Statement by Prof. Jose Maria Sison
NDFP Chief Political Consultant
November 1, 2018
Like his master Duterte, DND Secretary Delfin Lorenzana claims that the AFP is on track to destroying the New People’s Army in the second quarter of 2019.
Not so long ago, he claimed that the NPA had the strength of only 4000 to 5000 in contrast to the previous false claim of the AFP that the NPA had the strength of only 2000 to 4000.
Now, he claims that 3,443 NPA fighters have already surrendered and that 1,162 have been either arrested or killed. These amount to the total figure of 4605.
Lorenzana is obviously lying. Instead of claiming that the AFP has already fully or nearly decimated the NPA, he makes the false prediction that his objective or pipe dream will be fulfilled in the second quarter of 2019.
He is a big liar and he does not know how to do arithmetic. What makes him a bigger liar is that he misrepresents as real surrenders the false surrenders staged by the AFP and its paramilitary agents.
The thousands of NPA fighters are far beyond 5000 in more than 110 guerrilla fronts in 73 provinces and are intact, alive and kicking. They are principled, disciplined, intelligent and vigorous in carrying out extensive and intensive guerrilla warfare on an ever widening and deepening mass base.
The NPA fighters are augmented by tens of thousands of people’s militia members and the hundreds of thousands of members in self-defense units of the rural-based mass organizations. They are the inexhaustible auxiliary and reserve force of the NPA.
Like his master Duterte, Lorenzana does not understand that the NPA has arisen and developed as a result of the following:
- the ever worsening chronic crisis of the semicolonial and semifeudal ruling system;
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the intolerable suffering of the people from escalating oppression and exploitation and the people’s desire and struggle for revolutionary change;
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the self-defeating contradictions among the factions of the reactionary classes; and
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the comprehensive development of the Communist Party of the Philippines as the revolutionary party of the working class, the New People’s Army, the National Democratic Front of the Philippines, the mass organizations and the organs of democratic political power.
Ultra-reactionaries like Duterte and Lorenzana do not understand that so long as the basic problems of the people are not properly and adequately addressed, the people’s armed resistance to the semicolonial and semi-feudal ruling system will grow in strength and advance from victory to victory.
It has been demonstrated in the last 50 years of Philippine history that neither the Marcos fascist dictatorship nor the pseudo-democratic regimes can destroy the NPA.
A grossly traitorous, tyrannical, brutal, corrupt, bankrupt and mendacious regime like that of Duterte cannot destroy a people’s army that is correctly led by the revolutionary party of the proletariat and that has accumulated strength and has become tempered in so many battles in 50 years.
The NPA will not be defeated by any amount of mass murders and fake surrenders that the AFP, the PNP and their auxiliaries can carry out. The escalating oppression and exploitation will only engender more armed resistance and more revolutionary victories by the people.###
