Featured Post

MABUHAY PRRD!

Wednesday, August 28, 2019

Duterte must outlaw Communist Party, now!

BY RIGOBERTO D. TIGLAO         AUGUST 28, 2019

A MOUNTAIN of evidence has been piling up that the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), through its front organizations like Anakbayan, has continued to dupe our gullible youth, barely out of adolescence, to join their long- discredited project to topple our democratic system.

Simply put, they want to install — to be quite frank about it — the mass murderer Jose Ma. Sison as the Filipino “Dear Leader,” or some NPA commander who has spent his adulthood in jungles, the kind of milieu that created the genocidal Khmer Rouge of Cambodia.

Isn’t it such a no-brainer that it is high time this violent organization is outlawed?

With his coalition’s control of Congress and his immense popularity, President Duterte — because of his long stint as Davao City mayor, the only president to have a deep insight into the insurgency and its record of brutality and treachery — would default on his sworn duty to defend the Republic if he cannot get the legislature to reimpose the Anti-Subversion Law, which the opportunist President Fidel Ramos got Congress to repeal in September 1992, three months after he assumed power. “Opportunist” as Ramos’ overarching interest was for his regime to be politically stable, even at the cost of the Republic’s future.

Nearly three decades after that “experiment” of letting a violent organization be shielded by our own laws, allowing it to continue its killings, why are we so stupid as a nation not to do anything about it?

Window
A window of opportunity has opened for our country to bring an end to this violent rebellion which has resulted in at least 100,000 Filipinos killed, who weren’t even divided — as in the cases of the civil wars in Indonesia and Malaysia in the 1960s and say, Myanmar in this era — by the more intractable problems of ethnicity or religion.

It is mostly Sison’s demagoguery and Machiavellian maneuvers — such as his Plaza Miranda bombing operation — that has resulted in so many of our idealistic youth killed, mostly with little military training, in some forgotten rice field or jungle.

I’m sick of reading leftist and naïve bleeding-heart Facebook posts that so and so gave his life to fight the Marcos dictatorship, and to struggle with “workers and peasants” — with no mention at all that they were high-anking communist cadres or NPA commanders.

Latest issue of Communist newspaper: And they claim they’re not in the schools?

I can give you names of scores of young people who did that, but are now alive and well, and enjoying their grandchildren in middle-class subdivisions: They didn’t join the Communist Party, much less the New People’s Army.

What did they expect the Armed Forces of the Philippines — led by such distinguished generals as Gen. Romeo Espino and even Philippine Constabulary chief Fidel Ramos during Martial Law — to do, that their soldiers would just use tear gas or rubber bullets in confronting in a battlefield NPAs with AK-47s and the Chinese-copied M-14s?

The primordial duty of any nation-state is to defend its existence. This is the reason why all nations in the world each have an army. The communists are threatening our nation-state’s very existence.

CPP Constitution
The CPP’s Constitution very categorically declares that its goal is to overthrow our democratic, republican system using the weapons of “revolutionary armed struggle and the national united front.” Its program declares that this is to be done by building guerrilla fronts “to encircle the cities from the countryside… until it becomes possible to seize power in the cities.”

And what will replace the Philippine Republic, its Congress and Constitution? “The Party as the ruling party, in representation of the working class, shall form the government,” the CPP program declares.

Last year the communists even had the gall to issue a statement — carried by all newspapers — ordering the NPA to attack, that is, to kill without provocation our soldiers and policemen. The statement declared: “ The CPP calls on the NPA to mount tactical offensives across the country in response to the extension of martial law in Mindanao. All NPA units must exert all possible effort to punish the worst fascist units and officers of the AFP…”

Have we become a nation of masochists that we don’t have a law to ban an organization that has declared war on our way of life?

Most countries in the world facing insurgencies led by communists have banned these organizations, as a means of defeating them. Even India declared illegal 10 Maoist parties in 1990. Even former members of the dissolved communist-ruled USSR, such as Ukraine, have criminalized communist parties in their nations. Indonesia’s total ban on the Indonesian Communist Party in 1965 helped it demolish what was then the second biggest communist party (after China’s) in the world. Thailand’s ban on its communist insurgency in the late 1970s, coupled with an amnesty to those who surrendered, defeated the rebellion in a few years.

Many countries even impose criminal penalties on the display — and publishing in media — of the communist hammer-and-sickle symbol.

Consensus
What would such a law banning the CPP accomplish? A lot.

First, laws reflect the national consensus. A law criminalizing the CPP would mean that we as a nation have become so fed up after 50 years of this terrorist organization’s existence and its dragging down of our country’s development, that we want it obliterated from this land.

Second, an anti-communist law would make the incarceration of the CPP’s ranking leaders and even its rank-and-file easier, as it would make it a de facto crime to be a party member. Since the emergence of the Maoists in the 1970s, authorities had to prove that communist leaders and even NPA commanders were involved in homicide and murder, in order for them to be arrested and jailed.

If Sison can be proven here to be a Maoist party member, and therefore in violation of the anti-communist law, the Philippine government can request his extradition from the Netherlands.

The Maoists extensively use the world wide web for its propaganda efforts, as Islamic jihadists do, mainly but not exclusively through the website Philippine Revolution Web Central (https://www.philippinerevolution.info).

If we have a law criminalizing Sison’s party, the government can ask the website’s servers (the outfit that hosts the website for global access) to desist from providing the criminal organization web services, just as most servers in the world have stopped hosting website of Islamic jihadists. That would go a long way in cutting off the party’s propaganda reach, especially to the youth.

And third, a law criminalizing Sison’s party could be part of a broader strategy to finally end this useless, bloody insurgency. It could offer an amnesty to those who admit their membership in the party and register with the government within a specific period of time. That in fact was one of Thailand’s key strategies to defeat its communist insurgency in the 1970s.

It is time for Filipinos to unite against this curse that has been bringing our nation down, which has killed over 100,000 policemen, soldiers and innocent civilians.

Is there any doubt at all that Sison’s CPP has been a criminal organization for 50 years now?

Email: tiglao.manilatimes@gmail.com
Facebook: Rigoberto Tiglao
Twitter: @bobitiglao
Book orders: www.rigobertotiglao.com/debunked

https://www.manilatimes.net/duterte-must-outlaw-communist-party-now/606971/

No comments: