>By the way, my own position on this book is different than Robin
>Blackburn's
I'm glad to hear it. Blackburn's position, argued somewhere else on this list is unsustainable. You are right to say that
>While it is absolutely scandalous that Menchu and Elizabeth Burgos, who
>collaborated with her, would make things up,
No good cause needs lies to sustain it. Nothing ought to be taboo in the search for the truth. Nor is the argument that intermediate lies support a 'higher truth' sustainable.
In particular the recourse to all that Wittgenstein and other philo - sophism bullshit only indicates that the defenders of the book are making it up as they go along. When someone starts saying 'it depends on what is is' you know they are talking through their ass, as you Americans would say.
But when Louis goes on to argue
>we have to be clear what the
>real agenda of people like Stoll and the US government is on this question.
>They want to whitewash the Guatemalan regime of Rios Montt, who killed more
>than 100,000 indigenous peoples in a bloodbath that lasted over years,
I'm prepared to believe that is Stoll's agenda, but it does not take away from the fact that the book was shored up with some lies. If Stoll discovered that it, does not make his discovery less true, because his ultimate goal is reprehensible.
I should have thought that the reprimand to us on the left is this: Why didn't we expose those inconsistencies? Why did we leave it up to this right-wing apologist to do the job?
I remember a time when you were not allowed to criticise the Soviet Union, or the Labour Party or the Trade Union leadership for fear of 'exposing division in our ranks'. That policy of silencing critical debate on the left reduced the left to a Stalinist rump, that used bureaucratic measures to supplement its dwindling authority.
I'm not interested in being told that you should not criticise people on the left. That kind of Stalinism just makes the left into a force for conservatism.
So when Louis says
>The murderers and land thieves are
>seeking desperately to tarnish the reputation of everybody involved in this
>struggle.
I say that it is better to come clean than get caught. And when Louis adds
>Our goal should be to hammer away at the bigger truth.
I say that there is never a need to tell small lies to support the bigger truth
> Whatever
>fictions may be present in "I Rigobertu Menchu", the larger fact is that
>our client state in Guatemala was guilty of genocide.
True enough, all the better reason why it is necessary not to score an own goal like this.
Louis asks
>Jim Heartfield's position
>as well, which is rather difficult to discern. He seems to be saying that
>Rigobertu Menchu is a "brown Marxist" like himself, while at the same time
>he seems to identify with the right-wing attack on her book, which is less
>about upholding historical accuracy than discrediting the Guerrilla Army of
>the Poor, a group which effectively combined Marxism and indigenism.
This is just the kind of stalinoid attack I'm talking about. If I say that I, Rigoberta Menchu has been exposed as being in part untrue, it does not follow that I 'identify with the right wing attack on her book'.
I was not surprised to hear that the book had been heavily embroidered. There was something about the Rigoberta Menchu road show over here that struck me as phony. It wasn't her account in particular, but the patronising way that she was adopted by the middle classes over here, as I illustrated. They were interested in her as long as they could present her as the innocent victim of repression and a child of nature. Their sympathy was pure exoticism, without any hint of real solidarity.
Once she revealed herself to be a leftist, with a programme and policies, they all recoiled in embarrassment.
You really ought to ask yourself, Louis, what the Nobel prize signified.
The Nobel has rarely gone to anyone but the allies of imperialism, or to those who are to be rewarded for laying down their arms. I struggle to think of a single genuine revolutionary who has been awarded the Nobel.
Isn't it truer to say that indigenism, once it is separated from its popular base, is readily reconcilable with middle class liberalism.
-- Jim heartfield