Wednesday, August 22, 2012

On Nial Ferguson

Rob sent me this:  "Hey As`ad,
Nothing to point to in this missive, just an observation. While I'm pleased that the Salon link you provided about Ferguson led me to the LRB piece by Pankaj Mishra on the odiousness and dishonesty of Ferguson, which was very good, I have to say that I'm rather grossed out by all the liberal outrage about Ferguson now. As Mishra demonstrates handily (and as I've also known for many years), this guy was spewing various forms of cultural, civilizational, imperial, racial supremacy for years and years and years and the wise men of Salon and the rest of the liberal press largely let him and his NYT best-seller status be, and sometimes even mentioned him approvingly (although I have no citations, so don't quote me on that, and I certainly can't say that Pareene himself did). Now, however, he attacks the man at the current head of the empire, and the liberal commentariat gets upset about his shoddy and disingenuous scholarship, while still leaving largely unscathed his apologias for empire beyond, in Salon's Pareene's case, a link. Cry me a river!"