E
EmptyTimCup
Guest
Bamboozled: Two Recent Biographies Shed New Light on Liberal Icons
Why are we startled to learn the real truth about Gandhi and Malcolm X? Because journalists are remarkably adept at seeing only what they want to see when a liberal dreamboat comes floating along on a river of lies.
Did you hear that ripping sound? Two liberal icons known by their silly stage names — Mahatma Gandhi and Malcolm X — have just been torn down from their sanctified perches thanks to a pair of massively researched but finally damning new biographies.
Both men, it turns out, were at pains to take on phony identities. Each hid his homosexuality, each was racist, each took pains to manufacture favorable coverage, each was driven by petty hatreds instead of shining ideals — each of these supposedly principled figures was an out-and-out phony.
Perhaps the most delicious irony of this myth-busting is that writers with impeccable liberal credentials are the ones who are doing the exposing — and implicitly rebuking the generations of journalists who actively participated in the distortion and exaggeration.
Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, by the Columbia scholar Manning Marable, who died just as the book was being sent to stores, shows us a “profoundly flawed individual,” Princeton professor of African-American studies Melissa Harris-Parry told NPR, which called the book “an abrupt departure from ‘heroic’ and ‘perfected’ visions of the African-American minister that were set in motion by The Autobiography of Malcolm X and perpetuated in American popular culture.”
That “autobiography,” as David Remnick makes clear in a review in The New Yorker, consisted in large part of Malcolm Little making up tall tales about his life while being egged on by the sensationalist writer Alex Haley, whose later book Roots would also turn out to be mostly fictitious (and partly plagiarized). Haley, says Marable, wanted to write “a potboiler that would sell,” facts be damned.
<snip>
Mohandas Gandhi also successfully hid his homosexuality — his biographer Joseph Lelyveld, former editor of The New York Times, writes in his admiring new book Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India that the Indian leader dumped his wife to have an affair with a German bodybuilder, Hermann Kallenbach. “How completely you have taken possession of my body,” he wrote to Kallenbach. Gandhi even said that Vaseline was “a constant reminder” of his boyfriend.
If Gandhi was not a rabid anti-Semite like Malcolm, his beliefs in regard to Jews are nonetheless reprehensible. He addressed Hitler as “my friend” in a letter and urged that the Jews pursue nonviolent resistance to the Nazis. He also advised the Jews of Palestine to “rely on the goodwill of the Arabs” and wait for a Jewish state “till Arab opinion is ripe for it.”