I think it makes some points. Does anyone more knowledgeable on this subject have a different take?
Maoism is when committing crimes against humanity and terrorism on innocent villages in Peru’s countryside, obviously.
“You won’t let us ransack and pillage your village, steal all your food, and then occupy your houses?”
“Guess we have to shoot all your children, rape your women, and then pillage your village anyways”.
The PCP were a disgusting abomination. On the same level as the Khmer Rouge. Utter garbage and evil. They are a terrorist organization that use Marxist symbols for aesthetics and nothing else. Utter scum.
I highly recommend reading up on the Shining Path. Their founder and leader was a deranged megalomaniac, who was a fascistic nationalist and cared more for his personal cult of personality then Marxism. He has admitted to never even READING MARXIST THOUGHT. The entire history of the organization is insane and I highly recommend the BadEmpenada episode on them.
I feel like the article made some arguments that could hypothetically work if there were proper context, goals, and strategy in mind. Like, sure, in some contexts excesses are expected and accepted, but did you actually do something positive in that work. Sure, the state probably used a lot of violence too, but was the PCP aimed at them in response or mostly targeting civilians? People can do good with hatred as a motivation but can you really say violence is acceptable purely as a manifestation of hatred for the oppressors? (If the tone is not clear these questions are directed as Gonzalists, not you Comrade Salad).
What episode of the deprogram is it? I think I’ve listened to all of them, but I don’t remember one on Gonzalo. Any specific reading recommendations? I don’t want to pick up some random bourgeois book because then I’d be fulfilling the MLM stereotype of MLs being “left anti-communists” not believing lies about Stalin, but believing those about PolPot and the PCP.
My mistake, the video I was referring to was from BadEmpenada. I am very wary of him as a person and his material, but this video is excellently researched and gives a good socialist lens on the horrific nature of the Shining Path and their leader. His description also gives a very long and thorough reading list centered on leftist and South American sources that you might want to look into.
Also The PCP’s violence was aimed at the people. That’s what makes them reprehensible. They commit heinous acts of terrorism against the poor in Peru, are associated with Nacrotrafficking and cartels to make money, they utilize child soldiers as young as 10 to fill their militant ranks, and so on. They are not using “a means to an end”, they are just using a mean that is so vile and reprehensible that every leader and associated member deserves death or imprisonment at the very least.
They accomplished nothing leftist related, and instead murdered trade unionists, feminist activists, Marxist professors, and foreign emissaries. They probably pushed back the leftist movement in Peru by decades if not centuries with their actions.
I’ve seen the BE video, but I’m wondering if there’s a less questionable source I could listen to. I’ll have to check out his reading list I guess.
The PCP of Gonzalo did not and does not engage in narcotrafficking. The “Militarized” PCP, which hates Gonzalo and is considered the “third right-opportunist line” in the MPP’s literature, is the group that profits from the drug trade. Again, your accusations are nothing new for communist or even normal progressive groups, as every revolutionary anti-imperialist group has been accused of heinous crimes rather baselessly.
If someone said the same things but about Ukraine, the Bolsheviks, and Stalin, you all would rightfully be outraged at such dishonesty and propaganda. But since this is about a party you so staunchly disagree with, you’ll swallow up bourgeois propaganda.
Such revisionists, since they have not expelled their bourgeois mindset and bourgeois class stand, are still prone to getting weepy at the death tolls thrown about by “senderologists,” bourgeois academics, and even sources that are in the direct employment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a State plot most comparable to our COINTELPRO in the US. They study sources like Ivan Degregori, who was one of the top leaders of Truth and Reconciliation. He shared positions in Truth and Reconciliation with reactionary Peruvian Army generals like Luis Arias Graziani, ex-congress members like Beatriz Alva Hart and Rolando Ames, several catholic priests and bishops, and a conservative Protestant church leader, Lay Sun. This assortment of reactionaries were all partisan in the counterinsurgency against the revolution in service of the State, composed of Fujimori endorsers and people who supported Alan Garcia. Degregori, for his part, as an anthropologist, lends academic legitimacy to what amounts to a well-oiled anti-Communist slander campaign. …
These liberal humanists will decry the violence of 1983 and in doing this they decry the PPW in Peru and denounce its leader, Chairman Gonzalo. They insist with no regard to historical materialism or the most accessible facts that this “massacre” alienated the peasant base and actually bolstered the number of death squad recruits, harming the revolution itself. This is nothing but a fabrication. The masses themselves understood this action, supported it, and themselves carried it out at the behest of the Party. This was not the activity of “outside agitators,” shadowy Party agents from alien backgrounds. Much as with the rationale used by other liberals to dismiss the most rebellious activity of the US masses, the liberal mind makes fairytales and conjures ghosts. The Party is, in the liberal mind only, understood as divorced fully from the revolutionary masses, carrying out massacres nearly unprovoked based solely on a metaphysical bloodlust.
Let’s look then at the facts: The People’s War in Peru only grew stronger from 1983 into the 90s. When they began advancing upon Lima and other major cities, the peasant militia and people’s committees grew year by year, and with them grew the EGP and the PCP itself. The revolution spread like wildfire, from the Andes to the jungles and into the slums of Lima, which began choking the city from the countryside. The prisons were organized, and whole areas stopped using Peruvian State currency and began using the currency of the PCP. Such places were the most developed and advanced base areas of modern times and far exceeded any current example. The New State was already functioning throughout large areas of the country.
After the capture of Gonzalo and the establishment of the so-called Truth and Reconciliation Commission headed by Degregori, much was spun to portray the PCP as a bloodthirsty organization that led to the deaths of 70,000 people, half of which are attributed to the PCP. What is not mentioned in these liberal humanitarian reports is the crimes for those “civilians” that ranged from collaborators with the police and Marines, cattle thieves, wife beaters or other rural tyrants. These nuances are left out of course as they serve the ideological justification that rebellion is wrong.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission monopolizes legitimate justice and violence to be only dished out by the bourgeois state, at no point in the commission was a representative of the revolution given equal place, in spite of the Commissions posturing condemnation for the Fujimori government.
https://redlibrary.xyz/works/strugglesessions/enemies-of-the-communist-party-of-peru.pdf
NOOOOOOO ILL DEFEND YOUR HONOR GONZOLO!
You seriously want to blame tens of thousands of rapes, infanticides, murders of prominent leftists and feminists, and countless other crimes on COINTELPRO?
For all I know, Stalin was never accused of fucking boiling babies alive.
Fuck off. How about you start defending Pol Pot next.
What evidence do you have of infanticide? Y’all take Reddit memes too seriously. This is the first time I’m seeing the accusation of rape against the PCP. Did the Bolsheviks not, in their conquest of state power, murder “prominent leftists” such as the anarchists or the right-opportunist Mensheviks and SRs? The PCP similarly had to fight the revisionist (and actually homophobic) MRTA, and it had to combat state-backed forces and groups siding with the genocidal state.
When did I mention COINTELPRO? Can you even read what I said? Are you willing to engage with me honestly? It seems the answer to those last two questions is clearly “no”.
Every communist is accused of such heinous crimes without evidence. Lenin and Stalin are labelled “ruthless tyrants”, and Mao was supposedly a “sex pest” according to his “private doctor”, though many others close to Mao refuted that. Hell, Stalin is accused of deliberately causing a famine, resulting in infant cannibalism. You people are reasonably principled about those leaders and know to refute those lies, but once the same shit is hurled at the PCP, you capitulate.
Also, it astounds me that you’ll trust Bad Empanada on the PCP, but his video on the Holodomor, while not calling Stalin genocidal, still calls it a fault of the government’s mismanagement, and thus still Stalin’s fault. Anti-Stalin propaganda is bad, but anti-Gonzalo propaganda is good.
Yeah, but have you considered the capitalist nations are just lying about everything bad the Shining Path ever did, and the people just randomly refused to support them for no reason at all?
Also, those same capitalists are totally right when they say that China is lying about their poverty alleviation efforts though, because China is obviously the devil and it is more important to blindly hate on them than actually deal with the imperial core.
How’d you find this post? You’re welcome to stay here, our community is a lot better than whatever you’ve got on Quora and IG. Just know most of us don’t support Gonzalo. Just because someone calls themselves communist doesn’t mean they’re worth our support. Should we support Jim Jones? La Rouche? Caleb Maupen? Besides just understanding cults you should understand the line struggle between right and left deviations. It should be clear that the PCP were a pretty far left deviation. I’d rather support a slightly right deviationist China that continues to improve people’s lives and counter US hegemony than a random guerrilla group that killed random people motivated by hatred of people even slightly to the right of them (that failed).
Beside that our ideologies aren’t much different, so I’d hope you’d remain open and converse here.
I searched this site because a sudden rise in traffic to our site, and especially my article which you shared above, came from here. This community doesn’t seem too promising considering all the bourgeois and imperialist myths they believe about the PCP, but I’ll stay here and see how it goes.
The PCP was not a cult like Jim Jones’s group was. There’s a clear difference between a party working to liberate the people in a place where most parties turned electoralist and capitulated to the state, and a government that has turned bourgeois rather than simply being “slightly right deviationist”. The US “improved people’s lives” for quite some time because that’s how development works; China could have continued on the socialist path with a planned economy and worked just fine, just as the Stalin era saw the most massive improvement in development for the USSR, but the bourgeoisie seized power and reversed that trend. The PCP was not a “random guerrilla group”; it was a revolutionary party with support from the oppressed masses.
Here’s a document with even more sources than what I used in my article: https://docs.google.com/document/d/16bue8TQo-knWAKlkpuNBnePOs7j7KDh11aDoNa_dPO0/edit
I also have a playlist with some decent documentaries that Bad Empanada would never show: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1otLYuSiLBdsx6Wu0hRxdT_T2RLKpGAY
for me they completely rejected praxis and established a complete militarization of the party. Unlike the CPC or the maoists in india and the philippines, which establish civilian facilities such as schools, toilets, housing and food, the PCP snubbed this, since the doctrine of the concentric concentration of the three instruments demand the party to act like a militia group. Just violence, pure violence, and the reason for this is they believe that outside revisionist elements will infiltrate the party and corrupt it, despite revisionism actually coming from inside the party politics, such as what we saw during the twilight years of the soviet union, or some chinese “communists” which wanted shock therapy in the country.
The shining path even abandoned Marxist-Leninist-Maoism and just stuck to their deranged ideology of “gonzaloism”. And the PCPs continued path of MLM puts them at odds with other MLs groups. Their broad definition of revisionism lands the Communist Party of India (Maoist) and the Communist Party of the Philippines as revisionist, as these groups do not apply elements like the militarization of the party.
