-Caveat Lector-
It doesn't matter what is true, it only matters
what people believe is true.
-- Paul Watson, founder of Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd
~~for educational purposes only~~
[Title 17 U.S.C. section 107]
The Left's Truth Problem
The suppressed record of liberal deception
Thomas E. Woods, Jr., Ph.D.
COLUMNIST, New York
One of the strangest aspects of the ongoing attacks
on Pope Pius XII is that they seem to intensify the
further away in time we move from the events they
involve. You may well wonder how the New York Times
can today criticize Pius XII for "inaction" with regard
to Jewish persecution during World War II when the same
New York Times praised him in the early 1940s for being
the only person in Europe who was doing anything. You
may also wonder why the New Republic just published a
rather lengthy screed by Professor Daniel J. Goldhagen
(author of the absurd book Hitler's Willing
Executioners) dismissing Pius as a hopeless
anti-Semite when one Jewish commentator after
another in the 1940s and 1950s, from Albert Einstein
to Golda Meir, said just the opposite.
The answer, though, is not hard to find: such
distortions serve useful purposes for those who
perpetrate them. They cast the Catholic Church,
an institution such people generally despise, in
a profoundly negative light, and aim to render the
Church helpless and contemptible in a never-ending
quest to apologize for a never-ending catalogue of
alleged sins. "What is truth?" asked Pilate. Our
current adversaries do not even bother to ask. There
is no such thing. To them, scholarly work does not
involve a search for truth or even an attempt at
serious, accurate, and disinterested analysis, but
is simply another arena in which the revolution may
be advanced.
In the academic world, the latest such incident involves
Michael Bellesiles' book Arming America. Bellesiles, a
professor of history at Atlanta's Emory University,
argued that gun ownership in early America was in fact
far less widespread than had originally been thought,
and that all this time we had mistakenly supposed that
a "gun culture" or at least some emphasis on the
importance of being armed had significant roots in
American history.
It turns out, though, that in order to reach this
counterintuitive conclusion, Bellesiles had to
falsify dataa lot of it. He also claimed to have
consulted sources that do not exist, or that were
destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco fire. Even
liberals are deserting him now, and his university
is calling on him to answer the charges that the
entire scholarly community, practically in unison,
have brought against him.
But Bellesiles was only doing in much cruder and less
elegant fashion what leftists have made a habit of
doing for generations, even centuries: prostituting
their scholarship for a political cause. I still
remember a student-faculty dinner at Harvard at which
the professor I'd invited, a political centrist,
admitted to me that in his experience "the Right
tends to be more scrupulous with facts than the
Left." That about says it.
Let us take Denis Diderot, for example. Diderot was
a key figure in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment,
and indeed was the classic eighteenth-century French
freethinker. We also know that Diderot was, shall we
say, a little bit restless in monogamy. His marital
fidelity left much to be desired.
Now let us examine his discussion of faraway Tahiti.
Diderot intended to use what he persuaded himself were
the extremely relaxed standards regarding human
intimacy that existed in Tahiti. Diderot, in fact,
wrote a fictional dialogue between a Catholic priest
and a native of Tahiti that has to be read to be
believed. To no one's surprisecan't the Left ever
surprise us?the priest is made to look like a fool,
and the Tahitian a vessel of simple wisdom.
We now know that this is all a lie from start to finish.
But it was a lie that Diderot had to believe. He had to
believe that the European standards of morality with
which he was familiar were merely time-bound and not
universal. He had to believe that somewhere there
existed, in greater peace and harmony than obtained
in Europe, a society in which monogamy was ridiculed
and casual liaisons celebrated. Diderot thus set the
stage for a whole series of leftists who followed him
who, in the name of science, falsified data in order
to reach the conclusions they believed in already.
The most spectacular example in the following century
must have been Karl Marx, the father of Communism.
One of the chief teachings of Marx's system was that
the capitalist system, as sure as the sun rises in
the east, would lead to what he called the
"immiseration" of the working classes, whose earthly
fortunes would surely be so systematically reduced
with the passage of time that they would ultimately
find themselves one day with no choice but to rebel
violently against the entire system. Then, at last,
would mankind cross the threshold of the final stage
of history, that of Communism. Thus we see how
important it is to Marx's entire scheme for the
workers to be more and more exploited, more and more
impoverished, as time goes on. For without this
increasing impoverishment, the proper class
consciousness will not develop among the working
class; and without the perception of an innate
clash between bourgeoisie and proletariat, no
rising of the workers, and no Communism.
But one of the most astonishing aspects of the
economic history of western Europe in the second
half of the nineteenth century was the tremendous
increase in wages and in the well-being of European
workingmen that took place. This development
completely contradicted Marx's own predictions;
therefore it had to be ignored. This Marx
accomplished in Das Kapital by using falsified
and/or outdated statistics. Paul Johnson points
out that "all the first part of Marx's scientific
examination of working conditions under capitalism
in the mid-1860s is based upon a single work,
[Friedrich] Engels's Condition of the Working
Class in England, published twenty years before."
And how much scientific value, Johnson asks, can
be attributed to this single source? In one
section alone, Chapter Seven, "The Proletariat,"
falsehoods, including errors of fact and transcription,
occur on pages 152, 155, 157, 159, 160, 163, 165, 167,
168, 170, 172, 174, 178, 179, 182, 185, 186, 188, 189,
190, 191, 194, and 203. By the way, Marx described
himself as a scientist.
In the twentieth century it would be difficult to
keep track of all the scholarly charlatans who have
gained celebrity status. Anthropologist Margaret Mead
fell into the same error as Diderot when during the
1920s she traveled to Samoa to study the inner workings
and social relations of that society. Mead was herself
a woman of, shall we say, unusual practices, who also
found heterosexual monogamy too constricting. To the
surprise of no one who understands the psychology of
the Left, she found in Samoa what Diderot thought he
had found in Tahiti, complete with free and open
homosexuality. She has, finally, been exposed as
a fraud. (See, for example, Derek Freeman, Margaret
Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an
Anthropological Myth, Harvard University Press,
1983.) The only question that now remains is whether
she deliberately produced fraudulent scholarship or
whether she was deceived by Samoan natives who told
her what she obviously wanted to hear. This latter
explanation seems far too charitable and not at all
plausible. Yet her book Coming of Age in Samoa (1928),
which competent anthropologists had to have known was
fraudulent certainly by the next decade or so (in
the late 1930s Yale's Edward Sapir described Mead
as "a pathological liar"), remained a classic of
the literature and required reading in college
courses well into the 1980sand in some places
it retains this stature.
Still more recently, we have the case of Nobel
Prize-winning author Rigoberta Menchu. Her
1983 book I, Rigoberta Menchu purported to tell
from an autobiographical point of view the story
of the Guatemalan civil war and the atrocities
committed by the right wing there. She became
an instant celebrity among the American Left and
an icon on college campuses. But in the late
1990s, along came Professor David Stoll, himself
an avowed left-winger and erstwhile admirer of
the diminutive Guatemalan. Stoll, who teaches
at Middlebury College in Vermont, revealed in
his book Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of All
Poor Guatemalans (1999) that much of Menchu's
narrative was a straightforward fabrication.
As Kenneth Lee explained in The American
Enterprise, "Her 'life story' told the tale of
how her family and other poor Indian peasants
fought to maintain their land against wealthy
landowners of European descent. In reality, this
supposed grand struggle between haves and
have-nots turns out to have been a family
dispute between Menchu's land-rich father and
his own (Indian) in-laws." Furthermore, the
brother whose death from starvation Menchu
claimed to have personally witnessed is in
fact not only alive but quite well off in
Guatemala. Her tale of woe in which she
received no formal education until her later
years also turns out to be a liein fact, she
attended two prestigious boarding schools.
Did the academic yahoos who had championed her
cause -- shocking and surprising, I know, to hear
about academics placing their prestige at the
support of fashionable and chic liberal
causes -- retract that support, or at least
temper their enthusiasm? To the contrary, these
intellectual giants directed their venom at Stoll!
"Whether her book is true or not, I don't care.
We should teach our students about the brutality
of the Guatemalan army and the U.S. financing of
it," fumed Wellesley College professor Marjorie
Agosin to the Chronicle of Higher Education. "I
think Rigoberta Menchu has been used by the Right
to negate the very important space that
multiculturalism is providing in academia."
Joanne Rappaport, president of the Society for
Latin American Anthropology, told the Chronicle
that Stoll's book was "an attempt to discredit
one of the only spokespersons of Guatemala's
indigenous movement." John Peeler of Bucknell
likewise downplayed Menchu's lies: "The Latin
American tradition of the testimonial has never
been bound by the strict rules of veracity that
we take for granted in autobiography." (Menchu
had, apparently, emancipated herself from the
"strict rule of veracity" according to which
one's autobiography should have some connection
to actual events.)
In the early 1990s I recall reading about a
study -- I've forgotten the university where it
was carried out -- which, according to the news
media, came to the conclusion that something on
the order of 12 or 16 million American children
were "starving." And so Dan Rather and the whole
media crew, none of whom would dream of accepting,
say, a Gun Owners of America study at face value,
solemnly informed the nation that millions of its
children were "starving." Nevermind that such a
statistic obviously and absurdly defies everyday
experience; they reported it anyway.
Well it turns out that in fact the study had asked
children, "Did you go to bed hungry at any time
during the year 1991?" That is quite another thing
from being on the verge of starvation, and there are
many reasons why once in a year a child may go to
bed hungry.
Consider also some well-known feminist claims. One
is the rather odd, and, needless to say, totally
false contention that the rate of domestic abuse
jumps 40% the day of the Super Bowl. Another
statistic claims that one in four women will be
raped in her lifetime. This statistic, also false,
brazenly defies everyday experience. Furthermore,
there is the statistic offered again and again by
Gloria Steinem, which claims that because of our
culture's insistence on maintaining a standard of
beauty, 150,000 women are dying every year from an
eating disorder called anorexia nervosa. In order
to live up to this standard of beauty, the argument
goes, they are starving themselves. The only possible
conclusion is that the very idea of a standard of
beauty is oppressive. Well, it turns out that this
oft-repeated statistic is also false -- the number
of women who die from this disease actually numbers
around 100 annually. (If you've seen a lot of
feminists, you can perceive the vested interest
they have in undermining the idea of a standard
of beauty.)
One could continue indefinitely. How about the three
million homeless statistic? We now know that that was
simply made up by homeless advocate Mitch Snyder, and
is an exaggeration of perhaps ten times. Likewise,
how many of the environmental scares have been
exaggerations or even outright fabrications?
Yet none of this deception is for nothing. It all
makes perfect sense from the Left's point of view.
The Left thrives on manufactured crises, and is
thrilled at the opportunity to report statistics
that seem to imply that the traditional family,
or private property, or "patriarchy," all lead to
horrific and intolerable outcomes from which
disinterested liberals with degrees in sociology
and social work are ready to rescue us. The result
is always to give such people more power over the
licit use of private property and over the household
itself. The more crises they can manufacture, the
more willing we will be to hand over to them the
power they want in order to remake American society
in their image. They're doing a pretty good job so
far.
What I have sketched here is only the tip of the
iceberg with regard to the modus operandi of the
Left. Still, it is impossible to chalk up such a
record of systematic deception as merely a series
of innocent mistakes. Lying comes naturally to
those whose primary goal is not the acquisition of
truth but the acquisition of power.
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