Defend the Great Leadership of Chairman Gonzalo!

Posted on January 14, 2009 by @ndy
    Read the Great Works of Secretary Žižek!

As the trial of former President Fujimori draws to a close (see The Fall of Fujimori by Ellen Perry), remnants of the Shining Path remain at large. In fact, just a few weeks ago, according to the BBC, the Peruvian army “said the Shining Path — which moved into cocaine trafficking after its bloody war against the state collapsed in 1992 — killed at least 25 police or soldiers this year in a series of brazen ambushes, including one that blew up a military convoy with dynamite”.

NTDTV, October 14, 2008:

Fujimori is accused of being one of the principal authors of a state terrorist campaign to destroy Shining Path in the late ’80s and ’90s. Specifically:

    1991 Barrios Altos killings: 15 dead
    1992 La Cantuta killings: 10 dead
    1992 illegal detention: journalist Gustavo Gorriti and businessman Samuel Dyer
    Separate trial on corruption and illegal wiretapping charges

His trial is the subject of a Major Motion Picture:

Captured in 1992, Chairman Gonzalo — aka Manuel Rubén Abimael Guzmán Reynoso (b. December 3, 1934) — was sentenced to life in prison in 2006.

Peru’s Shining Path founder sentenced to life for terrorism, murder
BBC
October 14, 2006

A court in Peru has sentenced the founder of the Shining Path Maoist guerillas, Abimael Guzman, to life in prison for terrorism, murder and other crimes. The sentence was for leading an uprising in which about 70,000 people were killed during the 1980s and 1990s. In sentencing Guzman to life imprisonment, three judges listed the charges of terrorism and murder in a verdict that lasted more than six hours. In his second retrial the former Shining Path leader stood impassively as he received his sentence. His partner and second-in-command, Elena Iparraguirre, also received a life sentence. During the trial, Guzman rejected being called a terrorist and described himself as a revolutionary combatant. Most Peruvians revile him, particularly in the poor rural areas, which bore the brunt of the violence.

A bourgeois, he left the philosophising behind to become a General in a People’s Army, fighting a People’s War, in Peru. This insurgency against the Peruvian state was conducted in the name of the Communist Party of Peru, aka Sendero Luminoso, aka Shining Path. (NB. Bloody Peruvian terrorist also had fuzzy side: “LIMA (EFE) – Peru’s Abimáel Guzmán, the founder of a Maoist guerrilla movement-cum-death cult that sometimes dynamited the bodies of just-murdered functionaries and hanged canines from lamposts as warnings to “capitalist dogs,” also had his soft, sappy and romantically poetic side…”)

When Gonzalo was finally arrested, the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement issued a big fat statement. “Defend the Life of Chairman Gonzalo” : The Battle-cry Resounds on Every Continent:

Since the September 12th capture of Comrade Gonzalo, Chairman of the Communist Party of Peru (PCP), a fierce and complex struggle has been unfolding. On the one side, the Fujimori regime backed by U.S. imperialism and egged on by reactionaries the world over. On the other side, Chairman Gonzalo, the People’s War in Peru, the world’s proletarian revolutionary forces centred around the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement and a broad and growing front of people opposed to imperialism and reaction and united in the demand to save the life of Dr Abimael Guzmán (Chairman Gonzalo’s given name).

Chairman Gonzalo was hauled before a military tribunal with breakneck speed. The reactionaries planned to present the people with a settled question before much could be done about it. But on September 15th, the Committee of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement issued a call to “Move Heaven and Earth to Defend the Life of Chairman Gonzalo”. In only a few days, a movement to defend his life had already begun to spring up, with an unprecedented rapidity and a broad social scope and international character.

A broad array of people from all over the world stepped forward to form the International Emergency Committee to Defend the Life of Dr Abimael Guzmán (IEC). By September 20th, the IEC began issuing regular bulletins and other messages by fax to the local defence committees that were being established in Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia and North and South America. Among them was a letter from Alfredo Crespo, Chairman Gonzalo’s lawyer, who wrote, “My client is aware of the concern of your organization and appreciates all of the efforts that are being undertaken…

Gonzalo was associated with RIM. Another, US-based Maoist mob, the Maoist Internationalist Movement, was opinionated, and has remained so:

Again on the arrest of comrade Gonzalo
MIM
February 5, 2008

With death threats against MIM, it is imperative that we attempt once again to address the greatest blow to communist hopes since 1976, the arrest of Comrade Gonzalo in Peru. A CIA agent involved in contributing to Gonzalo’s arrest was a white male speaking Spanish and with knowledge of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist teachings–and as of now we have verified this with one source. The main blame for Gonzalo’s capture lies with the imperialists and their lackeys, because of the “occupational hazards” of revolution. Nonetheless, Gonzalo shares partial blame for his own capture by disarming his own security ideologically.

It was the hope of many in the 1980s and early 1990s that Gonzalo in Peru would turn out to be both a genuine communist and successful revolutionary. He did have the most successful communist movement of his time, but he ended up captured and put in prison for life in 1992.

In 1980, the “Covert Action Information Bulletin” available and distributed by Gonzalo’s comrades published a CIA document on how “deep cover” is arranged. The 1980 article specifically mentioned the space services of other countries and communist parties as two targets for infiltration:

“For a Western service, penetration into an Orbit installation or the leadership of a Communist party are types of missions for which deep cover of indefinite durability may be required.”

Now it is time to criticize the Peruvian comrades ruthlessly for their own contribution to enabling the CIA.

# MIM raised the struggle against Trotskyism and its single world party idea since before there was the RIM single party Gonzalo joined. Gonzalo lightly joked on the topic the same way that RCP=CIA has all this time.
# Even after the arrest of Gonzalo, Peruvians could be found saying “only” MIM talks about crypto-Trotskyism.
# When MIM published on Internet Mao’s words on dissolving the Comintern, a Peruvian cursed us as “academic.” No Peruvians we met were aware of Stalin’s and Mao’s position.
# No Peruvian we met was familiar with Lenin on the “seal of parasitism” being on whole countries.
# No Peruvian we met was familiar with what Mao said in the Selected Works about armed struggle in imperialist countries. Only after struggle was this finally grudgingly admitted, only because it was in black-and-white from Mao.
# No Peruvian disowned Avakian for his attacks on “Lin Biaoism.”

To his credit, Gonzalo did sit his Central Committee down and have them discuss hegemonism within the RIM and he published a document from that. Gonzalo also had his Central Committee discuss whether there should be a world party, but he never evidenced any knowledge of what Stalin and Mao had said or reasons why Trotsky’s position should be resuscitated. Nor was there any discussion how the CIA builds cover from inside the u$a first in many cases.

Without Gonzalo’s being decisively correct on this question, there were bound to be problems in a military situation where the main force was peasants. In lower levels of the organization, MIM found military rigidity and aridness, and an inability to connect line and strategy, an inability to reason concretely.

Reinforcing this problem was the RCP=CIA. It held that 90% of the U.$. population was “objectively revolutionary.” The Peruvians in exile went out into France to conduct canvassing work as if Avakian and Gonzalo knew what they were talking about. They did not. No revolution came about in France.

Instead of white males imminently about to become revolutionary, such that Avakian’s slogan was “Revolution in the ’80s, Go for it!”–the Peruvians in fact encountered Amerikan white males from the CIA. Having been told that 90% of Amerikans were objectively revolutionary, the Peruvians were disarmed when it came to dealing with the reality of deep cover and international operations. The CIA was on a mission exactly at that time to have agents spend years in the united $tates building business or hobby covers for international operations.

The lying sacks of shit from the RCP=CIA told people of distant lands to expect 90% revolutionaries from the united $tates. They swindled many people of peasant background with little education and no thorough concrete knowledge of the imperialist countries. Reality was that in the 1960s, chances would have been better IF those white males Peruvians were meeting had been youth, because in the 1960s there were that many young people thinking about revolution even in the united $tates. By the 1980s and early 1990s, spies outnumbered communists by far in the united $tates, but instead of expecting exploiters, Peruvians expected benevolent white males as exemplified by Avakian’s omnipresent picture. Everywhere the RCP=CIA newspaper went, the masses received the wrong impression, a completely upside-down distortion of the general facts. Ideologically disarmed, the Peruvian masses and their allies south of the U.$. border could not contribute to the defense of comrade Gonzalo.

Every step of the way, before RIM even existed, MIM was there saying RCP=CIA was wrong. So these crimes of the RCP=CIA cannot be excused for “not knowing better.” We told them their “Conquer the World” document was wrong. We told them they were Trotskyists in our very foundation struggle. The Covert Action Information Bulletin they themselves distributed told them that the CIA used U.$.-based covers before going to the Third World. Nonetheless, Gonzalo and Avakian kept to Trotskyism, Gonzalo going so far as to admit that the RIM was “principally” a U.$.-led phenomenon. In the late 1980s, the Peruvians noted MIM as “coming on strong,” but they did not listen to us that the majority of Amerikans are exploiters. Instead of preparing the masses, the PCP ended up with Gonzalo captured–with the help of an Amerikan white male CIA agent enabled by the RCP=CIA. Contact with the masses is a disadvantage to the revolutionary struggle, if the supposed revolutionaries feed the masses incorrect information.

As for Gonzalo Thought, this precious commodity is preserved at redsun.org. An archive of earlier materials may be found at The People’s War in Perú Archive (‘Information about the Communist Party of Perú (PCP)’). Some of the flavour of His Thought and its impact may be viewed in the form of the Peruvian Revolutionary Women of Canto Grande Prison; apparently, murdered at some point following this footage.

More recently (January 12, 2009), a schmuck called Josh Rushing of AlJazeera has compiled a report on the path that still shines: “The Shining Path is on the move again. The formerly idealistic Maoist guerrilla force now models itself on the Farc in Colombia. It supports its operations by drug trafficking. Josh Rushing embeds with the Peruvian military as it goes on raids to flush out guerrillas and destroy the cocaine labs that fund them.”

Jo-Marie Burt is a scholar who has written extensively on Peru. Here she talks about inequality, human rights, democracy and the Fujimori trial. She’s also written a book on Peru, Political Violence and the Authoritarian State in Peru : Silencing Civil Society (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008): “The Shining Path was one of the most brutal insurgencies ever seen in the Western Hemisphere. Political Violence and the Authoritarian State in Peru explores the devastating effects of insurgent violence and the state’s brutal counterinsurgency methods on Peruvian civil society.”

Bonus!

TAKE UP THE MASTERFUL SPEECH OF OUR GREAT LEADERSHIP!
TODAY THE PARTY, CONTINUING ITS APPLICATION, GOES TOWARDS A NEW CONGRESS IN THE MIDST OF THE PEOPLE’S WAR

“We are living historic moments, each of us knows that this is the case, let us not fool ourselves. In these moments we must strengthen all forces to confront difficulties and continue carrying out our tasks. And we must conquer the goals! The successes! The victory! That is what is to be done. We are here as children of the people and we are fighting in these trenches, they are also trenches of combat, and we do it because we are Communists! Because here we are defending the interests of the people, the principles of the Party, and the People’s War. That is what we do, we are doing it and will continue to do so!” ~ Chairman Gonzalo, 24th of September 1992

LONG LIVE THE 15TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE MASTERFUL SPEECH OF OUR GREAT LEADERSHIP THAT SHINES VICTORIOUS AND POWERFUL BEFORE THE WORLD AS A COMBAT WEAPON! FOR THE NEW PARTY CONGRESS IN THE MIDST OF THE PEOPLE’S WAR!
LONG LIVE THE VICTORIOUS AND INVINCIBLE PEOPLE’S WAR!
LONG LIVE CHAIRMAN GONZALO!
LONG LIVE THE BPU!
LONG LIVE MARXISM-LENINISM-MAOISM, GONZALO THOUGHT, PRINCIPALLY GONZALO THOUGHT!
LONG LIVE THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF PERU!

About @ndy

I live in Melbourne, Australia. I like anarchy. I don't like nazis. I enjoy eating pizza and drinking beer. I barrack for the greatest football team on Earth: Collingwood Magpies. The 2024 premiership's a cakewalk for the good old Collingwood.
This entry was posted in History, State / Politics, Trot Guide, War on Terror. Bookmark the permalink.

4 Responses to Defend the Great Leadership of Chairman Gonzalo!

  1. Paul Justo says:
    January 14, 2009 at 5:55 pm

    MIM and the Red Sun websites make easy targets.

    Why? Because the “US-based Maoist mob, the Maoist Internationalist Movement” is actually a one man band, a website not a movement – likewise ‘Red Sun’ is run by one man out of Malmo in Sweden.

    If you want to criticise the PCP read their documents and come up with a counter analysis.

  2. @ndy says:
    January 14, 2009 at 9:01 pm

    …a counter analysis…

    Wendel brought it to life in his guest room bath tub
    It was a special project for his 4-H club
    But it broke loose out in the middle of the night
    And now it’s eatin’ flower children left and right

    All the punks are gonna scream yippie
    ‘Cause it’s the thing that only eats hippies

    First it cruised on out to Malibu
    And ate a couple a’ surfers
    Who were too tough to chew
    So it slithered it’s way
    Out to old Irvine
    And ate a couple a’ hippies
    And they tasted just fine

    Now it’s got a sweet tooth for long hair
    So Bob and Greg and Grant you should beware

    Followin’ the Dead is how it gets its kicks
    Shame it wasn’t born in 1966
    Listens to the music and begins to sway
    Dreamin’ acid dreams of a hippie souffle
    Hey hey hey

    What do they taste like –
    Some kind a’ treat?
    How many hippies can this monster eat?
    It ate Stills and Nash before they could shout
    And then it chewed on David Crosby
    But it spit him out

    All the punks are gonna scream yippie
    ‘Cause it’s the thing that only eats hippies

    There it goes
    Gonna send ’em all to that big Folk Festival in the sky
    So long suckers!

    Stalinism: It’s Origin and Future.
    Andy Blunden (1993)

    The Sino-Soviet Split

    Since 1949, the Communist Party of Australia had had quite close contacts with the Chinese Communist Party. It was not surprising then that they were initially more than sympathetic to China’s condemnations of Khrushchev following his 1956 ‘secret speech’. The more so because ‘communists’, who had maintained the faith for so long by way of unquestioning belief in the infallibility of Comrade J V Stalin, felt personally threatened by the leader of the world Stalinist movement condemning Stalin in the most extreme terms – “despotism”, “criminal murder”, “mass terror”, “monstrous falsification”, etc etc.

    The CPA did not finally commit itself to support of the CPSU until the end of 1961. The leadership, especially Lance Sharkey, hesitated for a long time. A small party like the CPA depended more than any on the unity of the Stalinist movement. The prospect of a split was horrific for them. But as the split became inevitable, the majority of the CPA leadership sided with the Soviet Communist Party.

    As is common in Australian working class politics, the CPA split along geographical lines. Ted Hill, Victorian State Secretary of the Party, supported the Chinese position. [Edward Fowler Hill (1915-1988), Australian communist, was Chairman of the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist) (CPA(ML)) from 1964 to 1986. The current Chairperson is Bruce Cornwall.] He was able, in August 1963, to leave the CPA and establish a pro-Chinese Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist), with the support of Flo Russell, Clarrie O’Shea and a significant number of Communist Party members prominent in the trade union movement in Victoria. Shortly after the split, Ted Bull, a CPA(M-L) member in Melbourne, won the leading position in the Wharfies union. Support for the CPA(M-L) was minimal outside of Melbourne, even as it reached about 200 members by mid-1964.

    The rival workers’ state bureaucracies maintained their political [125] sponsorship of the two factions, and the split was consolidated into two rival CPAs. By 1966, the CPA(M-L) had begun to establish itself in the other states.

    Initially, the CPA(M-L) concentrated on propaganda, rather than directing the work of activists in the trade union and social movements. From the end of 1964 however, it combined its propaganda with serious work in the trade union movement. Just as the CPA had slavishly followed the Stalin line since 1923, the CPA(M-L) followed the Mao Zedong line. The M-L’s tendency towards dogmatism verged on being a serious problem with the English language.

    Nevertheless, the Maoists still held some key positions in militant industrial unions. In 1969, Clarrie O’Shea defied the penal laws which had been put in place by Menzies to crush the militancy of Stalinist-led trade unions in the 1950s, O’Shea was sent to jail, and a million workers came out in his support in a powerful general strike movement. This movement destroyed the penal laws, and was the beginning of the end for the Liberal-National regimes which had held power in Australia since 1949.

    The polemic inside the CPA during the period from 1956 to 1963 was one of “unity” versus the “purity” of Stalinist theory. But this polemic was but the outer form for the struggle over the issues of political perspective posed by Khrushchev.

    While many CPA members were attracted by the political liberalisation implicit in Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin, many in the leadership of the CPA never reconciled themselves to this denunciation. The seeds of a later split were already present. ‘Even though we now rejected the substance of Chinese attacks on Soviet policy, we were unsure what to make after the events of 1956, of the theoretical and political soundness of the regime in the Soviet Union itself’ reflected Eric Aarons in his autobiography. [126]

    The split had broken the monolith. Many left the CPA in the years after 1956, notably among the CP’s most prominent intellectuals. The authority of the leadership was undermined; the faith was weakened.

    Brezhnev put the lid back on in the Soviet Union, but the cloth had already begun to unravel in Europe and elsewhere…

  3. Paul Justo says:
    January 14, 2009 at 9:18 pm

    Stalinism: It’s Origin and Future.
    Andy Blunden (1993)

    Your authority on the CPA(ML) Andy Blunden was a member of the “Healyite” WRP.

    The WRP were one of the more lunatic manifestations of the Trotsky cult of worship.

    Gerry Healy was described by a female member of the WRP in these terms –

    ‘Healy came towards me, was hovering over me. He was not listening to a word I was saying. He wanted only one thing from me – my sexual submission. For a moment, I just stared at him: fat, ugly, red-faced.”

    Give us a post on the Healyites Andy, all the salacious detail, including the details of Healy’s women’s witch choir/harem.

  4. @ndy says:
    January 14, 2009 at 10:20 pm

    Yes, Andy Blunden is a source; not necessarily an authority. In particular, a source on the origins of the CPA split; if I wanted to speak to an authority on student politics of the late ’60s/early ’70s, especially in Melbourne, I’d speak to Leigh R.

    Re Gerry Healy: yeah. Like Mao and other dicktators, he took advantage of his position vis-à-vis the ladies. What Next? contains a bio, as well as other materials on Mister Healy’s Harem.

    The final nail in Healy’s political coffin was the eruption of a sexual scandal centring on his corrupt relations with women comrades. Again, there was nothing new in this. Back in the early 1950s, Healy had been in trouble after propositioning of daughter of a prominent figure in the Fourth International. In 1964 an SLL control commission had been held over Healy’s relationship with a leader of the Young Socialists. And one of the background issues to the 1974 split in the WRP was the rejection of Healy’s advances by a woman supporter of Thornett. All of this, however, had been kept from the membership, the majority of whom reacted with shock and outrage after Healy’s corruption was exposed in a letter by his longtime secretary Aileen Jennings.

    What was the character of this sexual abuse? It was later stated that the women Healy pressurised into having sexual relations with him ‘mistakenly believed that the revolution – in the form of the “greatest” leader demanded this, the most personal sacrifice of all. They were not coerced … physically, but every pressure was brought to bear on them as revolutionaries’. The situation was ‘not so much rape but … sexual abuse by someone in a position of power and trust’. It was, Dave Bruce comments, ‘wholesale sexual corruption in a manner analogous to these religious sects. There’s a very close parallel’.

    As Soon As This Pub Closes … is funny:

    This pamphlet was written by John Sullivan, whose death in September 2003 was a great loss to the Left and to readers of What Next? in particular. It was published by the author in 1988 and many of the specific details of Left groups are now of course long out of date. Organisations have split (Militant), transmogrified into new and almost unrecognisable formations (the RCP), or dissolved completely (the CPGB and, to all intents and purposes, the WRP). Like his friend the late Al Richardson, whose obituary of John appears in What Next? No.27, the author had little time for feminism, gay liberation and other ideological trends that became prominent within the post-’68 socialist movement, and this is reflected in As Soon As This Pub Closes … But John’s characteristically humorous take on the absurdities of the Far Left is, we think, well worth reproducing. We are grateful to Ted Crawford for scanning the original pamphlet and sending us the text.

    The split in the WRP in 1985 was awesome. It produced the Workers Revolutionary Party (Workers Press), led by Cliff Slaughter (in 1996 it became the Movement for Socialism) and the Workers International to Rebuild the Fourth International (WIRFI), formed in 1990 — it may even still exist! The WRP also spawned the Workers’ International League (WIL) in 1987, which later became Workers Action. The WRP (Newsline) is still kicking ass and taking names:

    Wiki…

    In the early eighties the party suffered a period of intense factional struggle and for a time two versions of the WRP were in existence, each publishing their own daily News Line paper. The split in the WRP also had repercussions in the [International Committee of the Fourth International] and as a result there were two versions of this body, too.

    The two versions of the WRP soon became known by their newspapers with the version led by Gerry Healy and Sheila Torrence being known as the WRP (Newsline) and that led by Cliff Slaughter known as the WRP (Workers Press). Both would fragment further over the coming years.

    The first split in the pro-Healy WRP came when a section of the London membership around full timer Richard Price went into revolt and were expelled in due course. They formed the Workers International League which has since evolved into Workers Action and no longer has anything in common with the Healyism it defended when first founded.

    Another split in the pro-Healy ICFI and WRP would develop when the American section of the ICFI led by David North revolted against Healy’s leadership and split to form its own rival movement also called the ICFI. Some members of the WRP sympathetic to North left the WRP at this point to form the International Communist Party, based in Sheffield. This grouping has since been renamed the Socialist Equality Party and largely confines its activity to the publication of texts on the internet.

    In 1986, the ICFI loyal to Healy expelled the WRP (Newsline) after Healy had been pushed out of the WRP and had formed his own Marxist Party in 1987 with his few remaining supporters including the well-known actors Corin and Vanessa Redgrave. The Marxist Party would in turn lose another small split after Healy’s death which formed the Communist League while the Marxist Party would linger on until 2004 before dissolving itself.

    The WRP (Workers Press) suffered a series of further splits and is now a tiny organisation known as the Movement for Socialism.

    Torrance’s WRP is now the only surviving Workers’ Revolutionary Party in the UK and it still publishes News Line daily.

    The party has been registered with the UK Electoral Commission since 15 May, 2001, with Frank Sweeney as registered leader. The WRP has assets of just over £4,000.

    PS. Paul Anderson on SADDAM’S BRITISH ADMIRERS – 5, July 27, 2004.

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