Obituary: Chairman Gonzalo
moufawad-paul.blogspot.com
On the same date as the 1973 coup in Chile, one of the great revolutionaries of the 21st Century, Abimael Guzmán ("Gonzalo"), has passed awa...
  • Alaskaball [comrade/them]M
    ·
    3 years ago

    So when it comes to Gonzalo and the PCP, these mistakes and excesses cohere with the Lucanamarca massacre of 1983... which they not only admitted were excessive, and tried to explain the reasons behind them

    At least they're willing to own up to their fuck ups

    And yet every revolutionary movement, even the successful ones, have stories of excesses and mistakes. For example, the Saint-Domingue Revolution (Haiti) has multiple stories of excessive revolutionary violence, still documented by historians, that are far worse than what the "Sendero Luminoso"did in Lucanamarca.

    They didn't just pull a "oh we did an oopsie but at least it wasn't as bad as these fucked up things right? We look like Buddha when we compare ourselves to Vlad the fucking impaler"

    • richietozier4 [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Sure we slaughtered a village because one of our guys was killed, but slaves also killed their masters!

    • Huldra [they/them, it/its]
      ·
      3 years ago

      At least my understanding of their "reasoning" was that it was literally a mass revenge in order to prove how strong and ruthless they were, so they did basically exactly what they intended to do. The only thing that could have been argued would have been better would be if they only killed the men or some shit, but thats borderline "military age male" reasoning. Slaughter is slaughter no matter if you try to save face by sparing the children.

      And all the comparisons to violence in the middle of revolutions feels disingenous, cause that shit is during an extremely chaotic time with lots of shit going on and everything that has been built up overflowing at once. Lucanamarca did not happen during such a time, in fact in Gonzalos discussion of Lucanamarca he talks about how they couldnt have restrained themselves because otherwise the waters would not overflow like would be necessary for a revolution. Its just deliberately confusing individualist terrorism with state and mass terror against the bourgeoise and other reactionary classes.

  • cokedupchavez [none/use name]
    ·
    3 years ago

    ok so when you reject marxism-leninism, why exactly is marxism leninism maoism more valid than marxism leninism maoism avakianism? :thinkin-lenin:

      • drinkinglakewater [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        IIRC it's a term referring to the ideas of Bob Avakian, former leader of the Revolutionary Communist Party of USA, who developed an extreme cult like following and basically rotted the party with dogmatism to his ideas. There's a book called Against Avakianism that criticizes his philosophical shortcomings.

  • Multihedra [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    I was curious to see if there would be any discussion about this here.

    I’m not knowledgeable about the various splits and schisms and sects, nor am I terribly familiar with J Moufawad Paul. But I did recognize this piece as much more charitable to Gonzalo than “the consensus” at large