The Peruvian guerrilla and terrorist group Shining Path was founded by a professor of philosophy: Abimael Guzmán, who died in 2021.
Shining Path is a Maoist version of Marxism, believing in the inevitability of revolution and the bloody process necessary to see it through. Shining Path is estimated to have killed 11,000 civilians along the way. “A New York Times report … says the group often hacked its victims to death with machetes to save ammunition.”[1]
Guzmán spent the rest of his life in prison in Peru, convicted of murder and aggravated terrorism.
Now here’s the eyebrow raiser: Guzmán’s university dissertation was The Kantian Theory of Space.
Is there a connection in Guzmán’s mind between Kantian philosophy and Marxist political practice? I don’t know, but I note this striking quotation about the psychological selflessness of Guzmán’s followers. From Peruvian journalist Santiago Roncagliolo:
“I talked to 70 people who have had personal contact with him since his childhood to the present moment. In the case of terrorists, what hit me the most was their faith. They talked about Guzmán as one would a divine entity. Not even his wife had a normal personal relationship with him. Even she called him president. The Shining Path believes in him as other people believe in God. … Now I understand better both the personal and political strategy of terrorism: Personally, they create a little world of people around a common truth, a truth that determines their love, friendship, and life. After a while, they cannot understand their own lives from that group, and they lose their individual will.“[2]
Denying reason to make room for selfless faith, indeed.
Sources: [1] “Shining Path, Tupac Amaru (Peru, leftists).” Council on Foreign Relations. [2] “A Look Inside the Shining Path.” Foreign Policy‘s interview with Santiago Roncagliolo about his La Cuarta Espada (The Fourth Sword), which explores Guzmán’s life and downfall. The significance of the title is that Guzmán sees himself as the only true heir of Marx, Lenin, and Mao — he’s the fourth sword. // The image of Guzman is from Reuters.
Related: Marx and Engels, in the Philosophers, Explained series.
Total deaths from Sendero conflict, professor, is close to 70,000, half of which have been attributable to the Shining Path.
Thanks for the update, Dorian. Good to know. Do you have a source for that number?
http://www.usip.org/publications/truth-commission-peru-01 …kindly excuse delay.
Guzman is just where he belongs, in a cage being exhibited as a representative specimen of a species of human known for its stupidity, a leftist. What is the moral standard of the Left? Equality. Except Karl Popper, off-handed one day, mentioned out loud that it appeared to him that leftists are barking up the wrong tree in their defense of the welfare-state by invoking Equality as its moral justification. The argument Popper had heard leftists babbling that supposedly justified Equality as a moral ideal–from the fact that all men are born equally human, equal in their fundamental identity as free agents, can be inferred the prescription that they should be equal in certain fundamental social and economic goods required to ensure an equal chance to actualize their human potential as the free agents they in fact equally are [the same blunder at the bottom of Rawls’ idiot theory of justice]–he noticed is a violation of Hume’s law, the most egregious logical blunder leftists could have chosen to commit in ethics. Upon that observation escaping the confines of Popper’s personal conversation, leftists, embarrassed at their obvious blunder, gave up trying to logically justify Equality as a moral precept. Did they abandon Equality after Popper pointed out its illogic? Of course, not. They simply decided to just assume it. After all, who would dare oppose Equality as an ideal? And so you won’t run across a leftist since Popper attempting to justify Equality. It’s just the assumption that no one dares to question. And on this harebrained assumption of Equality Guzman mass-murdered innocent victims? He should have done his dissertation on Kant’s ethics rather than his critique of metaphysics. He might have run across Kant’s insistence that as rational agents men are ends in themselves and not means to the ends of others. Aristotle has a better grasp than Kant of the human condition, but so what? The point is that Guzman made the unforgivable intellectual blunder of slaughtering cognitive agents with the potential for self-originated thought as he would slaughter cattle in a slaughter house. He should have been given over to the families of their dead family members he killed to have been torn from limb to limb for his stupidity. That he’s sitting in a prison eating and shitting at taxpayers’ expense is merely multiplying the crimes he’s guilty of perpetrating. He continues to be what he was born to be, a festering boil on the ass of humanity. Since I was nine years old I’ve had a low opinion of leftists. I mean I despise their incompetence, their never getting anything right, as Heilbroner noticed about them. Finding out Guzman was a philosophy professor cinched it for me. Explains everything. I’ve taken a few philosophy classes in my day. I wasn’t impressed by the intelligence of the instructors. Not one of them had ever had an original thought in his/her entire life. Tarski wasn’t impressed with philosophy professors, either. I quote: “I’ve found musicians, mathematicians, and poets to be intelligent. But philosophers are stupid.” The Founding Fathers of America understood what Guzman never did, that the fact that agents are capable of self-originated thought implies the fact that they are endowed with moral claims [rights] that are unalienable, among which are life and liberty. [I’ve skipped several steps of logic between the two facts.] Justice demands that an infringement on a man’s rights be retaliated against in proportion to the infringement. Why hasn’t the pathetically stupid Guzman been executed?
Guzman is just where he belongs, in a cage being exhibited as a representative specimen of a species of human known for its stupidity, a leftist. What is the moral standard of the Left? Equality. Except Karl Popper, off-handed one day, mentioned out loud that it appeared to him that leftists are barking up the wrong tree in their defense of the welfare-state by invoking Equality as its moral justification. The argument Popper had heard leftists babbling that supposedly justified Equality as a moral ideal–from the fact that all men are born equally human, equal in their fundamental identity as free agents, can be inferred the prescription that they should be equal in certain fundamental social and economic goods required to ensure an equal chance to actualize their human potential as the free agents they in fact equally are [the same blunder at the bottom of Rawls’ idiot theory of justice]–he noticed is a violation of Hume’s law, the most egregious logical blunder leftists could have chosen to commit in ethics. Upon that observation escaping the confines of Popper’s personal conversation, leftists, embarrassed at their obvious blunder, gave up trying to logically justify Equality as a moral precept. Did they abandon Equality after Popper pointed out its illogic? Of course, not. They simply decided to just assume it. After all, who would dare oppose Equality as an ideal? And so you won’t run across a leftist since Popper attempting to justify Equality. It’s just the assumption that no one dares to question. And on this harebrained assumption of Equality Guzman mass-murdered innocent victims? He should have done his dissertation on Kant’s ethics rather than his critique of metaphysics. He might have run across Kant’s insistence that as rational agents men are ends in themselves and not means to the ends of others. Aristotle has a better grasp than Kant of the human condition, but so what? The point is that Guzman made the unforgivable intellectual blunder of slaughtering cognitive agents with the potential for self-originated thought as he would dispatch cattle in a slaughter house, literally. He should have been given over to the families of the dead to have been torn from limb to limb for his immorality, worse, his stupidity. That he’s sitting in a prison eating and shitting at taxpayers’ expense is merely multiplying the crimes he’s guilty of perpetrating. He continues to be what he was born to be, a festering boil on the ass of humanity. Since I was nine years old I’ve had a low opinion of leftists. I mean I despise their incompetence, their never getting anything right, as Heilbroner noticed about them. Finding out Guzman was a philosophy professor cinched it for me. Explains everything. I’ve taken a few philosophy classes in my day. I wasn’t impressed by the intelligence of the instructors. Not one of them had ever had an original thought in his/her entire life. Tarski wasn’t impressed with philosophy professors, either. I quote: “I’ve found musicians, mathematicians, and poets to be intelligent. But philosophers are stupid.” The Founding Fathers of America understood what Guzman never did, that the fact that agents are capable of self-originated thought implies the fact that they are endowed with moral claims [rights] that are unalienable, among which are life and liberty. [I’ve skipped several steps of logic between the two facts that succeeds in circumventing Hume’s law.] Justice demands that an infringement on a man’s rights be retaliated against in proportion to the infringement. Why hasn’t the pathetically stupid Guzman been executed?