While image isn’t really everything, it certainly appears so when it’s all people are allowed to see. What follows is a list of 10 individuals who have Dr. Jekyll images that obscure a Mr. Hyde reality.
1. Alice Walker
While The Color Purple author and feminist icon masquerades as a champion of women, the woman she should have cared about most in her life, her own daughter, Rebecca, she viewed as a “millstone” around her neck.
As Rebecca reveals, her mother called her birth a “calamity” and would leave her in the care of others or to fend for herself while she was still a child. Her mother drummed into her head that motherhood was slavery, but was happy when she became sexually active at 13 — Alice fancied it “empowering.” And while she was “supportive” when Rebecca had an abortion at age 14, this changed when Rebecca decided to become a mother as an adult. In fact, Rebecca’s rejection of the culture of death led to a spat that ended when, writes Rebecca, “she wrote me a letter saying that our relationship had been inconsequential for years and that she was no longer interested in being my mother. She even signed the letter with her first name, rather than ‘Mom’.”
But, hey, I’m sure Alice Walker has read It Takes a Village.
2. Alfred Kinsey
It’s not just that this bug researcher turned self-proclaimed human-sexuality expert was a scientific fraud. It’s that when he reported data on infants and young children, no one asked how he measured their “sexual responses.” But the answer was given to us by Kinsey colleague Paul Gebhard:
The “researchers” used “oral and manual stimulation.”
Kinsey was a pedophile who once boasted in a letter that he’d show nude pictures of men and boys to his young charges when he was a YMCA counselor. He was, Gebhard says, “interested in having sex with men, women and children and animals…” and took the position that “pedophilia is not as big a problem as the public intolerance of it.” But most damning are letters he exchanged with a former Gestapo officer and pedophile named Fritz von Balluseck in which Kinsey encouraged “him to continue his ‘research’ and warned him to ‘watch out’ and avoid being caught by the law.
3. Margaret Mead
This woman, who once wrote to her husband, “I’ll not leave you unless I find someone I love more,” channeled Kinsey and tried to manufacture a scientific justification for her own sexual habits. The result was her fraudulent volume Coming of Age in Samoa.
Far from being the libertine “paradise” of Mead’s fantasies, however, Samoa was an island where the purity of girls was safeguarded with a zeal that put Puritans to shame.
4. Noam Chomsky
In 1979, the communist Khmer Rouge had already exterminated a quarter of Cambodia’s population. Yet that very year Chomsky published a book, After the Cataclysm, in which he denied this holocaust and claimed, writes Paul Bogdanor, that “‘allegations of genocide’ are being used ‘to whitewash Western imperialism,’ to distract attention from the ‘the expanding system of subfascism’ and to lay the ideological basis for further Western intervention (pp. 149-50).”
Three decades later, Hugo Chavez-supporting Chomsky finally starting wondering if the Venezuelan was becoming authoritarian, saying he wasn’t “sure,” but “perhaps” Chavez was. Gee, ya’ think, Noam?
An old Dutch proverb states, “We grow too soon old and too late smart.” Then again, some of us just grow old.
5. Mohandas Gandhi
We can’t be sure how Gandhi earned the title “Mahatma,” or “Great Soul,” but perhaps it was his support of Britain’s war against the Zulus. Or maybe it was his admiringly calling fascist Benito Mussolini a “Superman” or his later claim that there was “an exact parallel” between Britain and Hitler’s Third Reich.
Actually, the clincher must have been when he left his wife and four children — for a man: Jewish-German bodybuilder Hermann Kallenbach. Daniel Bates wrote about this and reported, “He [Gandhi] nicknamed himself ‘Upper House’ and his lover ‘Lower House’ and he vowed to make Kallenbach promise not to ‘look lustfully upon any woman.’”
Of course, for a long time it was hard to get the truth about Gandhi, since he also pressured journalists to not report his actual words but only transcripts he authorized — and sometimes heavily edited.
6. Arthur Miller
Fellow playwright Edward Albee once said, writes the Daily Mail, “Miller had held up a mirror and told society: ‘Here is how you behave.’” I guess this includes not only being sympathetic to communism, but also tearing your infant Down syndrome son away from a mother who desperately wanted to keep him and committing him to a mental institution. And this was done, avers American Thinker editor Thomas Lifson, “All because he [Miller] must have been embarrassed that his son wasn’t capable of being the intellectual he wanted to pretend to be himself.”
7. Morris Dees
By scaring gullible donors into believing that mainstream conservative organizations have a Klansman in every closet, Dees has transformed his Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) into the nation’s wealthiest civil-rights organization. Not that this money filters down to the unfortunates about whom Dees purports to care. In 1986, Dees’ entire legal staff resigned in protest over his refusal to tackle problems that would actually help poor minorities — but that wouldn’t make him money. Another SPLC lawyer who resigned later, Gloria Browne, said that the organization’s goal was to cash in on “black pain and white guilt.”
Former business partner Millard Fuller summed Dees up well: “He’s the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker of the civil rights movement — though I don’t mean to malign Jim and Tammy Faye.”
8. Alex Haley
In 1977, America was transfixed by the TV miniseries Roots, the story about Haley’s slave ancestors. The problem is that it wasn’t his story. In fact, the characters weren’t even his ancestors.
In reality, Haley plagiarized large portions of his book from a fictional work by author Harold Courlander titled The African. After being sued by Courlander in 1979 and repeatedly perjuring himself in court, Haley settled with the author for $650,000 ($2 million in today’s money) to avoid public exposure.
As a result, many are still unaware that Roots is, as liberal journalist Philip Nobile put it, “one of the great literary hoaxes of modern times.”
9. Michael Moore
With his new genre, docu-fiction, Moore is adept at blurring the line between fantasy and reality for his viewers — and himself. So bad are Moore’s trespasses that even other liberals can feel compelled to speak out, such as the late Christopher Hitchens, who described Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 as “a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of ‘dissenting’ bravery.”
And, really, Moore ought to focus more on changing himself than the world. As a former close associate of his told me, Moore is the most money-hungry person he’d ever met and that he finally had to sever his relationship with the director because Moore treated everyone — his wife, waitstaff, etc. — like dirt.
10. George Bernard Shaw
Sadly, Shaw’s moral compass wasn’t nearly as sharp as his pen. Like the Nazis, Shaw was a eugenicist who spoke of people who are of “no use in this world.” He said, “Just put them there and say ‘Sir, or madam, will you be kind enough to justify your existence? If you can’t justify your existence … then, clearly, we cannot use the (inaudible) of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive because your life does not benefit us….”
Not surprisingly, Shaw called Hitler “a very remarkable man, a very able man.” But he did have a problem with the Nazi leader’s program: Hitler was killing the wrong people. He should have been killing people based on class.
Shaw also defended the Soviet Union. When leaving Russia in 1931 he said, “Today I leave this land of hope and return to our Western countries of despair.” He also called reports of Stalin’s Terror Famine a “lie” and a “slander” and claimed that the gulag was merely a type of luxury vacation spa.
Despite this, Shaw never joined the Depression Era Americans who, believing the whitewash, immigrated to the Soviet Union and relinquished their American citizenship in search of a better life. What they got was death in the gulags.
And that’s what happens when we listen to the wrong people. Unfortunately, because today’s liars lie about yesterday’s liars, we still do.
