Duterte: Bayan Muna, KMU, Gabriela are communist fronts
Credit to Author: RIGOBERTO D. TIGLAO| Date: Thu, 06 Dec 2018 16:24:51 +0000
AT long last, we have a president so bold, and so not a pulitiko that he tells it like it is, what the political class and media have known for years but do not say for various reasons.
Duterte recently declared that a group of so-called party-list organizations — he specifically pointed to Bayan Muna, Gabriela and Kilusang Mayo Uno — are communist fronts directed by the Maoist Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), the goal of which is to violently overthrow our Republic and install its one-party dictatorship.
Included among these are the other members of the so-called, misnamed Makabayan bloc in our Congress: Act Teachers, Anakpawis and Kabataan.
The Communist Party calls these and similar bodies as “mass organizations,” at the core of which is what is called the party group, consisting of three or more cadres. (In schools, factories and territorial areas, it is called the party branch.)
After this command cell are widening circles of members who are gradually brainwashed to become party members. The heads of these party groups report to a higher party organ for guidance.
These communist party-list organizations easily manage to get seats every election, not only because the Communist Party’s 50-year network nationwide is mobilized and turned into electoral campaign machines. The party’s New People’s Army (NPA) allegedly even threaten voters in the hinterlands to vote for its candidates or face violent retaliation. The communists also strike deals with local politicians to support their candidates in exchange for the latter’s safety when campaigning even in the remotest municipalities.
The fact that these are communist fronts has been common knowledge among journalists, politicians, the military, and people in areas heavily influenced by the NPA or the CPP. Only either the most naïve journalists or those sympathetic to the communists do not see, or pretend not to see this fact.
Propaganda success
It has in fact been the communists’ tremendous propaganda success that their fronts are referred to by media with such virtuous adjectives as “militant”, “progressive,” and “nationalist.” The Philippine Daily Inquirer and the news website Rappler among a few others for instance routinely call these communist fronts’ collective as the “progressive” Makabayan bloc.
There is nothing progressive about these communist fronts. Their ideology, which the party officially claims as “Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought,” is of 19th century-vintage, totally debunked by the collapse of the Soviet Union (1922-1991) that tried to implement it and miserably failed at the cost of tens of millions of lives.
The purveyor of its “Mao Zedong Thought” component, the People’s Republic of China, has almost totally abandoned it except for its dictum of one-party rule. And when it did, China started to become the economic and military superpower it is now.
There is nothing “progressive” in the communist goal of plunging our country into what they romantically call “people’s war.”
What communist sympathizers, especially academics and students from UP, romanticize as a noble guerrilla war, will, in the worst case scenario, lead to a bloody civil war in the country so horrible that the Syrian or Yemeni civil wars will look like frat wars. The communists’ 50 years of “armed struggle” has already resulted in at least 100,000 Filipinos — civilian and military — killed by the New People’s Army.
There is nothing “nationalist” in the Communist Party’s thinking, except in its lip-service to what its founder Jose Ma. Sison way back in the 1960s referred to as “nationalist industrialization,” which neither he nor his ilk can even explain with rigor. Its purported nationalism is merely its vitriolic stance against the US, which of course was required by its Soviet and then Chinese communist mentors during the Cold War.
Our telecoms industry has been dominated for two decades now by foreigners — the Indonesian tycoon Anthoni Salim in the case of the PLDT conglomerate, by Singapore Telecom in the case of Globe Telecoms. Global capitalists who own at least a third of these firms’ through the stock market also siphon off millions of dollars yearly out of the country. Yet the Communist Party hasn’t said a single word to point this out, or call for its followers to “expose and oppose” such foreign control.
Source of funds
Why? Because these companies have allegedly become among the biggest sources of funds for the CPP and the NPA, reportedly in the range of P200 million or so. Why would they do that?
Because paying the NPA what it euphemistically calls “revolutionary taxes” is a lot cheaper than employing heavily armed security guards to protect their over 12,000 cell sites outside the metropolises, many of which are in remote areas. Cheaper certainly than having to erect new towers when these are destroyed by the NPA, especially since no insurance company would cover such destruction which would be defined as “civil unrest.”
How can the communists and their fronts claim to be makabayan when they are receiving money from foreign global capitalists?
Nationalism has never been in the DNA of the Communist Party, nor of Sison and his comrades who believe in a boundary-less world ruled by their mythical international proletariat. There is not even a hint of the nation we call the Philippines in the Communist Party’s flag and anthem. Its constitution declares: “The Party flag and emblem shall be red with the hammer and sickle in gold at the middle. The Party anthem shall be the “Internationale (the anthem of all communist parties since the late 19th century).”
The CPP and the NPA in fact was able to grow in the late 1960s to early 1970s because of the huge amounts of money poured into its coffers by the Chinese Communist Party, whose leader Mao during that period still believed in exporting communist revolution. The Chinese in 1971 and 1972 even tried to smuggle 10,000 rifles that they themselves manufactured, copies of the American M-14.
Seven in Beijing
Sison — who has been living for 30 years in the Netherlands, a colonial and imperialist country which now clothes, feeds, and houses him — even deployed starting in 1970 seven of his trusted subordinates to Beijing to receive orders from and beg support from the Chinese communists. (The lurid, scandalous details of this are in the fictionalized account Secrets of the 18 Mansions, by Mario Miclat, one of those seven cadres.)
A big factor really for Marcos’ decision to impose martial law in 1972 was the threat — which also worried the Americans who therefore threw their support for the strongman — that China calculated a communist-led revolution in the Philippines would tie down US forces so much that all of Indochina — Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and even Myanmar — would easily fall to the more advanced communist insurgencies there.
The communist party-list representatives mean that in the very heart of our democratic system — the Congress — has been lodged a group that is part of an armed conspiracy out to overthrow democracy itself, using its very institutions.
These have become powerful propaganda tools for the communists. Newspapers routinely have headlines screaming that “solons” are against “martial law in Mindanao” or this or that policy of government.
Read the news article itself, though , and you will find that the “solons” are usually the most talkative of the communist lot, or those who have strong links with media, often ACT Teachers Rep. Antonio Tinio, Bayan Muna Rep. Carlos Zarate, and Kabataan Rep. Sarah Elago.
Sison’s rantings
Indeed, press releases of the CPP, Sison’s rantings, Kilusang Mayo Uno, and its underground mass organizations such as Kabataang Makabayan and Makibaka naturally don’t get as much media mileage as those of communist party-list representatives, who portray themselves simply as “pro-people” congressmen.
The offices of the communist party-list congressmen have also become effective venues for communist organizing and political work, as these are disguised as legitimate activities of “members of Congress.” Communist cadres and NPA travelling through cities are known to have IDs issued by the congressional offices of this communist party-list representatives.
How much of the over P50 million each that party-list representatives receive from Congress for their ‘expenses’ are funneled to the NPA?
Corazon Aquino, the saint of the Yellow Cult, freed Sison, who had been captured by military intelligence in 1976 at the cost of many lives, a few days after she assumed power in February 1986. She let him escape to the Netherlands from which he has continued to direct the communists for two decades, and get international financing for his insurgency.
But Aquino’s bigger contribution to the communist movement is that she ordered the constitutional convention she set up in 1987 to institutionalize the party-list system in the Constitution itself, purportedly in order to allow marginalized sectors to be represented in Congress.
Ironically, this party-list system has only allowed two different, opportunistic entities, hardly marginalized sectors, to get seats in Congress, and who answer to no one but themselves: unscrupulous big businessmen who want some form of political clout, and the communists.
Email: tiglao.manilatimes@gmail.com
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