"It was a day of infamy."
"It was a day of infamy."
The germ that accelerated the decay of the militant left began on Feb. 25, 1986. People who know more about ideology and could narrate the events that led to the ouster of Ferdinand E. Marcos will never interpret the so-called “Edsa People Power” as the turning point of the revolution.
Rather, those who opposed his ouster interpret the revolution as a counter revolution coated as an end to the so-called dictatorship. While it took his followers some time to assess and accept the significance of Edsa, they realized that it could soon work in their favor. To them it was just a setback to what they call an “unfinished revolution.”
Those who had their orientation what ideology is all about could easily assess that what transpired on Feb. 25, 1986 was a day of infamy. They witnessed a counter revolution led by the oligarchy, the conservative Church and the US, and strangely enough by the Communist Party of the Philippines under the leadership of Jose Ma. Sison, the National Democratic Front and the various the various front organizations. As a disguised struggle to end the dictatorship, Edsa clearly restored the power and privileges to the international monopolists, the oligarchy and the Church with the people made to believe they were about to be liberated.
Simultaneous with their victory, the CPP/NDF’s classic revolutionary formula of “protracted people’s war” instantly became stale. The collaboration in particular of the militant Left automatically divested them of that weapon. The militant Left as a tool for political change has all of a sudden became irrelevant. As one political observer would put it, EDSA as a symbol of people power defrocked the status of the demigod of the ideologues to that of plain demagogue.
The theory to capture political power from countryside to the cities became a theorem of infantile adventurism, for what happened was a mutiny of disgruntled officers whose ambition and option for political change was meticulously prepared by Washington and Wall Street. The leadership and the cadres of the militant left could not answer that the event at EDSA was contrary to the revolutionary formula advanced by Sison and his trolls of unthinking followers.
They refused to admit that the entire leadership of the Communist Party participated in the most grotesque form of betrayal of collaborating with the oligarchy, the Church, and the imperialist while publicly hooting before the masses that the participation of the masa action was necessary for their liberation from the shackle of the dictatorship. The militant left was unexpectedly caught “between the devil and the deep blue sea” for the fact that they never truly understood their ideology, and what they want to achieve beyond the issue of changing Marcos.
Everybody knows that EDSA was a game-changer formula hatched by the CIA, the State Department and Pentagon was designed to reduce the militant left to mere kibitzers of their make-believe revolution. The EDSA people power was a fool’s game against a politically embattled President who lost the upperhand in the propaganda battle to pursue his progressive reforms.
It is the same political line they now adopt against the incumbent President Rodrigo Duterte. The camp of Jose Ma. Sison wanted the support of the US in his bid to oust Duterte just as the US wanted Sison and his army of blind fanatics to participate in the final removal of Marcos.
The CIA had to entice the militant Left to participate in that conspiracy. What was important to them is that EDSA people power appeared in the media as supported by the masses. It was the lending hand of Sison and his cabal of degenerating Marxists that made Edsa people power the greatest spectacle of treachery. All their operatives were already in place to execute the job to the last detail.
The oligarchy already had their assignment on what to grab. The ultra-conservative Church had their valid reason, not on the question about the validity of their dogma but on the decision of the Marcos government taxing the church of its properties.
In other words, it was only Sison’s CPP and NDF that positioned on the wrong side of the fence. Maybe we can give Joma and his blind acolytes the benefit of the doubt of what happened. However, others who have a deeper understanding of their role as guardians of the revolution knew they committed the greatest betrayal of the Filipino people. They gained nothing in their participation in that mass action except to cling on to Cory Aquino’s promise to release all of them from prison.
The US did not officially object because their presence could make it Edsa as massive and concerted. In that, the only value of the militant Left was to provide the warm bodies to make the political hoopla credible. Sison and his detained members of the CPP’s Central Committee acquiesced to that unholy alliance because his interest was to get out of the detention center.
This unsaid sequence of Edsa is one that Sison and company refuse to talk about for fear it would expose them as immature ideologues who committed the same act of betrayal often accusing party members of the more serious charge of treason to justify their imposition of death penalty by execution. They could not officially endorse EDSA, but it was an open secret that all their cadres were ordered to proceed to EDSA to support Cardinal Sin’s shepherded students from the exclusive schools.
When the smoke finally cleared that Marcos has already been kidnapped by the US imperialist, only then did their more enlightened members began to ask why it was the US that did their job when supposedly overthrowing Marcos was integral to their revolutionary program of government. As one would quip in the vernacular, ni hindi sila pinadama tulad ng ginawa ni Digong, like appointing them to the government with a rank of cabinet position even before they could formally begin the talks.”
The putsch that ensued after Edsa unmasked the political swindle that Sison and his cabal of degenerating Marxists committed. Surprisingly, it was our own patriotic soldiers that exposed their treachery. To desperately tried to isolate, Sison and his gang countered by branding them as “Marcos loyalists” to downgrade the value of the charge of pretending to be revolutionaries.
The US intervention to save their installed lackey confirmed the suspicion of the Soldiers of the Filipino People (SFP) headed by Gen. Carlos Zumel and Col. Reynaldo Cabauatan and the Young Officers Union (YOU) headed by Gen. Danilo Lim and other young officers but ideologically reformers. Their principal objective was not to restore Marcos to power but to make known the birth of the nationalist soldiers. The SAF YOU soldiers asked why the CPP/NDF and their front organizations sacrificed the interest of the Filipino people only in exchange for the release of those bunch of ideological demagogues?
To this day, Sison and his cabal refuse to acknowledge that the uprising in December 1989 was indicative that the soldiers was more politically advance in their consciousness than those who have been parroting as ideologically committed. They know the ideology that promised to liberate the Filipino people has become redundant after Edsa. For that, they now shout the slogan of the Katipuneros of finishing the unfinished revolution of 1898.
