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October 16, 2006
By International Minister
RIM ("Revolutionary Internationalist Movement") has started a whisper campaign against Peruvians Luis Arce Borja and Adolfo Olaechea. References on one Irish website refer to them as possible CIA agents. Then came the death threats.
If we go over these comments, we see that the Irish one had nothing, not one bit of any substance, not a reference to a website or article, just a phrase in passing suggesting that Luis Arce Borja is CIA.(1) Then if we look at Indymedia, we see rats in Spain and Kanada attack Luis Arce Borja, with what? What do THEY stand FOR? Where is THEIR website? They don't show you.(2) We'll probably find it leads back to the peace accords supporting RIM with people using a lot of fancy rhetoric about "revisionist" rat to cover their tracks.
These bullshitters claim to be defending "the life of Comrade Gonzalo." How are they going to do that by attacking the people still doing political work?
The RIM's "A World to Win" has also called for "summing up" Luis Arce Borja's work based on two problems in his journalistic articles spanning decades--1) his article that speculated Gonzalo was dead; 2) his denial of Gonzalo's capitulation. So here we have the RIM people attacking Luis Arce Borja from both sides. In Spanish from Spain and Kanada, they attack Luis Arce Borja for not upholding Gonzalo today still. In English, they attack Luis Arce Borja for not saying Gonzalo was a capitulator before! Both attacks are from the RIM!
MIM will start by commenting that Luis Arce Borja's position change on Gonzalo was momentous. For that reason among others we found it sensible to list Luis Arce Borja on our Peru page, not in a page mixed with party entities. Luis Arce Borja's decision makes sense to us, but it had to be a decision between him and the Peruvian people. The Spanish language replies we expected--pretty baseless really, no reasoning for what they say. The English language replies at the Irish website and in the RIM magazine are sinister.
MIM did not want to appear to be the one behind the decision to call Gonzalo a capitulator based on things people are piecing together about him in prison. In principle, MIM has qualms about making too many conclusions about people in prison, other than that they should not lead parties or in the case of the united $tates, there are too many prisoners. Deciding what specific prisoners have done is not a strong point for the bourgeoisie or scientific communism. The next watershed moment for Gonzalo if he never gets out of prison will be when a real vanguard party forms in Peru and it decides how to handle his legacy.
Ironically, "A World to Win"'s attack on Luis Arce Borja applies even more to RIM's own www.redsun.org/www.solrojo.org website, which were born dead-on-arrival. The relevant comparison is between Luis Arce Borja's work and "Red Sun"'s--just to be generous to the state agents and stoners at AWTW, because if we compared Luis Arce Borja with RIM's supporters advocating peace accords there can be no discussion. We urge all our readers to visit www.redsun.org and www.eldiariointernacional.com right away and realize that there is 1000 times more depth to Luis Arce Borja's work.
"Red Sun" gradually came to be able to cut-and-paste pre-peace accords PCP language. It is stuck in all the same metaphysics that RIM accuses Luis Arce Borja of--except that it applies 100 times more to "Red Sun" than Luis Arce Borja. There is simply no comparison in terms of the output of El Diario Internacional and Red Sun these past 10 years. Anyone who thinks there is needs her head examined. This is a pathetic joke to even have to discuss, but we have to because of youth coming to political life at this time.
Even that error speculating that Gonzalo was dead was an intelligent error. The state had done nothing to prove Luis Arce Borja wrong. The real way to solve the problem was for someone to capture and trade Fujimori for Gonzalo. It is once again a question of the relationship between truth and power. After we obtained Gonzalo, we would have known whether he was the one saying "peace accords." Instead what we have over more than 10 years is trickles of this and that information, all while Gonzalo was under duress. Perfectly inconclusive information good for division, not for decision.
The true metaphysicians, the persynality cultists removed the question of truth and power from the beginning and made it one of persynal integrity befitting a morality tale in a bourgeois epic. This is historical idealism. Leaders are produced by "accident" and had there been an "accident" to Fujimori at the time, we might all be saying something different about Gonzalo right now.
It is true that many gave their blood for Gonzalo. Yet even this is the bourgeois idealist way to look at the question. They gave their blood for the international proletariat and MIM and other Maoist parties are still grateful. Today in Aztlan, we have those inspired by the Peruvian example. The impact of Peru is not yet finished, in this year 2006.
That brings us to the next point. Gonzalo is in prison, his revolutionary career effectively ended. Luis Arce Borja appears to be still writing. If we want to speculate about Peruvian CIA agents, speculate about Gonzalo!
For International Wimmin's Day, 2006, RIM bashed Iran in the united $tates. At the same time it was serving as an outlet for CIA recruiters such as Phyllis Chesler and Ray McGovern. RIM had a united front with CIA agents but not Iran and so it is obscene to have to have this discussion. Meanwhile, for International Wimmin's Day 2006 Luis Arce Borja published a first ever story about a womyn martyr of the Peruvian struggle, a first-hand account. How dare these RIM scum attack even a progressive chronicler of the Peruvian revolutionary struggle!? Can we afford today to live without Anna Louise Strong's books even though Stalin suspected her of spying? Down with the RIM-CIA dogs!
The public knows that MIM and Adolfo Olaechea did not get along. We swore at each other in public. He defended Khruschevites against MIM and purged MIM for lacking sufficient Khruschevism. Later, he tried to make peace with us and maybe he is really making peace with Peru at a late age. We don't know. Before MIM's conflicts, before the arrest of Gonzalo, Peruvians already did not fully trust him. He was from an ultra-rich background. People marvelled how he could accomplish what he did in England and wondered what kind of support he must have had. Yet before the arrest of Gonzalo, Peruvians did work with him, perhaps at a distance--and so it has to be.
Would it surprise MIM to find out that Olaechea was working for Interpol? We have to defend the man. We can vouch that he did make great contributions to the struggle, but vouching is not a means of security. His English translations were useful to MIM and we distributed Luis Arce Borja's work together. Adolfo Olaechea had accomplishments of his own on behalf of the Peruvian revolution that we will not mention, but working with Luis Arce Borja made him far more significant than anything in the CIA-run RIM.
We defend Adolfo Olaechea as a matter of principle. The state's given reasons for taking him away were his association with PCP "terrorism." The Peruvian media hounded him for speaking in favor of PCP. That is all easily documented for anyone who cares enough to read Internet archives. In that situation we generally have no choice but to defend the man, and anyone who does not do it because of lingering distrust for rich people is wrong. It should not be done on that basis. The decision has to be made on principle.
Let it be known that when it comes to self-admitted FBI informers and others documented on Internet, RIM takes no action. Yet when it comes to Luis Arce Borja they start a whisper campaign that is somehow simultaneous with death threats.
To find out that Luis Arce Borja had disagreements with Gonzalo, again would not surprise MIM. Yet MIM never heard any major suspicions against Luis Arce Borja the way they floated around Adolfo Olaechea, fairly or not.
People who are suspicious of Luis Arce Borja--they should check their relative suspicions. If they distrust Gonzalo, Luis Arce Borja and the peace accords, OK, then MIM can see their point: basically they're saying the RIM was a CIA setup, from the beginning, but even then at least Luis Arce Borja had the sense to get out. If critics are still trusting Gonzalo but not Luis Arce Borja--uh, uh, no, we ain't buyin' it. That would be metaphysics to the point of sickness. Luis Arce Borja has been an active contributor to the struggle for at least a quarter century, even if he gives it up now--perhaps out of frustration with RIM zombies or more likely because of repression. There is a great mystery at the core here about Gonzalo, because we the international proletariat did not exert enough power to find the truth. We are only saying if people are going to speculate then they really have to speculate all the way.
Perhaps a more realistic speculation than thinking that Gonzalo was always a CIA agent is that Gonzalo made a deal with the CIA and was aware of CIA's pursuit of him and realized his capture meant he was no longer useful to CIA. The most extreme speculation would be that perhaps Peruvian police stumbled on him contrary to CIA wishes despite CIA bragging after the fact. We do know that the united $tates entered into major conflict with Fujimori after the arrest of Gonzalo and once the united $tates put Gonzalo's nemesis Montesinos in prison too, Montesinos wanted to deal with Gonzalo in prison. This speculation would explain why Gonzalo continued to hail the RIM, as basically saying that he was keeping CIA's secrets, because to those of us outside Peru looking at what happened to revolutionary support in exile, we could see that RIM was in contact with the issue and worked on getting Gonzalo out of prison by reformist means, but we did not see RIM continue support for revolution until it was too exposed. Only then did it give www.redsun.org a chance, after giving its pro-peace accords faction a two year head start. The RIM had a peace accords faction all along after 1993, but it did not develop the other side until years later. They called it their idea of "two line struggle"--having both counterrevolution and pseudo-revolution in the same house.
Here is what we say: if you don't trust Luis Arce Borja, then don't send him your name, address, phone number and picture and leave it at that! Back off, because he is still more significant than anyone else on the Peru question! If you distrust the whole Peru situation, that is fine too, but do not take it out on Luis Arce Borja.
The crimes of Afakean are too long to list in comparison with Luis Arce Borja's few errors, so we will make just one more point that we have not already. If Afakean wanted to say he was such a great leader and had a better line than Luis Arce Borja's, then he needed to make his move to form a "Sol Rojo"/www.redsun.org in 1993. More than that, he needed his Comintern to re- constitute the MPP-France on a revolutionary basis and get it going. Afakean did not do that and the legitimate distrust that arose from that even spilled over on MIM, as if guilt by Amerikan association. Had MPP-France resucitated on a revolutionary basis in 1993 or 1994, MIM would have had high esteem for Luis Arce Borja but accorded him second-place. Instead, we did not hear anything from Afakean, MPP-France or anyone else that said Luis Arce Borja was untrustworthy before the peace accords plot. There were hints of internal political dissension, yes. But there was no revolutionary basis for discontinuing El Diario Internacional just because MPP-France keeled over for peace accords.
Line, not formal organizational structure is key. RIM owned MPP-France in all its political shades, but it did not have the correct line at the crucial moment. MIM had a handful of people on the scene and other visitors coming to and from the scene and they were able to discern a revolutionary camp. RIM was not able to see a revolutionary camp until after Peru proved for years that it was not going to give up the People's War immediately after Gonzalo's arrest. The great irony here is that by Hoxhaite line, RIM was right to stay with the MPP-France. It was in the tradition of Mao and the Cultural Revolution, that the bourgeois headquarters was overthrown in 1993-4. Thanks to that, those struggling to continue the revolution in Peru had support in exile to exercise their right to rebel even without Gonzalo. The Peruvian people had earned the right to try to continue the revolution and for a few glorious years, they did.