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Sunday, June 18, 2006
Mercado: Selective silences
By Juan L. Mercado
In a recent TV interview, party-list congressman Teddy Casiño found himself backed into a corner with a question that bothers many people. Do Filipino communists run on twin tracks of armed rebellion and aboveground legal struggle for one objective: to take over power?
Well, yes, Casiño reluctantly admitted. Guerilla forays and battles in legal fora are flip sides of one movement. The New People’s Army (NPA) shares the “same world view” with party-list representatives like the “Batasan 5.”
Communist Party of the Philippines’ (CPP) Jose Ma. Sison once said, the movement resembled a warrior with sword and shield, Columnist Antonio Abaya recalled. The NPA scimitar; the shield is cobbled from the National Democratic Front’s (NDF) multiple fronts.
Homegrown communists use democratic space given by constitutional government to destroy that same government, he added. “This would never have been allowed in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan South Korea. Onli in da istupid Pilipins.”
Taking up arms against the government is a crime. But being a communist is not. Casiño & Comrades nonetheless shrink from the tag. Bayan Muna’s Satur Ocampo, Gabriela’s Liza Masa or Anakpawis’ Rafael Mariano prefer antiseptic names like: “militants,” “leftists,” “radicals,” etc.
Many in media oblige. That’s understandable. “The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers,” Marshall MacLuhan wrote in his 1964 landmark study, “Understanding Media.”
Except for North Korea, Cuba, communism has collapsed everywhere else. Who’d relish being identified with a bankrupt creed?
Ordinary Filipinos, however, are disquieted by this twin-headed hydra. That mistrust persists despite posturing, by Batasan 5 and fronts like Kilusang Mayo Uno, as reformers of oppressive socio-economic structures gripped by a corrupt elite.
The unease doesn’t stem from scrubbed names or even verbal outbursts. Rep. Crispin Beltran, for example, cheered the bloody massacre of Chinese students at Tiananmen Square.
But in a democracy, everyone is entitled to his wrong opinion. Even commissars can exercise the constitutionally guaranteed right to speak freely. Of course, they’d promptly squelch this right if they wiggled into power.
Doubts also fester from what communists refuse to discuss. “The cruelest lies are often told in silence,” Robert Louis Stevenson once said.
Party-list congressmen zippered their lips when, in the last elections, they were bluntly asked by the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines: “Do you support payment for ‘permits to campaign’ levied by the NPA?”
Neither will they question “revolutionary taxes” the NPA wrings at gun barrel point. Taxation is the sole function of a sovereign government. Thus, they’ll shuffle around questions on NDF claims to a “status of belligerency,” i.e. heading another state.
They’ve kept mum on the post-1992 CPP policy of assassinating former communists: Romulo Kintanar, Popoy Lagman and Arturo Tabara, among others.
Meeting in Porto Alegre Brazil, the World Social Forum called for a stop to threats against ideologues like Walden Bello, Aurora Maria Nemenzo and Lidy Nacpil and others. The assassination threats were credible, it said. It was the old Mao tactic of “killing the chickens to scare the monkeys”
Neither will they discuss the bloody pogroms that executed scores of cadres in the paranoia over military deep penetration infiltrators. Were 700 executed in a purge that netted five agents, as Walden Bello claimed in a study? Or was it 2,000? A policy of gritted teeth ensures we’ll never know the truth.
And what will their program of government be if they “overthrow the bourgeois state and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat”?
Few talk. But former secretary Horacio Morales gave some hints when they tried to hitchhike on Joseph Estrada’s “transition government” in street demos that fizzled.
First, they’d scrap the 1987 Constitution--–a document ratified by 76 percent of voters in a referendum. Next, this unelected group (or politburo?) would suspend elections for 1,000 days.
And after that, what? Then, the de facto dictatorship would consider whether they could afford the luxury of elections? Any doubts what the answer will be?
How would communism, Pinoy style, differ from versions in Kim Il Sung’s Korea, Maoist or today’s China, let alone the disintegrated Soviet Union?
Will it be a one-party police state? Media would, of course, be gagged. Will the state create its own church, as in China, and insist on appointing its own bishops? Will the state control all schools, businesses, farms, etc.? Will the New People’s Army substitute for the under-trained, underpaid AFP?
A flood of open letters, articles, “studies,” meanwhile, come from “organizations” that claim to represent every sector: students, migrants, workers, fisherfolk, etc. These are nothing but cubbyhole operations with access to a fax, printer and computer. These shell organizations are megaphones. And you’ll know them by their silences, award-winning commentator Bobby Nalzaro points out.
Murky muteness erodes credibility. No wonder, Cebu Gov. Gwendolyn Garcia ruled out dialogue with them. Thus, homegrown communists never mustered enough warm bodies to topple even an unpopular regime like the Arroyo administration.
Like Sisyphus, they’re forever locked into hijacking political groups, from Fernando Poe’s campaign to Erap’s bid to beat plunder charges, to wrest the power that has eluded them so far.
Nor can they count on widespread citizen support until transparency replaces their policy of selective silences.
(juan_mercado@pacific.net.ph)
For Bisaya stories from Cebu. Click here. (June 18, 2006 issue)
Write letter to the editor.Click here.
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