They both have a bit in common. They’re both communist Asian states that the US went to war with during the Cold War and did not win. But the messaging regarding the two states is a lot different. DPRK is treated like the worst dictatorship ever, that kills you and your family for even thinking that the Kims are less than gods, whilst also starving. But Vietnam, they say… nothing.
Why isn’t Vietnam demonized like DPRK?
I mean, there’s not much context that you can give “boiling babies” to justify it, and then when you look at the context it was basically “disciplinary terrorism” because some people in a village collaborated with enemies of the Shining Path. Notably, babies did not collaborate with those enemies and it was basically a form of collective punishment by brutal torture and death (adults were also boiled alive, in somewhat larger numbers).
I personally would not trust any Gonzalite.
I also view the PRC as revisionist and think that explains a lot of their decisions, though obviously they first started playing friendly with the US under Mao. They are still a historically progressive force (as the revisionist USSR also was), but if we imagined that they were internationalists then we would need to conclude that they are pathologically averse to conflict. I think the Philippines is probably one of the easier to explain examples because the PRC really does not want the government there to side hard with the US and turn their country into another fleet of unsinkable aircraft carriers like China already needs to deal with with its neighbors in East Asia. That and it would hurt the standing and credibility it has cultivated as “socialist country that does not export revolution” to back the guerillas to try to have influence over the Philippines that way.
I don’t talk about this view because it doesn’t seem that useful to me to try to move the mountain of Hexbear’s consensus, even though I have repeatedly run into one of the more annoying problems caused by this view of China, which is that people then use China’s revisionist stance as a justification to defend other revisionism, e.g. within the DPRK
User xiaohongshu has written quite a lot on the revisionism of the PRC, so that’s a good place to read more about it that is written in a register and frame of reference that is relatively more familiar to users of this instance.
First of all, yes you are absolutely correct and there is absolutely no way that I would ever consider that okay under any circumstance. Not for anyone at all. Just wanna make that EXTREMELY clear lol. Also I’m not a Gonzaloite and here I am just kinda playing devil’s advocate a bit because now I’ve been introduced to both sides of the argument about Shining Path and am curious about it, but still largely have reservations about Shining Path. And I think in my mind I probably need to remember the distinction between MLMs and MLMpMs because I would guess not all Maoists believe in gonzalo thought. (too many fuckin acronyms in communism)
I think what my comrade was getting at was that people will argue that Gonzalo approved of those acts because of his testimony while on trial, and that that particular testimony was misinterpreted, or that the documents may have been falsified or something like that. I don’t think my comrade was debating the validity of the massacre but that the members of the party that did it went rogue or something. I wouldn’t be surprised if a government would fabricate documents to imprison him, or any other communist insurgent. There are still people who believe that Mao intentionally starved five trillion people and that he made them eat rocks (yes, I have heard that one) and cannabalize eachother, so recognizing that is what makes me question the majority opinion on Shining Path.
I appreciate you sharing your perspective on China, how people totally glaze China here is kind of off-putting to me. I think there was a debate a while back about China-Israel relations and people seemed to bend over backwards to justify their continued relations in the midst of the Palestinian genocide. So instinctively I think your position is correct. And you allow for nuance, I feel like a lot of people kinda fall into black or white thinking sometimes.