Friends,
It is one thing to discuss the Sendero Luminoso movement in Peru and to try to get
through all of the propaganda put out about it. It is also one thing to understand
that people ravaged by brutal repression will often react vioently when they are
organized. It is one thing to say that the U.S. has a lot of nerve to condemn
violence by oppressed peoples. However, it is another to condemn a person who
provides us with some additional information about Sendero and the Peruvian left
(always badly divided as I remember) and raises issues about the class background of
Guzman and SL leaders and their record to date. It is another to suggest that
anyone who raises such issues is some comfortable jerk in a wealthy country without
a real clue. Believe me I am no enemy of revolutionary violence. Allende and even
the Sandinistas (before so many of them abandoned thier cause) could have uses more
of it or some of it.
Michael Yates
p.s. I would like to see some more discussion of Mao and the Cultural Revolution.
Mark Jones wrote:
> Brian Green wrote:
>
> > However, with Robert Saute, I would add that it is not possible, nor
> > desirable, to ignore the human rights issues
>
> Meaning, we must take the PCP at your evaluation rather than it's own. Fine, if
> you also permit us reciprocally to question the totality of your own
> commitments/accommodations, the degree to which your participation in
> intellectual and political life in the west opposes or colludes with the
> existence of world-capitalism as the defining last instance which determines the
> misery of the Andes indigenous peoples, and marginal peoples everywhere. Do you
> allow us to do this? Or do you claim some special privilege which allows you to
> question their 'human rights record' but not them to interrogate yours/ours?
>
> More specifically, do you think that our position, socially, as members of a
> salariat engrossing far more of the labour of others than they of ours,
> qualifies us as being disinterested, morally-competent observers? Do you think
> that your position within the academy is on balance a support to the status quo
> or an assault on it ? (and I am not answering the question for you, since I have
> no idea who you are, nor do I doubt that you are well-meaning and genuinely
> fraternal). This is the status quo which privileges us and grinds their
> faces in the dust, that I'm talking about.
>
> Unless the answers amount to more than expressions of wounded pride,
> indignation, perhaps a sanctimonious insistence that we 'all' enjoy the right
> to criticise 'human rights abuse', even those of us morally disadvantaged, as it
> were, by our phenomenal (comparatively speaking) wealth and personal opportunity
> -- the answers will not satisfy the average Senderista, I fear.
>
> He/she (it is likely to be a she) may retort that you are a damn Yanqui
> (even if you are not), that you have enjoyed the good life long enough, and
> that the only reason you continue to enjoy it, and to snide about human
> rights violations, is because you are protected in your ivory towers by
> shadowy legions of stranglers, poisoners, dark forces, clever propagandists
> masquerading as aid workers, 'human rights' advisers just as interested in
> Peruvian government crimes as SL crimes; as labour activists freshly returned
> from up-to-the minute CIO-AF of L funded (ie, CIA funded) courses in human
> rights etc or as Americas-Watch sociologists interested in the *anthropology*
> of PCP women prisoners herded like pigs in Fujimoris pens ...
>
> Yes, on the whole, I think the average Senderista might well regard anyone who
> did not clearly take a stand against the millenial immiseration of his people --
> who continued with weaselly words to support Garcia's 'land reforms' etc -- as
> part of the problem, as merely another claw of another finger of the Great
> Satan, to be cut off without mercy.
>
> Mark
