To the editors:
On reading “Defender of the Shining Path” in your January 22 issue, I was confronted with the thought that the Reader may print news but not always news fit to print.
Of all the people who are professors, or who could or should be professors, how was Bill Martin picked for a story? Was it the sensational nature of a defender of Shining Path?
A “professor of political philosophy at DePaul” saying the Shining Path is “fighting a war”? He should know that they are fighting a rebellion; and until they win, they are criminals.
How could such a person be a professor? He not only is ignorant of Shining Path and its activities, he also shows little common sense–going to a country of which he knows nothing, where they speak a language of which he is also ignorant.
The Shining Path has failed with the very peasants they are supposedly fighting to assist. They have tried to institute a communist system in Peru’s indigenous communities, which already are the only successful examples in the world of a communist style of living. Where they have tried to institute a communist system in free communities, they have met with subsequent rebellion of the “natives”–who either killed or expelled the Shining Path members left to govern them.
Guzman is not the brightest person in the world; many say he is quite nuts. His management of the rebellion is certainly chaotic, to say the least. Shining Path is successful at only one thing: destruction, and the disorder that accompanies it.
Maybe the learned professor should take a sabbatical and go to Peru to study it, its language, and the Shining Path, and then come back to tell us some truth in the matter.
Ralph Moore, PhD
W. Strong