Addressing the menace of redscare, redbaiting and red herrings
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ANTI-LEFT'S "BATTLE OF THE BRAINLESS"
It has sometimes become like the absurd "Battle of the Brainless", with the anti-Left loudly accusing the Left of the non-crime of criticizing all Philippine governments since time immemorial or of not helping any of them at all. They harp on this accusation to lay the predicate on another canard against the Left: that it is only an evil enterprise bent on bringing chaos to the country.
Let's focus first on Marcos and all the succeeding regimes.
It is a matter of pride for the Left and toiling masses of workers and peasants that a New People's Army and a vast rural and urban underground kept the fire of freedom burning nationwide. The Left led the people in unrelenting struggle throughout the fascist dictatorship, offering the lives of many activists in order to end the dark days of tyranny. While other political forces either capitulated or ran far, far away from the dictatorship, the Left stayed in the Philippines, endured the hardships, forged alliances with other remaining political forces, helped prosecute the Marcoses before an international tribunal in Belgium, and propagated nationwide its program of national democratic revolution.
Corazon Aquino did not fulfill her promise to be the "exact opposite" of Marcos. After freeing scores of political prisoners and proclaiming the return of "democratic space", her regime inched towards to the right where landed families like her feel most comfortable. The Aquino government reneged on the question of peace, with the President allowing the AFP to treacherously monitor and later murder many representatives and members of the NDF in the peace talks that ended ominously with the Mendiola Massacre. Land reform was a sham, as evidenced by the still-unresolved problem of Hacienda Luisita. In the 1987 elections, candidates and offices of Partido ng Bayan, the progressive leftist party headed by Jose Maria Sison, were brutally attacked and fell victim to ultra-rightist onslaughts. Economically, Aquino relied not on Filipino people power, but on US economic aid that had many conditionalities, mostly onerous. She decided to "honor" all the fraudulent foreign debts incurred by the dictatorship, and put on our lawbooks that edict that automatically appropriated debt service in the annual national budget. For a regime brought to power by Filipinos themselves, she ironically depended on US war planes to defend her government from disgruntled and mutinous soldiers -- "persuasion flights", pundits calls them at the time. Lest we forget, the next big time demonstration she led was not for national freedom or democracy, but for keeping the US bases in the country.
We now reel from the fakery that is Philippine 2000 under the rabid globalist Ramos. The push for deregulation, liberalization, privatization and denationalization resulted in the loss of national control on many strategic industries and government corporations. The Ramos government signed and ratified the Uruguay round of the GATT that had as an immediate effect the loss of one million jobs in agriculture and the start of the end of Philippine agriculture as we knew it, what with the flooding of cheap imports courtesy of "globalization". "Low intensity conflict" and other psywar tactics turned from bad to worse, with the Ramos government alternating between full-scale war and peace negotiations with the overall goal of attaining strategic victory over the NPA. Addressing the root causes of the armed revolution waged by the Communist Party of the Philippines was, at best, a psywar operation. In fact, after many boasts and repeated deadlines for defeating the CPP-NPA, the AFP eventually failed in spite of well-funded counter-insurgency drives. It was also during Ramos' time that pseudo-Leftists had a heyday, with the precursors of Akbayan performing the utterly demeaning role of being tails to the entire burgis class, dreaming that the burgis would become leftists too. These "leftists" who proudly called themselves either as "non-communist", "post-communist" and even "anti-communist" raided the membership rolls and funds of the groups they hoodwinked for so many years, and launched a grand propaganda war against the national-democratic movement locally and internationally. It made Ramos smile endlessly.
Some other former leftists threw their lot at the camp of Joseph Estrada, helping intall to power the demagogic Estrada presidency. His victory in the 1998 polls was unassailable, but his style and program of government was not. For the Left, it was not so much the form but the substance of the Estrada regime that agitated the movement into calling for his ouster. He declared an all-out war on Muslims in Mindanao. He continued Ramos' sham economic program. He perpetrated a worse form of political patronage and immorality surpassing those of the Marcoses. He cracked down on the critical press. Estrada thought that his electoral win was impregnable but he had to contend with the direct exercise of sovereign power of the people which eventually punished him for his misdeeds by 2001.
How about Arroyo? Her acts of lying, cheating, stealing and suppressing the people are slaps on the face of each Filipino who stood for good government in the nationwide People Power uprising of 2001. Her refusal to allow the resolution of outstanding and unresolved questions on her government's legitimacy since the 2004 elections is symptomatic of an unaccountable political system. It is just too unfortunate that some refuse to open their eyes and hearts, and continue to allow GMA to pretend she is the elected and the best. It is not just the Left that believes otherwise, but a whole united front so powerful that GMA has seen it fit to use Marcosian political repression just to keep her stranglehold on the presidency.
Yes, the Left has criticized each and every regime from Marcos, and even his predecessors, but not because the Left had a simple penchant for criticism. The Left struggled and debated with these regimes because these leaders committed criminal and terrorist acts against the Filipino people, and sought to foil the onward march towards national democracy and progress. For the Left, these regimes were the biggest stumbling blocks to prosperity as we all want it: equitable and sustainable.
All in all, the persistent Left critique on the ruling regimes compel the people to continuously rise up and demand meaningful change, and an end to a system that spawns bad leaders and bad governments.
The "Battle of the Brainless" tactics of those who seek to discredit the Left as "mere critics" seek to absolve all the regimes for their role in the huge mess the nation is in right now. We should not allow such rank stupidity to deter us from holding these regimes and the political elite where they come from accountable.
posted by: constantflux at 00:55 |
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