The Black Book of the American Left Volume 2: Progressives by David Horowitz

Author:David Horowitz [Horowitz, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781886442955
Amazon: 1886442959
Barnesnoble: 1886442959
Goodreads: 20763741
Publisher: Second Thoughts Book
Published: 2014-03-17T23:00:00+00:00

14

Three Political Romancers

It’s been a bad year for prevaricators of the political left. First, Nobel laureate and Guatemalan terrorist Rigoberta Menchú 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.1 Now it’s Modern Language Association president and PLO apologist Edward Said’s turn to have his inventions uncovered and be exposed 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 crafted their phony biographies to serve a radical cause. They thus form part of a continuum with what Leon Trotsky once termed the “Stalin school of falsification,”2 in which historical data are tortured in the interests of a politically useful “truth.”

Rigoberta Menchú presented herself as a poor, uneducated Mayan peasant, whose family had been deprived of its land by a ladino ruling class, which was 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. 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 morally decent readers of the justice of the terrorist movement whose spokesperson she had become, and whose strategy was to foment violent confrontations in the Guatemalan countryside to bring Marxists to power.

Every salient element of Rigoberta’s parable was based on a demonstrable 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, with members of her family’s own clan. And the violence they suffered was not unprovoked, but resulted from the violent confrontations initiated by the terrorists whose pawn she had become.

Betty Friedan presented herself in The Feminine Mystique—the book that launched modern feminism—as a suburban housewife who had never given a thought to “the woman question” until she attended a Smith College reunion, which revealed to her the dissatisfaction of her well-educated female classmates, 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 deaththreatening 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. Friedan chose to view the malaise in political terms—not as the ambiguities of an epic transition already in progress, but as the consequence of a male conspiracy to oppress females and confine them to traditional roles.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.