Peru gets rid of glossy shrine to Marxist guerrillas

January 1, 2019 By Monica Showalter

Peruvian authorities on Saturday demolished a mausoleum holding eight Shining Path rebels killed during prison massacres more than three decades ago and relocated their remains to a cemetery in a northern part of Lima. More than 50 police officers and dozens of workers from the cemetery in the Comas district of Peru’s capital participated in the operation, said prosecutor Javier Zapata. The remains of the Maoist rebels will be buried in separate niches.

When I visited Lima in 2012, I was amazed to visit a place called the "Memory Museum" which was dedicated to exposing the crimes of communism. Apparently it was paid for by the Germans and the European Union, and there was some nod to equalize crimes in the eurotrash style, so that supposedly no one would think communism was any worse than thuggy government soldiers, but it didn't work that way, in effect. The simple reason why is that the museum listed all the atrocities, and did huge news spreads on each, as viewers moved from room to room.

The communist atrocities were so much more numerous, so much more expansive in their killing numbers, and so very, very, vile in details, that it was obviously an effort to discredit and de-romanticize communism. (The communists even came into villages and hung people's pets, which shows just what kind of psychopaths these vaunted fighters for social justice really were.) The whole thing was recognizable to anyone, too - the Che tshirts, the university radicals, the press romanticism, the establishment's tolerance ... and the forced marches and death pit massacres. There also were things you never see otherwise, too - such as the news that it was the indigenous people who were brutalized the most by the communists, and those people visited the museum with tears. That doesn't fit the lefty narrative anywhere, and it was clear that the museum's truth-telling was Peruvians refusal to kowtow to those narratives.............Read more