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Gonzalo
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this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2024
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chapotraphouse
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did that actually happen, do you know?
I don't really know much about shining path, and I tend to automatically disbelieve anything a settler colonial state like Peru or the US etc says, especially when its blood libel level outrageous.
It's something that got broken telephoned into a meme. IIRC a village lynched a local party leader and in retaliation the local cadre violently attacked the village. In the attack they threw boiling water at people, including pregnant women, and later Gonzalo made a somewhat unapologetic statement on the attack.
ok, thanks. I did just look for what happened (although internet research is ofc limited) and it looks like that claim comes from a testimony (that I can't find but is quoted, idk the origin of it) given to the commission set up by the Liberal, US educated president, and that it claims that a group of 29 people (including men, women, children) were gathered into a house and attacked with machetes, hatchets, and guns, and during and after this (i.e while alive and while dead) were sprayed with boiling water.
I get killing people with weapons, but I'm a bit confused at the purpose of the boiling water? idk if there's some utility of boiling water that I'm missing?
Since it was in retaliation for a lynching I imagine it was just cruelty on the cadres' part they thought was justified
yes, I would agree, and that was my first thought, supposing it were a true testimony - sometimes people use acid or boiling water to scar people in order to terrorise them. The part I don't get about the alleged action, is why they allegedly did it to bodies too?
That I don't have an answer for
Me either! Its odd.
Incidentally, the other source I could find for claims of the use of boiling water (as an execution method - reminiscent of the claims that the Uzbek leader boils his enemies), as well as other similar claims of atrocities, is from InSight Crime a non-profit think tank with offices in Washington DC, and Colombia, founded by US journalists and funded by Soros' Open Society Foundation.
I've seen allegations of involvement by the CIA, but I haven't really looked into them much. It would be around when Operation Condor was in full swing though
I think you can throw a stone in South America and find the CIA. Actually, on looking a bit further, one co-founder is a US Journalist, and the other is someone who claims to be a journalist, but has an interesting background as a British Army Officer, who apparently 'saw active service in Northern Ireland and Bosnia'.
Given how remote and rural the conflict was, and given the state of Peru's politics and history, I'm not willing to believe any of what is said about the communist party and insurrection there. I'd be a lot happier if there was corresponding testimony from the communist side (and if it weren't a crime to express support for them in Peru), but given that the trial was conducted in secret, all I ever have to go on when I do look into it ends up being western or settler-colonial government sources. Similar is true for FARC.
We have testimony from the "communist" side and it's "we dealt them a blow by annihilating 80 people there". they don't apologize or obfuscate so I don't get why you are for them
80 people, but who were those people (if that itself isn't an exaggeration ofc)?
I take it you're referring to the speech, but in that the 'victims' are referred to as combatants, so.
I'm for them because they're communists, and they're fighting against a US (and European) backed colonial government, whose ancestors genocided the people and took their land. That's enough for me, I don't feel the need to decry and condemn people resisting just because the US or a colonial government says they were bad - every side in a conflict says the other is bad, its expected.
thats certainly a claim I've read too, but then I suppose every revolutionary movement has had a conflict with local peasantry as well as the state - peasants are often co-opted to fight against such movements, and certainly landowners usually resist. From what I read about Peru, they were fighting cattle farming interests.
I was under the impression the lynching happened after the PCP had been occupying the village for months and had themselves executed several villagers.
It's been a while since I've refreshed myself on it, but I recall there being a longstanding beef between the two so that lines up.
They admitted to killing babies, and they were proven to have boiled peasants alive.
People have put two and two together, but there’s no concrete proof of boiling babies IIRC. However, the other two are damning enough without combining them
Do you have the source for those admissions and that proof by any chance? The ones I could find weren't very good.
Of course, many revolutions involve the death of children, and peasants. Obviously not a good thing, but the successful ones get upheld regardless - damned sometimes in part but not in whole.
Are the death of those children and peasants purposeful and done in cold-blooded executions? Are they added to the death count and bragged about unapologetically by the leader of the movement, saying they were "annihilated" there to "teach the enemies a lesson"?
Yes peasants and children die in wars and revolutions. But if the Red Army committed such a crime as executing a village full of peasants as collective punishment Lenin would have had them shot not bragged about it
Its difficult to find a good source, isn't it?
I don't really believe the claims made by Israel about Oct 7th either. Of course, clearly at least some 'innocents' did die in crossfire on that day. I also find it difficult to believe, on the basis of testimony alone, the claims from both sides that during the Nakba and also during the recent uprising, that children were cooked in ovens. Obviously (some few) people are capable of doing such things, but its also a very good lie to tell because it causes instinctive outrage and disgust that prevent people from investigating further - blood libel is a very old and common tactic, because it works.
I think the leader of the movement doesn't/didn't accept the tale we've been told by the Liberal settler colonial government, and by US agencies, about what happened. I don't think he was stupid, whatever else he was, and it would be a stupid thing to brag about if it happened as alleged.
It's almost certaintly made up, but it's not like that's ever stopped anticommunists.
Ah ok, thanks. I know there's a lot of dislike toward Shining Path, and like I said I don't know much - I haven't taken the time to attempt to properly investigate - but from what little I do know I don't see any particular problems, just that they were unsucessful in winning (so far).
I recall @CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.ml was working on a translation of a book about Gonzalo being a CIA asset from Spanish into English. I'm not sure how much progress was made on that though.
Yes
Where can I see the progress on that? I'm interested in reading it whenever it's translated.
We'll make announcements on the prolewiki twitter and lemmygrad community as it progresses!
What's the book title?
Ah really? That's interesting - do you know who wrote the book?
Maybe investigate a bit further
Thanks, I will do - do you have any recommendations, especially ones not from a settler-colonist state or anticommunist source? Thats all I tend to find when I look.
I BadEmpanada might have a video on it, at least he's the first one I remember talking about how weird these gonzalo people are
yeah, to it seems like one of those things where if america or its allies commits war crimes its all ok and 'just the nature of warfare' and 'a few bad apples' but we still gotta support Da Twoops, but if foreigners do it, its a repudiation of their entire leadership, ideology, and humanity.
The leader of the movement admitting to massacring peasants and saying it was good and he would do it again does in fact repudiate his entire ideological strain that he invented
source? cuz others in this thread say thats a misinterpretation of the facts, like the dude gave a non-apology apparently more than it was condoned but idk
http://www.redsun.org/pcp_doc/pcp_0788.htm
Here is an interview where Gonzalo just outright states he murdered ~70 indigenous men, women and children in Lucanamarca village and called it “revolutionary excess”.
Of those killed by the Shining Path, eighteen were children, the youngest of whom was only six months old. Also killed were eleven women.
Why does he openly defend killing 29 indigenous women and child peasants as a good tactic? Like what the fuck?
He’s talking about slaughtering peasant children to deal a “devastating blow”
You got a source for this part?
The interview doesn't seem quite as damning as you're making it out to be. He seems to be saying they dealt a devastating blow to the mesnadas.(which are supposedly government-run paramilitaries?)
He claims the army came in and
right before he says
So he doesn't appear to be saying they murdered a bunch of unarmed peasants, he's saying they attacked an armed paramilitary group.
This also doesn't suggest unarmed peasants.
I'm not saying he's telling the truth, or that they didn't kill any innocent people. It's just far from him openly admitting they killed babies.
He did this by killing 29 women and children in an unrelated village? This is open revenge killing of the poorest and most oppressed in society. shameful to defend this shit. The reports actually have 69 deaths whereas Gonzalo claims 80. Basically half of the deaths were kids and random civilians? This is not how the Bolsheviks fought their revolution, nor the Chinese Communists. They didn't kill peasant children purposefully and include them in their "kill count" they "annihilated". This is bloodthirsty mania, out of control, aimed downward not at the rich.
I'm not sure it matters too much (if the events there are as presented by the commission) that there were women killed does it? A lot of the membership of the communist side were women, which possibly meant they didn't uphold 'chivalric' values (for want of a better term) in wartime.
As for indigenous, Mao of course killed a lot of indigenous Chinese in the course of his war. I'm not sure using these categories of people for moral outrage is useful for analysis, unless there's some kind of sustained genocidal campaign, which there clearly wasn't.
Children of course are usually somewhat different, but as we know the Romanov children died during that revolution, and I would be surprised if thats the only example.
I'm not defending these actions - its bad optics to do so and so you must always caveat with this - but war is always like this. I suppose all you can do is weigh the result against what it took to get there - like the Terror in France, or the purge of landlords in China.
where i come free we don't slaughter unarmed women with machetes and boiling water comrade. some say it's not their revolution if they can't dance, for me that line is slaughtering defenseless women and children especially those of the people you're supposed to be fighting on behalf of. If you fuck up and bomb an area or accidentally shoot up an orphanage or something, you don't proudly display it as a good tactic that you are unapologetic about. That's something to feel shame about that is a great crime. If your soldiers commit such crimes, they should be shot - as Lenin often did to any criminals among the reds who mistreated the people
Mao and Ho Chi Minh were part of the people. Gonzalo obviously was not if he had to resort to this sort of terror
Well no revolution is fighting on behalf of all the people is it?
You're admirably vehement in defending the official version of events, have you wondered if you might be wrong? Like, if your opinion and view of what happened aligns with the US state department (among other imperialists and colonisers, and anti-communists), what if this is another case of lies like the supposed Uyghur genocide, or the 'holodomer', or basically any of the things the US tends to say about its enemies? What about this particular case, Peru, convinces you that the US and the colonial government are correct and not lying?
Unlike the Uyghur genocide lies there’s actually corpses here. Xi also doesn’t make speeches where he talks about how much he collectively punished the Uyghurs and “annihilated” them
That's your (and the US, Peruvian colonial anti-communist gov, and European) interpretation of the speech, in accordance with the same 'sides' claims about what happened - as has been pointed out to you, but you seemingly aren't in agreement with, although you haven't mentioned why.
Corpses of course occur in every conflict - it would actually however be useful as a piece of evidence as to what happened, provided of course we can trust the investigatory body that conducted autopsies, and there was nothing suspicious about the process (like in the Oct 7th case, or Bucha). Do you have a source for such autopsies or investigations, I couldn't find one when i looked?
We do have testimony, from members of the 'terrorist'/liberation group that operates in that region (as well as poor people who understandably will take money to say whatever is asked of them), regarding the alleged Uyghur genocide, and China has discussed previously its 'security' campaign in that area, which naturally involved killings - annihilations - of combatants (as well as police action, arrests and so on). There was also allegations of 'collective punishment' via mass arrests, seperation of families. Xi is unlikely to say such things, because of his position and circumstance - it would hardly be useful to brag about the defeat of a comparatively insignificant enemy force.
Of course, in the case of the Uyghur 'genocide' we can easily say that its a nonsense, that what happened there is not as the west alleges, for various reasons - mostly that we have more evidence from a wide array of sources, including the Chinese (and local government) side of the conflict. That isn't so in the Peruvian case as I'm sure you'll acknowledge - which is why I think leftists have been persuaded more easily to take the US state department line about savage murderous barbarian enemies of all that is good and right, who were supposedly hated by the people of Peru.
Incidentally, how do you feel, given what you've said previously (about the Red Army) about the so called Katyn massacres? The Russians admitted responsibility - though not that it was a war crime - in the 90s. Personally, my view of it is that it is likely that it was the Germans, but that it was expedient or useful to 'admit' responsibility (Stalin being long gone) for Russia at the time. Further, I'd also say that even if it did happen by the Soviets, I'm fairly indifferent to it - a bunch of military, aristos, and their sympathisers getting offed in the course of a war isn't a big deal.
Which comes to the point made by the Peruvian communists, that 'human rights' and 'war crimes' are a product of Imperial and Colonial governments. This is true, thats who drew the laws up. I don't think that means that there is no moral or ethical code, but rather that a concept of human rights must be the product of all of humanity to be meaningful. For example, its considered a war crime to take hostages, as Hamas (and the Peruvian communists) did. This is absurd of course - provided the hostages are treated well I don't see a problem, hostage taking is a very effective tactic in warfare particularly against a stronger and wealthier opponent, which is why its considered illegal by strong wealthy states. Collective punishment is another example - there are obviously degrees of such, and those matter when determining justification. Mass restriction of movement, while not ideal, is hardly the same as mass indiscriminate bombing (in fact is simply what happens at borders between states every day).
It's a much worse look since Gonzalo wasn't Indigenous but some white settler. It just reminds me of CHAZ where they made so much about CHAZ being free of the US but a couple of Black teens got murdered by white settler guards, meaning that CHAZ managed to reproduced the settler-colonial plantation of the US.
Honestly, the main takeaway from Gonzalo is that decolonization has to be the primary focus within settler colonies (Peru is a settler colony as well) and if your so-called revolutionary movement isn't decolonial, it will reproduce settler-colonialism. That's what the whole killing Indigenous peasants represented in the end. It's just a reproduction of settler-colonialism, which is inherently genocidal towards the Indigenous and Indigeneity. Towards the end, Indigenous communities began to take up arms against the PCP. You could say that those armed militia are reactionary, but to me, it's just them wanting to chase out settler crackers and I see absolutely nothing wrong with that.
its important though to seperate the 'look' from the actual circumstances. Was he anti-indigenous, did he kill indigenous Peruvians deliberately because of their ethnicity, or because some were fighting on the side of landed interests?
Lots of bolsheviks were Jewish, of course that doesn't mean that in killing Russian opponents they were carrying out an anti-Russian campaign - although that is a common rightist accusation, presumably because of how it 'looks'.
As far as I understand Peru, a lot of the rural areas have indigenous populations, partly because many fled there during the European conquest. I don't think it is possible that the resistance movement could have done what it did without the support of a large amount of indigenous people. Of course, some will have opposed the communists - the armed militia, referred to as 'peasant patrols' seem to me to be paramilitaries assisted by the state and fighting for landowners, particularly cattle ranchers.