How Philippines Communists Get Their Guns
While the Communist Party of the Philippines/New Peoples Army, enjoys considerable funding and support from foreign sources, it gets its guns the old fashioned way-it steals them.
PRESS RELEASEInformation Bureau
Communist Party of the Philippines
CPP congratulates NPA for "big firearms haul" in Davao raid, urges more tactical offensives
April 8, 2007
Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) spokesperson Gregorio "Ka Roger" Rosal issued today the following statement congratulating the New People's Army-Merardo Arce Command (NPA-MAC) for the "notably successful raid and seizure of arms" of the Davao Penal Colony in the early morning hours of April 7.
The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and the entire revolutionary movement congratulate the New People's Army-Merardo Arce Command (NPA-MAC) for the successful raid on the Davao Penal Colony (Dapeco) in the early hours of April 7. Without firing a single shot, NPA Red fighters were able to totally control the area and within 20 minutes haul in 101 assorted firearms, including 50 M16 and Carbine rifles from the Dapeco's armory. It was one of the biggest NPA arms hauls from the enemy in recent years.
The big firearms haul makes the April 7 raid a notably successful tactical offensive. This large caché will arm more than a hundred new recruits into the NPA waiting for arms to join the next tactical offensives.
The Filipino people, revolutionary forces and units of the New People's Army (NPA) celebrate this victory. It inspires them further to intensify the people's war, the mass struggles and other forms of struggle against the Arroyo regime.
The CPP calls on the entire NPA to emulate the April 7 raid of the Davao Penal Colony, carry out more tactical offensives nationwide and seize more arms from the enemy. The CPP challenges all NPA units to carry out one tactical offensive after another, surpass the Dapeco arms haul, punish the worst fascist criminals and plunderers, deal bigger blows against the Arroyo regime and raise the people's war to a new and higher level.
PRESS RELEASEInformation Bureau
Communist Party of the Philippines
CPP congratulates NPA for "big firearms haul" in Davao raid, urges more tactical offensives
April 8, 2007
Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) spokesperson Gregorio "Ka Roger" Rosal issued today the following statement congratulating the New People's Army-Merardo Arce Command (NPA-MAC) for the "notably successful raid and seizure of arms" of the Davao Penal Colony in the early morning hours of April 7.
The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and the entire revolutionary movement congratulate the New People's Army-Merardo Arce Command (NPA-MAC) for the successful raid on the Davao Penal Colony (Dapeco) in the early hours of April 7. Without firing a single shot, NPA Red fighters were able to totally control the area and within 20 minutes haul in 101 assorted firearms, including 50 M16 and Carbine rifles from the Dapeco's armory. It was one of the biggest NPA arms hauls from the enemy in recent years.
The big firearms haul makes the April 7 raid a notably successful tactical offensive. This large caché will arm more than a hundred new recruits into the NPA waiting for arms to join the next tactical offensives.
The Filipino people, revolutionary forces and units of the New People's Army (NPA) celebrate this victory. It inspires them further to intensify the people's war, the mass struggles and other forms of struggle against the Arroyo regime.
The CPP calls on the entire NPA to emulate the April 7 raid of the Davao Penal Colony, carry out more tactical offensives nationwide and seize more arms from the enemy. The CPP challenges all NPA units to carry out one tactical offensive after another, surpass the Dapeco arms haul, punish the worst fascist criminals and plunderers, deal bigger blows against the Arroyo regime and raise the people's war to a new and higher level.
posted by Trevor Loudon at
4/09/2007 01:23:00 PM
2 Comments:
Somehow, I am getting the feeling that's not the only source of where these Communists get their arms.
First things first.
Mr. Trevor Loudon states that terms like “semi-feudalism”, “semi-colonialism”, “imperialism”, “fascism”, “bourgeoisie” and sorts (basically, terms which I employed in my reaction to his previous blog post) are Marxist jargons, and by using Marxist jargons in my statement he concludes, my credibility is therefore destroyed.
For your information Mr. Loudon, the above-mentioned terms are terms not exclusively used within the Marxian parlance: they are no novelty made by Marx! Those terms have been used, also, by ACADEMICIANS, INTELLECTUALS, historians, political economists, literati, to refer and accurately describe phenomena, realities, historical forces and events; thinkers and practitioners who are not necessarily operating within the Marxist problematique. Post-structuralist/post-colonial critics like Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, Homi K. Bhabha and other renowned and celebrated philosophers made use of the term (some of them even critical, if not hostile, to Marxism). What this fact tells us about your Mr. Loudon, is your IGNORANCE regarding the meanings and uses of those terms; your intellectual depravity. Your statement is practically a cold-war knee-jerk reaction which sees RED whenever such terms come across their field of (myopic) vision. I bet you don’t even know the definition of those terms, nor are you acquainted with the philosophers that I have mentioned. But if you feel like laundering your imbecility to the reading public, go ahead, after all this is your blog site.
Mr. Loudon states: “Your affiliation to WFDY does imply the communist nature of your organisation as virtually every other WFDY affiliate is OPENLY communist”. Unfortunately Mr. Loudon failed to deconstruct my previous statement that ANAKBAYAN is an organization that has its own founding principles (which are in fact not “communist” by strict Marxist-Leninist standards, but are caricatured as such by those arrogant people who happen to be incredibly ignorant at the same time) and we unite with other organizations on the basis of those principles. Our strategy of forging alliances does not entail our absolute adoption of the ideologies and perspectives of those organizations and groups we are making alliance with.
Mr. Loudon merely repeats what he previously said. Unfortunately, mere insistence does not make a lie true. Nevertheless Mr. Loudon is adamant: “There could be another reason why your government names your organisation as "communist"-because it is communist. ANAKBAYAN is also close to the League of Filipino Students, The KMU, KMP, NDF and several other Communist Party of the Philippines fronts”. And then he says: “This is not debatable, but well documented fact, easily confirmed with a little research”. That is if resource for the research is acquired in the archives of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (which, for the benefit of the reading public, has failed to produce even an iota of credible evidence which can be brought up to the court that will establish legal organizations so-called links to the underground movement) As for the AFP and Mr. Loudon, they can only forever make hilarious connections-concoctions which may temporarily function as a source of entertainment for us Filipino leftists. I suggest that Mr. Loudon, now start to make his own “research”, contact and make the necessary arrangements with the publisher of “Harry Potter”. It will certainly sell in the “fantasy sections” of bookshops.
Mr. Loudon inquires me: “…why would you sign an internet petition, announcing your affiliation to ANAKBAYAN if that would put your life in danger?” The above mentioned internet petition, in fact, was for the post-structuralist philosopher Jacques Derrida who recently passed away (do you know Mr. Loudon who Jacques Derrida is, have you read some of his works? can your brain actually process his ideas?). My affiliation with ANAKBAYAN in itself does not put my life and security in danger. And it shouldn’t be. My classmates, professors and friends are very well aware that I am a member of the said organization. We intelligently discuss and argue with each on the basis of the validity and soundness of our analyses regarding issues we present to them. But you Mr. Loudon, in a deductive (il)logical fashion, first categorically imputed my organization as being a communist front and then proceeded to abstract from therein that I, sine qua non, is a supporter of the communist movement (which amounts to the same thing, that I am a communist).
Mr. Loudon would like to establish connections out of what in reality, disparate events and spaces (my signing of a petition in the internet wherein I indicated my affiliation with ANAKBAYAN (a legal, UNARMED, youth organization) and his “revelation” to the public through this blogsite regarding my affiliation with ANAKBAYAN (which now (dis)figures in his site and in his imagination as a “communist front”) He is making comparisons and basing observations out of two very much distinct – to borrow Michel Foucault’s term – discursive contexts/environment (I suggest he study the linguist Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the dialogic character of utterances as not absolute in themselves, not enacted in a void or in isolation but rather executed and addressed for and within a specific, concrete sign-system with its own internal epistemological and semiotic processes). This answers Mr. Loudon’s stupid question for me: “Your government has already labelled ANAKBAYAN a "communist front", a fact you have confirmed above. Why then would you openly affiliate to the organisation in a forum as public as the internet?”
What I am vehemently protesting is Mr. Loudon’s distasteful act of maligning/slandering of legal, UNARMED, progressive organizations like ANAKBAYAN as communist fronts. By doing so, Mr. Loudon becomes no different from the terrorist/fascist henchmen of Mrs. Arroyo in the AFP.
We in Anakbayan firmly assert our right to legal recognition and operation as we are not violating the law nor have we inflicted any harm against any fellow. We are just claiming our right to freely organize and express our own opinions and views; rights that are enshrined, and guaranteed to us in the Bill of Rights of the 1986 Philippine Constitution.
The first comment that I had posted onto his blog site was intended to encourage debates, stimulate honest-to-goodness intellectual discussions and exchange. Unfortunately, Mr. Loudon has a different agenda in mind. I went to the wrong web page.
Mr. Loudon demagogically proclaims his continued adherence to “free speech”. Mr. Loudon has to qualify his use of the word “free” here for it is already a well established truth that this phrase can also be used to suppress and silence voices which threaten the harmony and stability of the Symbolic Order. What Mr. Loudon probably means is that I am free to rant and rave versus the state as long as I do not infect others to do the same, and of course as long as I do not challenge the hegemony of Capital. In short, I am free to obey the normative rules of Mrs. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and her toy soldiers in the AFP.
Let us further peruse Mr. Loudon’s blog post: “If you wish to align yourself to such criminals, by all means do so, but don't deny me my right to point out the facts”. Mr. Loudon still needs to provide ample proof that I am indeed aligned with what he calls as “criminal” (the CPP-NPA, he means) before this statement could hold ground (his accusations against the CPP-NPA as a mere band of “criminals” requires another forum, he can not just simply say that the CPP-NPA is “criminal” without further elaboration). Mr. Loudon claims that I am depriving him of his right to point out the “facts”. As I have said previously the “facts” he is referring to are no facts: they are “regurgitated, stale, cold-war rhetoric” we Filipino activists already heard from the black-propaganda machines and outfits of the military.
And may I also dare say that Mr. Loudon is not simply pointing out “facts” (in his subjective interpretation of the term). He is rather giving it a certain narrative structure and form to fit his pre-determined premises (or ideological biases). Mr. Loudon himself is not free (nor will he ever be) from the structuring and structural operations of ideology (for ideology –or as the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls it, symbolic power – is that invisible power, like the Freudian unconscious, which can be exercised only with complicity of those who do not want to know that they are subject to it or even that they themselves exercise it.).
(In some instances, Mr. Loudon couldn’t even get some of his so-called “facts” straight. Anakbayan is not an electoral wing of BAYAN (New Patriotic Alliance). Anakbayan is a mass-organization of Filipino youths and is a member-organization of BAYAN. We have our own partylist running for the upcoming national elections – Kabataan Party (Youth Party) – of which Anakbayan is one of the charter members. Would you readers let yourself be deluded by someone who supposedly points us the way to truth, when even minor details such as this Mr. Loudon can’t get right?)
Further into the fray.
Listen again to Mr. Loudon’s violent fulminations: “I don't doubt that Ivan's life might one day be at risk, if he maintains his current affiliations. The choice is in his hands. He doesn't have to support communists.” He says the choice is in my hands. But let me ask you Mr. Loudon, who determined and selected the “choices” laid out for me? The choice you said is whether I should or not support the “communists” – or to put it in a more correct manner – whether I should continue my membership with Anakbayan or not. As you see, the State (and Mr. Loudon) pre-selected the “choices” for me. This creates the illusion that I am, in fact, free to determine my security, future and life. What goes unquestioned is the power relations that exist between those who pre-selected my options and the subject who is (imagined to be) free to do the picking. The choosing subject is actually free to move (or pick) within the parameters of the existing social order constructed by those who are in power (or Mr. Loudon’s imaginary of pre-determined set of choices).
“In many ways (sic!) admire people like Ivan Phell Enrile and Edgardo Alarcon Leon. They take big risks for what they believe in. Unfortunately, what they believe in is evil and results in much death and destruction”. Indeed, flattery is also a form of rebuke especially if it emanates from the dirty mouths of those who practically knew none. Normative and ethico-religious assertions and judgments, alas, can never be admitted as a form of intelligent debate.
If there is anything fruitful that has resulted from this “interesting” encounter, I think it will be the fact that the public has finally seen the true political and ideological color of Mr. Loudon. Marxists (here I am openly acknowledging the term’s ideational/paradigmatic roots to Marxist discourse) have a term for the likes of Mr. Loudon: clerico-fascists. A clerico-fascist is someone who preaches social justice but are in fact ideological allies of the reactionary state. They endlessly babble about “freedom”, “potentials”, “working in the same direction” “responsibility” etc., concepts that will only hold true if they are used within the confines of the existing social relations. They are the real terrorists, Hitlers of the new world order from which humanity and civilization should be rescued.
“I suggest if either objects to being named, they should change their allegiances to something more positive and try to make amends for the damage they have done.”
With this, I am left with an expression that any intellectual could possibly reply: “huh?!”
I. P. Enrile
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