Business World

MANILA, PHILIPPINES | Tuesday, February 15, 2005

Commentary

How did I feel when I was put on a Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) hit list (Ang Bayan, Dec. 7, 2004) containing the names of assassinated and living “counterrevolutionaries?” This is a question that I’ve had to answer countless times over the last few weeks.

At first there was shock and anger. What did I do to deserve this? Who do these people think they are, marking me out as a “counterrevolutionary” deserving of elimination? Then sadness at the thought that the CPP and New People’s Army (NPA), once innovative agents of change, have degenerated into a mafia in the service of megalomania. Then a sense of how fragile life is — that it can be snuffed out at any moment at the whim of a mind sickened by ideological poison.

But above all, one felt resolve hardening within not to allow these murderous folks have their way and, in the name of “national liberation,” turn the Philippines into a second Kampuchea. These local clones of the Khmer Rouge already have the distinction of being the first revolutionary movement ever to massacre their own cadres before coming to power: from 1981 to around 1986, in a terrifying paranoidal paroxysm, the CPP/ NPA detained, tortured, and murdered some 2,000 of its best people on the mere suspicion that they allows them, with no compunction, to classify people they consider rivals as “counterrevolutionaries” to be liquidated, fabricate preposterous charges that they are “imperialists” or “military agents,” and send their paramilitary gangs to hunt them down.

To hunt us down.

These are the people that, like Stalin, Pol Pot, and the Shining Path leader Abimael de Guzman, have given that wonderful idea “revolution” a bad name. These are the folks that, because they have so sullied the image of the left, are, paradoxically speaking, among imperial Washington’s best allies in the country today.

The moral collapse of what was once a movement of fine individuals was underlined by the common, scripted answer that Ibon Foundation, Cordillera People’s Alliance, KMP, KMU, Asian Student Association, and Migrante made to an honest and heartfelt appeal to them to exercise moral suasion on the CPP to desist from its assassination policy: To repeat what the boss says, there is no hitlist; this fellow is imagining things; and he’s deliberately exposing us to George W. Bush, Barbara Bush, the Pentagon, the CIA, Col. Delfin, Condi Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, the Mossad, and, yes, Cherie Blair, by making a public appeal to us. No apologies, and besides why apologize to the damned?

And, by the way — one organization pointedly, added— he better watch out.

But there is a silver lining to every tragedy. The outpouring of support from people and comrades from all over the world has simply been overwhelming. Boyd Reimer from Canada offered to trade his life for mine. Devinder Sharma, one of India’s most resolute campaigners against the World Trade Organization, invited me to “shift [my] base to India. I will be too pleased to host him and his family.” Susan George, probably the most articulate critic of neoliberal economics, offered her residence in Paris. Even Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez took some time from his busy schedule to tell me to “come to Venezuela if you need a place of refuge. We can travel from one end of the country to the other. You know, you are my father.”

One of the most heartening expressions of collective solidarity recently occurred at the recent World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, when about 70 of the world’s leading progressive intellectuals and activists immediately signed a statement initiated by India’s Amit Sengupta and Prabir Purkayastha in support of all those Filipino activists threatened by the CPP’s assassination policy. It is worth reproducing the statement in full here along with the signatories for it shows that even as global civil society has united against the US imperial venture in Iraq, it will not tolerate threats, violence, and assassination by the Neanderthal “left.”

Thank you all. Solidarity based on simple human decency is the ultimate antidote to ideological madness.

But will local and international public opinion stop these people? It should.

But one must be coldly realistic about these things: the chances are high that these folks will get me and some of the others in their diagram of “counterrevolutionaries” at some point. In my case, I am almost tempted to tell them: go ahead, don your shades, cock your 45s, and get this over with. But you will never, never kill the vision of a pluralist, humane, open, and democratic left.