By Prof. Jose Maria Sison
NDFP Chief Political Consultant
April 2, 2018
The revolutionary movement of the people and particular communities have strongly condemned the atrocities being committed by the reactionary armed forces, police and auxiliaries. They have intensified various forms of struggle against the US-directed Duterte regime. They have effectively exposed the self-defeating military psywar claims of the regime that it has practically wiped out the New People´s Army through fake surrenders and fake encounters.
But DND Secretary Delfin Lorenzana persists in the delusion that under Oplan Kapayapaan the coercive apparatuses of the US-propped big comprador-landlord state are winning the war against the NPA and continues to advice President Duterte against negotiating peace with the NDFP in the same way that he and his likes had previously convinced Gloria M. Arroyo and Benigno Aquino III that that their strategic campaign plans of military suppression (Oplan Bantay Laya I and II and Oplan Bayanihan) could defeat and destroy the NPA.
To rationalize the delusion that the NPA can be defeated, Lorenzana denies that the NPA is fighting for the Filipino people´s national sovereignty and independence, democracy, social justice and economic development at this stage of the Philippine revolution and misrepresents the NPA as the cause of underdevelopment and mass poverty in the Philippines and as a supposed failure in waging the armed revolution in nearly 50 years.
As a rabid reactionary, Lorenzana obscures and denies the fact that the cause of underdevelopment and mass poverty in the Philippines is US and other foreign monopoly powers which take out superprofits from the country and the conniving local reactionary classes of big compradors, landlords and corrupt high officials of the reactionary government.
The armed resistance through the NPA is the response of the oppressed and exploited people to the oppressive and exploitative ruling system, which keeps the Philippines underdeveloped and impoverished. The NPA is not the cause of underdevelopment and mass poverty but is the instrument of the Filipino people to fight for national and social liberation.
Lorenzana mocks the NPA as supposedly a failure in waging armed revolution. But he obscures and denies the fact that against tremendous odds the NPA has grown and gained strength nationwide from its modest beginnings in the second district of Tarlac, with only 9 automatic rifles and 26 single shot rifles and handguns.
As a map can easily show, the NPA is now in at least 73 out of 81 Philippine provinces. It has thousands of rifles. It operates in more than 100 guerrilla fronts. It is supported, as auxiliary and reserve forces, by the people´s militia in thousands of barangays and the self-defense units of revolutionary mass organizations. It is based on the strength and support of millions of organized and unorganized masses.
It is the guarantor for the existence of thousands of local organs of political power at the level of the barangay, municipality, district and province. These democratic organs of political power constitute the revolutionary government based mainly in the countryside. This government is steadily gaining strength in stages and advancing wave upon upon to ultimately install the power of the working people in cities.
The people´s army and the people´s war are not only an outstanding phenomenon in Philippine history and contemporary times but also in the global arena of the struggle between imperialism or monopoly capitalism and the broad masses of the people led by the working class. They are the torch bearer not only of the new democratic revolution in the Philippines but of the world proletarian revolution.
They serve as the base for the thinkers, leaders and masses of the Philippine revolution in supporting the line that while US imperialism appeared to be winner in the Cold War because of the revisionist betrayal of socialism and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US is now in the process of accelerated decline since the financial meltdown of 2008 and is now in what Pentagon itself calls the postprimacy period, after wasting so many trillions of dollars in promoting the neoliberal economic policy and neoconservative policy of aggressive wars from 1991 onwards.
The US and China are now the main competitors and rivals in what seems to be a Thucydides Trap in a multipolar world. The inter-imperialist contradictions are intensifying, worsening almost every day the rigors of crises, social disorder and wars, accelerating the decline and decomposition of the entire global system of capitalism and generating the conditions for the resurgence and ultimate victory of revolutionary movements for people´s democracy and socialism over imperialism and all reaction.###
