Anti-American Art: Grateful Dead

Here's another poster from the pro-Shining Path Movimiento Popular Peru, this one from 2003: "Long Live the 23rd Anniversary of the People's War in Peru!" Underneath the floating Maoist triumvirate plus Chairman Gonzalo, a crowd of revolutionaries looking like they stepped out of a videogame use their red banner to push a skeletal Uncle Sam into the dirt.

I don't think the socialist realistic aesthetic holds up in such primitive CGI graphics: the idealized heroic caricatures necessary for socialist realism seem to become mechanical and lifeless, devoid of the spark of aspiration necessary for its quasi-religious inspirational effect. Then again, click through to the MPP's propaganda site and you'll find some pretty soul-deadening sloganeering.

Anti-American Art: The Burning Path of Maoism

"Desarrollar la guerra popular de resistencia contra el imperialismo yanqui!" "Support the People's War of Resistance Against Yankee Imperialism!" proclaims this fairly recent poster from the Movimiento Popular Peru, one of the external factions of the Partido Comunista de Peru en el Sendero Luminoso de Jose Carlos Mariategui, better known as The Shining Path. The poster is a complicated montage of images: Front and center under the banner of Maoism, a demonstration of indigenous people burn the American flag at their feet. Floating up in the sky is the triumvirate of Marx, Lenin, and Mao, joined by Abimael Guzmán, the Shining Path leader imprisoned by the Peruvian government since 1992.

The Shining Path waged bloody "People's War" in the 1980s and 1990s, controlling portions of Peruvian territory and conducting urban guerrilla warfare. It was accused by the Peruvian government of terrorism and involvement in the drug trade. I read one account of a factional struggle -- that included the Peruvian Maoists -- in the worldwide Maoist movement in the last decade or so over whether to adopt the phrase "Marxism-Leninism-Maoism" or "Marxism-Leninist-Mao Zedong Thought"; the likes of this factional struggle had not been since then-socialist Albania broke from its People's Republic of China sponsors in the late 1970s throwing the Maoist movement into disarray.

(Poster snagged from Esdeladea blog. Thanks! Click on the image to see it much larger.)