“Someday, someone will have to explain why the most bloodthirsty terrorist group of our era was led by professors”[1]
There are not many books about how an apparently normal man becomes a killer. There are not many books that talk about an event whose details are mostly unknown within its country of origin, much less beyond its borders. And most definitely, there are not many biographies of a man who is responsible for the deaths of almost 70,000 innocent people.
Abimael Guzmán was an academic genius who rose through the ranks of academia and became a prominent Peruvian communist intellectual. With a life cast in shadow and clandestinity, how does a journalist write a biography about a man the whole country wants to forget? This is the quest that Santiago Roncagliolo undertakes in his book The Fourth Sword: the history of Abimael Guzmán and Sendero Luminoso.[2]
Basic events
Before I read this book, Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) was a guerrilla group in some remote Latin American country— didn’t know exactly which one. The few references I had beforehand were thanks to Mario Vargas Llosa’s novels, in which they appear as some uncanny enemy in the background, hiding in the Andes.
In fact, Sendero Luminoso was a Peruvian communist terrorist group responsible for the deaths of 69,280 people and led by an imposing figure: Abimael Guzmán. Guzmán, known among his political revolutionaries as Camarada Gonzalo, was not involved with the army as many Latin American revolutionaries were; instead, he was devoted to academic life. Guzmán was a philosopher that never fired a shot but managed to influence the minds of thousands of followers that mindlessly threw themselves in the arms of a revolution that lasted over a decade, from 1980 to 1993.
However, beyond the Peruvian borders, few people are aware of this war, and the figure of Sendero’s leader remains shrouded in mystery. There are no biographies of Guzmán, neither authorized nor unauthorized. No journalist ever managed to interview him, and the only recorded images show him either standing trial after his capture or are uncontextualized fragments of his life in hiding with a quality so low it's difficult to tell what you are watching. His direct victims and witnesses to his acts are unwilling to talk, while the few who knew him before his rise to power don't want to be associated with him at all.
According to a Truth Commission that was established after the conflict concluded, almost half of the 69.000 victims were killed by government repressive forces. These numbers are bigger than the death tolls of both Chilean and Argentine dictatorships combined, with the terrifying detail that Peru was a full democracy during this time. The victims included both Senderistas[3] and police forces, but the really striking statistic is that more than 70% were poor people from the rural areas, not military personnel, and not terrorists, just normal people living under extreme poverty.
The main aim of this book, then, is to construct a biography of Abimael Guzmán, and conduct interviews of his lieutenants and victims, trying to understand the conflict as a whole and shed light on events that seem to be actively willing to remain hidden.
The biography of the man himself
- Early years
First of all, the author traces Guzmán’s biography in order to understand his psychology and thereby, better comprehend the whole picture. The writer recalls an advice given by British journalist Justin Webster about delving into Guzmán’s childhood. As Webster notes “people tend to change very little after turning seven, his essential personality traits had to be there already”.
The main challenge that Roncagliolo faces is that people either don’t know anything about Guzmán or actively do not want to remember him. The only, and highly improbable, source of information about the leader’s childhood is a novel written by one of his sisters, who mostly refuses to talk in interviews claiming that “everything is in the novel”.
Born in 1934, Abimael Guzmán was the illegitimate child of a rich man from Arequipa and his mistress. His mother had planned to get pregnant by Abimael’s wealthy father in order to force a formal marriage, but the plan didn’t turn out as expected. The father refused and the mother left Guzmán with one of his uncles, never contacting her son again. However the father spent some years sending him money in secret until one day Guzmán learned how to write formal letters at school. The child contacted his father with the hope of being adopted, but his stepmother, Laura read the letter instead, discovering her husband’s infidelity. A devout Catholic, Laura, decided to formally adopt the child making him just one of the ten illegitimate children of different mothers that her husband had fathered.
Although he was loved by his stepmother, his school days were rough. Bullied for being an illegitimate child, Guzmán became introverted and focused on becoming a good student, excelling in history, literature, logic, and ethics, and turning into an avid reader. Later, during his teenage years, Guzmán was witness to violent insurgencies against the dictator and, as he himself declared, those uprisings were the first time he understood the useful role violence could play in politics.
- Becoming a professor
Quiet and organized, Abimael Guzmán had no trouble getting into academia and becoming a university professor. Far from the wealth and glamour that we associate with that position today, Guzmán started at the lower echelons of the university in Ayacucho, a very poor city that sharply contrasted with his former upper class lifestyle in Arequipa.
The social and political climate of campus life was something Guzmán had never experienced before. The children of peasants shared classes and public spaces with the children of landowners, socializing and drinking after classes. This environment, alongside the closeness and sympathy of many professors, the closeness of the Cuban Revolution, revolts in eastern Europe, and latin american guerrillas created a revolutionary climate that would ultimately become the perfect weapon for Guzmán.
Inspired by the Marxist philosopher José Carlos Mariátegui, Guzmán applied the following logic: “The university is like a factory, and the students are its workers. The main point of student formation was to teach them to cooperate with already established labor unions, gain combat experience against conservative institutions, and constantly practice self-criticism in order to always be on the ideological avant garde”. Mariátegui dreamed of self-organized institutions, in which anyone could freely attend any class, and in which students would be able to purge professors they deemed too conservative.
Guzmán, although heavily influenced by this perspective, didn't start a cult of personality in academia, but instead remained a shadowy figure working as director of personnel. That newly acquired position allowed him to ideologically purge any professor or worker at the university, and urged his close associates to position themselves in key internal institutions, like the one that granted scholarships. Therefore, Sendero, as a proto-group, ended up managing student residences, university dining halls and canteens, grants, and scholarships. This gave them soft power and gained them a huge following, either out of selfish interest or true belief. The plan that Guzmán and Sendero had envisioned, however, was not limited to controlling the university, but weaponizing it to force a true revolution in Peru. Their revolution was originally not a bloody one but an ideological one, a revolution of near mind control.
Each year, about 500 students graduated from the university of Ayacucho to become rural teachers, technicians, and even college professors. The real plan was not to lead demonstrations, or violent uprisings but to plant the ideological seed of Maoism in every future teacher in the region, and to expand their ideology through the free education of the most disenfranchised sectors of society.
Their focus was the most rural regions in the Andes, the ones without formal education, which tended to be victims of police abuse and were generally forgotten by the state. Sendero turned education into the easiest-to-understand propaganda, talking about bread, working the land, and rural life without any explicit allusion to any communist symbology. Their textbooks were filled to the brim with illustrations showing the exploitation of rural areas by landlords and state officials. This created a subconscious understanding of the class system in the minds of children and illiterate farmers, who felt for the first time heard and understood by a group who had their best interests in mind.
This education, based on class struggle, progressively transformed into guerrilla warfare training aiming at teaching Andean peasants a way to conduct a war without any money or resources. Dynamite from the mines was the preferred weapon, as it was both easy to access and highly effective. Guzmán himself labeled it “humble dynamite, the weapon of the people". However, when dynamite was not available, any other object was used as a weapon. As one of the former members recalls in an interview “The first class always started with the instructor urging us to grab our weapons. When we protested that we didn’t have any, the instructor screamed at us: “False! Open your eyes. A tree is a weapon: it can be used as a shield. A rock is a weapon: it can be used as a blunt object. A pen is a weapon: it can be used to stab the enemy”.
How Sendero worked
A large part of the book is devoted to understanding how Sendero Luminoso worked, on both an ideological and practical level, both internally and externally, and, to a great extent, how they managed to gain such a following.
To understand the birth of Sendero Luminoso, we have to go back to the deplorable state of the left in the late 1960s Peru. Highly abstract ideological discussions about which sector composed the Peruvian proletariat (whether miners, fishermen, or peasants), what the main economic production system of the country was (feudal, Asiatic, or capitalist) or which socialist model they wanted to align with (Albanian, Yugoslavian, Romanian...) created such deep divisions within the left that they ended up with no less than 74 different Marxist-Leninist parties.
The author points out that there was even a party whose main focus was to welcome extraterrestrial beings in case they showed up in Peru, following the logic that if they were technologically capable of visiting, they must necessarily have reached socialism. Against that backdrop an extremely small Marxist-Leninist party originally called “Por el sendero luminoso de Mariátegui” (Through Mariátegui’s shining path) was created by a young academic named Abimael Guzmán.
How did they succeed amidst the maelstrom of leftist parties? Easy, they were coherent and predictable. While other leftist parties discussed topics such as ideological purity, the chain of command or internal democracy, Sendero had a central management that ruled with an iron fist from the very beginning.
As I have already mentioned, Sendero was born in academia with its primary focus placed upon theory, shared ideology and core values. This created a group whose members were unable and unwilling to criticize any aspect of the party’s strategy, and who shared exactly the same ideas with exactly the same words. Roncagliolo reviews multiple interrogation transcripts, and marvels at the internal coherence of every member, noting that “any answer is structured exactly in the same order: international situation, Peruvian situation, people’s war. It is almost impossible to detect even a hint of personal opinion, and it is surprising that each member thinks exactly the same, says exactly the same things and even keeps exactly the same silences.”
The resemblances to a cult are striking, even more so when you learn about their behavior at parties. When at a social event, Sendero members kept their eyes open to prevent anyone from talking to, much less falling in love with, a member of another Marxist-Leninist party, creating a de facto rule that allowed only members to be romantically with each other in order to prevent espionage. An interviewee ex-member codenamed Clara states that the other members accused her husband of being too bourgeois. When the pressure became too much, they abandoned the party and escaped, but she noticed that the normal approach was for members to leave their partners in favor of Sendero.
This extreme level of delusion and structural and mental rigidity is brilliantly illustrated by the author through multiple anecdotes and interviews. When a high-ranking member was purged for opposing Guzman’s vision too often and was later imprisoned, the Senderistas that were already in prison organized a committee to decide his fate. Although he was deemed a traitor the Senderistas decided to be magnanimous and not kill him. Instead, they forced the traitor to go to the toilet on his knees during his six years of imprisonment. After he was released, he did not have any resentment towards Sendero, on the contrary, he compulsively asked one of his few friends “Do you think I will be readmitted anytime soon?”.
Theory before praxis
It is easy to dismiss Sendero as a simply disorganized, violent, and ruthless terrorist group. However, far from justifying their actions, the author devotes a substantial portion of the book to understanding their ideology, their interpretation of communism and the little nuances that made Sendero Luminoso such a unique and bizarre organization.
As described by Nancy, a former sympathizer, “Sendero was like a lion that only kills when is hungry. Its members did not rape, nor torture, on the contrary, they respected the prisoners they were going to execute. They killed them, of course, but before they fed them”. According to other accounts the Senderistas called every prisoner “comrade” and explained in a detailed and calm manner why they were going to be executed. The executions were quick and clear with a single shot to the back of the head.
Sendero’s focus on education was paramount. They established schools wherever they controlled a territory and taught children to sing the Internationale instead of the national anthem. Their morals were rigid: short skirts, blasphemy, and infidelity were forbidden, and their three moral principles were not to be a thief, not to be a snitch, and not to be lazy. Drinking in excess and prostitution were frowned upon. These principles were so ingrained in the psyche of its members that (as one of the interviewees remembers) surreal situations occurred. Once, a member was caught stealing a tuna fish and was brought to the public square by the rest. Kneeling he admitted to the crime, and ensured that the party was right and just and that the real fault was his own greed and individualism. Instead of begging for his life, this man asked to be executed in a quick and public way to serve as a moral example, and, following his wishes, was shot on the spot.
Sendero’s devotion to ideology was an almost religious or metaphysical matter. One of the former members recalled the day he learned how to create homemade explosive devices. The teachers always reminded them that they must keep ideology in mind, as if it were a supernatural power like the Force in Star Wars. For the Senderistas, ideology was a transcendental force of unlimited power, and even if Marxist materialism is incompatible with metaphysical thought, Guzman asserted that “Marxism is science and ideology at the same time”. This predominant role of ideology in the guiding every daily action and behavior can be perfectly encapsulated in the words of one of the ex members: “Amongst Sendero members there were psychopaths, sick people, but also many people so idealistic that they were unable to see reality”
Modus operandi
Once we have understood their revolutionary and ideological motivations it is time to delve into the historical accounts that Roncagliolo superbly narrates. In the cities, Sendero adopted a more psychological approach. They strategically bombed power supplies to leave everyone in the dark for hours or even days, and during the night, the surrounding mountains were lit with gigantic hammers and sickles on fire.
In the rural areas, where there was not a regularly established police force, the killings were indiscriminate. Sendero worked with a sort of blitzkrieg tactic. They descended upon rural communities and quickly assassinated the authorities, whether they were mayors, priests or even slightly prosperous peasants. This created a power vacuum that was quickly filled by public trials conducted by Sendero against rapists and other undesirable members of society, giving a facade of stability and justice.
However, the group usually turned against peasants and the very people they wanted to liberate, like it's the case with the Laucanamarca massacre. This small village got tired of Sendero’s presence, which disrupted trade routes and forced everyone to work for their own subsistence. Fed up with the situation and believing that the army would help them, the villagers killed two Senderistas with their bare hands. Guzmán, wanting to make the situation even more tense, ordered a retaliation that resulted in 69 dead villagers. In addition, not wanting to misspend bullets, Guzmán gave the order for the killings to be conducted with rocks and machetes, which in the hands of inexperienced members resulted in many corpses having more than a hundred fatal wounds.
This modus operandi created, according to the interviewed experts, a psychological break among the perpetrators: “When a sniper shoots, he is far away from the victim, he may even not see them die. However, a killer crosses the psychological threshold of savagery when he kills in close quarters combat. After that he is ready for anything”.
Abimael was an expert in making a virtue out of necessity. Sendero did not have financing, nor firearms besides the few dozen pistols or rifles they were able to snatch from dead policemen. Therefore, he turned the ability to kill with any object into a core part of his revolutionary philosophy. This had a dark advantage, as whoever is able to kill with a rock ends up invested in the cause and it's probably unable to return to a normal life after such an act. To access the upper echelons of the party, aspiring members had to spend three years committing these sorts of crimes to demonstrate loyalty, and in the end, to become made up members they had to kill a policeman and bring his pistol to the supreme command. This served as a way to, first, collect firearms for the cause, second, ensuring that the member you are letting into is a hundred per cent invested in the cause, and finally, it is a perfect way to render infiltration completely impossible.
In addition, there was not an armed and military branch that could eventually turn against the supreme leader, so the political branch was always above and dominating the armed aspect of the conflict.
How did any sane person support this?
The quick and easy answer is: because the government was even worse. It is surprising how Sendero Luminoso managed to gain social favor even when perpetrating grotesquely violent crimes against innocent people, but this was because the police and the army executed a campaign of indiscriminate retaliation, instead of trying to defend the status quo.
There are many instances of these incredibly brutal and counterproductive public acts: for instance, after winning a shootout and successfully arresting a big number of Senderistas the police had no better idea than violently dragging the injured members out of the hospital and publicly executing them in the street. Even if your enemy is the devil himself he is gonna look good in the public eyes after an act like that.
To obtain information, the Peruvian army of course perpetrated a number of systemic tortures and other human rights violations that have been proved to be true and appear in official reports, such as waterboarding, introducing sticks and other objects in the anus or vagina, testicular electrocution, and the particular case of a 14-year-old girl whose house was raided and she was kidnapped, raped by seven soldiers and then swung from an helicopter to force her confession. You can only imagine what else happened if this is the public information collected on official reports.
Psychoanalysis of a man you’ve never met.
More than a historical account of violent events, The fourth sword is a blend of a first-person account of a man trying to understand events that nobody wants to openly talk about, and, above all, the psychoanalytic assessment of a shadow. The author spends the whole book unsuccessfully trying to get an interview with Guzmán, who is in a supermax prison by the time Roncagliolo starts the book and dead of old age by the end. During that quest, the author collects scraps, impressions and memories of Abimael’s life, some true, some false, some exaggerated, but ends up with more questions than answers. That is precisely what makes this book interesting.
The psychology of Abimael Guzmán is extremely complex: a hermit but a charismatic leader, an extremely intelligent man and also someone absolutely impractical in his desire to apply ideology to every aspect of his life. Above all, someone who doesn’t want to be known, seen or heard, a mystery.
While people on the street label him as an “assassin,” "psychopath," or "genocidal killer,” the few family members who are willing to talk about his childhood remark that young Abimael was serious, introverted, extremely polite and very sensitive "I've never seen anyone treat homeless people with such dignity. He was the kind of person that actively waited in corners to see if any old lady needed some help crossing the street”.
As time passed, his whole life was devoted to Sendero, affirming that he had no friends, but only comrades. His familiar, laboral and political life turned into one and the same, only relating to party members, devoting his time to planning attacks and reading theory and even falling in love with not one but two different women on the high command ladder.
Politics fascinated Guzmán from an early age to a point of overtaking any other aspects of his life. In 1988 he was asked about literature and said that he enjoyed Shakespeare, but was unable to separate him from politics. He thought behind every great artist was a great politician. When reading a Thomas Mann short story about Moses, Guzman interpreted its meaning as "Breaking the law is going against Marxism. Being mistaken is allowed, but it is impossible to deny Marxist thought". These examples show the mind of a man ready to fit any narrative in his mental models, as one of his college professors described him “He lacks both English humor and Russian tenderness, the only thing he has is a solid german brain”
In order to graduate from the same two degrees as Marx, Guzmán defended both a thesis in economics and another in Kantian metaphysics. His defense, according to his director, consisted of a five-hour philosophical debate before an audience of a hundred students. He was never seen as a leader but rather as a high level intellectual, he talked for hours, debated anyone, and structured his entire existence around the logic of his political thought. Guzmán was not a leftist, he was to the left of the extreme left. He considered Che Guevara a traitor, and defined revolutionary Cuba as an “advanced bourgeois state”. He also despised the Soviet Union, after the death of Stalin, accusing them of being just another imperialist superpower that sold its principles by renouncing violence.
Ideologically he was not only a Marxist-Leninist, but more particularly a Maoist. He fashioned himself as “la cuarta espada”, the Fourth Sword of communism after Marx, Lenin and Mao. He particularly identified with the latter, as both were provincial teachers turned revolutionaries. Mao declared that “politics was war without blood”, so in the same vein, war was simply “politics with blood”. Guzmán adhered to this idea with the same final objective as Mao had: ending inequality by any means necessary. War for Guzmán was a sort of “push” that we must give to history, we have to accelerate the advance of an equal world by whatever means necessary. As Guzmán states “Not seeing this is blindness, and not rising in arms after noticing is cowardice”.
For many, it was standard operating procedure for a communist revolution to kill authorities and policemen, but this tendency to kill peasants is certainly strange. When questioned about this, Guzmán posed himself, again, as an ideological reformer of Mao's thought, claiming that the Chinese leader had committed a huge mistake in not killing the bourgeois among the peasants. Those were the future traitors, the “future Deng Xiaopings”, the revisionists, and thus they deserved to die. It is surprising, nonetheless, that this "bourgeois peasantry” consisted mostly of people without access to power or running water who just had a tiny patch of land to cultivate their own crops.
This ideological purity led him to be an incredibly impractical leader. In the beginnings of the party, Guzmán positioned himself and Sendero as the only non-bourgeois option, assessing that “the only party that raises the proletarian flag is ours. Anyone else is bourgeois." This led Sendero to never negotiate, never compromise and never form alliances, as they considered themselves the sole guardians of ideological purity. This ideological purity entered the realm of delusion when Guzmán started to only accept good news about his military operations, rejecting anything that wasn’t a “notable, resounding and unquestionable success”.
In the end, Guzmán was a professor at his core, coherent, formal, highly theoretical and honest in his own particular way. The first time he was arrested for mild public disturbance, he admitted to having the desire to rise in arms against the state. The second time, when he was arrested and the group dismantled, he was asked by an interrogator how one would carry out a revolution. The answer given by Abimael Guzmán was, “Start reading Dynnik’s History of philosophy, continue with Marx and Lenin’s 57 volumes. Stalin is easier, just seven volumes. Finally, Mao’s four volumes”.
Psychology of the author
One of the most interesting aspects of the book is not a chapter per se, but a scattering of clues that are just as crucial as the inner workings of Sendero or Guzmán’s politics: the psychology of the author.
Roncagliolo is a present character through the narrative, constantly sharing his opinions and telling in the first person how difficult his quest is. This book is labeled with the catchphrase “it reads like a novel” and to a great extent this is true. The Fourth Sword is not a dry technical book about Peruvian politics or psychological and biographical analysis of a historical character, but instead the story of how a disoriented journalist that goes back to his native country to get information about an event so painful nobody wants to remember. This aspect of the book is often funny and engaging, as the author is constantly drifting from one lead to another, usually not finding anything of interest and bothering the wrong people. This, of course, leaves us with a book full of both voluntary and involuntary psychological details about Roncagliolo himself.
Santiago Roncagliolo, the son of revolutionaries, was named Santiago because his parents fell in love during a protest in Santiago de Chile. When, as a child, he was interviewed for access to a new school decided to wear a shirt stamped with the face of Saddam Hussein and said that his favorite game was “popular revolution”. This shows what kind of parents Roncagliolo had, and how familiar he was with leftist thought, which becomes all the more important when you consider how horrified he grows as he learns more about Sendero Luminoso.
One of the most redeeming aspects of Roncagliolo as a narrator is that he makes an extraordinary effort to admit his motivations, contradictions, and all the problems he faces. He always conveys a sense of honesty and transparency which is something to thank him for in a book like this.
So... Why did he write this book? Plain and simple for money. In the author’s own words: “Why a book on Guzmán? Because it sells. Or because I believe it sells. Or because it’s the only thing I can sell. I’ve always been a mercenary of words. Writing is the only thing I know how to do, and I try to make it pay off. Right now, I’m living in Spain and trying to make a name for myself as a journalist. I need something fresh, and the trending topic over the last year, following the 2004 Madrid train bombings, is terrorism.”
The same transparency applies to Roncagliolo’s unfavourable opinion of communists, who are described as people who think they can tell right from wrong, with principles so ingrained in their minds that they are incapable of changing their opinions even when presented with more than enough evidence. For the author a communist knows the essential truth, and therefore any opposing view is seen as part of a conspiracy to suppress communism as a whole. Nonetheless, the author is able to keep these opinions at bay, honestly examining everyone’s point of view and trying to empathize with them.
This empathy is a pretty interesting aspect of the book, as Roncagliolo evolves throughout the narrative becoming deeply affected by all the evidence and theories he is presented with, and ending up way more confused than he started.
The author begins the narrative being scared of the Senderistas, imagining them as psychopaths and boogiemen. However, as he starts interviewing people and contrasting information their point of view, or at least their internal coherence, starts to grow in him: “It is harder to calmly hate someone you have conversed with. Something in your moral defenses breaks down when you are forced to recognize that the monster speaks your language, has friends; in short, they are not so different from you”.
Their ideology starts to make sense too, as the author becomes obsessed with war and class inequality, seeing them in every corner and trying to turn every conversation into a deep discussion on these topics. Naturally, people tend to get bored or overwhelmed by a topic such as this, so they, of course, change the subject. When this happens, the author explains that a new feeling starts to boil in him, as he perceives a moral superiority creeping in. He feels like a victim, like someone whose interests are relevant, deep, and important for the good of the world while nobody seems to really care. He feels the impotence and deep contempt for other’s 'ideas, therefore, he starts to feel like a Senderista.
Roncagliolo describes this sentiment as a real burst of radicalization, as a sort of illness that if it had happened to him in the right conditions and at the right age would probably have led to real violent action.
Finally, one of the biggest merits of this book is that it is not too sensationalist with such a morbid topic. Other authors would have taken advantage of rumors, half-truths and the general lack of information to craft their own narratives. However, this book is perfectly aware of that, and its author remarks every time there is a discrepancy between the factual truth and the better story.
When investigating about Guzmán’s childhood, the author hears a rumor indicating that his real name was not Abimael but Abismael, which sounds like abyss and, as the author ensures even though i haven’t been able to find any reference to this, being the name of one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. However, the writer admits that there is not enough evidence and it's probably a mistake or an urban legend, ultimately giving up on the strong symbolic idea of linking a mass murderer with the apocalypse itself.
Another instance of this happens when examining Guzman’s childhood. It’s easy to draw psychoanalytical explanations that attempt to justify his personality, crimes, actions, or any other matter really. Roncagliolo instead moves away from these kinds of narratives, presenting all the theories as just theories attributed to particular people in quotations. The writer admits that avoiding the temptation is incredibly hard, not only as a journalist but as a Peruvian because Abimael is seen as a national monster who could have been born anywhere but ended up being Peruvian, leaving the whole society feeling partly responsible for creating such a monster.
Conclusions: Should you read this book?
Indeed! This work of investigative journalism is the perfect mix of gossip, good prose and relevant information. It doesn't meander or ever tell you anything that is not genuinely interesting. If you can read Spanish and are slightly interested in either Peruvian history, psychology, cults, communism, terrorism or just plain good nonfictional storytelling please do yourself a favor and read The fourth sword.