by the Editorial Board
June 19, 1986 is a day the oppressors of the world want you to forget. It is a day many of us working people in the US have never learned about. On that day, in the midst of an ongoing people’s war, the so-called “left-wing” government of Peru carried out a massacre against hundreds of revolutionary prisoners of war. The prisoners had taken over their prison and turned it into another trench in service of the ongoing revolution, and even when confronted with a combined assault from the air force, army, navy, and police forces, the revolutionary combatants fought to their death rather than surrender. Hundreds were murdered, without trial and in the most brutal fashion. This murder did not come easy, and it is the heroic resistance of the prisoners that provides the most potent ideological lessons and examples for us today.
Lesson 1: Do not be a victim, become a combatant.
It is quite common for those reared by liberal society to think that in genocide it is enough to condemn the barbaric acts of the oppressor. To treat every wound as something to shed tears over, to show the bodies of Palestinian children on the evening news and attempt to morally convince the oppressor. It is a one-sided view that forgets about the heroic resistance. It is a cynical view that cannot consider actually winning.
The revolutionary view is something else: that it is natural for the reactionaries to act genocidal, in fact it is their only recourse and this fact grants the revolutionary optimism. The revolutionary has made a conscious choice, one of combat and resistance. The oppressor knows how to kill, it is easy for them, but they do not know how to die. The revolutionary on the other hand has chosen death in order to resist oppression. This choice is the answer: the revolutionary standpoint and world view will inevitably triumph, because it will make the necessary sacrifice in order to win, to teach the enemy to die, by bringing death to the entire way of life that is built upon oppression.
A combatant of the Shining Trench of Combat known as “El Fronton” prison wrote shortly before his death in pitched battle against the forces of genocide: “Bloodshed is the banner that calls for all people to achieve what we have craved, power. We are condemned to win, it’s a beautiful sentence.”
Lesson 2: Even when all seems lost, keep on fighting to the last one.
The liberal ideology thinks that it is bad to ever be attacked by the enemy. This only confirms a desire to be accepted into the old order of oppression. The revolutionaries see things differently. If the enemy never attacks, then you have failed in the first order of rebellion—you have not separated yourself enough from the old order. To be attacked by the enemy is a good thing. The enemy does not attack from a position of power, but from fear that they are losing control. The enemy does not amass arms and prisons for any other reason than that without these it would be ripped to shreds. The enemy does not carry out genocide for any other reason than the fact that they are losing control.
It is fear, panic, and the lack of control that makes the enemy resort to genocidal attacks, and because of this he will stumble from failure to failure; isn’t it true? All of the pain inflicted by the enemy and every victory he thinks he has won is his ultimate failure; for every one he kills, he forges a hundred more enemies. The people on the other hand have been crushed by oppression and exploitation, and when they attack the enemy it is because they are gaining the strength to conquer the world. They are not afraid to fail, because for them failure is the process of winning. Each drop of blood shed from the fighters dyes our flag a deeper red and calls forth more combatants. This is the tide of history and no one can stand against it.
Lesson 3: Complacency and demoralization are not revolutionary
There are those who become complacent with victory and dispirited with defeat. This is part of the one-sided view derived from having the logic of the oppressor in your head. Ours is a long struggle, but also a struggle that we will win. That means that we should use each victory to struggle harder against the oppressor and each defeat as a lesson on how to struggle better.
Opposed to complacency and demoralization is revolutionary optimism, an optimism rooted in the science of revolution. We are not optimistic out of sentiment or desire, but from a place of understanding that the realization of communism is a scientific fact based on the mechanisms of capitalism. Every process, whether natural or social, is guided by its own laws of development, and just as we can ascertain these laws in the natural world, so too can we ascertain the laws of social motion. Our optimism, spirit of self-sacrifice and hard struggle are rooted in this scientific understanding that communism will inevitably be realized just as the sun inevitably rises. The question is not if communism will be achieved but when, and this is decided by the actions of Communists, if they will fight or surrender, if they will be complacent and demoralized or optimistic and scientific.
The Day of Heroism proves that both complacency and demoralization have no place in the revolutionary struggle. Communists are armed with their ideology, which is constantly developed in the unity won in the process of struggle and self-criticism. Armed with this worldview, it is certain that nothing and nobody can defeat us.
