/lit/ - Literature

>>6413994
Saying that they're zealots, and that they don't believe in their ideas is a contradiction. I mean, sure nowadays, after the CC disarmed, but the local cadres still continued fighting, yeah, it is fair to say that they (the people who still fight) don't really believe in Communism.

The problem with the shining path, from my understanding, was that the people who founded the movement were urban intellectuals who didn't really understand how peasant life was like, idealizing the peasant to the point where they no longer resemble what they really are. As a result, they acted against the interests of the people they claimed to represent to the point of completely severing themselves from them.

I wouldn't say that eating well leads to a betrayal of Communism. Communists tend not to care about that kind of stuff, like complaining that Che drinking coke that one time, or the Che t-shirts. The only people who think that Communists are betraying their ideals by indulging in commodities are anti-communists.

I wouldn't say that they never believed in Maoism from the beginning, though. The modern Maoist ideology (that is Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, not the weirdo Maoist-Third-Worldists online) was founded pretty much by the Shining Path.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Internationalist_Movement