By Prof. Jose Maria Sison
Chairperson
International League of Peoples’ Struggle
2 July 2011

On behalf of the International League of Peoples’ Struggle, I wish to express warmest greetings of solidarity to the organizers, the film makers and all participants in the AGITPROP International Film Festival.

For their success in organizing the festival, we congratulate the Southern Tagalog eXposure, Mayday Multimedia, Tudla productions, KODAO productions and all the cooperating multimedia and cultural groups.

We welcome and appreciate the AGITPROP film festival as a highly significant contribution to the growing international solidarity movement of the people along the anti-imperialist and democratic line. It provides a venue for a wide range of films that present the dismal social realities and the aspirations of the people of the world for greater freedom, democracy, social justice and all-round development.

Today, the movies that dominate the international film industry conceal or obscure the realities that are laid bare by the films in AGITPROP. They serve only as a tool to distract and bend the consciousness of the people towards subservience to the dictates of imperialism and reaction. This is also true in the case of other cultural art forms that inundate the mainstream media.

Since more than a century ago, US imperialism has used culture, the arts and the mass media to help maintain and expand its power, to manipulate the consciousness of the people and draw them away from resistance. For this purpose, it has propagated decadent bourgeois culture and values that are distinctively colonial, feudal, patriarchal, selfish, racist and fascist.

In recent decades, the US imperialists have systematically generated a culture of greed under the policy of neoliberal globalization and a culture of repression and aggression under the policy of global war of terror. They have misrepresented the forces and people that oppose and fight against imperialist plunder and war as terrorists, enemies of democracy and development and have targeted them for suppression.

US imperialism is the No. 1 terrorist, exploiter and oppressor of the world. The global economic and financial crisis that is ravaging the world today is rooted in the drive of the monopoly capitalists for superprofits at the expense of the people. We can expect the crisis to become worse, inflict more suffering on the people and incite them to struggle for their own national and social liberation

In this context, the AGITPROP festival plays an important role. It shows us the way to counter cultural imperialism with revolutionary cultural work and advance the people’s struggle with the use of films and other art forms. These do not merely expose the bitter realities but they also constitute a direct action against imperialism and all the social ills that come with it.

We must have more AGITPROP festivals to inspire the artists, the cultural workers and the entire people to take the road of revolutionary resistance against imperialism and reaction.##