LETTER TO THE EDITOR
January 13, 2004
This is in response to a part of Mr. Ramon Tulfo’s column, “On Target,” on why young people still join the New People’s Army (NPA), (“Why Ted Failon is not running again”, January 13, 2004).
First of all, Mr. Tulfo’s column is tastelessly and incorrectly named as he consistently misses the target on issues he tackles daily. His simplistic analyses on pertinent matters display a superficial and small-minded viewpoint, undeserving of space in the country’s leading broadsheet.
In his column, Tulfo stated that the “youth’s love for adventure and misplaced idealism” is the prime reason for the continuing “exodus to the NPA by young people.” He underestimates the youth’s critical and analytic-thinking – a trait he should consider acquiring before lashing out dim-witted statements in print.
He had, however, unwittingly acknowledged the growing number of youths opting to leave the conveniences of urban life to ultimately serve the people and wage the people’s war in the countrysides. This resolve is not shallowly based on adventurism and romanticism alone, as Mr. Tulfo so eloquently poses. Far from a “misplaced idealism,” the growing number of youth NPA guerillas precisely recognizes the wide exploitation and injustices in a semi-colonial and semi-feudal order. It grasps the urgent need for a cultural and armed revolution for genuine socio-political and economic change.
This is the reason why the youth is not fazed by the widespread black propaganda against the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) on the issue of the purges and executions in the 1980s. The government, with some elements of reactionary media, persistently tries to revive this age-old argument in a desperate effort to demonize the revolutionary movement to this day.
The CPP has long-ago condemned the “DPA (deep penetration agent) hysteria” campaigned by peti-bourgeois elements and traitors within the CPP regional leadership in Mindanao. It has then on launched a nationwide rectification movement denouncing the purges and rectifying ideological and organizational errors which assailed the revolutionary movement in the 1980s.
Kabataang Makabayan, the nationwide revolutionary movement of the youth, has learned and matured greatly from this undertaking. It remains vigilant in its struggle against modern revisionism and peti-bourgeois opportunism within its ranks.
Unlike Mr. Tulfo, who pityingly confuses revolutionary ideology with pure heresy, the youth has long-ago distinguished the modern revisionist government of the Soviet Union from that of the socialist state first established by Comrade Lenin. Communism, for the youth, is not a “dead ideology” but rather modern revisionism is and its disciples.
Furthermore, it seems as if it is Mr. Tulfo who is remiss in his education in seeing “the light about communism.” He pointed out that China, “once a fundamentalist communist country, is fast becoming socialist.” For your information, Mr. Tulfo, China, like Russia, never became a communist country. This assertion, in fact, is one of the main reasons for the downfall of modern revisionist Russia. China, on the other hand, enjoyed the benefits and progression of a socialist system of government until the reign of modern revisionist Deng Xiao Ping in the late ‘70s.
For Mr. Tulfo to judge the youth’s revolutionary principles, and the World Proletarian Revolution in general, he should first check his “ideological” resources – or risk making a complete fool of himself. His column is based on pure sensationalism and arrogantly foolish opinions. His condescension towards the youth is uncalled for, discussing a topic which he obviously does not have any knowledge of.
He goes on to appeal to our educators who “haven’t made the students aware that we’re the only country in Asia that is plagued with communist insurgency.” On the other hand, the youth is very much aware and proud of the fact that the CPP-NPA-NDF is one of the leading movements in the waging of the people’s war in Asia. It continues to maintain international solidarity and relations with those of Nepal, South Korea, India, and Indonesia, to name a few.
Lastly, the youth cannot really blame Mr. Tulfo for his misguided opinions. Especially so if he genuinely believes that “military abuses have now been minimized, if not eliminated” and that “complaints about abusive members are now acted on with dispatch by the AFP.” You work for a newspaper, Mr. Tulfo. Read the news.
After all, it was no less than Comrade Mao Zedong who said, “No investigation, no right to speak.”
Andres Guerrero III
Spokesperson, Kabataang Makabayan
[email protected]