Cannibal revolution

www.inq7.net ^ | Jan. 02, 2004,

[Tailgunner Joe]

IT is easy to see the Inquirer special report series by Juan V. Sarmiento on the bloody purges of the Communist Party in the 1980's as another case of the revolution devouring its own children. This is a deterministic view. The polarization that happened then, fostered on the one hand by a newly restored democratic government that sought to reassert democracy and turn back the gains of the communist insurgency by a military push, and on the other, by a communist movement that was trying to recover lost ground after missing the boat at the Edsa Revolution, appeared to have spawned a paranoia in the underground leadership that unleashed the wave of purges that continued even to the '90s.

The paranoia in fact might have been germane to the communist revolution that is a utopian enterprise. The bright dream of utopia seems to breed the utter nightmare of paranoia. Rabid idealism instills the manic fear that the movement is being undermined from within. Castles in the air become terrifying specters in the heavens.

But as we've said, this is a deterministic, even benign view. It basically absolves the communist leadership of culpability. It's like the temporary-insanity defense.

Despite upholding an ideology that purports to explain the world in a materialist and scientific fashion, the communist leadership has not come up with anything remotely scientific to explain the bloody purges. It has basically responded to the issue either with silence or denial, either way a most un-clinical, unscientific approach.

Ah, but it has acted quite scientifically and deliberately in pinning the blame on others. In what should be a classic case of spinmeistering, aboveground organizations connected with the communist movement launched a campaign at the height of the purges to press the government to release information about the so-called "desaperacidos"--leftist activists who had suddenly disappeared from public view allegedly because of military and police illegal detention or summary execution. But as the Inquirer special series shows, the campaign merely led kin of the victims on a wild goose chase, and camouflaged the truth about the disappearances: the widening killing fields of communist purges.

The spin-doctoring continues up to now. Even in Dutch-sponsored forums on human rights in Manila, open and intelligent discussion about the purges is anathema. Communist groups have been quick to brand such discussions as reactionary, as anti-revolutionary discourses. They will brook no criticism, much less an honest, intelligent discussion. All pretensions at dialectics and science are thrown to the wind.

But the bloody purges cannot be dismissed. The huge number of killing fields and the high number of those missing are not statistics that can easily be manipulated or wished away. In the end, they ought to be confronted by the communist leadership.

The continued silence, evasion and worse, disinformation and revisionism by the communist bosses will merely mean two things: first, that purges and executions are the way of life in a movement that purports to be enlightened and "scientific"; and second, that the communist-owned executions of former members who chose the option of peace--such as Romulo Kintanar, Popoy Lagman and Hector Mabilangan-had been prefigured early on by the arbitrary killings of cadres and other members whose only sin was to invite the merest suspicion about their loyalty. Indeed, the revolution devours its own children.

Leftist fascism

HOW do victims of the communist purges get justice? Against the oft-repeated claim of communist bosses that human-rights violations are inherently state commissions and are therefore, not to be blamed on state enemies, there has emerged the belief that non-state armed groups should be made equally culpable for violence. For instance, Soliman Santos, director for Asia of Geneva Call, said that the purges were yet another argument that "non-state actors" should be made accountable for their abuses.

If the NPA, the CCP and the NDF insist on being treated as an equal of the Philippine government, in fact as the "other" government with powers to exact taxes and tariffs (they're insisting on collecting "permit-to-campaign" fees from candidates in the 2004 election), then they should submit themselves as well to the investigation and prosecution of their alleged abuses and excesses. Their refusal to do so would only mean one thing: that their vision of egalitarianism and communism is something exclusive to their self-interest, and not inherent to the rest of humanity.

[Iris7]

Took a minute to figure the Phillipines.

Communists work on "there's a sucker born every minute" theory. Theory is wrong though, there are a lot more suckers born than just one a minute!!