… For journalism that still cherishes the critical role that obituaries play in informing the broader world about those who recently passed away and what their deaths mean, the recent passing of Jose Maria Sison at 83 in the Netherlands would have produced journalism at its best and most exploratory form. The reason is whether you have the political persuasion of retired General Parlade/Lorraine Badoy or that of Luis Jalandoni, it is undeniable that Mr. Sison is one of the most consequential Filipinos of the 20th century. There is no Right-Left debate on this because it is a settled issue.
Jose Maria Sison or Joma presumably must have been inspired by Jose Marti and Fidel Castro. The struggle he led, though, did not have the success of the Cuban version and is currently swimming against the current in a broader world that has lost its appetite for armed revolution as a means of seizing state power.
In some corners, Joma is demonized and cursed, blamed for a long-running communist insurgency that has caused many deaths, much anguish and the nation’s seeming economic paralysis. We still remember the names Mr. Duterte called him, with the accompanying expletives. A national villain like no other Mr. Sison was to the former president.
In some quarters, Joma is hailed as the founding father of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and its armed wing, the New People’s Army (NPA), which has bannered the fight for national liberation since the 1960s.
Even the so-called rejectionists, who left the CPP after a fallout with Mr. Sison over his supposedly ideological rigidity, have ambivalent sentiments about him. They vilify and deify him at the same time, but they in no way have diminished the outsized role that he played in influencing the life of our nation. Note that he was the intellectual father of the longest-running communist insurgency in the world. The old Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas was a moribund organization still tied to the apron strings of the dour Soviet Politburo when Joma cut ties, then repudiated the old guards called the Lavaites in 1969 and aligned the new party’s fight with a fresher formulation called MLMTT (Marx-Lenin-Mao Tse Tung) thought. In that year, Mao’s China was still a communist experiment 20 years after its triumphal march to Beijing by a coalition led by peasants who “encircled the city from the countryside.”
The 21st century has been tragic to Mr. Sison. Leftists who rejected his call for ideological purity asked him, some in disrespectful tones, to “read Gramsci instead of Lenin.” From a peak of 25,000 in the 1980s, the NPA supposedly is down to just about 2,000 fighters today. Marxists guerrillas elsewhere have either made peace with their governments or been rendered irrelevant. Former role models, Russia and China, are now dismissed as part of an “arc of authoritarianism,” not true Marxist nations.
But even those negativities cannot downplay the consequential life of Mr. Sison. A man with a sense of history would have merited obituaries that trace his roots as part of a landowning clan in Ilocos Sur, his university days, his poetry, and his decision to turn his back on his class origin to lead a Marxist, Leninist and Maoist revolution.
The obits should critique his two books on Philippine society with the thesis that it was decadent, bankrupt and beyond reform whose salvation lies in armed struggle. With “US imperialism” now more of a shibboleth than the scourge of former colonies like the Philippines, they should ask if the two books still serve their purpose amid new revolutionary conditions.
A second look at the doctrine encircling the city from the countryside deserves to be part of the obituaries.
Meanwhile, the country’s literary figures should appraise Mr. Sison’s poetry in their obits for him
Of course, expansive coverage of his demise will not come. TikTok seems to have canceled what is left of the country’s sense of history. When that dries up, a nation loses interest in the death of a man who mattered, hate him or love him.
I never wanted to write about obituaries this holiday season, but this piece about Jose Maria Sison has to be written. Merry Chtristmas, Pilipinas.
MICHAEL TAN: Still asking why
https://opinion.inquirer.net/159818/still-asking-why
They were good times, the ’50s and ’60s. World War II seemed distant, the world recovered from the war’s devastation. The Philippines was developing, and a middle class was emerging.
The baby boomers, those born in the early years after the war, were entering college with high hopes for a bright future.
But the 1960s were marked, too, by increasing global tumult, with the baby boomers, who had benefited from the growing prosperity, asking many questions about persistent—even worsening—poverty.
In the Philippines, close family ties meant these baby boomers dutifully attended weekend family reunions, listening to elders with a litany of complaints about government inefficiency and corruption, and personal accounts of having to bribe the police and government officials, oh and, pare, can you get me a calling card from your friend the general so I won’t have to argue with the police?
There would be complaints about rising prices, including “blue seal” cigarettes, which were imported, mostly stateside, smuggled into the country and openly sold in the streets.
Oh, and why don’t the police do something about those squatters and the street children and the beggars? Everyone had their stories to tell about “lazy” household help and office staff, and how they were just having too many children.
In between the complaints, parents updated each other about children sent abroad to study, or who have found a job and settled down in Los Angeles, New York, and how other siblings might follow.
The solutions were always to be found in Mother America. Our failings in the Philippines were attributed to our not having followed the American models of development.
There were dissonant voices questioning those models—in Congress, Claro M. Recto, Lorenzo Tañada, Jose Diokno. Universities were becoming restless, too; in 1964, a spectacled professor named Jose Ma. Sison formed the Kabataang Makabayan (KM), whose youthful membership quickly swelled.
But makabayan, nationalism, was a dirty word, as was aktibista.
In 1965, the young and charismatic Ferdinand Marcos Sr. was elected president, promising better times, but the corruption and inefficiency worsened, as did social unrest.
“Poor” was no longer some abstraction. In universities, professors began to talk about “class,” and in discussion groups, students realized they had some tough questions to ask as well about their own class origins and, much to the dismay of parents, being asked to take sides.
In 1971, Sison’s “Philippine Society and Revolution” or PSR (and the Filipino “Lipunan at Rebolusyong Pilipino” or LRP) was published. Sison used Mao Zedong’s theoretical framework that identified “three basic problems”: imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucrat capitalism, together with an analysis of classes in the Philippines and their roles in perpetuating social problems.
PSR triggered “oo nga” realizations, and in the process, ended an age of innocence for Filipinos. It was painful because it meant asking about power relations and the control of resources, about collaboration and complicity.
The family reunions today still involve stories similar to those from half a century ago, except some of the parents or even grandparents are the erstwhile activists of that era will smile remembering the 1970s and say they’ve moved on. Talk some more and they’ll acknowledge PSR and student activism and the alphabet soup of mass organizations changed at least two generations’ ways of looking at society and the world.
The PSR was too simplistic, we were told, but so, too, maybe even more so, the arguments about the poor destined to be poor, corruption an inevitable product of human nature.
The world has changed and so, too, has activism. Sison himself has modified some of his analysis, referring to Russia and China as additional imperialist powers. It isn’t just capitalism anymore but neoliberalism, and the villains aren’t just oil companies now but Silicon Valley chief executive officers.
Today, we grapple with Asia’s longest insurgency, going back to 1968. Instead of revisiting Sison and other radical works, government bans them.
And so, the cycles continue, a recycling of old rhetoric and proposed solutions, like a change of values and moral education and ROTC.
KM and the activism Sison started wasn’t just about shouting out slogans. Might we learn, as many did during those years, to go out into the world, talking less, listening more?
And asking why.