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Wednesday, March 15, 2006
Carvajal: Sleeping with the enemy
By Orlando P. Carvajal
Communism is espoused and promoted by ideologues whose extremist approach to social transformation (“political power comes from the barrel of a gun”) never fails to rouse the poor towards a violent grab of power from a government that neglects them and serves only the interests of society’s elite.
In a predominantly Christian country like the Philippines, it is harder to whip up the poor man’s anger because religion, the communist rightly claims, functions as opiate (“accept the will of God”), soothing the angry hearts of hungry people. In the end, however, the poor man’s instinct for physical and emotional survival wins over all the religious platitudes meant to keep his anger in check and he answers the call to take up arms, break his chains and free himself.
Hence, when President Arroyo vowed to crush the communist insurgency, we could only hope that, included in her brave declaration, is also a grim determination to fight poverty with a pro-poor strategy for economic growth.
Pro-poor meaning economic growth must improve the quality of life of the poor and not simply widen the gap between rich and poor as the trickle-down strategy has done in the past. If poverty is to be substantially reduced, a pro-poor strategy must give a proportionately bigger benefit to the poor. Otherwise, economic growth without a pro-poor bias will only result in widening the gap separating rich and poor.
Killing armed communist insurgents will not stop communism at all. Only the eradication of poverty can crush communism. Poverty is communism’s life-blood. Keep it in bed and communism will be fully alive feeding on it. Poverty is the enemy. This government must vow to stop sleeping with it.
Malacañang is right about traders who back coups wasting their money. They are backing coups because they want a military government to protect their businesses by dealing harshly with communism.
Yet, Malacañang is also wasting its money fighting the insurgency only with guns. A well-trained and fully equipped Philippine military can only cripple the local communist insurgency temporarily because, if mass poverty remains the dominant feature of the Philippine social landscape, new rebels will take over from their old and dead comrades and the protracted struggle continues on its bloody and deadly path.
Communism has failed in many places because it is a rigid system that makes god of a state that rules with an iron had and does not respect basic human rights. Thus, we do not want communism to liberate us from poverty, not unless we have to. And we won’t have to if we learn the lesson that only a crushing blow to poverty’s jugular will keep the masses from taking up arms. Nothing else will.
For Bisaya stories from Cebu. Click here. (March 15, 2006 issue)
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