Guzmán is dead, but his Marxist creed lives on

The people of Peru appear to be bearing with admirable fortitude the melancholy news of the death of their aspiring liberator, Abimael Guzmán, founder of the Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path, Maoist guerrilla army that terrorised the country for more than a decade of savage civil war. Guzmán died in prison, of natural causes, on 11 September, after 29 years of imprisonment.

Of all the Marxist terrorist organisations that turned Latin America into a living hell in the second half of the 20^th century, Sendero Luminoso stands out for its exceptional cruelty. It was a unique phenomenon, owing to the warped personality of its leader. Peruvian politics have always been distinctive from the rest of South America: during the 19th-century wars of independence Peru remained largely loyal to Spain and was only detached from the Bourbon crown by the intervention of Simon Bolivar with forces drawn from other revolted colonies, inspired by freemasonry, though the royalists were not finally defeated until 1826. This is called the “liberation” of Peru.

Guzmán was the illegitimate son of a prosperous merchant and became a professor of philosophy at the provincial university of San Cristóbal de Huamanga, where he spent years converting to Marxism students drawn mainly from the large cohort of first-generation entrants to higher education. Like all revolutionary leaders, he used a pseudonym: Presidente Gonzalo. Few of his followers ever saw him and this very obscurity helped him fabricate a personality cult as monumental and absurd as that of Kim il-Sung in North Korea, or Mao himself.

In 1980 he launched his war on Peruvian society, after founding Sendero Luminoso, a Maoist revolutionary terrorist group. His ambitions were not modest: he believed that, after conquering Peru, Sendero Luminoso would go on to lead a world revolution. The earliest Shining Path initiative was symbolic: the burning of ballot boxes in Peru’s first free election following military dictatorship. Thereafter, Shining Path indulged in an orgy of cruelty and savagery unprecedented even among Marxist movements.

Its early success was spectacular, due to the government underestimating the group during the first year of conflict. At no time did the number of Senderistas in the field exceed 5,000, but that was because Guzmán, who retained absolute control of his hierarchic and highly centralised organisation, recruited very discriminatingly. Potential recruits were given demanding tasks, which invariably included murder, to prove their unflinching loyalty and divorce them forever from law-abiding society.

When they realised the scale of the emergency, the Peruvian police and armed forces reacted wildly, committing atrocities themselves and acting as recruiting sergeants for Shining Path. However, no one could compete in savagery with the Senderistas, who made war on everyone, including other Marxist groups, but most of all upon the hapless Peruvian peasants. Shining Path’s demands on them totally wrecked the rural economy, causing hardship and starvation.

The Senderistas, like all communist parties, were ideologically rigid, defining as an enemy anyone who was heterodox in arcane debates about how many members of the proletariat could stand on the point of a pin. They believed in terror, which they inflicted on the peasantry to enforce unquestioning obedience to all their prescriptions. Within their own ranks, blind obedience was exacted to test members’ loyalty: couples in a romantic relationship were separated and paired off with other people, to demonstrate the absolute authority of Presidente Gonzalo.

With the advent of Alberto Fujimori to the presidency of Peru in 1990, the government finally launched an effective offensive against Sendero Luminoso. Intelligence was greatly improved, but the real stroke of genius was the policy of giving official status to the rondas – irregular groups of anti-Senderista peasants who had been fighting back against Shining Path since 1983, with only limited impact. Now they were officially recognised as Comités de auto defensa, trained by the Peruvian army and given arms.

The random cruelty of the Shining Path guerrillas had thoroughly alienated the peasants, who now saw them as worse enemies than any landowner or government official. Shining Path were never content simply to kill their victims: they tortured them, stoned them, boiled them or burned them alive. They forbade the peasants to bury the bodies, which deeply offended their sensibilities. They massacred whole villages, including babies. Shining Path was notable in that half of its guerrillas were women – a reversion to pre-colonial Inca practice – who competed with the men to prove their ruthlessness, often carrying out executions, being adept at cutting victims’ throats.

So, it was unsurprising that the peasants’ response to the opportunity to rid themselves of their tormentors was so enthusiastic that the number of self-defence committees swelled to 7,226. The Shining Path was thus at war with the population it had supposedly set out to liberate. Increasingly beleaguered and weakened by a growing casualty rate, Sendero Luminoso soon learned the penalty of ignoring Chairman Mao’s key precept, that the population is the sea in which the guerrilla swims. For these guerrillas, the tide had run out. On 12 September, 1992, Peruvian intelligence captured Guzmán and other senior leaders in the urban setting of Lima.

The Fourth Sword of Marxism (following Marx, Lenin and Mao), as he had modestly entitled himself, was displayed in a cage-like cell, dressed in a striped prison jumpsuit. That was the end of the myth. Shining Path’s greatest strength had been the mystical cult of its leader: “There is no Number 2, there is only Presidente Gonzalo and then the Party.” That megalomaniac principle now became a fatal vulnerability: with the leader a prisoner and the personality cult deflated, the movement rapidly fragmented.

For more than a decade Guzmán and his fanatical followers brought death, terror and misery to the poorest elements of the Peruvian population. The post-war Truth and Reconciliation Commission revealed that Shining Path had murdered 31,331 people. That toll of human misery may seem relatively modest, compared to the 65 million victims recorded by Guzmán’s idol Mao; but if Guzmán had gained control of Peru, as at one point seemed possible, he could have been relied upon to become at least a Latin American Pol Pot.

Marxism is not a “philosophy” – that ancient intellectual discipline is degraded by the suggestion – but a psychopathology. It is economic illiteracy married to narcissistic megalomania. It attracts unbalanced individuals with a messianic complex; it demands totalitarian subjection and will brook no dissent from its delusory precepts. In all its successive incarnations it has clothed itself in a patina of pseudo-intellectualism, projected via a pretentious vocabulary of gobbledegook. Because its demands run counter to every natural human instinct, it can only impose itself on human societies by force and ruthless repression.

Marxism is not a past phenomenon, to be analysed by historians: it is a present and increasing threat to Britain today. Unchallenged, it has captured the commanding heights of academe, secured favourable legal status and insinuated itself into all our major institutions. Cultural Marxism is the most toxic version of all and it has launched an unprecedented assault on our civilisation. What are we going to do about it?

The insistence, for example, that sex is not determined by biology is a classic Marxist ploy to demonstrate that ideology – Marxist ideology – trumps scientific fact. Marxism has never acknowledged objective truth: truth is whatever, at any given moment, serves the revolution. In that sense, the imposition on an entire society, through the instrumentality of hate laws, agitators and the “reputational cascade” policed by social media, of a known scientific untruth is a victory for ideological prescription.

Why would we celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall, when people are losing their livelihoods in contemporary Britain for pointing out that the Marxist emperor has no clothes? Does no one recognize the irony of Britain denouncing the Taliban for suppressing free speech? While statues of Churchill and other British heroes are threatened, there is one monument in London that crusaders have never denounced: that of Karl Marx in Highgate cemetery, a place of pilgrimage for the terminally deluded. Why not “Marx must fall”?

Because it is a grave? That consideration did not save Franco from exhumation by the Spanish government. Would a grave of Adolf Hitler, if it existed, be allowed a monument of such propagandist flamboyance? Could Marx, the world’s most influential author of hate speech, not rest beneath a plain stone? The monument is not unchallenged: recently it was daubed with the words “Doctrine of hate”. Tasteless vandalism of a tombstone? Perhaps, but the constantly renewed floral tributes are more disturbing than the graffiti, considering that the man buried here dug the graves of more than one hundred million victims of his vile creed.

So, Abimael Guzmán has gone to his reward, joining Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Kim il-Sung and the other Marxist icons at the great Central Committee in the sky, or perhaps some more subterranean location. The world is a cleaner place; but the more important issue is to put a halt to the next tranche of comrades currently plotting our enslavement.