I BELIEVE it was Philippines Graphic magazine managing editor Psyche Roxas-Mendoza who spoke to me thus: “Don’t walk in the marsh or your feet get buried deeper in mire with every step.”
I’m not sure if the words are the lady’s original, but they sure speak wisdom.
That’s how attackers of Armed Forces of the Philippines Southern Luzon Command (Solcom) chief Antonio Parlade Jr., concurrently spokesman of the National Task Force to End Communist Armed Conflict, have virtually done. The more they try to press the general against the corner on the issue of red-tagging of popular showbiz personalities, the more they admit that red, indeed, is evil.
In a recent Zoom interview by “Matters of Fact” on ANC, Jose Maria Sison, acknowledged head of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), sought to debunk assertions by Parlade that it was Sison who had actually red-tagged groups such as the League of Students of the Philippines, the College Editors Guild of the Philippines, the Association of Concerned Teachers and the party-list groups that comprise the Makabayan bloc in the House, among many others in the organizational meeting sometime ago of what Sison termed as the International League of People’s Struggles; it is with this new grouping that Sison aspires now for leadership in the world socialist movement.
The gall of the guy — as if China’s Belt and Road Initiative hasn’t already rolled over two thirds of the world, and counting. To talk of people’s struggles is to ignore that armed struggle is passé and that people’s liberation has been crystallized as economic empowerment first of the masses onward to their exercise of political power approximating self-governance.
But precisely because from the very start the ostensible communist movement launched by Ninoy, Sison, Buscayno et al. in the late 1960s was leader-centric, it had been pushed solely as a means to install in power the top revolutionary clique. It was doomed from the start.
In the interview, Sison gloated in words to this effect: “The fact that our movement continues to this day proves that it has been correct.” That’s saying that mere fighting on and on is the measure of success of a people’s movement.
No, the measure of success is winning, and winning is over a short term. The Romanov Dynasty was overthrown by Lenin in just 10 days in 1917, leading to the establishment of the first socialist state in history, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It took just a year for Fidel Castro to bring down the government of Fulgencio Batista in Cuba in the 1950s. Though it took a longer period for the Communist Party of China to drive away the Kuomintang finally in 1949, this has to be understood in light of the Japanese aggression that the party had to initially contend with and the five-year Chinese civil war that ensued right after the end of the Second World War. In terms of duration of struggle, the Chinese revolution consumed a far shorter period than the half century now traversed by Sison’s protracted people’s war, and counting.
In the Zoom interview by ANC, Sison declared that what Parlade had alluded to him as admission of so-called progressive groups being allies of his ostensible communist struggle had been spliced with the original video of his speech in the “international people’s struggle” meet, actually denying that those whom Parlade exposed as red fronts are Sison’s allies.
Sison was a classic caricature of contradiction, now stammering, now fumbling in his assertions, but at any rate, by asserting that those whom Parlade had allegedly red-tagged are not red, he actually proclaimed the CPP/New People’s Army/National Democratic Front (CPP/NPA/NDF) triad as evil, for Simon pure not to be associated with.
If this terrorist conglomerate wants to be truly accepted by the people as noble and worthy of all support, why try ever distancing known militant groups from it?
For example, Sison proclaims the NDF as already the revolutionary government in the Philippines and as such has the legitimate prerogative to collect revolutionary taxes both from big business and the people at large. Well said, I would like to say. But then, must he not take pride in having groups upon groups of militants championing its cause. Why deny them?
In another interview, this time by “Teleradyo “of Angel Locsin, who also claims to have been red-tagged by Parlade, the actress speaks with a tremor in her voice, expressing fear, “Anumang oras pwede nila kaming damputin (Anytime, they can just pick us up).”
So, it would appear that Sison just wants to have his supporters in the legal front spared from being applied with the full force of the Anti-Terror Law, which explains his public disclaimer.
On this, Joma, let me just say, in DGs and teach-ins from the First Quarter Storm all the way to full immersion in the Communist Party of the Philippines, there was this constant reminder to comrades about watching out against the dangers of opportunism. What you are saying now that those whom Parlade had exposed as having been branded by you as reds are not reds actually constitutes what you had preached to us from the very beginning as right opportunism. And if we go by the IPO method of analysis you taught us, then you deserve being demoted from your high placement in the Netherlands ruling clique of Philippine revolutionary pretenders.
If I still believed in you as I did then, I would be extremely proud being red-tagged. It would be an honor to admit I was, in the strike at the Makabayan Publishing Corp. where we literally threw our bodies into the path of a truck to stop it from breaking the picket, the rubber of the tires squeezing our sides until, sensing our determination to die for the cause, the driver pulled back and we rejoiced, “Mabuhay ang uring manggagawa (Long live the working class)!”; in the People’s Congress at Plaza Miranda where we all had the balls to shout, “Mabuhay ang Bagong Hukbong Bayan (Long live the New People’s Army)!”; in the Congress massacre where I got an M16 slug slicing through a teeny top part of my shoulder as I dove to safety in the Sunken Garden. In my filmmaking days, when I developed camaraderie with and given assignments by NPA chief Rolando Kintanar, I had a reputation of being a bold director for making sex-oriented movies. To that I would raise my chin, “The greener I was, the redder I became.” The reputation made it easy for me to carry out tasks assigned by the NPA General Command.
Joma, ask your wife, Julie, if she had not come to my house in 1985 to listen to my presentation of a wooden replica of the Batasan Pambansa where, in the late 1980s, we were to carry out Kintanar’s strategy of city insurrection, which is anathema to your long-running “wave-by-wave encircling of the cities from the countryside.”
Ah, time was when it was such an honor to be an NPA that nobody minded being red-tagged. Why, Joma, do you slam General Parlade now for red-tagging your legal stooges?
Because, indeed, the CPP/NPA/NDF triad has finally reared its ugly head as degenerates priding itself in its terrorism and pure and simple banditry?
https://www.manilatimes.net/2020/11/14/opinion/columnists/jose-maria-sisons-saunter-down-the-marsh/796157/
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