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Red Red Whine

by Sonny Africa

IBON staff reflect on red-tagging and its attack on the ideas of the Left

Two weeks ago, as floodwaters reached a new high to trap thousands of Filipinos on the roofs of their homes and force hundreds of thousands more to evacuate, red-tagging reached a new low.

The nation struggled to mobilize help beyond what the government was giving but the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) saw it as just another day at work to whine about Reds. It tried to dissuade donations for relief work of youth activists, took a swipe at CNN Philippines for being infiltrated, and even thought it worthwhile to meddle in a call for support among co-parents in a high school group chat.

The sad episode is a case study of the depths the Duterte government goes to in calling people Communists or terrorists and organizations as fronts or infiltrated. The hysterical claim last week is that the call for donations is “extorting money and goods to fund and support their terrorist activities”. Go figure.

But it also prompts deeper reflection on what red-tagging is and why we all lose from it. It isn’t the mere labelling that the government and its security apparatus like to pretend it is and which, they insist, even the Left does to itself. Red-tagging is labelling to attack not just people and organizations but also the very ideas and values so needed to make tomorrow better than today.

Fear of ducks

These are the coordinates of their lunacy: Communists are terrorists, Communist ideas a.k.a. Leftist ideas are passé, and anyone spouting Leftist ideas is a terrorist or a brainwashed puppet.

But the thing is, with the world and the country the way they are, it’s obvious what anyone concerned about humanity will cherish for their absence – social justice, equality, and a decent life for all. An honest grasp of history, politics and economics also points to what’s needed for these values to become real – people taking control of society and their lives.

Drilling down further shows what makes ‘Reds’ look, swim and quack like the ducks that elites fear so much – the rejection of capitalism, redistribution of wealth, and the imagining (or even building) of a socialist alternative. There’s a diversity of ducks but they all have these feathers.

Reds proudly embrace these ideas, and are famously relentless in putting these ideas into practice as conditions allow. They wear their red hearts on their sleeves and wave their red flags, literally and figuratively, because it isn’t enough for the ideas to be compelling. They have to be grasped and embraced and practiced by as many people as possible.

Which brings us back to red-tagging. Leftist ideas are the floodwaters of social change but instead of homes of the poor they wash away the structures of power. These waters are rising – maybe not like a storm surge but inexorably rising nonetheless.

Red-tagging aims to put a stop to that. Starting with activists and their organizations, including their supporters, and then really anyone daring to think differently and taking a stand. It wants to reduce radical ideas to a trickle of disembodied voices embellishing a fake democracy but threatening no one.

Progressive ideas will be tolerated if spoken from armchairs or as rhetoric in speeches and policy-making. But red flags are raised when these ideas are connected to each other and, especially, when they’re borne by the organized power of politicized Filipinos in a mass movement for change.

Capitalism and wannabe authoritarians don’t want that. They need a blind and docile public that doesn’t question why the economy leaves them behind, nor that opposes unrelenting corruption and the abuse of power.

Duck-hunting

The Duterte administration is averse to Leftist ideas but is incapable of arguing against them beyond shrill banalities. The government admits as much whenever it laments losing the “propaganda war,” as verbalized by the NTF-ELCAC, National Intelligence Coordinating Agency (NICA), and even a militarist senator.

What they don’t see and can’t concede is that they’re losing because they’re on the wrong side of history – so they’ve gone duck hunting instead.

This wouldn’t be a problem if they were going after armed ducks. The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP)-led New People’s Army (NPA) is waging armed revolution in the countryside and, for that, is prepared for an equally armed response. The state can’t seem to defeat them in the battlefield and is in a virtual stalemate. But that’s another story.

The problem is that the Duterte administration is going after anything that quacks, wherever they might be, even if they aren’t doing anything illegal in their advocacies, projects, humanitarian work, law-making, and fiscalizing. In a back-handed compliment, the state is starting with the biggest, most influential, and deepest-rooted mainstream Left forces. The calculation may be that if the powerful radical flank is broken then moderates become more manageable.

The new Anti-Terrorism Law (ATL) is bringing a tactical nuke cannon to a duck hunt with the same kind of widespread and excessive damage. Red-tagging today is in cheap posters and flyers, bad PowerPoint presentations, loose media statements, and troll-like social media posts.

The ATL will make red-tagging graduate from these – bypassing courts where they’d just be a mess of inadmissible evidence – to become the first step towards thinly ‘legalized’ surveillance, freezing of assets, warrantless arrests, and indefinite detention. The brazen abductions and assassinations by shadowy state security forces before the new law will still continue.

Fantastic tales

Red-taggers won’t admit it but they know they would never win a battle of ideas. So they fight with twisted fantasies instead and bank on sheer repetition using the vast propaganda apparatus of the government.

Armed Reds and Leftist activists, or armed Leftists and Red activists, are crudely lumped together — this only exposes that it’s Red and Left ideas that they fear most of all. The NTF-ELCAC’s banal propagandists think that they’ve stumbled on irrefutable wisdom and repeat this ad nauseam.

A Philippines that would be idyllic if not for the renegade violence of NPA bandits in the countryside? As if it isn’t the government that’s been killing tens of thousands of alleged drug offenders and unarmed activists. The Duterte government’s state-sponsored and -sanctioned violence against civilians kills more than the guerrilla war does in the countryside.

Families blissfully happy if not for youth brainwashed to hate their parents? As if children, youth and students can’t see for themselves how their families and many others are exploited while a fraction have uncountable wealth and luxury. Our best and brightest love their country and their families. Their choices come from maturity and deserve respect.

Activists whose real agenda is hate, death and destruction? As if they aren’t among the most consistently compassionate, dedicated and productive defenders of human rights or enablers of oppressed and exploited folks wherever they might be. The self-sacrifice is out of a deep love for others.

Lumad communities in picturesque harmony if not for NPA recruiters? As if they don’t know that soldiers and paramilitary goons pave the way for mining, logging and energy projects that won’t benefit the Lumad communities. The government exploits the Lumad many times over when they are paraded as propaganda props.

The NPA are rapists, murderers and extortionists? As if a roving army of such deviants could survive for decades, attracting idealistic youth and getting the support of rural communities knowing them and seeing for themselves who they are.

And an economy made poor by Communist armed conflict? As if the economy wasn’t poor before the rise of rebellion, and isn’t kept poor by neoliberal policy incantations from worshipers of the Gods of Capitalism. And as if the most rapid economic growth in decades hasn’t benefited oligarchs, government functionaries, and foreign capital while leaving the majority poor and farther behind than ever.

The red pill

Part of red-tagging is the Duterte government wanting us to take the blue pill. To swallow their disinformation, stay ignorant, and live in the confines of an unjust, unequal and unchanging world. It’s a pill to make people not just clueless but ultimately helpless and hopeless.

The red pill, on the other hand, frees us from the enslaving control of thinking that there is no alternative to capitalism and the status quo. It affirms the working class coming together as the most powerful force for change for the better.

It also makes us see how everything is commodified where the presidency, elections, legislators and laws, even the judiciary can be bought. And how oligarchs, foreign investors, business cronies, and government officials have become wealthier – as well how the wealth of the president and his family has become suspiciously invisible.

At one level, the NTF-ELCAC propagandists are just indoctrinated military personnel and folks with a quasi-religious devotion to the president (or maybe just a crush). At a deeper level, the NTF-ELCAC is the spearhead of the system trying to put down dissent and the rising waters of social revolution.

A line is being drawn in the dolomite sand. But it isn’t between those for or against ‘Communist-terrorists’ – it’s between those embracing or enabling the status quo and those choosing to change this for the better. More than ever, it’s time to take sides. #

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Kodao publishes IBON articles as part of a content-sharing agreement.

On the proposal to revive the Anti-Subversion Law

By Jose Maria Sison, NDFP Chief Political Consultant

The proposal of General [Eduardo] Año, secretary of the Department of Interior and Local Government, is one more manifestation of the frenzied drive of the tyrannical [Rodrigo] Duterte regime to impose a thoroughgoing fascist dictatorship on the people in a vain attempt to end the armed revolutionary movement as well as the broad legal opposition through red-tagging, harassments, threats, abductions and murders.

In line with the Duterte tyranny, the most vicious and bloodthirsty officials who love to kill people to solve problems are enamored of the long-discredited Anti-Subversion Law because it provides for the death penalty, for the prejudgment of people on the basis of guilt by association and for the arbitrary listing of people as “communists” for the purpose of extortions and mass slaughter.

Contrary to the view of the chief suspect in the abduction and forced disappearance of the young activist Jonas Burgos, the revival of the Anti-Subversion Law will not eliminate the Communist Party of the Philippines and the people’s democratic revolution. It will only serve to further violate the national and democratic rights of the people and will thus incite the broad masses of the people to rise up.

The fundamental cause of the armed revolution in the Philippines is neither the existence of the Communist Party in the Philippines nor the communist ideas of Marxism-Leninism but the exploitation and oppression of the Filipino people by imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism in a semicolonial and semifeudal ruling system now lorded over by the tyrant and plunderer Duterte.

The revival of the Anti-Subversion Law can give further license to Duterte’s armed minions to violate human rights and can further embolden them to witch hunt, harass, threaten and kill those that they arbitrarily list as “communists” among the critics of the regime and the people in general. Such law can result in bigger mass murders than those perpetrated under Oplan Tokhang and Oplan Kapanatagan.

It must be recalled that the Anti-Subversion Law has long been discredited as an unjust and anti-democratic law by which anyone can be subjected to punishment on the basis of guilt by association, without the need to present evidence for the personal culpability of the accused for any crime.
Such law has long been condemned as a poison to the freedom of thought, expression and assembly.

Violations of democratic rights under the Anti-Subversion Law will drive more people to further oppose the regime and rise up in arms against it. Threatening to kill and actually killing people for their political ideas will compel them to act in a revolutionary way in order to get rid of the regime of terror that deprives them of the basic freedoms of thought, expression and assembly.

In my personal experience, red-tagging or anti-communist witch hunts under the Anti-Subversion Law of the past never deterred me from studying Marxism-Leninism and aspiring to become a communist. Whenever the great anti-imperialist and patriot Senator Claro Mayo Recto was castigated as a communist, I became even more inspired to study the theory and practice of Marxism-Leninism and learn how to apply the theory on the concrete conditions of the Philippines.

When I became a student activist in the University of the Philippines in the late 1950s, I was never afraid of the death penalty under the Anti-Subversion Law but on the contrary this anti-democratic law challenged me to organize Marxist-Leninist circles for the noble and patriotic purpose of reestablishing the Communist Party and continuing the democratic revolution started by Andres Bonifacio and frustrated by the war of aggression launched by US imperialism in 1899.

When the anti-communist witch hunt was carried out by the Committee on Anti-Filipino Activities from 1959 to 1961 in order to suppress academic freedom with the use of the Anti-Subversion Law, we the students and teachers of the University of the Philippines stood up for academic freedom and all democratic rights. Ultimately, we organized the 5000 protesters that literally scuttled the anti-communist witch hunt on March 15, 1961. A major part of the demonstrators flooded into the CAFA [Committee on Anti-Filipino Activities] hearing hall and put a stop to the proceedings.

The Anti-Subversion Law did not stop the rise of Filipino proletarian revolutionaries and their mass work. They succeeded in rebuilding the Communist Party and carrying out the people’s democratic revolution through protracted people’s war. Fidel V. Ramos repealed the Anti-Subversion Law in 1992 after recognizing the failure of this anti-democratic law to stop the growth and advance of the Communist Party of the Philippines and the revolutionary movement, 

In the concrete semicolonial and semifeudal conditions of the Philippines, the Filipino communists are of the view that neither socialism or communism is the current issue. Thus, they have excelled at leading the people’s democratic revolution, which strives to realize full national sovereignty, democracy, social justice, economic development through national industrialization and genuine land reform, a patriotic, scientific and mass culture and international solidarity and cooperation of peoples for peace and all-round progress. #

CPP holds 2nd congress; elects ‘younger’ Central Committee

THE Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) announced it has elected a new leadership in a congress held at a guerrilla zone last October 24 to November 7, electing a new and “younger” Central Committee and Political Bureau.

In a communiqué released today, the 48th founding anniversary of its New People’s Army, the CPP said its second congress was attended by 120 of its key cadres from all over the country.

“For the first time in nearly five decades, key leaders and cadres representing the Party’s close to seventy thousand members, were assembled to strengthen the Party’s unity, amend its program and constitution based on accumulated victories and lessons and elect a new set of leaders,” the CPP said.

The CPP said cadres from five Mindanao regions constituted around 45 per cent of the regional delegates while those from Luzon and the Visayas constituted 40 and 14 per cent respectively in reflection of the number of its regional memberships.

The other delegates represented the CPP’s central leading organs and its commissions, the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist group said.

“Guided by the theme ‘Greater unity, greater victories,’ the Party’s Second Congress took a long view of the Party’s 48 year history, took stock of the current objective and subjective conditions and reaffirmed the Party’s determination to advance the national democratic revolution to greater heights,” the CPP said.

The congress was guarded by a battalion-sized NPA fighters and supported by peasants and indigenous minority groups in the area, it added.

Read full communique HERE.

Updating its constitution and general program

The congress amended the 48-year old constitution written by Jose Maria Sison and his CPP co-founders, the communiqué announced.

The preamble containing the Party’s basic principles and analysis of Philippine society, its national democratic line for waging a revolution and socialist construction, the group’s history against revisionism, strategy and tactics for pursuing armed struggle, and establishing a people’s democratic government were amended, the CPP said.

New articles were also introduced to the old Party charter defining the party’s role in united front formations and struggles, enumeration of the economic classes in relation to party membership, as well as permission to allow foreigners to become CPP members.

The CPP now also allows members who have reached the age of 70 to retire from Party work without losing their membership.  They are also entitled to subsistence support and medical assistance, the communiqué said.

The Party’s updated general program called on all Filipino communists to “be ready to sacrifice their lives if necessary in the struggle to bring about a new Philippines that is completely independent, democratic, united, just and prosperous.”

To ensure the vigor and vibrancy of the Party, the congress also introduced a provision to its general program to ensure its new Central Committee shall have a balance of young, middle-aged and senior cadres.

‘Younger’ Central Committee

With 60 per cent of the delegates of age 45 to 59 years old, more than half of the newly-elected central committee members are from the young and middle-aged cadres of the Party, the communiqué said.

“(This is) ensuring that the Party leadership will remain vibrant, tightly-linked with the lower levels of leadership and capable of leading the practical work and day-to-day tasks of the Party, especially in waging revolutionary armed struggle against the reactionary state,” the CPP said.

“The combination of senior Party members with the young and junior Party cadres will ensure the ideological, political and organizational training of a new generation of Party leaders who will be at the helm of the Party in the coming years,” it added.

The CPP tasked its senior cadres to transfer knowledge and skills to their younger comrades “to help guide the present work of the younger generation of Party leaders.”

 Honoring ‘great communist Joma Sison’, heroes and martyrs

Congress delegates paid tribute to its founder Jose Maria Sison and all its martyrs in its nearly five decades of revolution that grew through the decades in spite of brutal anti-insurgency campaigns against its members and fighters by five Manila governments, including Ferdinand Marcos’ martial rule.

In a resolution, the CPP congress extolled Sison as a “great communist thinker, leader, teacher and guide of the Filipino proletariat and torch bearer of the international communist movement,” and recognized “his immense contribution to the Philippine revolution and the international working class movement.”

The CPP also it is resolved to continue seeking Sison’s counsel and take guidance from his insights on the ideological, political and organizational aspects of the Party’s work, endorsing his writings as basic reference and study material of the Party.

Sison founded the Communist Party of the Philippines on December 26, 1968 in the tri-boundary of Alaminos, Bani and Mabini in the province of Pangasinan with 11 others: Monico Atienza, Rey Casipe, Leoncio Co, Manuel Collantes, Arthur Garcia, Herminigildo Garcia, Ruben Guevara, Art Pangilinan, Nilo Tayag, Fernando Tayag, Ibarra Tubianosa.  Jose Luneta was recognized as the 13th member who was elected to its first Central Committee in absentia as he was in China on party business.

The congress also honored all CPP heroes and martyrs “who served as models of selfless dedication and served the Party to their last breath.”

It also approved the official Filipino lyrics of the Internationale, the Party’s anthem. # (Raymund B. Villanueva)