In 1992, exactly 500 years after Columbus sailed the ocean blue, a clutch of Norwegian socialists bestowed the Nobel Peace Prize on Rigoberta Menchu. The timing was intentional.
Ms Menchu, a Guatemalan Indian, had written a book titled (what else) “I, Rigoberta Menchu”, which tweaked every quivering nerve in the Leftist corpus with simplistic images of innocence, oppression and defiance, the sort of stuff leftists use to construct mythologies of purity to support academic factions claiming moral authority on grounds that they identify with the oppressed. Menchu’s book pretends to be the tale of how her Mayan family attempted to protect their land from the predations of greedy white capitalists and alien interlopers. There’s just one problem. It’s all a big lie. The oppressed Guatemalan Indian heroine turned out to be a slick liar with an ax to grind.
An anthropologist named David Stoll went to Guatemala and undertook an exhaustive study of Rigoberta’s claims. He discovered that all of her most important assertions were complete fabrications. He wrote a book exposing her lies. She called him a racist, of course.
For example, the dramatic heart of her story comes when Menchu’s brother is tortured and burned in a town square by the monstrous military. Stoll went to the town, interviewed everyone, and could not find a single person who could recall such an odd event. In fact, none of her atrocity stories could be verified.
An investigation revealed that all the violence in the area was initiated by the very Marxist guerrilla band of which Rigoberta Menchu herself was an active member. Contrary to what Menchu claimed, the violent insurgents were led by middle-class urban Marxist troublemakers and had almost no support among the rural Indians. Indeed, guerrilla movements usually have more support among Europeans and Americans than among Latin Americans. The Swede’s eager acceptance of Menchu’s bogus liberation fantasy tells us much about the needs of the Swedes, about their hunger for an artful piece of propaganda. Their enthusiastic acceptance of Menchu’s phony story may have encouraged the guerrillas to continue their unwelcome bloodletting for another decade after their failure was assured.
As for Menchu’s account of the brave Mayan struggle to save their land from the greedy white capitalists, well . . . that too never happened. The land dispute was with Menchu’s father’s inlaws, who were also Mayan Indians. Such disputes are common in this area.
Before the importation of foreign Marxist ideology and “liberation” movements, politics in Latin America was not so bloody. There was corruption and inefficiency, but a lot less slaughter. Once the starry-eyed idealists got involved, cruelty knew no limits. The Cuban-inspired methodology of rural guerrilla violence has accomplished nothing of value. It swept away the lives of hundreds of thousands of the rural poor. That’s all.
Fundamentally, leftist theory is an urban romance, propounded by middle-class radicals who dream of finding solidarity in the countryside. It is a simplistic vision of good people versus bad people. It is not a way of thinking, but a substitute for thinking.
Despite its exposure as a complete fraud, “I, Rigoberta Menchu” is still required reading on many American college campuses. Leftist professors are so in love with it that they refuse to part with it. They have declared it to be “true” in some higher sense. That’s how things are going in our weird republic.
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Thomas Clough
Copyright 2001