Written by: RJ LEDESMA
Editorial Cartoon by: JAZIEL ANN SEBALLOS

During the sham senate hearing on red-tagging last week, activists from Bayan and legislators from the Makabayan bloc were challenged to condemn the CPP-NPA. Their interlocutors from the military claim that this condemnation will prove, once and for all, that they aren’t high ranking cadres of the underground movement posing as legal activists.

Bayan Muna Rep. Carlos Zarate and former congressman Teddy Casiño refused to condemn the alleged “terrorist” groups. Zarate further explains that there are legitimate social and historical reasons for armed rebellion. They add that denouncing them as enemies of the state will not address the root causes of armed conflict.

Military officials took this refusal as a sign of their complicity. It is clear that this hearing is not a genuine investigation on the allegations hurled at the progressive groups. Instead, it is just a way for the military to further their witch-hunting and red scare propaganda. The Senate has given them a larger platform to spew state-sanctioned lies and to gaslight progressive individuals.

In all that hullabaloo, there is a truth that the feeble-minded military men seemingly tend to overlook. They refuse to acknowledge that our nation was forged through violent armed struggle by revolutionaries against our colonizers. So Zarate was right: armed rebellion is not merely an act of sedition against well-meaning people. It is a historical inevitability as caused by the continuing oppression of our nation by imperialists and their local compradors. Most of the time, people take arms not because they want to, but because they have no other choice.

If this regime was genuine in its solution to the armed conflict, they will take this into consideration. But why does their mindset remain completely ahistorical? Simply because they belong to the dustbins of history. This historical truth scares them so much because to confront it would mean to acknowledge that they are the oppressors, the reason for the continuing violence, poverty and corruption. They are the very reasons why the masses rise up. To acknowledge all these is to have to act against their own existence.

This is also the reason why their foundations are built on lies propagated over and over again. The truth of our history challenges the very existence of the reactionary State, as it has continuously been co-opted by forces that hinder genuine national liberation.

This is why the image of revolutionaries— especially Bonifacio— is only palatable to them when it speaks to their own imagined white-washed versions of nationhood. Images of revolutionaries, for the reactionary forces, are mere markers of shallow nationalism. The life and works of Rizal are in the curriculum, but we have yet to seriously consider the works of Bonifacio as mandatory study for our youth. In fact, if Bonifacio was alive today, he would have a bullet in his head by the AFP. He would have been an enemy of this reactionary state.

During the hearing, military officials also cite the Pambansa Demokratikong Paaralan (PADEPA) courses of National Democractic organizations, such as Anakbayan and League of Filipino Students, as proof of supposed terrorist indoctrination. The truth is PADEPA courses are not underground at all, and these courses only aim to shed light on the material conditions of the Philippines and the reasons for its continuing poverty and exploitation. Through PADEPA, young activists also learn about the nation’s history of armed resistance against various oppressors, especially Bonifacio’s 1896 revolution defeating the Spanish colonial forces.

Why then is the State threatened by all these? Why are they going after unarmed youth and legal activists who have nothing on them but knowledge of history and a heart for radical change? Why have we become the narrowest targets?

To put it simply, they do this because they have no interest in confronting the true ills of our nation. This reactionary state was built to reinforce the status quo of imperial domination and local exploitation. The men of the AFP and PNP are all complicit in this violence. They are the very enemies the revolutionaries, like Bonifacio, are fighting against.

In their desperate silencing of dissent, more and more people will rise up and continue the unfinished 1896 revolution towards national liberation, armed or not. Andres Bonifacio is well and alive today, and they are afraid.