Category: the left

calling on the church, the integrated bar, and the communists

on facebook, duterte’s pa-thinking trolls have been bashing bashing bashing vp leni for being on vacation in the states during and after typhoon nina that hit her home province hard.  kesyo hindi daw dapat umalis in the first place, kesyo dapat umuwi na, now na, kesyo wala siyang kuwentang vice president, at kung ano ano pang panlalait na tuloytuloy lang, to the point na OA na, as though the vp had committed, were committing, an impeachable offense?  medyo over the top, guys.

i suppose it has everything to do with rumors of an attempt to oust duterte and replace him with leni before january 10 when, it is also rumored, the supreme court is set to replace leni with bongbong, which btw rendered rene saguisag incredulous (what with an indolent SC in the middle of a long break), and so you wonder why these pa-thinking peeps are even dignifying it, one of them even warning that if leni et al. should attempt a people power action, well, sila mismo, with mocha in the lead, playing joan of arc i guess, would respond in kind.  how exciting.

i suppose, too, that it is these same rumors that had the president flipflopping on martial law. just early this december he had said it would be “kalokohan,” he would not allow oppression, it did not do any good the first time around, blah blah blah.  but just before christmas he was suddenly lamenting that he couldn’t impose military rule without the ok of congress and the supreme court, and practically ordering that the charter be amended to allow him to do a marcos!  takot ako, seriously.

i suppose also that leni being in new york of all places is driving them paranoid.  easy to imagine that she’s cozying up to loida and, who knows, ex-ambassador goldberg?  UN human rights commissioners?  the CIA?  the senators markey, coons, and rubio?  the extrajudicial killings has rendered the president infamous, after all, his war on drugs failing to net any big fish but a lot of small fry who have no ex-deals to offer, not to speak of the bystanders, and the “innocent until proven guilty” that’s been honoured more in the breach than the observance in the last six months.

read david balangue’s Justice–Philippine style.  and manolo quezon’s Freedom from fear.  and this, from tony la viña, posted on facebook the day after his bloomberg TV interview on extrajudicial killings.

… we are nearing a point when legally and politically, whether intended or not, what is happening in the country will be considered by objective and independent international mechanisms as genocide. It’s the number and the typology of the victims, certainly not mainly pushers or definitely not drug lords, at most addicts and users with increasing number of innocents and almost universally poor. The evidence being gathered is damming and at some point will be overwhelming. It will not only have aid implications but there will be severe trade consequences once genocide is determined. Can ordinary citizens stop it other than self-restraint by the government? In my view, only the Church acting with such institutions like the Integrated Bar of the Philippines, and the communists by making human rights compliance a non-negotiable in the peace talks are in a position to make a difference here. The opposition is too weakened or compromised or complicit to even contribute to what has to be done. 

“self-restraint by the government” is a pie in the sky, given the president’s martial law talk.  and indeed, even the opposition (leni loida leila and LP, take note) is “too weakened or compromised or complicit to even contribute to what has to be done.”

but, yes, the church acting with such institutions like the integrated bar, and the communists by making human rights compliance a non-negotiable in the peace talks — they ARE in a position to make a difference.  especially the communists.  would that they rise to the occasion this time around.  not necessarily to oust duterte but, at the very least, to make. him. stop. the. killings.

joma sison, plaza miranda, ninoy aquino

it was while i was writing marginal notes to the ishmael bernal anti bio, grounding a “dialogue” between bernal and jorge arago (both leftists at some point) in the culture and history of their times, when i found myself forced to deal with senate president jovito salonga’s studied view that it was cpp chairman jose maria sison who had ordered the bombing of plaza miranda in august 1971, and not, as we all had believed, president marcos.

sison has always denied it.  of course.  but salonga was known for rectitude and probity; he would not have charged sison so unequivocally if there had been any doubt in his mind.  and in this light there is no ignoring related questions raised re ninoy aquino who was expected at that miting de avance of the liberal party of which he was secretary-general.  it is said that he was just delayed by a party that he had had to attend; but it is also said that he had been warned to stay away from plaza miranda by a kadre friend, thereby insinuating that ninoy had not only saved only his own skin, but even that he had been complicit in the bombing.

i wondered if that was why ninoy stayed and submitted to arrest in september 1972 instead of going underground or fleeing into exile — he felt that he deserved some punishment for plaza miranda?  perhaps he could have done something to prevent the carnage?  but what if maybe, if there had been a warning, it had come too late to warn anyone else?  more recently, as i was reading up on the affair and writing this blogpost in my head, i wondered if the discovery that sison was responsible for plaza miranda may have affected the way that senator salonga had felt about ninoy, given the latter’s admitted links to the cpp-npa.

steve salonga, a friend from u.p. days and on facebook today, was quick to enlighten me via private message:

I looked positively at those links [of Ninoy with the CPP-NPA]. That happened way before Miranda and has no relation to later events. Most of what you hear about that today was actually trumped up ‘evidence’ during Ninoy’s military trial for murder.

Dad began hearing the ‘scuttle-butt’ about JOMA ordering the Plaza Miranda operations as early as 1982. Although it wouldn’t be until 1990 that testimony at a senate blue ribbon comm hearing would expose the whole fiasco.

The rumors that Ninoy knew about the bombing before the fact are true, but then, so did we. At that time we had raw intel of a plan to bomb our campaign sorties. But nothing definite. After Miranda, the rumors about Ninoy surfaced. But neither Dad nor I believed any of it. We knew Ninoy was at a party with Doy Laurel at the Sky Room at Jai Alai. We also knew he would follow shortly after that party. We never changed our mind about his innocence.

just the same it boggles the mind that when ninoy came home from exile, he timed it so that he landed on the tarmac on the 21st of august 1983, twelve years to the day since the plaza miranda bombing.  at the very least, it tells me that august 21, 1971 was a critical juncture in his life that he deemed worth marking.  with his death, as it turned out.

*

Truth about blast first told in Sierra Madre by Jovito Salonga
Revolution by assassination? by Max Soliven
Days of Shame: August 21, 1971 and 1983 by Rigoberto Tiglao
Once upon a ride to the Plaza Miranda bombing Part 1 by Mauro Gia Samonte
Part 2 …  Conclusion 
Ninoy Aquino, the Plaza Miranda bombing and Japanese collaborators
Jose Maria Sison Arrested by Dutch Govt for Murder
Victor Corpuz, Joma Sison, Martial Law, Plaza Miranda Bombing

COMELEC, coincidences, crossroads

COMELEC wants us to believe it was pure coincidence that smartmatic’s marlon garcia tweaked some code (to change ? to ñ) just when bongbong marcos’s 1 million-vote lead started to dwindle and leni robredo started catching up, allegedly in smooth flows, that now sees robredo ahead by 200k or so and claiming victory.

pure coincidence daw.  nagkataon lang.  walang koneksyon.  i’m sorry but in occult thought all coincidences are significant.  sharing here some of my essay Falling chandeliers and other omens that inquirer published back in 1998 soon after erap’s inauguration when he first stepped into the palace for his first cabinet meeting.

Filipinos are a superstitious people. We see meaningful relationships between apparently unconnected events that happen to occur at the same time or in close sequence: the number 13 and the Estrada presidency, the chandelier and the inaugural, the chandelier and the number 13. It comes from an intuitive grasp of Carl Jung’s concept of synchronicity which, going beyond science (cause-and-effect), “takes the coincidence of events in space and time as meaning something more than mere chance” and which is the very principle underlying the use of the I Ching and astrology (among other occult arts) in making sense of “the essential situation prevailing” for any one person or group at any moment in time.

This is why we continue to be disturbed by the story of a Palace chandelier crashing to the floor just a few seconds after President Estrada passed beneath it. The President had just taken his oath that noon in Barasoain. He had just arrived in Malacañang that afternoon and was on his way to swear in the new Cabinet officials when the chandelier crashed. Happening as it did in the first few hours of the new administration, it changed the quality and temper not just of the rest of the day – hitherto happy and hopeful – but of the rest of the presidential term.

Clearly, a warning. If it were not an attempt on the President’s life, then a warning of danger, of sinister human forces at play. If an accident, then of forces less menacing but quite as startling and disturbing. The message is, expect the unexpected, a pattern has been set.

the rest is history.  we all know what happened to the erap presidency.  which is to say that COMELEC ignores allegations of electronic cheating at its own, and the nation’s, peril. COMELEC asks too much of the citizenry when its officers ask us to take their word for it, when they ask for our trust, a trust they still have to earn.

i know a recount, or re-feed, or an audit — whatever it will take to give us the true count of votes cast for president, vice-president, and senators — will take time, and i’ve been expecting COMELEC to play the no-more-time card.  but the president will be proclaimed in time, no doubt, and we just have to make sure nothing happens to him, and maybe stop stressing him out, lol, until we have a vice-president.

but seriously.  this is too important to sweep under the proverbial rug yet again.  i hope leni wins, but fairly and squarely please.  if bongbong has the numbers pala, well, it’s our failure, not his.

meanwhile, the Left is at a crossroads, too.  that was a stroke of genius indeed on the part of the incoming prez.  in-out na lang basta ang mga komunista, lol.  and the challenge is to level up, guys, show us your stuff, or forever hold your peace.

cut PNoy some slack, and digong, too

i don’t know what the Left is up to, but between jose maria sison all the way from europe and satur ocampo here at home along with the makabayan bloc in congress, they sure are making a lot of noise, making kulit the presumptive prez about charging and arresting the incumbent prez (and his dbm sec) for plunder once the latter steps down.

come on, guys, cut PNoy some slack.  why can’t it wait?   it’s just another month and a half.  let’s give him the space to exit with some dignity naman.  talo na nga ang manok niya, konting simpatiya naman.  surely you know how that feels.

and take it easy with presumptive prez digong, too.  all this whining about digong’s “neoliberal” 8-point economic program is premature.  right now the duterte camp’s priority, i would think, is to calm the market.  which is good.  so give him, and nation, a break naman please.

unless, of course, the idea is simply to agitate, strike everywhere na lang, never mind that, given the disgraceful antics of COMELEC and smartmatic, there’s enough agitation already over the counting of votes, not to speak of bongbong marcos’s strong showing.  i can’t believe nga that you guys don’t seem to care how many votes your candidates truly got, kahit pa talo na.

or is all the noise in aid of distracting us from the fact that you guys lost this one yet again and risa didn’t.  but isn’t that balanced out by joma sison’s direct line to duterte?  naguguluhan tuloy kami.  lousy PR, guys.

you had it coming, this from duterte spokesman peter tiu laviña, no less, who i am told knows whereof he speaks, especially with regard to the extreme Left.  his statement in full, publicly shared on facebook 12 hours ago:

A mistake not corrected becomes an error. A mistake may not be intentional, but to commit the same could be fatal. Leftist groups have rejected the hands of friendship and cooperation by the incoming Duterte administration by mouthing their usual criticism of others but not undertaking their own criticism, self-criticism.

They made a patented error in reading the national situation and made a grave one in pulsing the mood of our people. They did it in 1985 and did it again in the 2016 election. They boycotted the election in 1986 and went with another candidate 30 years later. For groups that claim that they are patriotic, nationalist and anti-imperialist, many were aghast in their decision to go with someone who abandoned our country and once pledged allegiance to the US.

At least their units in Mindanao which were more grounded did not go with the selfish, myopic and opportunist posturing of its national higher organs. In their desire to push one of their national officials to be senator, they rush to a hasty decision rejecting calls to wait for the maturing of the political situation before deciding. Having done these mistakes, they want to continue with their old ways of critiquing, critiquing, critiquing. I am truly sorry for these leftist groups which will be left out in the march of history with their dogma and belligerent styles and methods of work. They need to right their wrongs and stop becoming roadblocks to genuine change. They should bring down their utopian dreams closer to reality. Sustained gains even little by little here and there to advance the cause of the masses are better than none at all. To perpetuate the sufferings of the masses is treasonous, a betrayal to serve them.

Their ways of pressuring others with the barrel of the gun and noise by the minority are now passe.

Here is an unsolicited advice to them – dialogue with the incoming government instead of mounting black propaganda to be heard. And listen to your units in Mindanao. Otherwise, you will be proving to be yet another bunch of trapos.