As a public intellectual, Walden Bello enmeshed himself with many struggles over six decades: rebellious Jesuit scholar, communist cadre, plotter and implementer of splashy (and low-cost) political theater, head of a series of international non-governmental organizations, later a member of the Philippines House of Representatives.

Bello has been restlessly searching for answers to the world’s chaos, scavenging for wisdom in the fragile corners of empire and amidst the broad network of challengers who sometimes fight each other as fiercely or even more so than they confront the powers-that-be.

Bello worked for the margins and yet found space and time to wage some battles in the heart of empire. He was an activist who churned out tomes respected by the academe, and an academic who welded intellect to action.

So it is surprising to learn in his introduction to his latest book, Global Battlefields, that Bello spent decades spurning invitations and demands to pen his memoirs.

Perhaps one answer lies in a long letter to author and academic Carolyn Hau. He carried, like most of his peers, the trauma of failed wars. We, the revolutionary generation, are “the generation that crashed,” he says, referring to the boomers.

Yet these failures shaped the world and provided the platforms for those seeking brave, new dreams.

The title of this article comes from a line in the last quarter of Bello’s book. It has its roots in his early search for alternatives to a paradigm (Catholic by way of the Jesuits) he’d already dropped.

Those youthful internal battles caused at least two episodes of what read like classic depressive episodes. He healed with this self-diagnosis: action as primary medicine. Never mind if swathes of the road ahead remain shrouded in shades of gray.

This primary driver of self gives Battlefields an urgent tone, even when Bello is discussing events of half a century ago.

It also provides some of the most interesting, hilarious moments in the book, including a three-year, pre-internet sleuthing, a dangerous caper that could belong in some hit movie and played a major role in the demolition of dictator Ferdinand E Marcos’ power myth.

It also partly explains why Bello sustains friendships and appreciation of folks even after prolonged and rancorous debates.

My copy of Battlefields has scribbled lines across many pages. The first read rammed home the holes of ignorance and led to a merry search of sources Bello cites, including philosophers and studies, and country reports. I also had to review first- and second-hand information about national events Bello tackles.

Academic rigor shows in the many facts that dot the book as context for the actions that occur. Bello’s wit and the scope of the actions that take place make this arc of modern history anything but tedious.

Davos, Doha, Seattle, Prague, Genoa, Cancun: I’m wondering whether it was devotion to journaling or recent research that drew out the details of huge battles between neoliberals at the top of the world food chain and the tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of globalization protesters.

Bello’s skilled pen and prodigious memory hurl the reader into pitched street battles and conference debates. As he systematically dismantles the myth of neoliberal growth (very short term, and at great cost to labor, the urban poor, the basic economic infrastructures, and the environment), he immerses you in color and action. You hear cobblestones being ripped and the shattering of glass storefronts; you can also hear Bello panting as he runs helter skelter either to avoid security forces or help shore up protest frontlines.

He shows how the dynamics between the empire’s military and economic centers eventually led to “overreach” — in Afghanistan and Syria, and Lebanon, and Israel and the occupied Palestinian lands. The maneuvers of power and the inconvenient results are fleshed out by Bello’s first-hand accounts of visits to the dispossessed. Later, as representative of Akbayan and chair of the House committee for OFWs, he would rescue hapless Filipinos. Again, the facts and context never get in the way of the storytelling.

From “structural adjustments” demanded by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, to the rise of Asia’s tigers who refused to give up state control over the economy, to how neoliberalism — the freedom to relocate where labor is cheaper — fueled Chinese economic might, Battlefields is a good introduction to anyone who wants to understand why the world is what it is today.

From a distance

I approached the book as a reader, not as Bello’s peer; more as a journalist interested in his takes on various issues.

For one, I’m at the very tailend of the boomer generation or at the start of Gen-X. My own history also gives some distance from the great struggle that rocked the National Democrats that spilled from the very top down to the regions.

Unlike other authors, and perhaps because Bello is clear about not writing a history of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), he is less abrasive in calling out perceived weaknesses of a movement that occupied 15 years of his life.

His interview of a woman cadre immersed in the madness of Kampanyang Ahos still manages to shock, even though I’ve heard directly from survivors.

Bello’s tempered language makes for powerful reading. He roots the paranoia of Ahos in the ND debacle of boycotting the snap elections, thus sidelining them during the EDSA People Power revolt.

He also clearly states that the two years of increasingly massive demonstrations following the 1983 assassination of Ninoy Aquino were also rooted in the ND’s careful buildup of the revolution that had (reluctant) admirers near the center of the empire, aka the US State Department and the US military.

Debacle is no exaggeration. Jose Ma Sison, the founder of the CCP acknowledged that. But Bello notes that both Sison’s “reaffirmists” and the “rejectionists” would continue to miss the point post-EDSA.

The latter pushed insurrectionary struggle and the former stuck to protracted war. Bello says both sides saw the restoration of elite democracy as just a mask slapped on dictatorship, and ignored what was needed to confront the country’s “ideological and cultural hegemony” — Filipinos’ belief in formal democracy as the bedrock of stability.

It’s not easily untangled, this spawn of empire, where elections are seen as a safety valve that make partisans brush over the very real cracks in our system and, instead, enthusiastically join these contests as proof of consent. That’s food for thought in this midterm elections, where the battle is framed as between incumbent President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and Rodrigo Duterte’s clan.

You’ll also benefit from a closer read of Bello’s dissection of the middle class, including those of Chile and Thailand, going back to the rise of Mussolini and Hitler and, fast forward, to Duterte and Trump.

I agree fully with Bello in the belief that individual rights, especially the right to life and due process, trumps any excuse. Given this, some readers could be confused by Bello’s views on Bin Laden and Hugo Chavez, Hamas, and Hezbollah.

While Bello says he doesn’t ethically agree with the actions of these entities, he says their actions stem from the sins of empire, and he recognizes their role in forcing the US to overreach.

Navigating dissonance

Bello’s fascinating childhood as the son of artists, with a network of connections to Ilokano elite and the networks of resistance that would later play roles in post-World War 2 growth, gave him a ringside seat to the dissonances he would navigate in the future.

Status dissonance, ideological and political dissonance, and emotional dissonance are the skeins that give a buoyancy to Bello’s labors.

The latter is especially interesting. Bello admits to hang-ups about women. That probably aroused teeth grinding among some of generational peers, especially those who fought (and still fight) against the machismo and other antiquated gender and sexual power worldviews in the national democratic, anti-globalization, and reformist circles.

It is strange that he fails to flesh out the characters of his former wives, who seem to be very strong women, and is silent on the roles they played (or not) in his arc of action.

In these sections, Bello’s skill as a narrator and student of personality suddenly stutters. Except for the brief descriptions he gives, you cannot even glimpse the persons who shared his life for years. He only changes course towards the end, in a chapter that recounts his marriage to the late Suranuch “Ko” Thongsila.

Perhaps at this point, the dissonances (they had very different politics and personalities) had woven together to make for a comfortable blanket.

Old warhorse’s dream

From Marcos to Marcos, not to mention Duterte, collective trauma is real. Across oceans, Donald Trump captured power, lost it, and roared back triumphant.

Duterte, and especially Trump, used anti-empire language to bolster their fascist networks. The beliefs that kept protesters hounding empire for decades are now being used — to great effect — by the leader of the world’s most powerful nation.

Bello isn’t shy about claiming success, partial as the wins may be. While his advocacies carried some danger, he was “never in a position of having to choose between my beliefs or my life,” while others paid the ultimate price for their beliefs.

His dream to “abolish the armed forces” is probably never going to happen. In this “age of extremes,” where crises converge one after another, things will get worse before they get better.

The old warhorse still moves to confront current dangers. In a final rhetorical flourish, he calls on comrades, allies, and perhaps, frenemies to “break out — and quickly — from doctrinal navel-gazing.”

And he ends with what most of us weary souls believe, even if our actions don’t always show it: that only the young ones, younger than GenZ, can do this.

Inday Espina-Varona

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