Emergency
Toolkit For Dismantling Of The Arroyo Killing Machine
By E.San Juan, Jr.
15 May, 2007
Countercurrents.org
Ang sagot sa dahas ay
dahas din, kung bingi sa katwiran.
---JOSE RIZAL
No uprising is ever wasted.
Each is a step in the right direction.
--SALUD ALGABRE, leader of the Sakdal Insurrection
Election
day, May 14, 2007: a time of reckoning for the oppressors, a time of
judgment for the avengers of the oppressed, exploited and slaughtered
generations of Filipinos, from the 1.4 million killed by the U.S. invaders
in the Filipino-American War (1899-1913) to the over 850 victims murdered
by Arroyo and her generals and their death-squads. Even as more imbecilic
pretexts and mendacities are spun by Arroyo apologists from the recent
Burgos/Posa/Arado kidnapping, and the well-oiled cheating dynamos revving
up for a last-ditch effort, synchronized with the rusty gears of the
killing machines of the AFP/PNP, the masses are assembling for a final
confrontation. Who will prevail? I rehearse the “Seven Theses,”
published earlier in BULATLAT, on the possible answers to that urgent
question, with some key revisions.
A fortuitous conjuncture of recent events seems to augur the inexorable
downfall of the Arroyo presidency. With the defiant manifesto of “Nanay
Ude” (Lourdes Rubrico) of UMAGA (Ugnayan ng Maralita Para sa Gawa
at Adhikain Federation) and the attempted killing of KARAPATAN officer
Jose Ely Garchico and the abduction of Maria Luisa Posa-Dominado (SELDA)
and Nilo Arado (BAYAN), we confront the desperate panic of the regime
side by side with the implacable resistance of the popular forces. Oppression
always begets resistance, as the adage goes. And with more oppression
goes certain retribution.
The inertia of tyranny at first seemed impervious to humanitarian blandishment.
Arroyo may shed crocodile tears, but her cabal of generals and security
advisers doesn’t care and seems addicted to the opium of violence.
Despite Alston’s exposure in the Human Rights Council of the “Order
of Battle” blueprint of OPLAN BANTAY LAYA I and II, Arroyo’s
minions continue to ratchet up the score of extra-judicial killings
and forced disappearances. Despite the judgment of the Permanent People’s
Tribunal and rigorous condemnation by Amnesty International, National
Council of Churches of the Philippines, Asian Human Rights Commission,
the Japanese Human Rights Now, and the InterParliamentary Union, among
others, of the obscene platform of “impunity” for operatives
linked to the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and the Philippine
National Police (PNP), the political murders show no signs of abating.
In an unprecedented “overkill,”AFP troops have saturated
urban poor communities in Metro Manila and elsewhere to openly harass
and intimidate citizens inclined to BAYAN MUNA and other progressive
party-list candidates in the weeks before the May elections. What more
atrocities are being hatched in Malacanang in step with Bush’s
global war of terror?
Before the May 14 elections,
the Arroyo clique may be gearing to “clean up its act” by
public-relations magic. In a belated response to the concerns of U.S.
Senator Barbara Boxer, Rep. Ellen Tauscher, and the U.S. State Department
officials over U.S. aid being used for the vilification and summary
executions of activists, the Arroyo -AFP’s show of a “state
of denial” can be gleaned from the bureaucratic maneuvers of creating
so-called special courts to try human rights cases. This comes after
Alston’s witnesses were killed, betraying the tendentious character
of such reforms. Could this cover up or compensate for the utter insipidity
of Task Force Usig and the Melo Commission? It would be wishful thinking
to believe in a sudden reversal of entrenched policy.
Scourge of the People
Unless her U.S. sponsors
demand more concrete measures to stop the killings, the Arroyo clique
will cheat—as KONTRA DAYA and others have predicted based on plans
already hatched with premeditated care—and cheat massively in
the May elections. It is only proceeding with “business as usual,”
in the time-honored tradition of elections since 1946. The regime will
then quickly proceed to implement the Human Security Law that will finally
legalize the “de facto martial law” which, for Senator Jamby
Madrigal (speaking at the People’s Tribunal at The Hague in March),
already prevails. But legitimacy cannot be earned by legislative fiat.
Last April 18, the University of the Philippines University Council
passed a resolution condemning Arroyo’s curtailment of civil liberties,
a mild show of protest from a fraction of the salaried intelligentsia.
However, that is still symptomatic of the fact that Arroyo lacks that
essential element of hegemonic consensus needed for any ruling bloc
to survive. Violence may soon become the only weapon available, a sign
of total moral and political bankruptcy of that “elite democracy”
so beloved by former “left-wing” friends who hailed “the
democratic space” of Cory Aquino as she was about to massacre
the Mendiola peasant protesters, a class penchant proved again in the
Hacienda Luisita massacre of 16 November 2004.
Urgent questions interpose
themselves between local and international developments. Amid unceasing
U.S. political-military intervention, can the realization of martial
law de jure be stopped? Can the killings and abductions be deterred
if not halted? Can the national-democratic opposition initiate a wider,
more in-depth realignment of all anti-imperialist forces throughout
the country? Can we establish a more radical discursive and organizational
framework to build the united front for nationwide insurrection, rallying
the middle strata beyond what has already been accomplished so far?
As of now, BAYAN and BAYAN
MUNA, the main progressive detachments, by themselves alone cannot mount
a sustainable challenge to the terrorist Minotaur without either getting
the support of other nonleftist anti-Arroyo forces, or neutralizing
them. What other sectors can be mobilized to strengthen the democratic
forces and unleash emancipatory energies that have been stifled by authoritarian
habits and practices grounded in the comprador-feudal structures of
our society? What historic openings for liberation might be seized from
this coming electoral exercise that can precipitate immediate change?
Or if not that, at least, catalyze a regrouping of forces that can ultimately
prove pivotal not just for the collapse of the Arroyo regime but also
for the continued growth of participatory democracy centered on worker-peasant
protagonism? What theoretical and practical breakthroughs may be read
from the signs of micropolitical resistance in the city and countryside,
as well as in the turmoil of the recalcitrant Filipino diaspora worldwide?
Here we take cognizance
of the economic and social facts already rehearsed in recent movement
documents from the liberated zones, as well as numerous IBON analysis
of the sharp polarization of social classes in the last six years. We
need an armed people’s defense force, no doubt, to relieve the
agony of ruthless AFP/PNP counterinsurgency drives. On another occasion,
we hope to explore the problem of why the strategy of people’s
war (as traditionally construed) predicated chiefly on military action
deviates from the principle of class struggle as a political resolution
of historic contradictions by a combination of diverse means/modes,
not just by violent means. Any physical combat in the social realm is,
as Clausewitz once observed, always an extension of politics by other
means. Yes, “el pueblo unido seran jamas vencido.” But it
is still a long way to go in uniting “el pueblo,” ridden
as it is with sharp divisions across the multiple axes of gender, ethnicity,
religion, locality, and other cultural/ideological determinants that
underlie the structural class cleavage. The U.S.-imposed neocolonial
“social contract” may show signs of unraveling; the point
is not just to interpret but to hasten its complete breakdown.
We demur from the triumphalism
of our comrades, notwithstanding the heroic advances that have already
been registered in the ejection of U.S. bases in 1991 and the Subic
Rape case in 2006 (to cite only two examples). The dogmatic hubris of
vanguardism cannot let us forget the regression to militarism/urban
adventurism committed by those who were targeted by the Second Rectification
movement. Such left and right tendencies will always exist in a neocolony
severely ravaged everyday by capitalist alienation, commodification,
anomie, as well as the destructive effects of archaic, feudal practices
(such as sexist-masculinist abuses, clientelism, religious skullduggery,
etc.). Neither pessimism of reason nor optimism of the will can help,
I think, but a consistent regimen of criticism-self-criticism of political
calculation can assist us in learning from mistakes of the past and
thus forge a less wasteful path of social transformation.
Realize the Impossible
We seek to broach here a
more heuristic and self-reflexive line of cognitive mapping of the sociopolitical
arena. We hope to advance the anti-imperialist struggle within the framework
of what is feasible in the short-term compass of Arroyo’s moribund
tenure. “Realize the impossible!” –this slogan rests
on grasping what is possible, just as freedom rests on comprehending
necessity. To be sure, the people’s cause of social justice and
true independence will emerge victorious in the end, via an orchestration
of all means of struggle attuned to the dynamic changes in the political
consciousness of various sectors. Vanguardism cannot preempt the slow
hard labor of mass political education, organizing, and critique. The
basic question is: how can we move out of this morass of impunity and
relative disarray of anti-Arroyo forces? After all, Crispin Beltran
is still detained by the military, and Satur Ocampo (as well as others
of the “BATASAN 6,” “TAGAYTAY 5,” and hundreds
of activitists named in the AFP “Order of Battle” a copy
of which was recently submitted by Alston to the UN Human Rights Council)
still faces an uphill legal battle, and all anti-imperialist militants
face threats of prison or “neutralization” every moment
of the day.
Here we will concentrate
on the specific contradictions faced by the ruling bloc and its ramifications.
This positing of problems faced by the enemy is offered as a way of
revitalizing the project of communal democracy so necessary to advance
the national-democratic program as a stage of socialist reconstruction,
within the framework of an uninterrupted revolutionary process. Of course,
unpredictable events and new players/actors may intervene that could
gradually, or by leaps and bounds, change the parallelogram of forces
and require a new theoretical calibration of class trajectories. However,
we need to always pursue the principle of historical-materialist analysis
in order to unfold the inner laws of motion from the surface of everyday
circumstances whose bizarre oscillation may seduce us into easy consolations
and premature celebrations of victories. True, you need to break eggs
to make an omelette; but there is no guarantee that the omelette will
be edible or savory at all. The categorical imperative for the wretched
of the earth is still: Makibaka, huwag matakot!
Needless to say, the propositional
form of this intervention invites further scientific inquiry and practicable
exchange, with the resulting hypotheses to be tried in concrete praxis
in the historical arena. What is necessary is to agree on the purpose
and goal of the national-democratic project of replacing the Arroyo
regime, not only illegitimate but politically and ideologically bankrupt,
with one reflecting the liberatory aspirations of the exploited classes
and all sectors committed to egalitarian democracy and genuine national
independence. Here the desideratum of “the mass line,” its
ripeness, signifies everything.
Impeachment Feasibility
Thesis 1: After the Garci
exposure and the failed impeachment attempts, the Arroyo bloc has definitively
lost any shred of legitimacy it may have putatively enjoyed after People
Power 2. While bribes and other inducements offered to Batasan trapos
have practically made the impeachment route counterproductive, the educational-propaganda
value of the impeachment case, as well as the obscenity of extrajudicial
killings, has not been fully exhausted. Other venues have to be found.
A preponderant number of Filipinos in the U.S., for example, doesn’t
know the details, much less the implications, of the Garci fraud. Like
other migrants, they still cling to the belief that the incumbent (like
the Marcos regime in the seventies) should be allowed to run the government
and preserve law and order for everyone.
The task then is to engage in a wide-ranging pedagogical, “conscientizing”
effort of propagating the merits of the impeachment brief to as wide
a constituency as possible, appealing to the traditional sense of fair
play, clean elections, honesty, and so on. This will reach otherwise
conservative, pro-US sectors of the population in the country and abroad,
and also energize liberal fractions of the “national bourgeoisie”
(now reduced to rentier and comprador pursuits). This is not to endorse
parliamentary cretinism; rather, it is to maximize what is still legally
allowed in a republican framework of class conflict and use it as a
point of departure for accelerating political education and organizing
toward insurrectionary readiness. This is to engage the bulk of civil
society still adhering to the old maxim, Salus rei publicae suprema
lex, bearing in mind that this current rei publicae exists to reproduce
class inequality and imperialist domination.
Authoritarian Cul de Sac
Thesis 2: The nearly absolute
reliance of the Arroyo clique on AFP/PNP counterinsurgency tactics,
including extrajudicial killings and selective persecution (Beltran,
Ocampo) of progressive dissenters, is a clear symptom of weakness due
to the loss of suasive power. A militarized bureaucracy (entrenched
since the Marcos period) has no political intelligence at all, tied
to a technocratic ethos. Its tactics are reactive, hence their agents
fall prey to conventional guerilla maneuvers even with the help of sophisticated
techniques given by Pentagon/U.S. advisers. Without genuine popular
support, the regime’s days are numbered.
Aside from private armies of thugs and assorted mercenaries, the main
coercive agency of the ruling bloc is the U.S-trained and U.S.-indoctrinated
military and police apparatus. Such limitation of agency cannot be remedied
by more bribery of politicians, or by expedient compromises with other
fractions of the oligarchy: the Marcoses, Joker Arroyo-type vacillating
“libertarians,” etc. Arroyo and her Cabinet Oversight Committee
on Internal Security, however, are bedeviled by three ineluctable determinants:
1) internal dissension within the military ranks due to the politicized
nature of promotions, division of the loot, etc.; 2) limited internal
resources, including decimation of ranks through desertion, casualties,
intractable clandestine activities, etc.; and 3) utter dependence on
the Pentagon and Washington for logistics, training, etc., which may
suffer the vicissitudes of political shifts in the metropole. Aside
from clientelism and opportunism, the military-police bureaucracy is
riddled with vicious in-fighting and personality cults that cause inefficiency,
paralysis, etc. Moreover, as in any uneven, dependent formation, there
exist in the ranks honest elements who may be won over in the course
of the struggle, hence the key lies in commonalities of political aims,
not ideological standardization.
Balikbayans Blasting the
Bastions
Thesis 3: A wholly new condition
has emerged since the Marcos dictatorship: the phenomenal increase of
OFWs (Overseas Filipino Workers). About three thousand leave everyday,
a million every year, adding to the nearly 10 million Filipinos abroad.
As already established, the temporary stability of the economy hinges
on the ability to pay the foreign debt, which in turn depends on the
continuing growth of remittance of dollars from OFWs, a large part of
which comes from the Middle East and North America. Foreign investments
have declined considerably, though transnational corporations can still
exert some influence (as in the Walmart-Gap criticism of Arroyo policies
handicapping union struggle for work-place rights). What is more valuable
for the corrupt Establishment is the huge reservoir of taxes and fees
extorted from OFWs through the OWWA Omnibus Policies amounting to at
least P17 billion so far, which will surely be raided again for this
May exercise. If the migrant community becomes fully mobilized in fighting
for social, cultural and political rights, this can deliver the heaviest
blows on the ability of the regime to deliver on its debts in time,
satisfying the IMF/World Bank and the greedy appetite of finance capital.
Given the precarious nature
of overseas hiring (consider recent Saudi Arabia’s restrictions,
Taiwan’s prohibitions, etc.) tied to the geopolitical prospect
of heightened conflicts in the Middle East, as well as periodic tremors
in the Asian region (affecting Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong—the
largest employers of OFWs), the Arroyo regime is vulnerable to such
reverberations. Any explosion of conflict in those regions is bound
to produce dire repercussions on the local political economy. This is
where MIGRANTE and other formations oriented to OFW concerns are bound
to play a key and possibly decisive role in precipitating a crisis of
failure to pay both internal and external debts fatal to the ruling
bloc.
Moros Undefeatable and Inescapable
Thesis 4: The Moro insurgency
remains an integral part of our national-democratic struggle. The Moro
people have suffered the most since the Marcos dictatorship: hundreds
of thousands killed, with more than half of the four million internal
refugees coming from the Moro villages and towns. They have also rallied
the largest armed combatants in the country and inflicted severe blows
on the AFP. The unrelenting resistance of the Moro community (represented
currently by the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and sections of the Moro
National Liberation Front) cannot be assuaged, or fully pacified, by
Arroyo’s diplomacy and cooptation. Nor can the AFP/PNP, even with
the help of U.S. Special Forces, ever succeed in eliminating the Abu
Sayyaf or the conditions that reproduce such a phenomenon. Not because
the Abu Sayyaf is a parasitic and coeval creature of the CIA and its
military/civilian patrons, which remains the case—Bush’s
War on Terror subsists on the continuing existence of this bandit group—but
because this is tied with the whole turbulent milieu of the Islamic
world (Indonesia, Malaysia, parts of Thailand, Bangladesh, Pakistan,
etc.) and the internal decay of its structures and ethos. Note that
a large part of the combat-ready AFP troops are tied with the fighting
in Mindanao and Sulu, thus enabling breathing space (exchanging space
for time) for building up the liberated zones and pursuing a war of
attrition and encirclement.
Here, the Organization of
Islamic Conference is a crucial international body whose ideological
shifts will certainly affect the capacity of Moro separatism to grow
or diminish. What is imperative is for the radical assemblage to incorporate
the Islamic resistance much more adequately than it has done so far.
A wider anti-imperialist united front cannot be realized without the
substantive participation of the Moro movement for autonomy. Luis Jalandoni’s
affirmation of the Moro (and other national minorities’) right
to self-determination, emphasized in his March 23 presentation to the
Permanent People’s Tribunal, is a salutary move in the right direction.
Subterranean Rumblings
Thesis 5: Aside from the
Bangsa Moro people, the indigenous communities (Lumads, Igorots, etc.)
need special inducements for their inclusion in the united front against
the Arroyo clique. So far, this has not been done, despite advances
in the Cordillera front. We need to pay closer attention to indigenous
practices of solidarity and coalitional work, esp. in the mines, remote
villages, and plantations. Perhaps the nationalist appeal for liberation
needs to be modified to promote the local demands for livelihood, preservation
of ancestral lands, and fostering of local religious customs, including
prophetic millenarianism. The same goes for the utopian experiments
of artists, anarchists, and other marginalized sectors. Christian chauvinism
remains the main obstacle here as well as dogmatic scientism and other
“orientalist” prejudices. Can our postmodern babaylans stir
up the slumbering chthonic energies of Mother Filipinas?
Arming the Spirit
Thesis 6: The religious front
requires special analysis in the light of unrelenting U.S.-influenced
evangelization. While the theology of liberation may have been eclipsed
by actual practices of progressive “fundamentalist” sects,
this aspect of the underground movement during the Marcos era may still
be reconfigured to draw quietistic and conservative believers to a more
dynamic worldly thrust that will dovetail with emergent programs of
industrialization, sustainable development, and the building of a self-reliant
economy. Given the attacks on the Philippine Independent Church, and
reformist church officials of the Protestant denominations, there exist
great opportunities to channel anti-statist sentiments in a more decolonizing
political direction. This has been done with women, gays, and unorthodox
intellectuals with their utopian dreams, so why can we not appeal to
the salvific impulse and direct it to secular ends (material well-being,
health, care for the environment)? Father Ed de la Torre’s incarnational
politics awaits vindication in a revitalized theology of national liberation
disabused of pettybourgeois reformist illusions. We need to call on
the Jacobin spirits of Reverend Aglipay and Isabelo de los Reyes to
aid us in this new materialist “reformation.”
Pedagogical Reconaissance
Force
Thesis 7: Now that KABATAAN
party, with its techno-cyber élan worldwide, has been launched,
it may be superfluous to emphasize the imperative of arousing and cultivating
the youth sector of the united front. Instead of accenting the age/generational
aspect, we would rather stress the institutional category of students
(from grade school up) that should be the target for intense conscientization
and mobilization. After all, institutions, not status or age groups,
serve as the sites of radical social transformation, the transmission
belts of what Spinoza calls deus sive natura. As our history has demonstrated
without fail, from the time of Emilio Jacinto and the Propagandistas
to the First Quarter Storm of Ed Jopson, Judy Taguiwalo and Carol Pagaduan-Araullo,
the institutional site of schooling/studentry functions as the crucial
arena for political education, organization and agitation. Time, energy
and resources should be allocated carefully and chanelled to this front
in order to deepen, widen and reinforce the ground already sedimented
by the pioneering initiatives of the League of Filipino Students (LFS),
CONTEND, ACT, and other affinal assemblages. Students, not youth (to
modify Rizal’s invocation), is the genuine hope of the motherland.
Imperial Rescue?
There is no doubt that the
public support of the United States is probably the only driftwood the
Arroyo bloc still clings to. But there is no certainty in permanent
U.S. patronage that is always based on the prior claims of U.S. racial
“manifest destiny,” that is, global hegemony. What is bound
to snap the U.S-Arroyo linkage is this: Arroyo cannot pacify the internecine
fighting of oligarchic factions, which may push Washington to opt for
a substitute among the contending elite politicians. A carnage-prone
state that cannot reconcile the internal feuds within elite ranks, much
less conciliate the dispossessed, cannot defeat the popular challenge.
Fellow-travellers during
the Marcos dictatorship failed to predict the dispensability of the
dictator for the U.S., thus withdrawing from the electoral struggle
in 1986. As the case of the Subic rapist Daniel Smith has recently shown,
the U.S. always tests any administration in the crucible of subservience,
whether by bribes (more military aid) or coercive pronouncements (suspension
of the Balikatan exercises). And no group of subaltern functionaries
is indispensable, as withdrawal of support for the Marcos dictatorship
has shown if what is at stake is the preservation of the subordinate
social relations of capital accumulation and its governability. If Arroyo
proves totally discredited, and the impasse of her corrupt, fraudulent
rule jeopardizes U.S. control and precipitates the entry of the National
Democratic Front into the scene, then the U.S. will immediately abandon
Arroyo and substitute the next compromise elite fraction. Thus the fight
against U.S. political and military intervention remains central to
the articulation of all the demands and goals of the national-democratic
assemblage.
In sum, the U.S.-Arroyo
terrorist state is plagued with incoherence, vulnerabilities, and intrinsic
inadequacies characteristic of the authoritarian state in the periphery
(an earlier treatise on this, Clive Thomas, The Rise of the Authoritarian
State in Peripheral Societies, 1984, may be useful; obviously, the “global
war on terror” and U.S. unilateral hegemonism have changed the
historical context, thus the need for new analysis). The Arroyo state
is neither a populist nor a classically fascist (European) state. It
has neither vast popular cross-class support nor does it promote a messianic
leader to channel middle-class frustrations, a racialized savior who
promises redemption, or even to make “the nation great again”
(as Marcos tried to do with the help of shoddy pundits like Blas Ople
and other hirelings). Its use of violence is narrowly instrumentalist,
not mystical or primordialist. (The old debate among Ernesto Laclau,
Ralph Miliband, and Nicos Poulantzas on facism and populism in the European
and Latin American context may be instructive here.) Of course, even
if the Arroyo regime is saddled with multiple problems sketched earlier,
it will not fall by itself (barbarism exceeding yesterday’s carnage
is always an option)—the popular forces have to dismantle it gradually,
or by leaps and bounds.
Point of No Return
This May election may prove
to be a decisive turning point both for Arroyo and the anti-imperialist
united front. It will certainly narrow the paths open to all contending
forces. Either Arroyo will cheat and entrench her authoritarian rule,
or the popular resistance will unseat her in a series of flanking moves
and direct confrontations hitherto unforeseen. We are in that interregnum
where the people can no longer accept the status quo and the ruling
elite can no longer implement phony democracy in the old style—an
in-between phase of the struggle replete with morbid symptoms; hence,
either the old system crumbles, or its agonizing death-pangs are prolonged
at the expense of the intolerable suffering of millions from globalized
market profiteers and their local henchmen.
Let us repeat what seems
to be commonplace now, though inflected in a more dialectical stance.
Arroyo’s makeshift combination of trapos and militarists, Cold
War ideologues, and pettybourgeois propagandists, betokens an expedient
mechanism for narrow get-rich-quick schemes by manipulation of the State
apparatus and raiding the public treasury. Except for its disproportionate
use of the military and police in extrajudicial killings, regional counterinsurgency
drives, massacres and tortures, the Arroyo state is a conjunctural result
of several intertwined contingencies: electoral fraud, advanced disintegration
of the oligarchic bloc of comparators-landlords-bureaucrat capitalists
(their productive base has considerably diminished and their ideological
control over peasants and workers has been countered by increased underground
agitation and labor-union organizing); and, sad to say, the still divided
mass of workers, peasants and middle elements who have not yet been
effectively interpellated and fused into a revolutionary counterhegemonic
bloc. In short, the objective conditions have ripened, but the subjective
forces have not yet fully matured to take over state power, or articulate
a new consensus, a new “common sense.” The alibi or escape
route of OFWs still beckons. Nonetheless, the process of maturation
can occur rapidly, depending on a sudden turn of circumstances that
cannot be predicted despite our claim to know “the laws of motion”
of the capitalist mode of production.
Our neocolonial condition
has always been a permanent state of emergency. But it is not one imposed
by Proclamation 1017, but by the vicious operation of sustained colonial
oppression and imperialist havoc. The treason of the technocrats that
Alejandro Lichauco (see his Hunger, Corruption and Betrayal, 2005) bewails
is only a symptom of the general crisis of a minor neocolony that has
been sharpening since 1946. No doubt, mass hunger has worsened. But
everyone knows that poverty and suffering do not translate automatically
into a fight for justice and equality. There are 25 million hungry Filipinos
(roughly 3.4 million households) who are desperately hungry, but not
all are marching for food and the overthrow of the iniquitous order.
Customary traditional beliefs, together with subaltern mentalities and
habits, offer outlets of anger and grief; emigration and charity drives
another. In After Postcolonialism: Remappping Philippines-United States
Confrontations (Rowman 2000) and also in U.S. Imperialism and Revolution
in the Philipppines (Palgrave 2007), I tried to analyze the institutionalized
ideological mechanisms that perpetuate subalternity. No appeal to neoliberal
“free market fundamentalism,” nor pluralist governance (how
can the Batasan or the courts perform check-and-balance procedures when
a culture of corruption and opportunism prevails?) will enable the reform
of COMELEC, the trial of Gen. Jovito Palparan and his ilk, or the successful
investigation of corruption and electoral fraud by the courts or Ombudsman
of the current regime. Arroyo, however, cannot institutionalize anxiety
and fear for a classic fascist mobilization since she has no genuine
mass movement to deploy. Nor is there any affective identification with
a leader who can channel persecutory anxiety against “communists
fronts” (as Franz Neumann noted in The Democratic and the Authoritarian
State, 1964). Her gambit hinges on the passivity of an electorate that
can, however, be volatilized and reoriented by critical popular interventions
in a revolutionary direction.
The Messiah Intervenes
Only two final points can
be made here due to space limitations. As an emergency measure to undercut
the “climate of impunity,” a tactical move of armed self-defense
by local communities may be adopted. This can be done through exemplary
arrest, trial and punishment of publicly known assassins, torturers,
and abusive police and military officers. People’s justice needs
no special juridical or moral justification. We don’t have to
wait for these criminals to leave the country and be put on trial years
from now in a European State which recognizes the International Court
of Justice. We need only invoke the provisions of the CARHRIHL (the
Comprehensive Agreement on Respect for Human Rights and International
Humanitarian Law) that the Philippine government signed together with
the National Democratic Front, which in turn draws its force from the
International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights and other ratified
international laws. The question is: who has the power to implement
it now? Time will tell.
A nagging question pursues
us entailed by the last query. If, as has been repeated everywhere,
the regime is irretrievably bankrupt and totally devoid of legitimacy,
ruling only through force, deception and bribery, sustained only by
the inertia of habit and the customary deference (the fabled “compassion”
of the mythical Filipino) of the neocolonized subaltern, what needs
to be done to finally bury it? Aside from the arguments drafted here,
only an allegorical answer can be ventured here, since the concrete
strategy is already being fleshed in the collective praxis of “the
mass line”: The Messiah will come when you least expect it, and
only through that tiny space of our prison’s emergency door about
to be slammed shut. “For every second of time [is] the strait
gate through which the Messiah might enter” (Walter Benjamin).
It is the tiger’s leap into the presence of the Now blasted from
the continuum of history. And “Messiah” is nothing but the
nom de guerre of the combative people’s empowering agency, ang
bayang lumalaban.
Prelude to Resurrection Day
Celebrating the Peoples Tribunal’s
“guilty” verdict against the U.S.-Arroyo collusion, Mrs.
Evangeline Hernandez, the mother of Benjaline Hernandez, one of the
850 victims of extrajudicial killings under the Arroyo dispensation
(372 of them belong to activist or progressive sectors), announced in
a public rally last March 27: “We who have lost our loved ones,
who have been violated, will not allow Arroyo to prolong her stay in
Malacanang…. The Filipino people will make this government pay
for its blood debt.”
This cry of people’s
justice will also signal the advent of a proactive grass-roots initiative
that will begin to Filipinize the so-called “Maoist” insurgency
that the U.S. State Dept. exploits to stigmatize the insurgency as “terrorist.
Why “Maoist” when People’s China has long become thoroughly
capitalist? Notwithstanding the now jejune RA-RJ squabble, why indeed
can we not move beyond parroting the “Red Book” and invent
our own national-liberation philosophy and methodology from the raw
materials provided by our own rich history of anticolonial revolts combined
with the world treasury of liberatory ideas (from the European Enlightenment
that Rizal, Bonifacio, Mabini up to Amado V. Hernandez and Renato Constantino
have incorporated in their praxis)? We have a massive durable history
of revolutionary experiences, from Soliman to the Katipunan, the Hukbalahap,
the First Quarter Storm, the generation of Maria Lorena Barros, the
Tagamolila brothers, Lean Alejandro, and the present legal and extra-legal
resistance.
In the wake of past defeats
of peasant and worker revolts—nothing is really lost, as Salud
Algabre reminds us, the indigenous culture of Filipino nationalism constantly
renews its redemptive emancipatory voice by mobilizing new forces (women,
church workers, ethnic minorities, gays, etc.) and utilizing all means
possible in an all-encompassing radical democratic movement of all the
oppressed and exploited millions. This struggle is organically embedded
in local and regional social movements whose origin recalls the fight
for national sovereignty and social justice in the tradition of third-world
struggles (Gandhi, Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara, Fanon, etc.), but are in
practice identical with the local insurgencies of diverse communities
against continued U.S. domination.
The Philippines, prosperous
and sovereign, is still a project in the making. Our nation may be conceived
as an “imagined” and actually lived/experienced ensemble
of communities and civic formations—not just families or clans,
but desiring-machines producing and reproducing the paramount Desire
called Becoming-Filipino. Filipinas/Pilipinas, universal and singular,
is in the process of being constructed and nourished through the many-faceted
social and political resistance of Filipinos everywhere, in the homeland
and abroad, against predatory corporate globalization and its brutalizing
commodity-fetishism.
The embodied spirit of the
nation, its ecumenical body germinal in the progressive groups and in
the thousands of martyrs of the national liberation struggle, is creatively
fashioning an appropriate culture of subversion, humanist solidarity,
and self-empowerment worthy of its own people’s history, its collective
vision and sacrifices, for freedom, material well-being, and human dignity.
Becoming-Filipino, an invincible
power born from the ruins of the terrorist U.S.-Arroyo State--- Mabuhay
ang sambayanang lumalaban! -
Digg
it! And spread the word!
Here is a unique chance to help this article to be read by thousands
of people more. You just Digg it, and it will appear in the home page
of Digg.com and thousands more will read it. Digg is nothing but an
vote, the article with most votes will go to the top of the page. So,
as you read just give a digg and help thousands more to read this article.
Click
here to comment
on this article