A PHILOSOPHY BASED ON LIES
A philosophy based on lies
Ottawa Sun
January 24, 1999 A philosophy based on lies
By R. CORT KIRKWOOD Ottawa Sun
The Clinton presidency has exposed an ugly truth about the political left: All of its power to seduce the heart, all of its appeal for the dispossessed, and all of its promises for a better life, are built upon the lie.
Nearly two decades ago, a political philosopher published an article in National Review that rightly concluded all leftism is inherently totalitarian. He didn't mention that many leftists, the real variety of which are totalitarians, achieve their ends by telling lies.
The Communist revolution in Tsarist Russia began with the Marxist lie that communism world liberate the masses from terrible injustices created by the ownership of private property, the oppression of the family unit and the opiate of religion. It wasn't long before Josef Stalin was murdering millions and a New York Times' reporter named Walter Duranty was lying about the evil of Sovet communism to millions of readers, earning a Pulitzer Prize along the way.
Speaking of prizes, a recently published book exposes another big lie, this one told by the author of Rigoberta Menchu, an autobiography that earned its author the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992. In 1983, author Menchu published a tragic tale about growing up an oppressed, illiterate Mayan girl whose father refused to educate her. The books details the horrors of her life under the thuggish military regime in Guatemala, and, as John Leo observes in U.S. News and World Report, the tome had strong appeal because "it stresses indigenous rights, feminism, identity politics, Marxist class analysis -- virtually the entire bundle of concerns of the campus left." The year she won the Nobel Prize just happened to be the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus' arrival in the New World, which, as we all know, was the beginning of exploitation of "indigenous peoples" and their "civilizations."
But Menchu the Nobel laureate is now exposed as a liar. The oppressed Mayan waif, if not well to do, was quite well educated by nuns in two boarding schools, and she spoke Spanish and Mayan. Yet her these lies, or the others that have been exposed, do not matter to leftist intellectuals.
Leo quotes one professor at Wellesley College: "Whether her book is true or not, I don't care." One wonders if those who govern the Nobel awards committee care, or whether they too believe, as one professor put it, that "the Latin America tradition of the testimonial has never been bound by the strict rules of autobiography."
Another tradition unbound by "strict rules," at least for black leftist intellectuals, is the tradition of citing sources for academic work, particularly a doctoral dissertation. A few years ago, when Ted Pappas, an editor at the Rockford Institute's Chronicles magazine, disclosed Martin Luther King's plagiarism in his doctoral thesis at Boston University, the reaction was predictable.
Confronted with the evidence, black scholars quickly enlightened Pappas by telling him that "plagiarism" is a "white" notion that blacks to do not accept. Like other black preachers, the defence went, King practiced "voice merging," a common and informal practice among black orators. Problem was, King wasn't "voice merging" with a preacher friend in a church down the street. He was "voice merging" with serious academics. Another hero of the left. Another lie.
So we now have a president, who, with roots in the radical campus left of the 1960s, built an entire career upon one lie after another. First, he lied to evade the draft and go to Oxford, then he lied to get back in the draft when he realized his lottery number would never be chosen. Then he lied about smoking pot, about an affair with a lounge singer, about harassing a state employee while governor of Arkansas, and about sex with a federal employee while president, these last two lies having been told to a federal court, before a federal grand jury and finally to Congress itself.
Bill Clinton has told so many lies he has lied about his lies. Of course, his left-wing supporters argue that lying under oath about sex doesn't matter, and a famous Amerian historian says lying to questions "that have no right to be asked" is perfectly acceptable. And 400 American intellectuals published an open letter denouncing those who would impeach Clinton for perjury and obstruction of justice.
In Bill Clinton, the radical left ascended the pinnacle of American power. But it achieved power here the way it has achieved power everywhere: By telling one lie after another.
Kirkwood writes on U.S. affairs for the Sun.
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