Date: Wed, 01 Apr 1998 02:41:43 +0000
From: Mark Jones <Jones_M-AT-netcomuk.co.uk>
Subject: M-TH: Re: Peruvian Maoism


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




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