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'Nobel' lies on campus
'Nobel' lies on campus
Apr 21, 2006
by Nathanael Blake
Rigoberta Menchu Tum was awarded the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize “in recognition of her work for social justice and ethno-cultural reconciliation based on respect for the rights of indigenous peoples.” She is also guilty of a literary fraud that would get her expelled from OSU for academic dishonesty if she were a student. Or perhaps not – she’s going to be an honored speaker on campus this weekend.
Born in 1959 in a poor village of Guatemalan peasants, Rigoberta lost several family members, including her parents and a brother, in a civil war that raged for decades. Having become a radical opponent of the government, she left for Mexico in 1980, and quickly became assimilated into Marxist circles. In 1982, living in Paris, she dictated her story to Marxist scholar Elisabeth Burgos-Debray; the resulting book, I, Rigoberta Menchu, has been assigned reading in thousands of college courses, and Rigoberta has been the subject of thousands of theses.
So ubiquitous is she in academic circles that Dinesh D’Souza’s 1991 Illiberal Education used her popularity as the symbol for the replacement of great classical works with mediocre multicultural education. “Rigoberta’s peasant radicalism provides independent Third World corroboration of Western progressive ideologies. Thus she is really a mouthpiece for a sophisticated left-wing critique of Western society,” and her book, “represents not the zenith of Third World achievements, but rather caters to the ideological proclivities of American activists.”
Such criticisms were for naught; Rigoberta won the Nobel the next year, with D’Souza ruefully remarking, “All I can say is that I am relieved she didn’t win for literature.” As it turns out, that might have been more appropriate. In the late 1990’s, the story that informed Rigoberta’s secular sainthood came apart. Anthropologist David Stoll, in research confirmed by the New York Times, revealed that she had been lying all along. She wasn’t illiterate, but had been educated in a prestigious Catholic boarding school. The land dispute central to formulating her Marxism beliefs didn’t pit her family against wealthy landowners, but against their own relatives. Her brother Nicolas didn’t die of starvation, but was alive and well in Guatemala.
But she retains much of her popularity. Her book is still assigned in classes, and she’s still welcome to speak at universities, including my own. Dan Flynn comments, “Her supporters find virtue in her mendacity because her falsehoods supposedly served a good cause.” But that’s only part of the justification. Rigoberta’s defenders haven’t just argued that her lies are noble (or Nobel, as the case may be), but that impugning her honesty is racist and ethnocentric. And those, as every college freshman (freshwoman, freshperson?) has learned, are very bad things indeed.
We are instructed that imposing the standards of historical accuracy that dead white male scholarship has created upon an indigenous woman of color is oppressive. She is to be allowed to appropriate the experiences of others as her own, and fabricate ones that never happened. According to this philosophy, the ideal of seeking objective historical truth isn’t an imperative for all of humanity that happened to reach its apogee in Western culture, but just one of many valid perspectives.
This relativism is very convenient for destroying any views its adherents oppose, and for insulating themselves from criticism. It also provides a sort of ideological coherence with its Marxism a la Marcuse, expanding class struggle beyond economics to include everything from race to sexuality, and thereby forms the basis for identity politics. Marxism as an economic policy is dead; Marxism as a social philosophy has never been more popular.
Its enemy is Western civilization, generally described as a hierarchical, heterosexual, white, Christian, patriarchal, capitalistic system of oppression. This allows groups that ought to be at each others throats (i.e. Muslims and feminists) to collaborate, because they’re both trying to destroy the same thing.
It also allows for a swift silencing of dissent. Anyone who opposes this neo-Marxism is easily dismissed if they don’t belong to the proper victim group, because they cannot possibly understand the issues. Their lot is to renounce the “oppressive” systems that have nurtured them, hence the spectacle of white liberals falling over themselves to denounce their own inherent racism. Furthermore, the Marxist doctrine of false consciousness provides a means for dismissing those such as Clarence Thomas, Condoleezza Rice, and Thomas Sowell who fail to conform to progressive ideas of what a minority member should think.
In short, playing identity politics has won many hands for the left. But it also annihilates what was formerly one of their great aspirations. Fraternity is dead. When truth is considered relative to our group classification, a brotherhood of man is impossible. Leszek Kolakowski observed that “all values and rights, in Marxist terms, are nothing but the temporary products of particular relationships of productions, nothing but the opinions that particular classes use to express their vested interests, to give them an illusory ideological shape.”
In the classical Marxist scheme, there was hope for eventual comity when economic class was abolished. This proved impossible, yet it was not as radical as the new Marxism of the multiculturalists. A class struggle that encompasses everything from sexual proclivities to skin color cannot be ended except by the abolition of all norms, that is, by the complete destruction of society.
Link
Apr 21, 2006
by Nathanael Blake
Rigoberta Menchu Tum was awarded the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize “in recognition of her work for social justice and ethno-cultural reconciliation based on respect for the rights of indigenous peoples.” She is also guilty of a literary fraud that would get her expelled from OSU for academic dishonesty if she were a student. Or perhaps not – she’s going to be an honored speaker on campus this weekend.
Born in 1959 in a poor village of Guatemalan peasants, Rigoberta lost several family members, including her parents and a brother, in a civil war that raged for decades. Having become a radical opponent of the government, she left for Mexico in 1980, and quickly became assimilated into Marxist circles. In 1982, living in Paris, she dictated her story to Marxist scholar Elisabeth Burgos-Debray; the resulting book, I, Rigoberta Menchu, has been assigned reading in thousands of college courses, and Rigoberta has been the subject of thousands of theses.
So ubiquitous is she in academic circles that Dinesh D’Souza’s 1991 Illiberal Education used her popularity as the symbol for the replacement of great classical works with mediocre multicultural education. “Rigoberta’s peasant radicalism provides independent Third World corroboration of Western progressive ideologies. Thus she is really a mouthpiece for a sophisticated left-wing critique of Western society,” and her book, “represents not the zenith of Third World achievements, but rather caters to the ideological proclivities of American activists.”
Such criticisms were for naught; Rigoberta won the Nobel the next year, with D’Souza ruefully remarking, “All I can say is that I am relieved she didn’t win for literature.” As it turns out, that might have been more appropriate. In the late 1990’s, the story that informed Rigoberta’s secular sainthood came apart. Anthropologist David Stoll, in research confirmed by the New York Times, revealed that she had been lying all along. She wasn’t illiterate, but had been educated in a prestigious Catholic boarding school. The land dispute central to formulating her Marxism beliefs didn’t pit her family against wealthy landowners, but against their own relatives. Her brother Nicolas didn’t die of starvation, but was alive and well in Guatemala.
But she retains much of her popularity. Her book is still assigned in classes, and she’s still welcome to speak at universities, including my own. Dan Flynn comments, “Her supporters find virtue in her mendacity because her falsehoods supposedly served a good cause.” But that’s only part of the justification. Rigoberta’s defenders haven’t just argued that her lies are noble (or Nobel, as the case may be), but that impugning her honesty is racist and ethnocentric. And those, as every college freshman (freshwoman, freshperson?) has learned, are very bad things indeed.
We are instructed that imposing the standards of historical accuracy that dead white male scholarship has created upon an indigenous woman of color is oppressive. She is to be allowed to appropriate the experiences of others as her own, and fabricate ones that never happened. According to this philosophy, the ideal of seeking objective historical truth isn’t an imperative for all of humanity that happened to reach its apogee in Western culture, but just one of many valid perspectives.
This relativism is very convenient for destroying any views its adherents oppose, and for insulating themselves from criticism. It also provides a sort of ideological coherence with its Marxism a la Marcuse, expanding class struggle beyond economics to include everything from race to sexuality, and thereby forms the basis for identity politics. Marxism as an economic policy is dead; Marxism as a social philosophy has never been more popular.
Its enemy is Western civilization, generally described as a hierarchical, heterosexual, white, Christian, patriarchal, capitalistic system of oppression. This allows groups that ought to be at each others throats (i.e. Muslims and feminists) to collaborate, because they’re both trying to destroy the same thing.
It also allows for a swift silencing of dissent. Anyone who opposes this neo-Marxism is easily dismissed if they don’t belong to the proper victim group, because they cannot possibly understand the issues. Their lot is to renounce the “oppressive” systems that have nurtured them, hence the spectacle of white liberals falling over themselves to denounce their own inherent racism. Furthermore, the Marxist doctrine of false consciousness provides a means for dismissing those such as Clarence Thomas, Condoleezza Rice, and Thomas Sowell who fail to conform to progressive ideas of what a minority member should think.
In short, playing identity politics has won many hands for the left. But it also annihilates what was formerly one of their great aspirations. Fraternity is dead. When truth is considered relative to our group classification, a brotherhood of man is impossible. Leszek Kolakowski observed that “all values and rights, in Marxist terms, are nothing but the temporary products of particular relationships of productions, nothing but the opinions that particular classes use to express their vested interests, to give them an illusory ideological shape.”
In the classical Marxist scheme, there was hope for eventual comity when economic class was abolished. This proved impossible, yet it was not as radical as the new Marxism of the multiculturalists. A class struggle that encompasses everything from sexual proclivities to skin color cannot be ended except by the abolition of all norms, that is, by the complete destruction of society.
Link
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