I have riled up the Twitter ultras once again

I give you an A+ on your usage of rhetoric!

I've said this in other places and I'll say it all the time, but the more I am forced to interact with ultras (of all kinds), the more I start to think they have violence fantasies and being communists allows them to live these out & their self-identification as communists doesn't go beyond that.

Consider this: when someone asks MLs about communism, when they ask about theory, when they have questions, we point them to resources. On the other hand, when they ask ultras, the answer is something like "you shouldn't even begin to read theory before you correct all your mistaken ideas about communism. You hold reactionary opinions so I have no interest or desire to help you. The revolution isn't meant for you".

They want you to do the work of getting their trust, when it should be the other way around. It is the other way around in any other setting.

When we published The CIA's Shining Path for example, none of the maoists we talked to were interested in correcting the record. Rather, they preferred to call the author bourgeois (despite not knowing the first thing about him), mistaken, counter-revolutionary, anti-communist, etc. etc.

Now imagine you're a lambda reader coming across this discussion. On the one hand, you have a freely accessible book that's right there that explains how the PCP-SL behaves like a CIA outfit. And on the other, you have people who go "no u". Who are you going to learn from, what are you going to take away, intellectually, after that conversation?

They're not interested in helping you, it's a very inbred (or consanguine, because one ultra didn't get it lol) ideology. You have to do the work first, you have to look all of the minute details about Gonzalo's life or Bordiga's mathematics before they will accept you.

And this is the part where I go armchair psychologist but ultimately, if we go by the violence fantasies theory, keeping their circle small helps them. Being able to deride others as revisionists, counter-revolutionaries, etc. makes them ideological enemies which makes them legitimate targets. It increases the pool of potential targets if you don't let too many people into your ideology.

That last part I'm not sure about. The violence fantasies I am becoming increasingly sure of and I have evidence. And again, they can try to debunk it, but they won't. They'll call me a fed or a revisionist, which will signal to their friends that they have someone to vicariously cannibalize for catharsis and they'll join in.

One maoist (mind you this is all on Twitter, which is fed central) sent us a gif of someone being executed by, I assume, a Red Army officer. Another called someone else "low iq". This was a bordigist, not a maoist. They love using the r-slur. The Gonzalo meme that's like "you should boil yourself" or something, it's based on the guy with lightning coming out of his eyes if you know the meme. I mean, even they are playing on the boiling babies atrocity when they repeat up and down till kingdom come that it didn't happen, that no one was boiled at Lucanamarca. They also love saying it was justified.

Can we talk about Shining Path itself? Violence fantasies need to find a suitable host to latch onto through whom they can live those fantasies. You're not gonna attach violence fantasies to Barbie, is what I'm saying. In 1989 the PCP-SL killed dogs and then hanged them to lampposts in Lima to protest Deng Xiaoping. That's the level we're dealing with here. The event is documented in pictures and witness testimony and Gonzalo claimed it.

Lucanamarca, as we've said, is something Maoists revel in. This is despite Gonzalo himself admitting there were excesses there.

Recently there was this quote about "if I killed him it was not because he's gay but because he was a counter-revolutionary". There is no indication on who the victim was, they just assume that because Gonzalo said it was justified, then it was justified. End of discussion. Gonzalo said it and that's that.

Meanwhile I've seen entire debates about whether Lenin called for the execution of (literal) prostitutes and pouring over historical records. The consensus is that there is no record of such a massacre or executions happening, there is no reference to it outside of that letter he wrote, and that by prostitutes he meant counter-revolutionaries, as calling your political enemies prostitutes was common enough in Russia at the time.

They deny the evidence of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee. They make the argument that it was held under a reactionary government, and sure, it started under Fujimori. But it's not a refutation. It's not a refutation of the accusations, of the witnesses, of the evidence, of the reports.

To do that you would have to systematically look at everything the committee investigated and then reinvestigate it yourself. Nobody is saying it's easy or fun. But it's necessary if you're gonna say shit like "Lucanamarca was justified".

The other option is to agree the Shining Path was a terrorist experiment and move away from whatever the fuck they thought they were achieving. But this is not what Gonzalo maoists do, so we have to ask why exactly do they cling to it?

You can compare to anything Stalin did. There's lots of material, and we happily share that material, about how for example the population transfers were justified or how they took place. I'm not saying one has to agree with it, I'm just saying there's arguments for it. The Maoist explanation for their perceived excesses is "no it didn't happen you fucking idiot, now stop asking about it".

Again you have to do the work to get them to let you in, and not the other way around. This is very cultish.

The thing is they know they're not being taken seriously but they swear up and down they're the reasonable ones, that we're just not accepting Gonzalo Thought as like the highest stage of Marxism and this makes us counter-revolutionary anti-communists. What do you think they'll do to us if their maoist revolution comes. What did the Shining Path do to other socialist movements in Peru?

We go back to the premise: don't ask why they like the PCP-SL, ask why it couldn't be any other way that they don't identify with anything else but the PCP-SL. Invert the premise and put it back right side up.