We Had Terrorists Before Al Queda

Every time a brown person with a name like Mohammed attacks someone, the American media swings into full hysteria and claims that the country faces an existential threat from Islamic terror. This is total nonsense; more people were killed in the US last year by armed toddlers than by sworn terrorists. But fear makes headlines and drives ratings; myths and rage continue to be good business and good politics.

We have had terrorism in our midst for decades of course. The Jewish Zionist Haganah tortured and killed British soldiers and ethnically cleansed villages in Palestine in order to stake out the new State of Israel. In my own lifetime the troubles in Northern Ireland spilled across Great Britain as Catholics and Protestants killed, tortured, and bombed in a battle to protect the lies they tell their children on Sundays. There was the Red Brigade, the Bader Meinhof Gang, and Basque Separatists. All left wing armed groups trying to make themselves heard in an indifferent world; like little children lying on the floor saying they won’t breathe until they get dessert.

In Peru, their period of domestic home-grown terror came from the Shining Path; from the founder of the Communist Party in Peru “Marxism-Leninisn will open the shining path to revolution”. This organization was founded in the 1960s by a Abimael Guzmán, a philosophy professor at the university in Ayacucho and for a decade or so he found willing recruits in the impressionable students and the working indigenous Quechua farmers who were being ignored by the government that, at the time, was a military dictatorship. Both these groups thought that the Shining Path would help them on the road to social justice and tackle the extreme economic inequalities and the exploitation of people in the highlands.

When elections were allowed in 1980, however, this turned into armed violence with the destruction of private property, burning of ballot boxes, and assassinations. Despite the fact that Guzmán said that “the triumph of the revolution will cost a million lives”, the government initially ignored the violence but eventually reacted then overreacted with the indigenous communities caught in the middle being brutally treated by both sides for assumed cooperation with the other. The Shining Path extended its campaign across the country but their homeland was the Andean highlands which they controlled for over a decade until Guzmàn was captured and sentenced to life in 1992 and his cohorts over the next few years.

In Ayacucho there is a small dusty museum run by a group of Quechua women who lost family members to this insanity. Their organization was founded in 1983, long before the “civil war” came to an end with the goal of bringing these crimes against their husbands, children, and fathers to the attention of a larger world. There is still a lunchroom there to take care of orphans of political violence.

Pablo and I visited and talked to the docent about her life. She lost her father when she was a small child and explained the evolution of the conflict and the wrongs that are still un-righted. She was particularly emotional when she told us that many of Guzmán’s lieutenants are now being released at the end of their jail terms and returning to join the remaining 500 or so Shining Path members now in the Amazon part of Peru trafficking cocaine.  

Overall 69,000 Peruvians suffered violent deaths during this period and the majority being from the country’s poorest who suffered murder, torture, rape, and forced disappearance. But how can you show this in a museum? All they can do is reflect the media coverage at the time and include art projects that portray how those affected feel.

The motto of the museum is “So this never happens again” Well of course it can’t, can it? I’m not so sure.

We now have politicians all over the world attempting to rise to power by demonizing others; including one that wants to be the leader of the free world. They all point to another group to blame for your problems and promise to make that group go away. Pick your responsible party – the king, the tsar, the capitalists, the bourgeoisie, the Jews, the “welfare queens”, the “takers”, or the immigrants. Off with their heads and your problems are solved. We know that’s not the case but it drives ratings and votes.

So I’m back where I started. Beware simple answers, selfish media, and angry citizens at your peril.