A farce played out

 

SOME 30 New People’s Army rebels who surrendered to the government recited the country’s “Oath of Allegiance” during the presentation of surrenderees under President Rodrigo Duterte’s Executive Order 70, which created the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict, held at Camp Bagong Diwa in Taguig on Tuesday. (PhilStar)…

 

CORRECTED: Some 30 personalities who recently withdrew their allegiance and support from underground movement engineered by leftist labor groups recited the country's “oath of allegiance” during the presentation of surrenderers under President Duterte's Executive Order 70, which created the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict, held at Camp Bagong Diwa in Taguig on Tuesday. (PhilStar)

WHAT A transformation! In a matter of hours, the 30 NPA rebels transmogrified into 30 personalities who recently withdrew their allegiance and support from the underground movement.

No doubt their morphing induced by the tsunami of snickering mockery in the web uniformly tagging the “surrenderees” as more like the archetypal huffing, puffing pot-bellied pulis patola ­– think Sinas, than the emaciated mountain-dwelling romanticized rebelde – think Che, or the young Kumander Dante.  

Aye, a slapstick farce played all too vividly there, the police and military truly worthy of their Keystone Kops tradition. Clueless? Google it.   

There is nothing new to the military presentation before the media of alleged rebel surrenderees. As a matter of course, that has long devolved into nothing more than fakery. That the state forces still persist in doing it only shows the strategic stagnation they are mired in in the war against the insurgency, notwithstanding the military modernization programs bruited about of late, not to mention the billions in intel funds.

Indeed, intelligence – outside the military sort – is beyond purchase.

Of the event at hand, I wrote more than 32 years ago – in the 8-13 Dec. 1988 issue of the long-defunct Angeles Sun:

The fallacy of overkill

THE ARMED Forces of the Philippines may be winning the insurgency war but the bite, that walloping impact, of victory is dissipated with the amateurish handling of information dished out for public consumption.

This is indicative of an inept, if not inane and inutile, propaganda machinery. Or of the employment of propagandists steeped in the old Hitlerian institution of the Big Lie. Nowhere is this more evident than in Pampanga where the overkill syndrome has become the norm in martial propaganda.

Rebel surrenderees are a stock-in-trade in the hearts-and-minds battle in any insurgency campaign, be it in Vietnam, in Malaya, in Somoza’s Nicaragua, or here.

The packaging of information relative to the surrenderees could spell the chasm of a difference between earned propaganda value and loss of credibility. To the latter has fallen many a report of surrenders. Not for anything else but for the substance of incredulity or illogic.

For instance, there were this year successive reports of NPA “regulars” surrendering in droves in Pampanga – 50 in Lubao, 40 in Sta. Ana, 30 in San Simon, if memory serves right – aside from the “200 regulars” captured and “subjected to tactical interrogation for one week” by a ranking PC (Philippine Constabulary) officer.

Against the backdrop of military pronouncement that there are less than 200 NPA regulars in Pampanga, the reports would show that the NPA in the province is operating on a deficit manpower or negative level!

Incredible too is the superhuman feat of tactical interrogation for one week of 200 NPA rebels by only one PC officer. With him alone, we wonder why there is still an insurgency war in Pampanga or in the whole country for that matter.

The slip in the surrender drama shows too in some field officers’ attempt at excellence directed toward an ultimate rise in the ranks.

During the Marcos misrule, an officer-friend was lionized in the local press for the number of “surrenderees” who took the oath of alliance to the Republic before him. The surrender rites being always on Sundays and in marketplaces sowed the seeds of disbelief that subsequently uncovered the sham of surrender and ultimately effected this officer’s relegation to the doghouse.

He was found to have been gathering all marketgoers on Sundays, telling them of a new Philippine Republic to which every Filipino should pledge his allegiance, and then passed off the pictures to newspapers as those of NPA surrenderees.

Overkill transcends the figurative and goes to the literal in certain casualty reports in internecine encounters between the NPA and the Hukbong Mapagpalaya ng Bayan (HMB).

The conclusion of 20 dead in a recent encounter between the two, without any body retrieved or accounted for is plainly fictitious. Especially when the speculated number of combatants did not go beyond two scores and the firefight lasting for a mere ten minutes (that would be two killed per minute).

The above data culled from a single military report evidenced the contradictory and illogical presentation of facts and fantasies that have become indistinguishable in many a military mind.

That the NPA has greatly lost its strength in the province, owing to military victory in Maj. Sonny Gutierrez’s and Maj. Roman Lacap’s fields of battle; in Col. Efren Q. Fernandez’s barangay dialogs; and in Lt. Col. Amado Espino Jr’s “capitalist cheerers,” is not simply believable but even highly probable.

It has been a long time since the last sparrow killing and field encounter. A number of NPA sympathizers do indeed return to the fold of the law. A relative peace reigns in the province. No need therefore to tilt the balance more by coming up with these ridiculous and insulting propaganda schemes. Which makes an utter fallacy of the military’s actual victory.              

 

Thus, shall Leni be?

 

LEADERSHIP – the word as well as its application – has been so much abused and misused that we now have a warped sense of it. So shallow is our notion of leadership that we automatically affix “leader” to any elected official, to presidents and chairs of just about any organization with at least two members.

So long as there is one to command and another to follow, there exists leadership. There too bogs down our concept of the word. For leaders and followers do not make the whole dynamics of leadership. There is the third element of goal.

From the book Certain Trumpets, the thesis on the nature of leadership by Pulitzer Prize winner Garry Wills, I quote: “The goal is not something added to leader and followers. The goal is the reason for the other two’s existence. It is the equalizer between leader and followers. The followers do not submit to the person of the leader. They join him in the pursuit of the goal.”

Wills further expounds “…the leader is one who mobilizes others toward a goal shared by leader and followers…all three elements (leader, followers and goal) are indispensable.”

Critical indeed is the requisite of a goal shared by both the leader and the followers in the holistic perspective, in the true nature of leadership.

Sadly, it is there – in the element of goal – that political leadership in the Philippine context is much, much wanting and thereby we the people almost always suffer.

More often than not, in fact as a matter of practice, the goal – as translated to interests – of the leader does not match, if not altogether contradicts, the goal or the interest of the followers.

No self-respecting presumptuous leader would ever accede to that. Thus, we all hear our so-called political leaders on the campaign trail vow their very “sacred honor” to the interests of the people. See those screaming streamers posted around: Bayan ang Bida, Serbisyong Tapat, Serbisyong Totoo, Serbisyong Todo-todo, Paglingkuran ang Bayan, ad nauseam.

Behold what political leaders do after getting elected! Conveniently forgetting their campaign promises, dishonoring their very vows to work for the interests of their constituency.

While honor may still obtain among thieves, it is a rarity among Philippine politicians.

So how and why do they get away with it? I mean thieves getting positions of leadership and robbing us, the followers, blind.

It is in the manner we choose our leaders. As a rule, Filipinos vote with their emotions, rarely with their intellect. Comes here the magic word charisma.

We are mesmerized by anyone with a flashy lifestyle: movie stars, entertainers, athletes, the pa-sosyal crowd, the perfumed set. Instantaneously, we stamp the word charisma on celebrity.

From the essential “divine grace,” the meaning of charisma has been so twisted that it is now a synonym to just about anything that is “attention-compelling,” even to its essential antonym of “infamy.” Yeah, the infamous we now call charismatic.

And so, we appended charisma on Joseph Estrada. To invest “divine grace” in one who makes the grandest mockery of the Sixth, Seventh, and Ninth Commandments of God is the most detestable sacrilege, the most damnable blasphemy. But did we know any better?

Star-struck, blinded by the flash of celebrity, bewitched by their larger-than-life personae, we readily elect fame over capability, choose passion over vision, favor make-believe over hard reality.

Erap has been deposed, tried, imprisoned, convicted and pardoned. Erap is again a front-runner in the 2010 presidential race.

Again, Santayana’s damnation is upon us: We are a nation that cannot, that refuses, to remember the past. We are a nation damned.

In the 1970s, a great political mind distilled the nature of Philippine politics thus: “Personalist, populist, individualist.” Then he went on to arrogate unto himself all the powers that can be had, and more – elevating himself to the pantheon of the gods, assuming the mythic Malakas of Philippine folklore with, naturally, the beautiful Imeldific, as his Maganda.

A keen student of history, Ferdinand Edralin Marcos appended to his public persona semblances of the charismatic leaders of the past: his World War II exploits – later proven false – invoked Napoleon, if not Caesar; his political philosophies gave him an aura of the Borgia and Medici clients of Machiavelli; his vision of a New Society paralleled Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal; his patronage of the arts that of Frederick the Great of Prussia.

Marcos even exceeded himself in self-cultivating an image of being his country’s hero-in-history in the molds of Napoleon of France, Bolivar of Latin America, Lincoln of the USA, Garibaldi of Italy, Lenin of the Soviet Union, Ataturk of Turkey, and Mao of China.

A wee short of divine rights, Marcos took upon himself a Messianic and Mosaic mission for the Philippines: Save the country and its democratic institutions from anarchy, lead the people to prosperity.

Indeed, what other Philippine leader did possess “charisma” greater than Marcos?

EDSA 1, the Cory Magic swept the land.

Ridiculed as “walang alam” (know nothing), plain housewife Corazon Cojuangco-Aquino brought down the towering intellectual, the almighty Marcos in one bloodless revolution – a contradiction in terms there, invoking what could only be some divine guidance.

There was charisma, in its purest essence. There was our Cory.

FIRST published in the Aug. 7, 2009 print edition of Punto! republished anew in remembering Cory’s 88^th birthday this Jan. 25, this old piece finds an eerie relevance to current times.

In Marcos and Estrada, Duterte unfolded.

In Cory, only Leni. Thus, shall it again be?

Standing for UP

 

“THE COUNTRY’S premier state university has become a safe haven for enemies of the state."

Thus spake Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana of the University of the Philippines, thereby – in some senselessness – making imperative the unilateral termination of the 1989 DND-UP agreement requiring state forces to inform the state university before its personnel can enter campus grounds.

Signed between then UP president Jose Abueva and then Defense chief Fidel Ramos, the agreement also holds that military and police cannot enter any UP campus "except in cases of hot pursuit and similar occasions of emergency" or when assistance is requested by university officials.

An earlier agreement, the 1982 Soto-Enrile accord between then student leader Sonia Soto and then Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile, was signed to protect the autonomy of the university from military intervention, especially in protest rallies.

The “agreement” – Lorenzana presumably making the two as one and the same – he deemed merely a “gesture of courtesy” that is now “obsolete.”

What Lorenzana takes as some outdated privilege bestowed by the state is the very core of academic freedom, among all other freedoms upheld as human rights in a democratic state.   

"However, during the life of the agreement the University of the Philippines has become the breeding ground of intransigent individuals and groups whose extremist beliefs have inveigled students to join their ranks to fight against the government," he said in a statement, bereft of even but a shred of evidence to support his claim.

Lorenzana in effect there reducing UP students to herds of cattle easily led by the nose, even to slaughter.

Expectedly, outrage poured out of social media deluging Lorenzana.  

"Kung meron tayong due process, sana sinabi muna kung ano ang resulta ng compliance sa halip na pumasok sa red-tagging na wala namang batayan si Lorenzana dun sa kaniyang desisyon to abrogate nga ito," said UP journalism professor Danilo Arao.

Furthering: "Ang mensahe natin sa publiko, ngayon UP 'yan baka sa susunod PUP (Polytechnic University of the Philippines) na at iba pang unibersidad na walang kasunduan. Mas lalakas ang loob ng military at pulis sa paghahasik ng kaharasan."

Seconded Froilan Cariaga, chairperson of the UP Diliman Student Council: “Ngayon sinusubukan itong lusawin ng administrasyon ay malinaw siya na atake laban sa karapatang sibil ng mga estudyante at ng buong komunidad ng unibersidad at malinaw siyang atake sa academic freedom ng UP at ng iba pang pamantasan.”

UP alum and former student regent Sen. Francis Pangilinan, on Twitter: "Tinutulan natin ang panghihimasok ng diktador noon. UP has always been and will always be a citadel of freedom and democracy. Pakiusap lang, please don't mess with UP” referencing the so-called “Diliman Commune” of some 50 years ago when students barricaded the UP campus for days in protest of the Marcos administration still in its pre-martial law stage.

A "blatant disregard for students' historic win against campus militarization,” shared Youth Rep. Sarah Elago. "For education institutions to fulfill their significant role in upholding human rights and democracy, they must be protected from ruling regimes' undue pressures and dictates.”

 

Sonia’s dare

For her part, Sonia Soto, principal party to the eponymous accord with Enrile had this to say: "Nalungkot ako at nababahala. Para sa akin, ang UP-DND Agreement noong 1989 na nakabatay sa Soto-Enrile Accord noong 1982 ay kapwa resulta ng democratic reforms movement ng kabataan-estudyante na hindi dapat ganoon kadaling makaisang-panig na ibasura ng pamahalaan. Ipinaglaban namin ito noon.”

And dared: “Forty years ago, we made a stand. Today it is the turn of the young Isko/Iska to defend their institution."

Defend the institution. Uphold academic freedom.

Comes to mind here one of the greatest philosophical treatises in defense of the basic right of freedom of expression, John Milton’s Areopagitica, thus:  

“Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?”

So Lorenzana urged the UP Community to "work together to protect our students from extremism and destructive armed struggle” even as he warned that the DND will "not tolerate those who will violate the laws of the land in the guise of lawful public dissent, free assembly and free speech."

An abject admission, unwittingly, there of the utter defeat of the regime Lorenzana represents in that free and open encounter that is the UP system.

Milton, once more: “For who knows not that truth is strong next to the almighty; she needs no policies, nor stratagems, nor licensings to make her victorious, those are the shifts and the defences that error uses against her power: give her but room, and do not bind her when she sleeps…”

Abrogating – unilaterally at that – the UP-DND agreement is that very shift, that deceitful scheme, that error, indeed, evil, uses against the power of Truth.

  

Inutile

Frank in December

 

 Clueless in January

HIS ZEAL may have gotten the better of his discretion, to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Doubtless though, the more plausible excuse his minions can make for his history of consistent inconsistency is that he is in his dotage. On fentanyl. Or, even both.

Whatever, most manifest here is the correctness of his diagnosis of his own malady: “I am inutile.”