Saturday, May 17, 2008
Three leading leftist figures have been exposed this year as having lied about their backgrounds. Has the failure of their ideology forced them to fictionalize?
Sep 27, 1999 | It's been a bad year for prevaricators of the political left. First Nobel laureate and Guatemalan terrorist Rigoberta Menchu was unveiled by fellow leftist David Stoll as a self-fabricating poseur. Then feminist icon and self-proclaimed suburban housewife Betty Friedan was unmasked (again by a political comrade) as a longtime propagandist for the Stalinist left and a political fibber.
Now it's Modern Language Association president and PLO apologist Edward Said's turn to have his inventions uncovered, exposing him as a cunning purveyor of biographical fiction.
These creative dissemblers did not idly conceive their deceptive constructions of self, in which case they would have been mere literary curiosities. Instead, each of them lied to serve a radical cause. They thus form part of an intellectual continuum with what Leon Trotsky once termed the "Stalin school of falsification," in which historical data are rearranged in the interests of a politically useful "truth."
Rigoberta Menchu presented herself as a poor, uneducated Mayan peasant, whose family had been deprived of its land by a Ladino ruling class descended from the European conquerors of her people. Rigoberta's story told how her family was destroyed by their oppressors for peacefully attempting to regain their land from the Ladinos.
According to Rigoberta, hers was not an individual story but "the story of all poor Guatemalans." In her telling, her autobiography became a political parable with the power to persuade any morally decent reader of the justice of the cause of the urban terrorist movement whose spokesperson she had become, and whose strategy was to foment violent confrontations in the Guatemalan countryside.
Every salient element of Rigoberta's parable, however, was based on a lie. She was not poor and not uneducated. Her family was not dispossessed by a Ladino ruling class (its land dispute was with other Mayans, in fact, members of the Menchu clan itself) and the violence they suffered was not unprovoked, but was the direct consequence of the violent confrontations initiated by the terrorists whose pawn she had become.
Betty Friedan presented herself in "The Feminine Mystique" as a suburban housewife who had never given a thought to "the woman question" until she attended a Smith College reunion which revealed the dissatisfaction felt by her well-educated female classmates, who found themselves unable to balance traditional roles with modern careers.
There were many views Friedan could have taken of the data she subsequently collected. In America, an unparalleled technological revolution was unfolding, among whose consequences were the liberation of women from household chores, from dangerous diseases associated with childbirth and sex, and from the tyranny of their reproductive cycles. All this provided them with options for entry into workplaces and professions where few women had previously ventured.
The sheer suddenness of this transformation would have provoked anxiety and dysfunction in any group. But Friedan chose to view the malaise she witnessed in political terms -- not as the ambiguities of an epic transition, but as the effects of a male conspiracy to oppress females and confine them to their traditional roles.
In Friedan's radical melodrama, middle-class marriage became a "comfortable concentration camp," and men's protective attitudes toward women became the oppressive stance of a master race.
Now it has been revealed that Betty Friedan was not very candid about the facts of her own life and the sources of her radical perspective. She was hardly a naive suburban housewife when she wrote those words, but a 25-year veteran of professional journalism in the communist left, where she had been thoroughly indoctrinated in the politics of "the woman question" and specifically the idea that women were "oppressed."
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