of course I have. Justin Trudeau once inspired a similar reverence: intense, global, vague. Those who saluted him from other continents might have been apprised of his administrative performance, but you will excuse me if I suspect not. It was enough that he was a telegenic francophone with progressive instincts and vulgar enemies. It was enough that he was who he was."
But he seems unable to process that a "reverence" or adulation for a political personality - even a kind of benign hero worship- is not the same as being a member of a genuine cult- even a personality cult. Certainly not like the Trump personality cult exposed by Jeff Sharlet in Vanity Fair ('He's The Chosen One To Run America: Inside The Cult of Trump, His Rallies Are Church And He Is The Gospel'), e.g.
Or QAnon - which is defined by members who fully believe Democrats are part of a powerful global elite of pedophiles who are also Satanists - engaged in drinking the blood of children- oh, and out to undermine Trump. Evidently 2 in 5 Republican voters believe this tommyrot.
By contrast, NO one on the Left who idolizes Ms. Ardern believes her opponents are cannibalizing kids or sacrificing them to Satan. Neither do Justin Trudeau's fans. They are, in other words, simply political fans or eager followers, not the malignant vermin who comprise QAnon. The other mental misfire of Ganesh is evident in his next paragraph:
"The idea has taken hold in recent years that only conservatives fall for thoughtless personality cults. Donald Trump and Boris Johnson appeal to the tribal id of their fans, it is said, while liberals reason their way into their politics. The rightwing leader can call on absolute fealty. The liberal one is there on provisional sufferance, subject to ongoing review by the Humean empiricists of their flock."
Ganesh again conflates malignant cults like Trump's or QAnon with benign personality "cults" - which are actually more informal groups of enthusiastic followers. Failure to make this critical distinction leads Ganesh into the rabbit hole where those who like or laud Jacinda Ardern or Obama are no different from those who are in thrall to Trump - even depicting him as a literal "Savior". This is a failure of mental comparison and also critical thinking -leading to the egregious false equivalence so prevalent in much of today's mainstream media. It is also a major mental misfire in being unable to isolate the malignant threat posed by the likes of QAnon - exposed by Ganesh's FT colleague Edward Luce e.g.
Compared to the benign liberal followers of Ardern, or Obama - who have no terrorist axes to grind, or dark conspiratorial ideations to harbor. Ganesh goes on to whine that it is a "mistake to see this as a peculiarly rightwing tic" when it permeates the liberal political tribe as with its adoration of "Jed Bartlett" the president in The West Wing "syrupy" TV series. But again, he mixes apples and oranges. For one thing Jed Bartlett is a fictional character, not real. So any "TV adoration" bears no resemblance to that for Trump for the simple reason a fictional president doesn't have access to nuclear codes, or a bully pulpit to call his dregs into service ("Stand down and stand by!")
Also, no one is condemning the Right's minions, say if they simply demonstrate a benign hero worship for Reagan. What we are trying to drill into Ganesh's hard head is there is a difference when the Right's affections veer from mere innocent personality adulation to embrace of QAnon- where the "glorious leader" (Trump) is seen as the only one to halt the Dems' pedophilia and Satanic sacrifices of children - and drinking their blood.
Clearly, Ganesh has not read Jeff Sharlet's expose of the pathologial cult of Trumpism in Vanity Fair. As when Sharlet notes:
"Many followers deploy a familiar Christian-right formula for justifying abuses of power, declaring Trump a modern King David, a sinner nonetheless anointed, while others compare him to Queen Esther, destined to save Israel—or at least the evangelical imagination of it—from Iran. Still others draw parallels to Cyrus, the Old Testament Persian king who became a tool for God’s will. ...Lance Wallnau, a founding member of Trump’s evangelical coalition, dubs him “God’s chaos candidate”: “the self-made man who can ‘get it done,’ enters the arena, and through the pressure of circumstance becomes the God-shaped man God enables to do what he could never do in his own strength.”
And even more nutso:
"In Trump’s case, divine backing is more about smiting than healing. When Rep. Elijah Cummings died last October shortly after sparring with Trump about Baltimore, Peterson declared on his radio show, “He dead”—like Trump enemies John McCain and Charles Krauthammer, Peterson noted. “That’s what happens when you mess with the Great White Hope. Don’t mess with God’s children.”
Carrying the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy to a preposterous excess. I.e. whatever follows x, y or z event was caused by x, y or z event. But this is all of a piece with the con Jim Jones also pulled on his followers in Guyana making them believe he could smite any foe who dared try to bring his kingdom down. (Including killing CA Rep. Leo Ryan in an ambush when he tried to help several followers escape.) According to one member (Walt Jones) quoted in the book, 'The Suicide Cult' (p. 69), what most held members in line was that:
"Jones was a master manipulator"
Much like Trump, he promised his followers the Earth, Moon and sky if they'd just believe and follow him, into hell as it turned out. By drinking kool aid laced with cyanide - this after a California congressman (Leo Ryan) tried to rescue several.
These mental misfires, forced mental errors and missteps about left and right "cults" would be bad enough but Ganesh also shows he knows next to nothing of American political - presidential history, writing:
"Readers of a certain age will have lived through the near-canonisation of John F Kennedy, owner of the highest hype-to-achievement ratio of any public figure, at least until historians started to bring his standing down to earth."
That such ignorant balderdash could find its way into an esteemed journal like the FT is incredible enough. That it is so indiscriminately spouted by one of their own in -house columnists is enough to demolish one's confidence that there is sufficient fact checking. For starters, perhaps Ganesh never learned that by October, 1962 - barely 20 months into his presidency - JFK ALREADY had effectively done more than any ten presidents combined by making critical decisions that avoided a nuclear war. This was in conjunction with the Cuban Missile crisis. Because, had Kennedy not used his brain and resisted the Joint Chiefs (particularly Gen. Curtis LeMay) , none of those other presidents would have been around to even be elected! Nor would Ganesh be around to scribble his codswallop.
The details may be found in: 'The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis’, by Ernest R. May and Philip K. Zelikow (1997, President and Fellows of Harvard College). Therein, on p. 347, for ’10:00 A.M. Oct. 24” we read:
"At the same time the quarantine became effective, the Strategic Air Command moved from the general Defense Condition 3 to Defense Condition 2, the level just below general war. In addition to ICBMs and submarine-based ballistic missiles, every available bomber – more than 1,400 aircraft- went on alert. Scores of bombers, each loaded with several nuclear weapons and carrying folders for pre-assigned targets in the Soviet Union, were kept continuously in the air around the clock with shifts- refueled by aerial tankers, taking turns hovering over Northern Canada and the Mediterranean Sea. The Soviet government was presumed to be aware of these developments.”
The Joint Chiefs wanted Kennedy to bomb Cuba and invade it ('Bomb Cuba! Le May Urged JFK', The Baltimore Sun, Oct. 26, 1996, p. 2A) , and we only learned many years later (after JFK former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara visited the island 30 years later) that Castro had ready 93 IRBMs (each bearing a single megaton warhead) - that would have been launched had JFK succumbed to the JCS demands. That launching, aimed at U.S. cities on the east coast, would have triggered a U.S. retaliation then a full Soviet counter strike.
But perhaps the courage and critical decision -making of JFK - to avert that nuclear holocaust- counts for nothing in Ganesh's brain, because well "if things don't happen they don't matter". But for those of us who lived in Miami at the time, barely 90 miles from Cuba, it mattered a hell of a lot. Anyway, this example alone skewers the claptrap that JFK had "the highest hype-to-achievement ratio of any public figure". But if Ganesh's memory is really that bad, we might remind him here of the following Kennedy achievements his education overlooked:
1) He first proposed old age medical care operating under Social Security (MEDICARE) (After Kennedy's assassination, LBJ was left to implement the vision and template JFK conceived.)
2) JFK in his 1961 Inaugural made the original call to service ('Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country') which led to the founding of the Peace Corps (in which I also served) More than 250,000 Americans have served in over 57 nations. What other president has done anything comparable, to constructively advance American values without bloodshed?
3) JFK confronted price gouging by U.S. Steel by threatening them with no defense contracts if they went through with it. Had he not done so, the economy would have been wrecked. As it was the company backed down but never forgave JFK.
4) JFK established and promoted the "Alliance for Progress' to enable low-interest loans for Latin American American nations, thereby outraging the 'Street" and the other capitalist bastions of thought (e.g. FORBES) which believed this to be a "giveaway" to the third world.
5) In August, 1963 he outraged the extreme right fringe by signing the Nuclear test Ban Treaty with Nikita Krushchev. (They were particularly enraged at the ban on anti-missile systems) The Treaty stopped the regular atmospheric testing of multi-megaton bombs which had been delivering enormous amounts of Sr-90 for years.
6) In the fall of 1963, JFK took the bold initiative to federalize the Alabama national guard, to protect black students trying to attend academic institutions, thereby enabling integration.
7) JFK provided the initiative, vision and basis for the Apollo Moon Program, which energy not only drove the U.S. to achieve a lunar landing by 1969, but also revved up our academic system to retool to enable math and physics to be taught on scales hitherto unseen. We became a nation able to compete with the Soviets, instead of a nation left in their dust.
No similar vision has been proposed, for such a mammoth project that engaged the imagination of the country, before or since.
One hopes that in any future columns Janan Ganesh corrects his errors of fact as well as logic, but that may well be too much to expect.
See Also:
AND:
by David Atkins | October 26, 2020 - 7:44am | permalink
No comments:
Post a Comment