Criticism
Blogger Glenn Greenwald has taken Ledeen to task for what Greenwald calls his history of false statements and inaccurate predictions, calling him "one of the most dishonest and ludicrous jokes on the political scene."
Writing in The Nation, Jack Huberman, who describes Ledeen as "the most influential and unabashed warmonger of our time", attributes these quotes to Ledeen:
- "the level of casualties (in Iraq) is secondary"
- "we are a warlike people (Americans)...we love war"
- "Change—above all violent change—is the essence of human history"
- "the only way to achieve peace is through total war"
- "The purpose of total war is to permanently force your will onto another people"
- "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business"
According to Christopher de Bellaigue of the New York Review of Books, Ledeen has purveyed a "distorted analysis of events in Iran" to his readers, claiming, for example, in National Review online that there were `something like a half a million` Iranians demonstrating the death sentence of Hashem Aghajari on November 22, 2002 when in fact Bellaigue, in Iran on that date, observed only about 5000 students in the biggest demonstration.
Read more about this topic: Michael Ledeen
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher—a Roosevelt, a Tolstoy, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It’s the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“Parents sometimes feel that if they don’t criticize their child, their child will never learn. Criticism doesn’t make people want to change; it makes them defensive.”
—Laurence Steinberg (20th century)