I, RIGOBERTA MENCHU . . . NOT!

...By the same token, if what she has to say is neither accurate nor representative, there can be no possible case for teaching the book, unless one wants to include it in a survey of celebrated hoaxes...

...Her book, hailed as a first-person account of Guatemalan bigotry and brutality against native Indians, spread from cutting-edge curricula like Stanford's to become part of the canon of required and frequently assigned readings in high schools and universities around the globe...

...She speaks for all the Indians of the American continent...

...For now, Rigoberta's academic fan club resorts to what may be termed the Tawana Brawley defense, named after the New York teenager who faked a racially motivated rape...

...Rigoberta Menchu's translator and literary collaborator, the French feminist Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, recognized this fact in her introduction to I, Rigoberta Menchu: "Her life story is an account of contemporary history...

...And if they spend their precious college years reading this stuff and thereby waste the opportunity to have a genuine liberal arts education...

...Then, just last week, the New York Times revealed that much of I, Rigoberta Menchu is a fabrication...

...My cursory check at such leading universities as Stanford, Columbia, and Princeton shows that I, Rigoberta Menchu is still widely assigned...

...All I can say," I replied, "is that I am relieved she didn't win for literature...

...This obscure Indian woman who published her 1983 autobiography when she was still in her mid 20s, suddenly received worldwide recognition as a leftist icon—a modern-day Saint Sebastian, pierced by the arrows of racist discrimination and colonial exploitation...

...Rigoberta's rhetoric employs a socialist and Marxist vocabulary that does not sound typical of a Guatemalan peasant...

...According to members of Rigo-berta's own family, as well as residents of her village, she also fabricated her account of how a second brother was burned alive by army troops as her parents were forced to watch...

...If it were, then the claim of factual inaccuracy might be beside the point...

...She received several honorary doctorates and in 1992 was nominated as a United Nations goodwill ambassador and special representative of indigenous peoples...

...Rather, the argument for teaching I, Rigoberta Menchu is based on the claim that, for all its literary flaws, the book is an accurate and authentic representation of the sufferings of a people, perhaps of all oppressed peoples...

...As I pointed out in Illiberal Education, there were plenty of reasons to be suspicious from the outset of Rigoberta Menchu's credibility as the spokesperson for oppressed indigenous peoples...

...But Rigoberta's account of the tragedy can no longer be trusted...

...Virtually all of the professors Wilson contacted defiantly told her that they would not stop assigning I, Rigoberta Menchu to their students...

...The Chronicle of Higher Education called the very day her prize was announced and reminded me that in my book Illiberal Education the year before, I had harshly criticized Menchu's autobiography as a sadly typical example of the bogus multicultural agitprop that was displacing the Western classics on the reading lists for undergraduates at elite universities like Stanford...

...She is a woman, and thus a victim of sexism...

...She embodies a projection of Western Marxist and feminist views onto South American Indian culture, which is manipulated and distorted to serve Western political objectives...

...For Rigoberta's admirers to renounce her now would be to give up a standard-bearer of progressive grievance and alienation...

...Well, that's just too bad...

...Both her parents were killed in that bloody conflict...

...David Stoll's study shows that Rigober-ta's life story was "drastically revised" to reflect the ideological perspective of a revolutionary left-wing organization she joined and on whose behalf she made the fateful tour of Europe that led to the publication of her book...

...According to the locals, however, this dispute was really a land feud that pitted Rigoberta's father against his in-laws...

...She met her feminist translator in Paris, not a venue to which many of the Third World's poor routinely travel...

...In a similar vein, Rigoberta apologists like Mar-jorie Agosin of Wellesley College now argue that whether or not Rigoberta's autobiography was faked, the native Indians of Guatemala have endured unimaginable hardships, the death squads of Latin America were a reality of the 1970s and 1980s, and so despite a few inconveniences of detail, the general message of I, Rigoberta Menchu is essentially true...

...Those nefarious oligarchs supposedly manipulated the government into forcing the Menchu family and other poor Indians off unclaimed land that they had farmed...

...No less interesting than these revelations has been the reaction to them by Rigoberta Menchu, her champions and advocates...

...Her radicalism provides Third World confirmation of Western progressive ideology...

...Even on small matters, Rigoberta's account turns out to be unreliable...

...Dinesh D'Souza, who is John M. Olin scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is author of Illiberal Education and Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader...

...She is a Latin American, and thus a victim of European and North American colonialism...

...Her story is overwhelming because what she has to say is simple and true...

...The voice of Rigoberta allows the defeated to speak...

...With extraordinary canniness, she presented herself in her autobiography as the consummate victim, a quadruple victim of oppression...

...She is an Indian, and thus victimized by the Latino ruling class of Latin America...

...Rigoberta Menchu has all along been a willing and crafty accomplice in this cultural transaction...

...The lawyers and civil rights activists who defended Brawley said it didn't matter that she had concocted her tale, because a racist society causes such desperation...

...In fact, she received the equivalent of a middle-school education as a scholarship student at two prestigious private boarding schools operated by Catholic nuns...

...The Rigoberta Menchu Foundation, based in New York, boasts that her book is one of the most widely read in classrooms in America and Europe...

...Central to Rigoberta's story—and the supposed source of her Marxism—is a land dispute in which her impoverished family, working for slave wages on plantations, is intimidated and oppressed by wealthy landowners of European descent...

...So what explains the continuing allegiance to her autobiography among Western academics...

...But of course the legitimacy of teaching Guatemalan social and political history is not in dispute...

...For Rigoberta, the Nobel prize proved to be a canonization in both senses of the term...

...they, too, can make victimology a basis for group solidarity...

...The book is one lie after another, and she knows it," Alfonso Rivera, a municipal clerk who kept all official records for the area for three decades, told the Times...

...So many high schools use the book that there is even a textbook, Teaching and Testimony: Rigoberta Menchu and the North American Classroom, about how to teach Rigoberta Menchu's life story...

...Rigoberta, though, does not run the risk of being confused with Hemingway...

...Times reporter Larry Rohter corroborated the research of an American anthropologist, David Stoll, whose interviews with over a hundred people and archival research during the past decade led him to conclude that Rigoberta's story "cannot be the eyewitness account it purports to be...

...For example, in one of the most moving scenes in the book, Rigoberta describes how she watched her brother Nicolas die of malnutrition...

...By Dinesh D'Souza I confess to having been mildly embarrassed when Rigoberta Menchu, Guatemalan political activist and author of I, Rigoberta Menchu, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992...

...The Nobel committee, having found Rigoberta a suitably obscure and politically correct candidate for its peace prize in 1992, the 500th anniversary of Columbus's landing in North America, said that it will not rescind the prize even though her only credential for winning was her life story, as narrated in her autobiography...

...I wanted peace, but none of us could get them to negotiate a settlement...

...But the New York Times found Nicolas alive and well enough to be running a relatively prosperous homestead in a Guatemalan village...

...A Moveable Feast, Hemingway's memoir of his life in Paris, would remain a minor fictional classic even if it turned out to be an unreliable account of that phase of Hemingway's life...

...The answer is even if Rigoberta does not accurately reflect the experiences of oppressed people in Guatemala, she does reflect the political ideology of American professors who came of age in the 1960s...

...These jarring elements in her story have now been accounted for...

...Rigoberta herself senses a racist plot and denounces her critics for "political provocations...

...On the very first page of her autobiography, Rigoberta says that she "never went to school" and only learned Spanish as an adult...

...Equally recalcitrant is the academic community that enshrined I, Rigoberta Menchu in the multicultural canon in American colleges and universities...

...She is in fact a mouthpiece for a left-wing critique of the West that is all the more powerful because it seems to come from an "authentic" Third World source...

...Even Rigoberta's strongest defenders, like Stanford anthropologist Renato Rosaldo, have never maintained that this young woman's autobiography is great literature...

...According to reporter Robin Wilson of the Chronicle of Higher Education, who has been calling professors around the country who teach I, Rigoberta Menchu, most of them are outraged—not with Menchu for making things up, but with anthropologist David Stoll for exposing her fraud...

...None of this is to deny that Rigoberta's family, like many Guatemalans, suffered greatly during that country's long civil war...

...She is a person of color, and thus a victim of racism...

...Her half-sister Rosa Menchu confirms that since Rigoberta spent much of her youth in boarding schools, she could not possibly have worked as a political organizer and labored up to eight months a year on coffee and cotton plantations, as described in considerable detail in her autobiography...

...Rigoberta thus provides a model with which American minority and female students are meant to identify: They, too, are oppressed like her...

...But still it raises the question of how universities, supposedly dedicated to truth and critical thinking, can continue to teach a book that is full of falsehoods...

...Some of this may be the defensiveness of those in shock...

...It was a family quarrel that went on for years and years," Efrain Galindo, the mayor of the town, told Rohter...

...For such ingenuity in seizing the bottom rung of the ladder, who can doubt that Rigoberta Menchu deserved a prize...

...The issue is whether I, Rigoberta Menchu deserves a central place in the liberal arts curriculum...

...As legal scholar Patricia Williams put it, "No matter who did it to her, and even if she did it to herself . . . Tawana Brawley has been the victim of some unspeakable violation...

...Now that Rigoberta has won the Nobel prize," the reporter asked, "what is your reaction...

...She is a privileged witness...