WSJ hit on Menchu

Louis Proyect lnp3 at panix.com
Mon Dec 28 08:13:19 PST 1998


At 10:48 AM 12/28/98 -0500, you wrote:
>The latest hit on Rigoberta Menchu comes from that notorious bastion of
>truth-telling, the Wall Street Journal editorial page. This screed's
>ingenious innovation: her "lies" might provide a pretext for violence!
>Anyone know who this Schwartz character is, and what the source of his
>expertise on "the Hispanic world" is?
>
>Doug

Schwartz is a professional anti-Communist. He wrote a book on the Spanish Civil War, but his most recent effort is "From West to East : California and the Making of the American Mind." You can get an idea of where he is coming from in these review excerpts from amazon.com.

The New York Times Book Review, Harold Meyerson Schwartz wants to demonstrate the moral and esthetic toll Stalinism took on the California left, and to resurrect the reputations of artists, intellectuals and unionists who were too democratic, bohemian or just plain ornery to toe the party line. Unfortunately, From West to East attempts to do a good deal more than that, and ends up doing a good deal less.... Schwartz forfeits his credibility in repeated bursts of rage, at Communists and their real and imagined allies, that push him into ludicrous speculation.

The Wall Street Journal, Donald Lyons Treating general strikes and surrealist poetics with equal fervor, Mr. Schwartz has sung a song of San Franciscan idealism--anarchistic, venturesome, tolerant, wacky, and, above all, free. If he is sometimes too uncritical of the local vintages of radicalism, he is never unvigilant when it comes to their mortal enemies: once, unfeeling expansionism and industrialism; more recently, enslaving communism.

Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)



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