EL DIARIO: Do you ever get depressed?
CHAIRMAN GONZALO: No. I believe that I've got an almost built-in optimism. And I occupy myself more with problems of understanding and conviction than with problems of feelings or depression. On the contrary, I think that I am quite optimistic. It is Marxism, Chairman Mao, who has made us understand that people, especially communists, are optimists. Whenever I find myself in a difficult situation I strive to look for its positive aspect or for what potential for development may stillexist within that situation, because nothing is completely black, nor is anything completely red. Even if there were to be a big defeat, even though we have not had one yet, there would always be a positive aspect. The point is to draw out the lessons, and continue to do our work based on the positive aspect. You will always find someone to support you, to lend their ardent enthusiasm and assistance to the struggle, because communism unites people.
blinkandwheeze posted:lo posted:what's the 'revisionist' or whatever line on the shining path, because they dont seem particularly funny to me just in general. maybe a small chuckle here and there, at the most. serious question, not just being flippant.
So many people who are ostensibly communists have completely thoughtlessly bought into the state dept propagandist line on sendero sadly. an immense national scale revolution developed from the base of indigenous campesina is cast as as minoritarian petty-bourgeois adventurist ultraleftism. i've honestly never seen any similar western propagandist ops executed so perfectly. comparing reports prior to the collapse of the revolution with those in its wake are genuinely shocking in how distorted and motivated hegemonic bourgeois history have been
people complaining about westerners repeating chauvinist state dept line is especially ironic when they are happy to dismiss peruvian revolutionary efforts as objects of ridicule out the other side of their mouth
i know you've seen this lo but everyone should watch this documentary put together near the height of communist advances in peru to get a basic grasp of the absolute seriousness and commitment of sendero's efforts
blinkandwheeze posted:at the very least everyone should see this footage of this international women's day demonstration within the canto grande prison, a maximum security facility sendero had successfully taken over and administered as an autonomous commune
2 months later the fujimori regime conducted a genocidal series of attacks on the prison, extending to shelling the facilities themselves, leaving hundreds dead. note that everyone depicted are holding batons in place of rifles, as these actions were perpetrated against nonviolent prisoner activists without any access to firearms. Really funny...
went looking for these posts after seeing exactly the phenomenon described in the first one — saw someone on twitter who's built his entire brand jumping to the defense of Actually Existing Socialist countries against state dept narratives go on vicious tirades about the horrors of the shining path.
anyone have any other recommended reading? it's not something i've spent much time investigating
Constantignoble posted:went looking for these posts after seeing exactly the phenomenon described in the first one — saw someone on twitter who's built his entire brand jumping to the defense of Actually Existing Socialist countries against state dept narratives go on vicious tirades about the horrors of the shining path.
anyone have any other recommended reading? it's not something i've spent much time investigating
It's pretty awful, if this is what contemporary revisionism leads to it should all be thrown in the trashbin.
All that I’ve been able to find is the collected works on FLP and it reads like the rest of the very stilted formulaic weirdos that fell into maoism
Constantignoble posted:anyone have any other recommended reading? it's not something i've spent much time investigating
I'm not a stats guy so can't speak to the soundness of the methodology but this is fairly recent and Big If True:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2053168018820375
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in Peru is usually cited as an example of how capture–recapture methods can help improve our understanding of mass violence from incomplete observed data. Using 25,000 documented death records, the TRC estimated a total of 69,000 killings, and that the Shining Path was the main perpetrator, in contrast with the raw data where the Peruvian State appears to be responsible for the most killings. One feature not often noticed is that the TRC applied an unusual indirect procedure, combining data on different perpetrators and lumping together missing perpetrator data in one group. I show that direct estimations with strict stratification by perpetrator and accounting for missing data do not support the results of the TRC’s indirect approach. I estimate a total of 48,000 killings, substantially lower than the TRC estimate, and the Peruvian State accounts for a significantly larger share than the Shining Path. Rather than an example of correcting biases in the observed data through capture–recapture methods, the TRC actually introduced further distortion.
shriekingviolet posted:I'm not a stats guy so can't speak to the soundness of the methodology but this is fairly recent and Big If True:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2053168018820375
that's really cool, good to know. i doubt it's a detail i'd bust out in like a debate or whatever, since the violence of the slave revolt and that of the slave owner can't rightly be compared. a version of that remark even appears toward the end of the documentary above, while the bodies of the executed are being laid out in the prison yard.
also if some lib is doing the bodycount-bait thing, and you take the trouble to make rigorous arguments to the effect that the revolutionary side is, as usual, the less homicidal one, they just swat the board away and smugly tell you you're damning with faint praise, and Even One Death Is Too Many, and it's like ok whatever dude you're the one who brought it up
Constantignoble posted:that's really cool, good to know. i doubt it's a detail i'd bust out in like a debate or whatever, since the violence of the slave revolt and that of the slave owner can't rightly be compared. a version of that remark even appears toward the end of the documentary above, while the bodies of the executed are being laid out in the prison yard.
also if some lib is doing the bodycount-bait thing, and you take the trouble to make rigorous arguments to the effect that the revolutionary side is, as usual, the less homicidal one, they just swat the board away and smugly tell you you're damning with faint praise, and Even One Death Is Too Many, and it's like ok whatever dude you're the one who brought it up
I agree 100% with your read of the rhetorical traps, but when there's evidence that they've deliberately skewed the statistics to vilify one actor it obviously tips off what's really going on and that it really does matter.
I also find parallels of the whole "Truth and Reconciliation" framing significant, being reminded of the canadian Truth and Reconciliation investigation into the genocidal residential school system that was such a sham the chair of the committee publicly denounced the government's motives and resigned, to give one example of many.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1470-9856.00026
this part is something recognizable from enough historical moments (including, in lower-stakes ways, contemporary social media) as to ring plausible:
[As] castigations and executions became more frequent ... villagers soon realized that they did not so much have to fear Sendero as what their neighbors might tell Sendero. Denunciations thus became a new means with which to settle old scores.
the case of the Iquichanos is pretty interesting:
In the eyes of their communities, [assassinated peasant authorities in Huaychao and Ccarhuahuran] were not criminals or corrupt government bureaucrats. Rather they were legitimate and highly respected local authorities. ... What was more, they were also kinsmen. A custom of edogamous marriage was strictly observed in these thirty or so high-Andean villages, bound together by blood so as to form a distinct ethnic group known as the Iquichanos. For this reason, Shining Path's execution of a single individual in one Iquichano village created wider ripples of anger in neighboring villages. ... "At first, we provided them with provisions and lodgings, and approved of their aim of fighting injustice," [recalled Elias Ccente, Uchuraccay's current community president and a relative of the murdered Eusebio Ccente.] "But soon we saw that what they said was not what they did. They behaved terribly. When they demanded provisions they always took the best, even our local girls, some of whom they got pregnant."
the pregnancy bit probably pings right off the "strict endogamous marriage" bit. the piece goes on to mention that the relative egalitarianism of the Iquichanos meant less purchase for sendero outreach than in more heavily stratified rural settlements where there were clearer haves and have-nots, etc
on the other hand, they were recent beneficiaries of prior land reform with something to lose in all this. that's a bit closer to the kulak mark albeit without the deep roots. and, again, the fact that they were for the first couple years on the same side was unexpected. (they also grossly underestimated sendero, and figured they could take them head on: "The first terrucos we met were young and scrawny. They were few in number and not very well armed. We thought it would be easy to annihilate them with our lances, slings, knives and stones." this did not end well for them.)
pausing about halfway through this one paper, but i'll be looking for others tonight
the ronda campesinas weren't an indigenous and internal development from the rural peasantry, they were an arms of an active state proxy counterinsurgency campaign. the stratifications in the rural communities is not going to offer much in the way of explanation outside of the system of incentives and coercion imposed by the state
rondas had existed prior to the revolution as a self-organised anti-cattle rustling response following the rapid absence of local authorities with the removal of the hacienda system follow the land reforms. but these had nothing to do with the state organised civil defence committees, which appealed to these traditions for a veneer of legitimacy, but were an artificial arming and recruitment of contra death squads
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14678802.2016.1200316
Those of Pichiwillca continually invaded disorganised population, accusing them of collaborating and assisting Sendero. They arrived and maltreated the local people, as happened on more than one occasion in Quimbiri, without anyone being able to intercede for them, neither the soldiers nor the policemen . They entered houses at night, masked in balaclavas, and abducted young people supposedly linked to Sendero, those same ones who in days were discovered murdered, thrown into the river or displayed in the open air.
As communities were expected to comply with extraordinary measures against Senderistas, sides had to be chosen in the name of security. One member of a ronda campesina in the Apurímac Valley described the dilemma: ‘In this zone of the Apurímac Valley no one can be neutral. They have already killed all those who were neutral’.
While the rise of accidental killings and intra-communal rivalry has been mentioned in the literature, the disruption of traditional forms of conflict resolution is the least studied effect of CDC creation in Peru. According to a majority of testimonies gathered by the CVR, a military logic was imposed in the villages by establishing CDC. Everyday life was organised according to war rationales (e.g. incessant military work-out, vigilante activities). In particular, this included penalising petty offences instead of making use of consensual community-based institutions. The CVR quotes a testimony that highlights the change:
During that time there was no judge, just the commands made people respect the laws, there was also a lieutenant, it was only them who punished those who behaved bad in the community, they would beat him/her with the butt of the weapon. There were only the lieutenant and the command in the community, there was not even a president there; accordingly, there was no sort of agreement, simply punishment.
The focus on military training constrained the local communities in carrying out their regular work such as managing their estates. Moreover, the militarisation of everyday life deeply impacted on the social fabric of local communities. Given the command exercised by the armed forces, usually younger ronderos became CDC leaders as most of them were graduates of the Peruvian military. They were chosen by the communities based on bellicose qualities alone: ‘The bravest, the one with the most power, this was the one we chose’.66 The traditional meritocratic ruling in Andean communities was pushed aside, and with it an entire generation of elder authorities. The young leaders frequently made use of their autonomy towards their local communities by liberating themselves from social control. In a few cases, the CVR identified warlord-like commandos:
They were like gods. They acted like kings. With the nomination they had got, in fact, they were kings indeed. To persons they did not get along with well, they would tell them, now, to the torture already.
pogfan1996 posted:Yet when a rondero gets elected the western left treats him like the next Hugo chavez
chavez spent his early military career fighting against a communist insurgency so that is actually a point of similarity
88888 posted:pogfan1996 posted:Yet when a rondero gets elected the western left treats him like the next Hugo chavez
chavez spent his early military career fighting against a communist insurgency so that is actually a point of similarity
Never knew that, thanks
jiroemon1897 posted:Saw this in Austin from the highway and had a good chuckle:
tears posted:
seeing this car IRL was a life changing experience for me
tears posted:Chair Man Gonzalo
