https://x.com/JoeSteakley/status/1852892191561044428
The top post is about a nationalist indigenous group (though I genuinely can’t fathom why I should oppose them; they want their people’s lands back), which may potentially be far right based on an old picture of them where they used very Nazi-looking iconography which apparently according to some posts they never used again.
I don’t know their views but I doubt they share the Nazi views of Western Europeans.
Coming as absolutely no surprise, this person is pro-Israel.
I’m gonna tell you a secret, OK? Indigenous people can, believe it or not, post L’s sometimes… Yeah, I know it’s hard to believe, but Indigenous groups have complex internal politics and are fully capable of having bad ideas, seeing as they are, you know, human beings and all. I’m not going to pretend to be an expert on Peruvian Indigenous politics — certainly not — but my impression just from briefly looking at ethnocacerism is that it seems really the same as any other far-right movement: an attempt to push people away from a coherent ideology that would actually liberate them. I wouldn’t be surprised if this movement is essentially funded by capitalists, Peruvian or Septic or whatever else, as a bulwark against class consciousness among Indigenous Peruvians.
I also feel like I’ve heard that at least elsewhere in Latin America, the view of Indigenous people as racially superior actually plays right into the colonization — something like that the colonization is seen as being on some level justified because it created a new breed of Übermensch, as if the genes of Natives were turned into a commodity. I think the magic word is “cosmic race” and the guy who invented this idea was José Vasconcelos. I don’t know how relevant this idea is for ethnocacerism, but it is something to be aware of, although I could be getting the idea a bit wrong, I am by no means an expert.
Neither did the Japanese!
Edit: Obviously fuck Fujimori though
True, some natives (even in the US) think they are superior than the mestizo population because their blood is much more pure than those of mestizo/pardo population, but this idea is not popular at all with most native politicians (This is similar to how the black movement in Brazil started as a far-right monarchist movement that eventually became left-wing).
They are not far-right, they openly said they are anti-imperialist, anti-fascist and anti-marxist (mostly due to them being former soldiers that fought the Shining Path, they follow José Carlos Mariátegui instead of Marx). They started out as a group inspired by Left-Wing Socdem Military Dictator of Peru Jose Velasco, who promoted Native Culture and Language, and also hated Chile because of the War of the Pacific. These soldiers became much more radical during the 1990’s because of Fujimori promoting a genocide in Peru. Since they are also veterans of the wars against Ecuador, they also hates them, but they also want to united with Bolivia and really like Evo Morales, Hugo Chavez and Lula da Silva (all of whom are minorities). They are currently agains the Peruvian goverment and are allied with the Shining Path, Communist Party and the Socdem and Liberal parties. No one seems to know why they use nazi symbols, but I guess it’s because the leaders were very inspired by WW2 and were trained in WW2 era tactics to use against the Shining Path during the 1980’s. They seemed to have let go of some of their racist views, even going as far as to defend some Venezuelan immigrants in Peru, saying that they also are Pro-Bolivar.
Ethnocacerism is against the comic race idea. In resume, José Vasconcelos saw race segregation in the US and white supremacy and was like “Wait! They are all wrong and dumb! We shouldn’t separate race, but rather unify all races into a single powerful race!”. Nowadays we know that race doesn’t exist, but at that time it was a progressive idea. And it inspired the goverments in Latin America to promote interracial marriage and relations (Which to many Afro-Latinos and Natives, was the only way the could buy land until the 1930’s. But for sometime the media at the time portrayed them in positive way, even some Far-Right groups in Latin America promoted race unity), because they would ended up all becoming a powerful race that would unify the world in peace. Ethnocacerists are against this because they used to think that Incans (Central Andean Natives) were better than anyone else, specially Amazon Natives and Afro-Peruvians. But it seems that they have let go of this ideas.
Is that so!
I’m just saying, it takes a bit less to call oneself anti-imperialist and anti-fascist than to actually be these things, so when you hear about all these weird racial ideas and reviving an Incan state and using Nazi-inspired symbols, it seems more than a bit suspicious, especially when they have this military background.
What would this mean in practice?
They were against the 2019 coup in Bolivia, they are Pro-Venezuela, Pro-Evo, Pro-Castillo. They seemed to have evolved into more moderate positions, they are currently allied with the Socdems and Communists in Peru. I guess they are currently fighting actual US soldiers in Peru.
I don’t know much about Mariategui, but from what I remember, he focused more on indigenism, agrarian socialism and cultural revolution. He believed that Marxism was too European and didn’t take into account the different cultures of the world. From the Peruvian point of view, Mariategui proposed a very well-organized form of land, since at the time Peru and most of Latin America were very agrarian, and that there was a fusion of indigenous, Afro-Latin and European-Latin cultures, promoting a cultural revolution. His grandson went on to criticize some of the things Mariategui said, claiming that he ignored some aspects of native culture that were reactionary. Mariategui also believed that the Inca Empire was a kind of proto-socialist society.
Very interesting, thank you.
If you ever get confused about mid-20-century latam socdems, just remember “Social democracy is the moderate wing of fascism”
I was thinking about that old phrase…
It makes everything easier to understand!