Doug Henwood 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
>
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> WALL STREET JOURNAL - December 28, 1998
>
> Commentary
>
> A Nobel Prize for Lying
> By Stephen Schwartz, who writes frequently on politics and culture in the
> Hispanic world.
>
> Rigoberta Menchú, 1992 Nobel Laureate for Peace and a world-famous advocate
> for the rights of Central American Indians, has been exposed as a liar in
> her 1983 book, "I, Rigoberta Menchú."
>
> Since its publication, Ms. Menchú's "autobiography" has been accorded such
> acclaim that it appears in the literature, political science and
> anthropology curricula of many U.S. universities. Ms. Menchú's story has
> also inspired at least four children's books, in which she is presented as
> a role model.
>
> The hoax was laid bare by David Stoll, an anthropologist and expert on
> Mayan Indian culture. In a new book, "Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All
> Poor Guatemalans," Mr. Stoll shows that while Ms. Menchú described herself
> as a child agricultural laborer who couldn't speak or write Spanish until
> adulthood, she actually attended two private Catholic boarding schools.
> Whereas she claimed her family had been dispossessed from its land by white
> oppressors, the property was actually lost in a quarrel with her father's
> Indian in-laws. A younger brother who died of starvation was imaginary, as
> was the burning alive of another brother at the hands of the Guatemalan
> military.
Even so, people were burned alive and worse by the Guate. military. People did and do die of starvation in Guatemala. Close to 90% of the population live on or below the World Bank defined poverty line. Even if these things did not happen to her, Menchu gets the point across. She did win a Nobel prize. Presumably, the Nobel committee did some fact-checking. The Nobel prize was awarded to Begin and Kissinger so I wouldn't place much faith in the fact checkers at Nobel inc.
>
>
> Mr. Stoll's book has received wide attention, including front-page coverage
> in the New York Times. Yet the fakery involved in Ms. Menchú's book is, for
> some, old news. In "Illiberal Education," published in 1991, Dinesh D'Souza
> argued that the vocabulary of the volume was not that of Ms. Menchú
> herself, but rather represented the feminist and ultraleftist fantasies of
> her ghostwriter, Elisabeth Burgos-Debray. Ms. Debray is the ex-wife of
> Regis Debray, groupie of Che Guevara and one of France's most notorious
> left-wing intellectual tourists.
So what? Does D'Souza speak Quiche? Menchu's account reflects her class outlook and her experiencesas a Guatemalen campesino fighting for social change. It has nothing to do with anyones fantasies. If her account resembles Marxism it is because Marxism is true, not because Menchu wants to make Guatemalen reality fit some preconceived theory.
>
>
> Still, it took most of the world seven years to learn the truth, and even
> with the imposture out in the open (Ms. Menchú herself has not disputed Mr.
> Stoll's allegations, except to tag her critics as "racist"), some of her
> advocates are anxious to give her a break. Her promoters view her tale as a
> morality play about the genocide of indigenous peoples at the hands of
> white invaders. They take the position that the "higher truths" they
> believe in are ultimately more important than the facts.
Who is they? An example would be nice.
> In an editorial on
> Thursday, the New York Times explained that Ms. Menchú's lies were
> ultimately of small account next to the "criminal oppression of indigenous
> peoples in Guatemala." Geir Lundestad of the Norwegian Nobel committee also
> dismissed the story, stating that "all autobiographies embellish to a
> greater or lesser extent."
>
> Yet the hypocrisy of Ms. Menchú's liberal apologists goes far beyond a
> willingness to overlook her mendacity. They also overlook the substance of
> her politics. Miss Menchú was a functioning leader of the URNG, the Marxist
> guerrilla movement that wreaked havoc on Guatemala for decades.
False. Menchu was never a member of the URNG. She criticized the Peace agreement because it gave full amnesty to those who committed genocide against her people.What she meant by victory was that the people who committed these crimes be brought to justice. By the conservative Arzu administration's own count, the military and paramilitaries were responsible for 99% of the murders and physical damage to infrastructure in Guatemala.
>From "Interview with Rigoberta Menchu Tum" NACLA 6-1996 p 8.
Q: Do you no longer consider yourself part of the left?
RM: It's that I don't know what is meant by "left". For me, for a long time
those old labels have been problematic, not only in Guatemala but throughout
the world. I greatly respect the work done by the popular organizations the
trade unions etc. but i don't put a label on them. I understand what is meant
by political opposition, but of the left or the right. I consider myself part
of the opposition, an opposition that has a role to play in proposing
alternatives.
Hardly a Maoist in the mist. Further, the URNG is not an ultraleft organization
from "An Interview With Comandante Pancho" in _Report on Guatemala_ Sum.'96 p 2. "At the time[1972] when you joined up what you read was Lenin and Mao at best; if not, there was those awful Soviet Marxism manuels. The problem was that inaddition to reading Marxist texts, I was also interested in other thinkers like Kerouac, Camus and Hesse. So I was criticized for not having a "defined" analysis. They said my thinking was vague, that I seemed like a youth from France with intellectual questions from France rather than from Guatemala. This freedom in my intellectual education was useful later because from teh beginning I avoided developing a dogmatic ideological position like those who tried to explain the world with the 2 or 3 manuals they had.....The principal objectives of the accord are,first, to improve the efficiency of production ,and second, to improve the distribution of that productivity...What we achieved through military force in the past we will have to gain through the strength of popular organizing and mobilization...I think that to go completely in the other direction and pull our small national economies out of the world economic dynamic would be a mistake. Because that would be an attempt to isolate them and submit them to anachronistic and medievil forms of production. That wouldn't benefit anyone right? I think its important to learn how to enter into these international economic mechanisms,but, as a number one priority, to aim for the good of the people and the workers."
> Insisting
> on a policy of unconditional victory, she declined to enter peace
> negotiations, even after she had received her peace prize (which she
> celebrated as a house guest of former Sandinista secret-police boss Tomas
> Borge).
>
Borge is no radical. Read his memoirs.
> To be sure, Ms. Menchú's is not the only recent case of the counterfeiting
> of memoirs. A similar controversy recently erupted about an alleged memoir
> of the Holocaust, "Fragments," by Binjamin Wilkomirski. Like Ms. Menchú,
> Mr. Wilkomirski reputedly fabricated details of his life, turning himself
> from the illegitimate child of a Swiss Protestant woman into a Jewish
> native of Latvia, and claiming to have witnessed various atrocities.
>
> But such other cases lack the most troubling feature of Ms. Menchú's
> misadventure: the deliberate use of lies to advance the agenda of the
> militant left. The worst aspect of such deception is that it obscures the
> real history of societies like Guatemala.
What is the real history of Guatemala Mr. Schwartz? What are your sources?
>From William Blum _Killing Hope p 233.
" ..journalists, lawyers, students, teachers, trade unionists, members of
opposition parties, anyone who helped or expressed sympathy for the rebel cause
anyone with a vaguely leftist political association or a moderate criticism of
government policy ...relatives of the victims, guilty of kinship..common
criminals , eliminated to purify society, taken from jails and shot. Men found
with their eyes gouged out, their testicles in their mouth, without hands or
tongues, women with their breasts cut off..."
Sounds a bit more serious than a "squalid family dispute".
> The transformation of a squalid
> dispute between family members over a parcel of land into a drama of
> indigenous victims and evil invaders involves much more than the benign
> recycling of apocrypha into slogans. Instead, it feeds dangerous illusions
> and creates easy pretexts for violence.
Fascist dictatorships create easy pretexts for violence too. People rebel violently because of social conditions not because they have read this or that in someone's memoirs.
>
>
> Of course, the aspect of the Menchú controversy most relevant for Americans
> is the continued use of her book in schools. Exposed as chicanery, will it
> now be withdrawn from required reading lists? Probably not. Seated
> comfortably as they are, on U.S. university campuses and the boards of
> Scandinavian academies, Ms. Menchú's acolytes aren't likely to hold
> themselves accountable for their complicity in her deceit.
Howard Zinn and Harold ? (Lies My Teachers Told Me) as well as many others have exposed the standard history books used in American schools as chicanery and as fraudulent. Will they be withdrawn? Probably not. Mr Schwartz's accolytes are seated in the DPt of Education and school boards across the country.
SP
>
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