A Peace Prize doesn’t make you an expert

Lorne Gunter, National Post:

When I read Wednesday that the Nobel Women’s Initiative had managed to round up eight winners of the Peace Prize to condemn attempts by a Canadian company to build a pipeline from Alberta’s oil sands to refineries on the Gulf coast in Texas, my first thought was, “I hope for their sake they haven’t resurrected Rigoberta Menchu.”

But they had.

Menchu is a Mayan who was active in the resistance by her people against the violence and repression they suffered at the hands of Guatemala’s junta in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. She won the 1992 Nobel Peace prize for her 1983 memoir I, Rigoberta Menchu, a harrowing expose of the brutality apparently inflicted upon her and her family by Guatemalan death squads. Menchu allegedly dictated the book to a journalist because she had been denied schooling and was illiterate.

Except that rather than being a poor peasant, Menchu actually came from a fairly well-to-do family and instead of being illiterate, had attended a fairly expensive elementary school and junior high. Much of the rest of her story was made up, too.

When the long list of erroneous claims came to light, Menchu’s response was to dismiss her critics as racists and insist they were motivated to undermine efforts by indigenous people around the world to defend their human rights.

But even if Menchu’s Nobel had been awarded for bona fide reasons, what does a Central American resistance fighter know about Canada’s oil sands or the ecological merits of a pipeline?

[...]

The revolutionaries of the ‘noble savage’ crowd who invoke some fanciful ideas about class struggle and Gaia earth worship against the evils of resource exploitation are almost always a bunch of naive rich and indulged punks who know next to nothing about the world because they have been incubated in a bubble of privilege and excess. These are the same sanctimonious morons who abort their babies while lecturing the rest of us on the plight of Harp seals.  Classic useful idiots.

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