Tuesday, May 18, 2021

"Death From Above": Malcolm Gladwell Is A Murderous
War Crime-Endorsing Chump

Stop lying & omitting facts, Gladwell, you sack of Canadian crap.
... sly maliciousness and explosive vacuity: the two primary qualities of Gladwell’s oeuvre.
[...]
A skeptical reader may wonder: Why would Malcolm Gladwell, who seems to admire LeMay so much, talk at such great length about the lethality of LeMay’s Japanese firebombing? The answer lies in what this story leaves out. Mentioned only glancingly in Gladwell’s story are the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. The omission allows for a stupid and classically Gladwell argument: that indiscriminate firebombing brought a swift end to the war, and its attendant philosophical innovations continue to envelop us in a blanket of security that has not been adequately appreciated.
[...]
In 1968, he [Lemay] would join forces with segregationist George Wallace as the vice-presidential candidate on his “American Independent Party” ticket, a fact literally relegated to a footnote in Gladwell’s book. This kind of omission is par for the course in The Bomber Mafia. While Gladwell constantly reminds the reader that the air force leadership was trying to wage more effective wars so as to end all wars, he cannot help but shove under the rug that which is inconvenient.
[The Baffler]

1 comment:

Al said...

Curtis LeMay is smiling in glee from the depths of hell because the Israelis are bombing the shit out of Gaza using US made F-14s and F-16s dropping US made JADAMs.