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| ON THE OTHER HAND |
| Leftists and Communists By Antonio C. Abaya Written Oct.18, 2005 For the Standard Today, October 20, 2005 Though I arrived several minutes late at ABS-CBN for our interview with Ces Drilon last week, I did hear my friend (and former colleague in the Kabataang Makabayan) Joel Rocamora twit National Insecurity Adviser Norberto Gonzales for estimating that 83% of those who demonstrate against President Arroyo were communists. Such �anti-communist rhetoric,� sniffed Joel, �should have gone away with the Berlin Wall.� I do not know where Gonzales got his 83% figure, which may or may not be accurate, but he was, without realizing it, maintaining the fundamental balance in the universe. As physicists will tell you, everything comes in pairs: positive and negative, action and reaction, attraction and repulsion, matter and anti-matter, mass and energy, gravity and anti-gravity. Without the parity principle, nothing would make any sense. So if it is acceptable for people like Joma Sison and Luis Jalandoni to spout �pro-communist rhetoric�, it should equally be acceptable for people like Bert Gonzales and Tony Abaya to spout �anti-communist rhetoric.� And speaking of the Berlin Wall, exactly who won and who lost (they also come in pairs) in the ideological debate when that monument to Failure was torn down in 1989? Or when the Soviet Union collapsed all by itself in 1991? Or when China re-embraced the profit motive, starting in 1979? I happened to be in Berlin three days before the Wall was suddenly and hurriedly put up, in August 1961, by the East German (or communist) government, to stanch the flow of East Germans fleeing to the West. East Germany was hemorrhaging to death as hundreds of thousands of its people abandoned the East for the West, lured by its evident material prosperity and its open society. The Berlin Wall was an admission of failure, the failure of the Socialist Dream. I stayed in a youth hostel or jugendherberge in the fashionable Wannsee district of Berlin, housed in what must once have been the servants� quarters of the adjacent Kaiser Wilhelm Schloss or castle, hemmed in on three sides by a barbed-wire enclosure that was part of the boundary between East Germany and West Berlin. The hostel was overflowing with fluchtlinger or refugees. As I can speak some German, I often got into conversation with them and with people on the other side of the barbed wire fence. The most common complaint was the lack of food and other basic necessities. And I often ventured into East Berlin on my Vespa to savor at first hand the joyless drabness of Unter den Linden and Alexanderplatz and Stalinallee in the capital of what was then billed as the most advanced socialist state in the world. If this was advanced, I shuddered to imagine what ordinary looked like. No wonder its people were leaving in droves. In 1985, I wrote and published a booklet titled �A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Communism.� In it, I wrote that the Socialist Dream that had begun with Karl Marx�s and Friedrich Engels� "Communist Manifesto� in 1848 was unraveling because of catastrophic failures and was heading towards the garbage dump of history. Only four years later, in 1989, millions of East Germans, Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Bulgars, etc � including their intellectuals, their artists, their civil servants, their students, their workers, their housewives � literally walked out on their governments, causing their communist regimes to collapse�with hardly a shot being fired in anger against anyone. The local flood that I had witnessed in Berlin in 1961 had grown into a giant tsunami in 1989 that swept everything away. Two more years later, in 1991, the Soviet Union itself � where the Socialist Dream had first assumed concrete reality in 1917 � also collapsed from the sheer weight of its failures, without any help from the evil Americans, despite (some Soviet communists say, because of) the efforts of the last Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, to reform their sclerotic system with glasnost and perestroika. In �A Funny Thing,� I blamed the failure of the Socialist Dream on Marx�s Theory of Surplus Value which equated profit-making with exploitation and thus made all private enterprises ideologically unacceptable. Thus in the Soviet Union, all enterprises � even innocuous ones like taxicabs, shoe repair shops and cigarette kiosks � were owned by the socialist state. No one was allowed to make a profit from the labor of others. I predicted in that 1985 book that the People�s Republic of China under Deng Xiaoping, which had gradually reintroduced the profit motive starting in 1979, would overtake the Soviet Union in economic development, which is exactly what eventually happened. Deng at first allowed entrepreneurs a maximum of eight employees each, to be exempted from the Marxist onus of exploitation. This limit was later raised to 50, then to 1,000; then, as I predicted, the limit would be removed entirely, thus spawning thousands, later millions, of rich, even millionaire, Chinese entrepreneurs, a tacit but total rejection of the Marxist theory of surplus value and a blanket repudiation of the Maoist ideal of anthill-like egalitarianism. Without that Marxist theory and without that Maoist ideal, the People�s Republic of China is just another one-party fascist state that uses its instruments of coercion to maintain a monopoly of power for the entrenched party, the Communist Party. Yes, Joel, �anti-communist rhetoric� should have gone away with the Berlin Wall in 1989. But �pro-communist rhetoric� did not. Joma Sison and the CPP-NDF-NPA continued and continue to wage their revolution in favor of Failure as if 1989-1991 had never happened at all. On the contrary, when the People�s Liberation Army sent troops and armored personnel carriers into Tienanmen Square in Beijing in June 1989 to sweep away with their machine-guns hundreds of thousands of students demonstrating for more democracy in their society � another monument to Failure � only Maoists Joma Sison of the CPP and Crispin Beltran of the KMU applauded the massacre. Consistent with the communist Golden Rule: Do not do unto Us what We will do unto You once we are in Power. So why should �pro-communist rhetoric� enjoy a monopoly in the public discourse, without being challenged by �anti-communist rhetoric?� Is Failure the ultimate destiny of humankind, since Communism is claimed to be the last stage of societal evolution? The questions for Filipinos in 2005 are a) why does a communist insurgency still persist in this country when it had long been extinguished in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore, and was never allowed to rear its head in Taiwan and South Korea? b) why do communists and pro-communists continue to be lionized in Philippine media as if they had anything substantial, original or meaningful to say? (which would never have been allowed in Indonesia or Malaysia or Singapore or Thailand or Taiwan or South Korea; onli in da istupid Pilipins) and c) why do Philippine media almost always refer to them as �leftists� or �activists� or �militants�, almost never by their correct label, which is �communists?� Question (a) would require an entire column or more to discuss, but questions (b) and (c) can be answered by two words: �compliant naivete.� Most media persons here are either former partisans of the communist movement themselves, or (among the younger ones) consider it politically incorrect to profile anyone as a �communist,� as if being a communist was a crime or a social disease or something to be ashamed of. But this is grossly inaccurate. In American domestic politics, Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton are �leftists� but they are not communists. In Western Europe, socialists and social democrats are �leftists� but they are not communists. In Anglo-Saxon countries, Labour politicians are �leftists� but they are not communists. In Spain, ETA Basque separatists are �militants� but they are not communists. In Ireland, IRA guerillas are �activists� but they are not communists. By deliberately avoiding the use of the word �communist� in favor of more innocuous terms when referring to communists, Philippine media in effect protect them from the opprobrium of being associated with Failure, which is the historical legacy of Communism, in Europe, in Asia and in Latin America (when Fidel Castro dies and Cuba unravels). Thus Philippine media are complicit in the prolonged adolescence of Filipino communists and, by extension, the continued persistence of the communist insurgency, about which Col. Ricardo Morales and other military officers expressed their frustration in recent installments of this column. Admittedly, socio-economic conditions exist that nurture the discontent that favors the insurgency. But these conditions take time to correct, and they will never be corrected at all as long as media � the most influential sector of Philippine society - show a pronounced bias in favor of communists and pro-communists, either out of a misplaced sense of social justice or just plain, insurmountable ignorance of recent history. Philippine media should learn to outgrow their own extended adolescence and learn to ask the hard question that I asked Renato Constantino Sr. and Joma Sison years ago, to which they never gave an answer: What makes you think that Filipino communists will succeed in building the Ideal Society that the Russian communists failed to build, even after 74 years of total and absolute political control? ***** Reactions to [email protected] or fax 824-7642. Other articles in www.tapatt.org OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO |
| Reactions to �Leftists and Communists� That's a very informative piece. Thanks for sending me this piece along with the others. Vicente del Fierro, Jr., [email protected] October 20, 2005 wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww Dear Mr. Abaya Why don't you answer question (A) yourself? Why does the communist movement in the Philippines persisting and even, despite your denials, flourishing? and what political movement did the Antonio Abaya school of thought ever launch that captivated the interest of people? Was your stint in the Kabataang Makabayan just for kicks? Well, there are people who take very seriously the business of revolution early in their lives. You did not when it was your dreamtime, as it was, maybe simply part of your intellectual explorations and teen age conquests. Come to think of it, how can you have savored the grandiose life of a renaissance man in the pubs and cafes of New Orleans and Berlin if ever you'd thought that it takes more than marches to right systemic wrongs? Yes, Mr. Abaya, your Communists did not think of the costs of righting what they perceived then as monumental wrong. Many of them may be as promising if not better as you then were. You were able to enjoy the beautiful cultured life of a freelance intellectual. They did not. Many of them ended up in lonely unknown graves. Secondly, what positive changes have your advocacies forced on Philippine governments? Who made these governments realize that they were wrong in many of their policy decisions and directions, and how distant were they from the interest of the population? It's the people's movements, Mr Abaya, more than the arm chair intellectuals and columnists, however attuned they are to the 'spirit of the age ( I really wonder who's shaping this spirit, the neo-cons of white houses and white halls?). The least your communists brothers and sisters deserve, Mr. Abaya, is respect. Ferdinand Anno, [email protected] Union Theological Seminary Dasmarinas, Cavite, October 21, 2005 wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww Tony, Many communist members in the Philippines claimed they are mere Nationalist just aiming for a government outside the control of US. Initially they believe that US meddling was the root cause but when the US Naval base left due to the end of the cold war , sophistication of US armaments and capabilities of US Naval aircraft carriers eventually no need for Subic & Clark, obviously the corrupt politicians are the one decaying our nation�s economy. Sad to hear that TNT Pinoys are now proliferating in European countries as US implemented more restrictions in its boarders and immigration processing. What if we became a communist country in the 70s? Will Joma be able to lead us to Nirvana? I doubt it. Joma must come to his senses and be useful, instead of evangelizing a failed form of economy. Nonoy Ramos, [email protected] Pennsylvania, October 20, 2005 wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww It is said that love of money is the root of all evil. For money corrupts even the "incorruptible" much more the daughter of the "incorruptible." De facto Philippine president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo has been corrupted by money. She is now using money to corrupt her minions and other vulnerable Filipinos. The trouble is that she is using the Filipino people's money to support her corrupt ways. In short, she is an addict to corruption and must undergo treatment the sooner the better. Else the whole Filipino nation will be corrupted. The issue of communism is now irrelevant. Terrorism takes its place. Offer good jobs and hope for a better life to the so-called communists and they will respect the law. But offer them an opportunity to earn good money and not "bribe money." Gloria cannot do it because she is sick. She needs a doctor. What is worse is that she is surrounded with equally sick people. Let's hope that her doctor's treatment will not be surgery. Let's hope that she may have the service of the late Ferdinand Marcos's doctor who may confine her into a sanatorium for rehabilitation. Gonzalo "Jun" Policarpio, [email protected] October 21, 2005 wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww Dear Tony, It was then "pure rhetoric" to be labeled during those years of student activism that "to be pro-Filipino is anti-American" and the perception that every radical UP student is a "card bearing communist". The case in point is Joma Sison who became visible when he started busy -editing the "Progressive Review" in the abandoned US Army Quonset huts of Diliman, Q.C. He was my classmate in journalism under the late Professor Armando Malay. It was fashionable at that time to "sing" Communist "Internationale" and once a while sneaked out of the country for visits to countries not listed in the passports, like Indonesia, China or Russia. The routine thing was in your arrival for Customs people ready and waiting to confiscate any communist literature in your hand-carry bag! A paragraph or two will appear in the newspaper the next day. It was also fashionable for some compatriots to draw analogy that if at the age of 17, if you are not a communist, you don't have the heart. And when at 21 if you are still a communist you don't the brain! True revolutionary and hard-core communist like JOMA will never mellow down. Not because it is a hard thing to do, but because he was a committed "Maoist visionary". Jose Sison Luzadas, [email protected] Delray Beach, Florida, October 21, 2005 wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww Dear Mr. Abaya; I must admit that in the past there are some articles and corresponding insights of yours which I do not completely agree with. But this one I am definitely on your side. I really enjoyed reading your article "Leftists and Communists" because of the excellent writing style, your keen sense of history and your wit that outrightly states your position on this issue. I studied in UP and now work for an NGO and although I was exposed to communist ideology (note I didn't use the word leftist), one has to mature and understand that capitalism has to exist and that economies have to survive if we want to give our countrymen a better life and expand their opportunities. I am actually disgusted with Joma Sison who continues to curry to the communist cause despite its decline and its lack of alternatives to find a better solution to the poverty in the country. He should come back to the Philippines and teach farmers to farm better crops and be competitive in the local market rather than spewing rhetoric and inciting rebellion. More power! Ruth G. Honculada, [email protected] October 21, 2005 wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww Excellent observation! Jose Custodio, [email protected] October 21, 2005 wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww Tony, well said, as always. And now, even Satur Ocampo has become religious and participates in �prayer rallies� . What a hypocrite. By the way, I wonder if another hypocrite, Fr. Robert Reyes, who wears a soutane only in prayer rallies and not when being interviewed or at other times, and led that last prayer rally where two statues of the Blessed Virgin Mary were carried (some kind of sacrilege here considering they were asking for trouble), could be exposed. Does he have any priestly duties. Or is he a professional dissenter using his priesthood as a cover? Poch Robles, [email protected] October 21, 2005 wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww Hello from Downey, California. I love reading your e-mails! Yung sa inyo ang una kong binabasa. Pwede po bang mapasyalan kayo at makamayan paguwi ko diyan sa atin? Ngayon, maliban sa asawa ko at dalawang anak, ay mayroon pa akong isang magandang dahilan para umuwi. Kayo po iyon! Ingat po kayo lagi... Sonny Felarca, [email protected] Downey, California, October 21, 2005 562-413-4630 CELL 9184058433 Smart Cell Phone. wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww Red is my favorite color. Does that mean I am a communist ? I am left-handed , will this administration brand me as a leftist ? What greed can do just to stay in power. Bombing Moll, [email protected] October 21, 2005 MY REPLY. No one has been labeled a communist just because he likes the color red and is left-handed. You are being paranoid. Or is this your way of saying, there are no communists under the bed? wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww "�.that the People�s Republic of China under Deng Xiaoping, which had gradually reintroduced the profit motive starting in 1979, would overtake the Soviet Union in economic development, which is exactly what eventually happened. " PRC has never overtaken the Soviet Union in terms of GNP per capita. (I know that. ACA). What probably you meant is that the growth rate of the PRC would exceed the growth rate of the Soviet Union at that time. As of this writing, the GNP per capita of the Philippines is still higher than the GNP per capita than the PRC in spite of their high growth rates. Off course, if the growth rate of PRC keeps increasing at these phenomenal rates, the GNP per capita of the PRC would exceed the GNP per capita of the Philippines in about ten years or less. (Probably less. Many Chinese cities now have per capita GNPs much higher than the Philippines�: Beijing, Shanghai, Xiamen, Guangdong, etc. ACA). "Deng at first allowed entrepreneurs a maximum of eight employees each, to be exempted from the Marxist onus of exploitation. This limit was later raised to 50, then to 1,000; then, as I predicted, the limit would be removed entirely, thus spawning thousands, later millions, of rich, even millionaire, Chinese entrepreneurs, a tacit but total rejection of the Marxist theory of surplus value and a blanket repudiation of the Maoist ideal of anthill-like egalitarianism." This is the first time I heard of a de-facto repudiation of Marxist ideals in a communist state like the PRC. I have been hearing of fast rates of growth of the PRC but I didn't know that private enterprises have been literally encouraged by the PRC. This is the first time I heard this from you. Thanks for the information. One does not have to categorically repudiate an idea to repudiate that idea. One merely adopts the opposite position, and that idea is de facto repudiated. The Chinese National Congress has done exactly that. See my articles �How Now, Brown Maos?� (Nov. 28, 2002) and �How Now, Brown Maos? Part 2� (May 04, 2005). ACA. The Gentile mentality of the Chinese is the reason why a communist government could remain in power without much trouble. Of course, if the PRC could maintain such growth rates, eventually communism would be totally abolished in the PRC. Taiwan used to be another authoritarian state -- authoritarian by our standards -- but as economic development pushed their GNP per capita to a dizzy height, the Taiwanese did not long remain into a docile people. Now, there are just as many protests in Taiwan as there is here. In fact, the government is run by a former opposition party. The Koumintang has been voted out of power by the people there. This is also true in Korea. A former opposition party is in power in Korea. In Japan, while it is true that the Social Democrats have been in power there since the surrender of Japan, yet the Social Democrats have never won the majority in the elections. They rule through coalition with parties having similar platform of government. The majority of Japanese dislike the ruling Social Democrats. (You mean the Liberal Democratic Party or LDP, not the Social Democrats. ACA) Ramon del Gallego, [email protected] October 22, 2005 wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww Dear Mr. Abaya, Someone forwarded to me your article about communists and leftists. I totally agree. I hope it gets more exposure and starts an honest-to-goodness public debate to expose the naivete of media and the public, and the cunning of these communists. Grace Abella-Zata, [email protected] October 24, 2005 Wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww When you visit New York City, please let me know and I'll ask some journalists here to hold a forum with you as a major participant at the Philippine Center in Manhattan. Jun Policarpio, [email protected] New York City, NY, October 25, 2005 MY REPLY. Thanks, Jun, but that may take some while. I have vowed not to set foot on the US again while George W. is president. If Dick Cheney succeeds him in 2009, that will be another four or eight more years of my personal boycott of the US, by which time I will probably be senile or dead. Thanks for the thought, anyway. wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww Tony - Actually, I have been reading each article you shoot in the email. Sometimes I do share them with friends. Quite frankly I find every article of substantive value for a well balanced perspective of contemporary events and history in the Philippines. Vic del Fierro Jr., [email protected] October 25, 2005 wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww |
| . Dear Tony, You're right. People should be properly educated to distinguish the differences among the various ideologies competing for legitimacy in our country. Mass media should take note. It has an important role the decision making process of the people. I wish you continue with your advocacy to make mass media more responsible and forthright. In my previous email, I've pointed out that, despite failure of governance at the national level, enlightened local executives and military commanders may in fact come together and take the initiative to mobilize available resources, provide good governance and secure local communities from the violence of the communist insurgency. This brings me then to the imperative of federalism as an important solution to our national problems. Federalism provides the mechanism for local initiative and greater people's participation for sound governance without the burden of nationally imposed mediocrity. Coupled with a federal form of government, a unicameral parliament with fifty-percent sectoral representation should create an even more ideal political structure for our country. It should neutralize the undue influence of vested interests on a currently vulnerable presidency and senate. Moreover, wider sectoral representation is going to pave the way for a highly organized nation actively participating in good governance. I suggest then that those military officers contemplating on taking up nursing and leaving for abroad stay on and help in the realization of this goal. The first step is to take down GMA. A council of respected men and women in the country is then formed to guide the day-to-day affairs of government. No major policy initiative must be undertaken to avoid undue stress on the unity of the transition government. It's main task is merely to keep things together during the transition period and provide the political framework that would provide wider avenues for substantive policy change in a democratic process. A constitutional commission is then convened to make the necessary changes in the constitution. The COMELEC is revamped and modernized and a plebiscite conducted for a new constitution. Finally, election is held for the formation of a federal government with a unicameral parliament incorporating fifty-percent sectoral representation. The transition process must be completed in one year and no more. A longer period is an invitation to instability and chaos. The newly elected government should assume the responsibility for national and local policy changes in an environment of greater accessibility, people's participation and independence from vested interests. Gico Dayanghirang, [email protected] Davao City, November 10, 2005 wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww Tony, I am promdi. There is little progress, if ever, in a province infested with commies. The farmers are complaining that part of their produce goes to them, businessmen (not all) in our place have to part with some of their earnings, where refusal to share rev taxes end in vehicle torching, and often cellsite burning. This is sickening. Tell you what. If I had my way, I�d put commies like Joma, LJ, Satur, Crispin, Ted, Renato, et al in jail and weld shut the steel doors! Oh that Ferdinand Anno e-mail address should read with the letters "ucku" inserted in the blank. I mean it. Carlos Reyes, [email protected] Guihulngan, Oriental Negros, Nov. 10, 2005 wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww Mr. Abaya, I admire your simple analyses on our present economic condition, especially YOUR greatest question to those living luxuriously in the Netherlands " WHY COMMUNISM HERE IN THE PHILIPPINES WILL SUCCEED IF IT WAS A BIG FAILURE IN RUSSIA AND OTHER PARTS OF THE WORLD" I don't think these idiots can answer that question squarely. That question should be put in the Book of Quotations. We should spread that question throughout the Filipino nation, so that it will echo not only in the cities but also to the mountains as well. I hope you can write something like a chain letter with this question embedded on it. so, it can easily be spread out through the net and txt messaging. Slowly but surely it will run down these communist terrorists. Darius Garcia, [email protected] November 13, 2005 wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww |
| I found your article "Leftist and Communists" disgusting to the core especially upon knowing thay you have been a member of kabataang makabayan. Yeah, I agree with one of the reactors that your stints during those days were just for kicks as you failed to really understand the essence of commumism. I asked my father once why does communist insurgency still persist in this country despite the fact that its leaders like joma and jalandoni are no longer in the country. My father's answer was simple yet profound, " the 'cause' has been planted in the hearts of the masses; a cause which they continually nurture when they realized that this 'cause' is actually their own, communism does not depend on its leaders, it depends on the people. Leaders will come and leaders will go and until it becomes a reality, the vision for a classless society will continue". I am not a communist but I hope someday I too, would be able to unconditionally embrace and selflessly give myself for the cause of the people like they do. Real communists have my utmost respect. Fetia Villaruel, [email protected] Banate, Iloilo, Jan. 31, 2006 MY REPLY. And I find your naivete not only disgusting but also pathetic. You and your comrades are infatuated with a Theoretical Ideal that does not exist, and has never existed, in reality. Of the 29 countries (including the 15 republics of the Soviet Union) that had the misfortune, since 1917, of falling under communist rule, 24 have of their volition abandoned it; two (China and Vietnam) have of their volition re-embraced capitalism, only two (North Korea and Cuba) remain steadfastly communist but suffer endemic food and fuel shortages and will likely fall into chaos when their current leaders die. Only Laos remains in splendid isolation, largely because it is an inconsequential country. You are willing to kill and be killed for this Ideal? You are not only na�ve, you are also hopelessly ignorant. OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO |