Religious Suicide Watch - Church Of England II

The Right Reverend David Walker, Bishop of Dudley, on dancing with terrorists.

This paragraph contains so much concentrated liberal stupidity you could package and sell it.

I need to hold on to the fact that well-intentioned and caring individuals can commit appalling atrocities in the name of some cause deemed high enough to justify it. The original aim of Shining Path – to present a solution to the poverty and inequality rife in Peru by promoting a society based on the radical equality that underpins communism – is not of itself evil; indeed it has much in it that is laudable. The use of violence as part of the means to overthrow despotic regimes is the story of the liberation of Africa (and elsewhere) in the 20th century. Somewhere Shining Path lost the balance. It terrorised the general population more than it pressurised the government. And maybe it was ill-fated in presenting a communist solution at the very moment when that political philosophy was collapsing across the globe.


He's talking about the people who did this.

An evangelical Peruvian village leader was executed March 20 after Marxist guerrillas declared him guilty of taking part in police and military activities.

Antonio Izuisa Chasnamote, the mayor of Ramal de Aspuzana, died from two gunshots wounds to the head following a "people's trial" conducted by some 20 terrorists, who identified themselves as members of the Shining Path rebel group. They had captured Izuisa as he returned from a sports outing with his eight children, who witnessed his execution.

Or this.

"True 'genocide' against Ashaninkas began in Jan 90… S[endero] L[uminoso] assassinations vary-from the 'simple' style with a single knife thrust into the throat to the 'torture' style w[h]ere fingers are cut off, eyes gouged out, and then ritual multiple stabbings by younger SL members undergoing 'initiation'. The mass killings and the deliberate torture deaths are meant to terrify the Indians into submission…"

Or this.

Rather than concentrate its attacks on the armed forces or police, Shining Path has predominantly singled out civilians. Attacks on local government officials have been carried out systematically, with the evident intent of undermining the presence of the state in the areas under the organization's influence.(136) The organization has treated with special venom popular leaders such as community activists, trade union organizers, and leftist politicians, who are excoriated as reformists intent on diverting the masses from their revolutionary destiny. It has selectively murdered such civilians during its seventeen-year war against the Peruvian state. In recent years, the same ruthless logic has been applied to members of the organization itself who have advocated renunciation of the armed struggle and have subsequently become targets of threats and assassination.(137)


The Shining Path has pragmatically avoided taking captives unless it intends to execute them. Executions frequently follow a mock trial held in front of forcibly assembled villagers. Descriptions of brutal killings of villagers committed with primitive weapons, such as sticks, stones, and machetes were common in press reports of political violence at the height of the conflict.(138) Often, such killings took place in front of the victims' families and neighbors.


Shining Path has been reported to torture captured civilians before executing them. Prior cases of torture by Sendero Luminoso remain vivid. On November 23, 1990, Javier Puiggrós Planas, an engineer and leader of the conservative Popular Christian Party (PPC), was killed by a Shining Path squad at his plantation in Vilcahuara, Huayra. As reported by Human Rights Watch/Americas:


Having located Puiggrós, the senderistas brought him before the workers and berated him for mistreating them. The workers protested that Puiggrós was a decent man and asked the guerrillas not to kill him. While under interrogation, Puiggrós was tied hand and foot and mistreated physically, but when workers attempted to help him they were threatened with harm. According to a witness, the helpless captive was executed with four shots to the chest.(139)