From: lquispe-AT-nyxfer.blythe.org (Luis Quispe)
Subject: Re: PERU: The Tale of Killing "Leftists" 
Date: Sun, 4 Feb 1996 02:08:06 -0500 (EST)


> To: lquispe-AT-nyxfer.blythe.org (Luis Quispe)
> From: hariette-AT-easynet.co.uk (hariette spierings)
> Subject: Re: PERU: The Tale of Killing "Leftists"
> Content-Length: 21351
> 
> >> 
> >> Hey, Quispe, you are for executing agents of the Fujimori government. 
> >> What about all those people who had been leaders of the Bolshevik party that 
> >> Stalin charged as agents of German and Japanese intelligence--people like 
> >> Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin and Trotsky. Were they on the payroll of the 
> >> class enemy like the IU in Peru?
> >> Luis Quispe:
> >  There is no comparison. Trosky and the others were protagonists of the
> >  Bolshevik revolution whereas the few scoundrels in Peru (IU) were not
> >  even part of the PCP nor have been participants in any revolution except
> >  elections and government posts. Actually IU is almost inexistent and
> >  irelevant in Peruvian politics. They split into tiny groups (democratic
> >  left, patria roja, PUM, MAS, Unidad, etc.)
> >
> >  With regard to Stalin, we believe that in the process of building
> >  socialism, Comrade Stalin generally followed the work of Lenin.
> >  Yes. He waged a struggle against the deviations of Trosky, Zinoviev, and
> >  Kamenev that concluded in 1937. It is not true that he resolved 
> >  contradictions amongst the people administratively. We agree wit the
> >  position of Mao on the legacy pf Stalin as being 70% positive. As
> >  communists of today, we have the task of making an adequate analysis
> >  of WW II, the standing of the International Communist Movement and
> >  particularly to study well the VII Congress, and within this, the role
> >  of comrade Stalin along with the actions of revisionists in France,
> >  Italy, etc. Imperialism was not being succesfull in defaming the
> >  contributions of Stalin, today the masses in Russia and the former
> >  lands of the USRR raise up the figure of Stalin. The distortions
> >  on his revolutionary role have been mainly reported by the 
> >  imperialist media.
> >
> >> What is your concept of socialist legality? How does one establish the 
> >> guilt of somebody accused of being a police agent? Does the Shining Path 
> >> allow the accused to have an attorney? 
> >> In the People's War, the forms of strugle are not exclusively armed
> > clashes between both armies: People's Army and the reactionary army.
> > Thera are also semi-legal and legal forms of struggle -that can be 
> > considered socialist legality. If you meant why does not the PCP
> >  participate in the electoral circus?  Is that socialist legality?
> > No. Peru has a reality that has been analyzed by the PCP and elections
> > is not part of it. However, at the local level, without the state
> > interference, in several cities ther have cases in which the PCP
> > fronts have practiced socialist legality (case of election of association
> > of small merchants of Villa El Salvador, a shantytown in which PCP
> > candidates defeated those of the Church-NOGs-IU-Fujimori).
> >
> > An attorney? I thought only OJ had attorneys. In Peru hundreds of
> > attorneys members of the Association of Democratic Lawyers were
> > murdered, jailed, and disappeared by Fujimori. Hooded judges
> > adminsitered a faceless justice. As part of the low intensity warfare
> > against the people's war anyone can  can be accused of being
> > a "terrorist." On the other hand only the people judge and punish the
> > criminals. The people's committees administered justice through
> > people's assemblies where the accused has the opportunity to
> > amend its mistakes and be useful to the revolution. "Save the patient"
> > teaches us Chairman Mao. Most of the captured soldiers are released,
> > they are part of the people and many desert to join the People's Army, the 
> > majority of the PCP army including its leadres are of peasants origin.
> >
> >> What about all the Trotskyites and ex-Trotskyites on this list? Are we 
> >> police agents as well? How do you sort out the good reds from the fake 
> >> reds? Do you just kill them all and assume that the ones who were really 
> >> innocent end up in red heaven.
> >> Peru has a different reality than this beast (known as US imperislism),
> >  Marxists believe in dialectics materialism not in methaphisics like you. 
> >  Nothing is absolute. One is split into two. There are honest 
> > "Trotskyites" in the U.S. as well in Peru. We friends who are Trotskyites
> >  and support the revolution in Peru. The People's War belong to the
> >  International Proletarian. Any honest revolutionary is welcome to the
> >  struggle, unite in the struggle comrades not in the coffee shop.
> >  Hope I have answered your questions.
> >  Luis Quispe. Editor, The New Flag.
> >
> >> Just curious.
> >> 
> >> Louis Proyect
> >> 
> >
> >
> >
> 
> 
> Comments from A. Olaechea:
> 
> I think that the question of the United Left should be understood
> dialectically and taking ito account it's historical development. 
> 
> It is not right to get the impression that the IU of today is the same as
> the IU of, let's say 1978 - 1980.  One must also make a distinction between
> the masses that followed and voted for IU, the militants at the base, local
> and regional levels in its early development - before it became exclusively
> an electoral apparatus - and the handful of revisionist and trotskist
> counter-revolutionaries who progressively deserted the camp of revolution
> and went to work OPENLY for the defence of the reactionary state.
> 
> This history reflects itself in the electoral levels that this opportunist
> conglomerate has achieved in the various elections in Peru - commencing with
> up to 45% of the national electorate in the 1978 elections for the
> Constituent Assembly, and culminating with its total collapse to levels
> below 0.4% in the last Fujimori 're-election'.   Also, one must not forget
> that this degeneration mirrors closely the degeneration and collapse of
> modern revisionism at the international level.
> 
> In 1978, the differences between the leadership of Chairman Gonzalo and the
> red fraction struggling for the reconstitution of PCP and the launching of
> the People's War, and a good number of the organisms and personalities -
> some even adopting the communist - even Maoist - banner, and participating
> as United Left on the Constituent Assembly elections, could AT THE TIME -
> and as can be seen from the documents of the Party itself (Against
> Constitutional Illusions, Let's Retake Mariatigui's Road, etc. - be deemed
> to have been - at least at the mass and ordinary militant level - including
> here many honest intellectuals - as differences among the ranks of the people.
> 
> We must not forget, for example, the case of El Diario - the Lima national
> daily that began its life as a semi-official organ of the United Left and
> that later up, due to the action of its own red fraction among the
> journalists and print workers, took a stand in defence of the People's War a
> couple of years after its initiation having in the past played a role in
> support of the electoralist line of the IU.  A case of internal revolution
> within the apparatus of the people's movement, then controlled by the
> revisionists and opportunists, and of further reconstitution of the People's
> Movement at the service of the People's War. Today El Diario is recognised -
> both in its Lima and Brussels editions as a voice in defence of the Party
> and the revolution that closely reflects at every turn the interests of the
> People's War. 
> 
> So a distinction between the rotten revisionists elements who HAVE
> PERSEVERED in the road of electoralism and SET THEIR NOSES against the
> People's War, should not lightly be overlooked.  This has also been the case
> at the international level.  Many organisms of the Left and the people's
> movement in the world have - once more information was available, and the
> very development of the revolution had become evident and confirmed this
> information - changed sides from support and illusions about the United
> Left, and gone progressively over to take a stand on the side of the
> revolution and Marxism.
> 
> In this context, one must remember the words of Chairman Mao:  (I am not
> here quoting verbatim for lack of time to look it up in the Library, but the
> gist of the thought is preserved in full in my memory) -  "Soon millions of
> peasants will rise like a storm and communists and revolutionary comrades
> will have to take a stand.  Those who take a stand against this mighty storm
> will be deemed to be counter-revolutionaries, while those who take the side
> of the revolution in words, will be deemed as revolutionaries only in words.
> Those who take a stand in words as well as in deeds, will be regarded as
> true and complete revolutionaries".  
> 
> Has that not been and continues to be the process among many people in the
> USA, Europe and the rest of the world vis-a-vis the mighty storm of the
> peasant war led by the PCP since the last 16 years in Peru?  Are we not
> seeing this very process unfold before our own eyes?
> 
> Have we not have seen in many countries a handful of people who puffed
> themselves up as great socialists, communists and revolutionaries, who have
> gone over - and continue to go over, openly, to the side of
> counter-revolution and imperialism on this very account? 
> 
> Are there not some others, too, who have proven - and continue to be proven
> only revolutionaries in words?. And are there not so many more others who
> are proving to be revolutionaries in the full sense of the word, as well as
> in deeds?  
> 
> What is now the trend?  The trend is towards the victory of the
> revolutionary line.  In that, the Peruvian process is proving to be an acid
> test serving the cause of combating capitulation, revisionism, and bourgeois
> ideology within the people's movement at the international level, and the
> developing process of arriving at a new revolutionary - and fully Marxist -
> unity.   We must always look at things dialectically and do not write off
> people wholesale.  We must understand the law of contradiction in full.
> 
> Therefore it is misleading to speak of liquidating agents of the Fujimori
> regime and equating that with ALL the United Left militants, and even
> leaders and cadres, even today.  Those who have been punished have not been
> punished for being members of the United Left or for being 'Leftist
> deviationists'.  They have been punished by the people for specific crimes
> against the masses - delation, oppression, assassination,
> counter-revolutionary crimes, etc. within the context of a People's War.
> 
> In this context, there are clear historic precedents. For example, in Italy
> during the war of resistance against fascism, many of the worst criminals in
> the service of fascism were people who at one point or another had presented
> themselves before the masses as socialist, even as communists.  Mussolini
> himself had regarded himself before his foundation of the Fascist party -
> and continued, even during the war, to regard himself as a 'socialist'. 
>  
> The last redoubt of the Italian fascist regime, the Salo Republic, was
> officially know as the Italian Social Republic, and within its 'parliament'
> laws were proposed, debated and even enacted on many occassions for the
> 'socialisation of the means of production'. 
> 
> Trotskists and old style revisionists - self-proclaimed 'leftists' who later
> had further occassion to convert themselves in 'leaders' of 'Left-wing'
> parties in the post-war regime, and to parade themselves as 'anti-fascists',
> also had representation in these 'representative chambers' where they
> continued to butress and serve this reactionary regime in various
> capacities, even at the ministerial level, or as regional governors, mayors
> of towns, members of municipal councils, 'trade union-leaders, members of
> 'Peace commissions', 'pro-fascist militias', and such like.  The same role
> played today by a good number of United Left bigwigs inside the Fujimori
> regime.  A knowledge of history always helps in not being hoodwinked by
> 'Leftist' labels. 
> 
> And Mussolini himself, in his last desperate months - harried on every front
> by the people's revolution and the partisan armies - even spoke of
> introducing a classless society as the aim of his regime, in an attempt - in
> complicity with such 'leftists' - to rally working class support for
> fascism.  Would that have qualified Mussolini into some sort of member of
> the United Left?  In Peru, there were and still are many 'leftists' of
> Mussolini's sort.  
> 
> In China, during the Japanese occupation, the regime of the 'socialist
> leader' Wang Ching-wei (a Trotskist), played the same role regarding the
> Japanese imperialists, as that played by another self proclaimed
> 'socialist', Vidkun Quisling, Prime Minister of the Nazi puppet regime in
> Norway.  That is why it is correct to use the term of 'quisling' to describe
> the role of those 'leftists' in Peru and abroad who are setting their noses
> against the people's revolution on various pretexts.   
> 
> On the question of comrade Stalin we must also adopt a dialectical approach,
> and take the concrete circunstances of the time fully into account.
> 
> Kamenev, Bukharin, Zinoviev, and other ringleaders of opportunism and
> revisionism, were not executed for 'desviations'.  Any serious study of
> their trials cannot but conclude that these were fair and fully legal trials
> and that the accussed were guilty as charged of having plotted the downfall
> of the Soviet regime.  There is the testimony of impeccable foreign
> observers and international public opinion never questioned the legality or
> the fairness of these trial at the time these took place.  That is one
> historical factor. 
> 
> Moreover, the confessions of Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin and other are there
> in black and white, and they themselves requested the punishment they
> received. It is only the agents of the bourgeoisie who - without regard to
> the integrity of the very 'Bolshevik leaders' they 'defend' who questioned -
> several years after the facts were known - these trial alleging
> 'brainwashing', etc. 
> 
> I myself, have studied this in full and have no doubts on the question of
> their guilt, particularly that of Trotsky, their mentor and manipulator.
> Trotsky had already deserted the Soviet Union and gone over to publish
> anti-Soviet propaganda in the fascist press abroad (Lord Beaverbook's Daily
> Mail - the notorious British fascist and patron of Oswald Moseley, was his
> first port of call - it was the Daily Mail the first mass bourgeois paper to
> publish Trotsky's 'indictment' of Stalin. Surely Lord Beaverbrook was
> greatly concerned and distressed with the 'tragedy that Stalinism had
> befallen on the Soviet Union' and was really being a 'consistent democrat'
> in offering the platform of his millionaire press to Trotsky in his
> chivalrous attempt to SAVE SOCIALISM!!!!
> 
> The question here, for any serious class analysis with a Marxist
> understanding - has to be if it was correct or not to grant their wishes and
> carry out the dead sentences impossed upon these people by the People's
> Tribunals.  On the hand, reaction in the world, has made - and continues to
> make - a lot of political capital out of these affairs.  On the other hand,
> the historical circunstances of the Soviet Union made it very difficult, if
> not impossible, to follow any other road in dealing with these problems.  
> 
> History will have to judge over the long historical perspective. However, it
> is wrong to consider this as a 'mistake of Stalin'.  As Chairman Mao himself
> pointed out, the 'mistakes of Stalin' were mistakes of the whole Party and
> of the ICM at the time. It is wrong to give succour to enemies of the
> proletarian revolution by adopting the stand of the enemies of the
> proletarian dictatorship on this account.  
> 
> It is in that context that Chairman Mao introduced a new kind of policy
> against these kind of betrayals of the revolution.  A policy that accords
> more with dialectics and takes into account that people's heads are not like
> the heads of onions. "People's heads are not like the heads of onions. You
> can chop the heads of onions and they will grow back, but once you chop some
> one's head it doesn't grow back".    
> 
> In comrade Stalin's time many people held the view that once you 'kill the
> dog you have killed the rabies'.  On the whole, this was never Stalin's own
> view, as can be seen from his long and patient attempts to convince the
> leaders of the opportunist line to give up their harmful ideas, and the many
> occassions in which these same people were given new opportunities to
> repudiate their anti-soviet stance and ACTIONS, and come over to the side of
> the people.  Let us not forget that Kamenev and Zinoviev, as well as
> Bukharin had recanted and being re-instated in several occassions before
> their final downfall. 
> 
> But it is also true, as Chairman Mao has explained at lenght, that Stalin
> had himself contributed to educate many people in a methaphysical approach
> on questions of inner party struggle - and other questions as well - and it
> is not easy to rein-in the people's indignation if you had not prepared the
> minds of people to adopt a more Marxist attitude on the question of those
> who - within the camp of revolution - commit grevious harm to the people's
> cause.  
> 
> Moreover, the times were different, comrade Stalin was responsible for
> upholding the proletarian dictatorship during a period of very acute and
> desperately inestable times, when fascism was preparing the forcible
> suppression of the revolution by means of world war. 
> 
> Chairman Mao comes to power in a very different context - of victory in the
> anti-fascist struggle - and had the communists and the people had at their
> disposal then a more solid framework for the handling of contradictions.  A
> different approach was then possible and necessary.  The handling of
> Wang-ming and Li-li-san's deviations and their grevious harm against the
> Party and the revolution, was handled by re-electing them to the Central
> Committee with the 'official' title of 'Teachers by Negative Example'.  This
> is a concrete demonstration of the difference of approach arrived at in
> Chairman Mao's development of scientific socialism and the handling of the
> class struggle under conditions of People's democratic dictatorship and the
> building of socialism.  
> 
> But neither should we adopt a simplistic bourgeois liberal analysis and say,
> look, Mao was absolutely right and Stalin was absolutely wrong.  No, things
> are not like that in historical questions.  All depends on time and
> circunstances.  Nevertheless, the facts are that as the proletarian
> revolution develops, more experience becomes available and more
> possibilities for avoiding mistakes are opened.  Mistakes are bad, not only
> because they are erroneous, but because they cost the people's cause dearly.
> 
> The assessment of Chairman Mao about comrade Stalin, (70% right and 30%
> wrong) may or may not turn out to be 'about right', as the Chairman then
> (1957) put it. It is wrong to consider this as 'divine revelation' and to
> take it in a methaphisical fashion. In other occassion, the Chairman said
> that Stalin may have been right in 80 or even 90%.  But the fact remains,
> and in this any true revolutionary positition must be that the positive in
> Stalin's outweights the negative.  That his mistakes are mistakes of a
> 'revolutionary' and not the acts of a counter-revolutionary or a revisionist.
> 
>  
> That is why Mao said that to pass judgement on the Stalin's era mistakes was
> premature and that it was a task that - over the historical perspective -
> belonged to the entire International Communist Movement, the proletariat and
> the people.  Today the Soviet people are precisely involved in this process
> of re-assessing the Stalin era.  And apparently they feel they need today to
> adopt more of comrade Stalin's policies and political line, in order to save
> the people's lives and restore a socialist direction to the land of Lenin
> and Stalin. Surely, with the historical experience now available, the masses
> will adopt from the Stalin era what was positive and try to avoid what was
> negative.  It is in this context that the development of Chairman Mao of the
> theory of revolution, Marxism, is important for the Soviet people in order
> to have at their disposal all the practical experience of the class in
> making their new revolution advance.
> 
> However, this should make us aware of the little use that delving on this
> subject from a bourgeois ethical perspective has for the revolutionary
> cause.  Moreover, to delve on comrade Stalin's 'mistakes' today, who does it
> serve?  It certainly does not serve the people!.
> 
> I think that a study of the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet
> Union (B) is important for a class based understanding of these issues and
> what was then involved.  If people of the left want to serve the revolution,
> they should not jump happily to the side of reaction in criticising comrade
> Stalin.  In doing so, they are only showing their lack of any serious
> Marxism in their appoach to historical questions.  Moreover, it does not in
> any way help to prevent mistakes in the future.  It only serves as
> ammunition for the people's enemies to fire against the revolution.  Sincere
> revolutionaries should aim their guns - both military and intellectual
> weapons - against the old order and leave this kind of debates to its proper
> and timely moment.  In this connection is it worth remebering comrade
> Chou-En Lai's response to a journalist who asked what was the final
> assessment on the French revolution:  "It is to early to say".  
> 
> Don't we then have other things to fight against, or even better things to
> do, than to rake over the past with the eyes of the present and at the
> service of the enemies of progress?
> 
> 
> Regards
> 
> 
> Adolfo Olaechea    
>        
> 
> 



     --- from list marxism-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---

     ------------------