You're not Ignorant, You're a Liar

I just finished reading the pages and pages of letters published by the NYRB regarding their recent piece by Jian Ghomeshi. And while it was refreshing to read many of these letters, because the vast majority of them were both powerful and deeply critical, I find myself somehow being angrier with the NYRB than I was beforehand.

While most of these letters were critical of the Ghomeshi piece and the NYRB's decision to run it, and often quite appropriately scathing in their condemnation, the NYRB peppered in supportive letters among the critical ones. And I found this in almost worse taste than I did the original publication of the Ghomeshi article, because it indicates that the NYRB still fails to understand the problem.

As many of their Canadian letter writers noted, the problem is not that an ambiguous figure was given a national platform to rehabilitate himself, it was that a figure so clearly and overwhelmingly guilty of heinous crimes was given a platform to lie about what he did. Consequently, to an American audience largely ignorant of Ghomeshi, his own narrative might come to appear as the truth. Or, at the very least, it might come to appear as one reasonable account of it, so that we can have "civil" arguments about the truth in good faith, with Ghomeshi representing one account and his victims representing another.

However, the problem is that there really isn't more than one account, and Ghomeshi's account isn't it. For many Canadians who took the time to follow the case, the evidence was so overwhelmingly stacked against Ghomeshi, that it was clear he was a sexually violent criminal with a long history of assault. And the only way you could come to a different account is through ignorance, be your ignorance the type of honest ignorance in which you simply don't know any better, or a more willful ignorance in which you don't want to know any better. But the facts were clear.

Yet, into the mix of largely condemnatory letters, the NYRB sprinkled in some letters that either praised Ghomeshi or else that praised the verdict, seeing the verdict as a vindication of Ghomeshi rather than as an indictment of the Canadian justice system. And whereas the critical letters almost unanimously demonstrated actual knowledge of the case, the letters praising Ghomeshi or the verdict came off as ignorant, albeit of the more honest variety. That is, the people writing these letters were clearly poorly informed about the actual facts.

I don't fault people in the general public for thinking well of Ghomeshi or of the verdict, because very few people take the time and the effort to really follow such matters. You might get a taste of it here and there, but life is busy, and who has time to follow the story of one lone Canadian celebrity? Which is to say, I don't fault the letter writers for their praise of Ghomeshi. However, I do fault the NYRB for printing them.

Perhaps Buruma really didn't know the facts of the case before he published Ghomeshi's article, even though, as an editor, he should have known them. As one of my favorite letter writers wrote to the NYRB: "You have e-mail, so I have to imagine you have access to the Internet and know how to use it. Next time some artsy sociopath looking to redeem himself pitches you an essay, spend half an hour on Google first."

But whoever decided to publish these letters would presumably have rectified this mistake of ignorance before deciding to proceed. That is, they would have googled some shit. If they did, then they would have known that publishing the letters praising Ghomeshi were not only in bad taste, but that they were downright wrong about the facts. And this would make their decision to publish them not the kind of innocent ignorance from which we all sometimes suffer, but a willful ignorance, because they knew what the truth was and yet decided to print letters that helped spread lies.

And this pisses me off to no end. As with Ghomeshi, they knew what they were doing. And what they were doing was lying.