A few days ago I posted a brief rebuttal to writer John Ganz, arguing that what he called “lies and idiocies that have been repeated since the start of the conflict” in Ukraine were in many cases neither lies nor idiocies.

John has posted a pretty funny response. Read it closely and you’ll notice that he doesn’t answer any of those specific objections. Instead, he simply leaps ahead to the conclusion I drew from all of those objections — that John hates anti-imperialists — and completely ignoring how I got there, pleads: “How could you say this?”

Where Beijer’s missive turns again from rebuttal into smear is…the conclusion that I “hate the anti-imperialist left.” What’s the purpose of this but to tag me as an enemy?

Since John thinks that “hate” is unfair — and since he spends much of this post complaining about my supposed “invective and name-calling,” my “insulting language,” and so on — recall his first post. The “lies and idiocies” he lists are really just the jumping-off point for an extended exercise in fake psychoanalysis of “the people who buy” such things; and all of that, of course, is just a flimsy pretext for constructing an elaborate insult.

Thus, simply because I argue that “war was inevitable, because it was provoked by the West,” John peers into my brain and discovers all kinds of things. Evidently, I see “Russia’s crude and cynical exercise of power…as a virtue”; I am afflicted with a “moronic cynicism that takes itself to be devilish cleverness”; I am “highly gullible”; I “treat both life and politics as an irresponsible flight from one pose to another”; I have a “need to find some take that appears oppositional and critical”; and so on.

This is not, again, a remotely plausible exercise in rigorous psychoanalysis; pseudoscientific mind-reading has just become the respectable mode of ridicule for a certain kind of intellectual. Even now he can’t resist speculating that my writing “sounds like the vitriol of wounded ego”; to this I can only respond that John’s inability to accept criticism is a clear failure to submit to the superego, which (as Freud teaches us) means that he has not successfully worked through his Oedipus complex. That’s definitely what’s going on.

One last point. John complains that I have criticized him for “openly admitting the limits of my knowledge,” but this is simply not true. The reason I call him a smug “I’m completely out of my field, but” liberal is that his humility is false. He makes this concession, and then in the very next post he is declaring towering figures like George Kennan “highly gullible” for his position on NATO expansion. He concedes that he is “not a scholar of any of the fields in question,” and then throws out little jabs about “the serious analyst that [Carl] supposedly is and I supposedly am not”. John, the next time I present at an ASEEES conference I’ll try to invite you, though I can’t promise they’ll let you in the door.

Reading it back that seems like too mean a note to conclude with, so I’ll just add that I think his writing on fascism is generally pretty good. I have a few quibbles, but this seems to be a field where he has a real academic background, so if I ever decide to lay them out I’ll treat him with the respect he’s earned.