|
| RAY O LIGHT |
By Ray O.
Light
“Praise of
Communism”
It’s
sensible,
anyone can understand it.
It’s easy.
You’re not an exploiter,
so you can grasp it.
It’s a good thing for you,
find out more about it.
The stupid call it stupid
and the squalid call it squalid.
It is against squalor and
against stupidity.
The exploiters call it a crime.
But we know:
It is the end of crime.
It is not madness, but
the end of madness.
It is not the riddle
but the solution.
It is the simple thing,
So hard to achieve.
– by
Bertolt Brecht
Who is Jose Maria Sison and
why should we
care about his plight?
In
many ways, Jose Maria Sison is a
real flesh and blood Filipino “Zorro.” Born into a wealthy
landowner
family which had its share of both patriotic heroes who fought for the
liberation of their country and puppet-comprador elements who served
the
Spanish and then the U.S. colonial masters, JoMa was a brilliant
student who
had the opportunity to choose a life-path of elitist privilege in the
highest
ranks of Filipino society, based on subservience to U.S. imperialism.
Instead,
he chose the difficult and extremely dangerous path of revolutionary
leader of
the oppressed and exploited Filipino masses. And, unlike the fictional
Mexican
character, Zorro, who functioned as an heroic individual in the
fight
for justice for the masses, JoMa Sison recognized early on that it is
the
working class and the peasant and other patriotic masses among the
oppressed
who are decisive in making human progress in our time.
On this basis,
he mobilized students and
intellectuals at his point of political origin, became a trade union
functionary in the working class movement and joined the already
heavily
compromised old Filipino communist party. With his outstanding
revolutionary
qualities, including his willingness to wage principled struggle
against both
left and right opportunism, Jose Maria Sison quickly rose through the
ranks in
all these areas of work.
Accordingly,
JoMa
mastered Marxist theory – especially the teachings of Marx, Engels,
Lenin,
Stalin and Mao. He particularly focused on Mao’s teachings in the
period
leading up to the victory of the Chinese national democratic revolution
in
1949, as Philippine conditions had so much in common with the
pre-revolution
Chinese political landscape. Armed with scientific socialism, along
with his
wife, Julie, a formidable revolutionary in her own right, he undertook
to make
a comprehensive and concrete analysis of Philippine conditions so as to
provide
a solid foundation for the new people’s movement there.
Summing up the recent
experience of the
mass movement within the Philippines and drawing strength from the
Chinese and
Albanian led political struggle against Soviet-led modern revisionism
internationally, JoMa led in the founding of the new anti-revisionist
Communist
Party of the Philippines (CPP) in late 1968, and to the founding of the
New
Peoples Army (NPA) and the National Democratic Front shortly
thereafter. (In
2002, along with JoMa as an individual, the CPP and NPA were also
placed on the
“terrorist” lists of the real global terrorists, that is, the
imperialist
powers, headed by U.S. imperialism.)
The results were a
powerful revolutionary
movement that within a few short years threatened to topple the Marcos
regime.
Ferdinand Marcos resorted to martial law to stay in power. This
resulted in
further isolation of the Marcos crony regime even from the rest of the
Filipino
ruling class and led to his ouster in the People Power revolt that
swept Cory
Aquino into the presidency in early 1986. It also brought JoMa out of
prison
after a decade during most of which Marcos had held him in solitary
confinement.
The courageous and
dedicated JoMa Sison
immediately resumed his untiring efforts on behalf of Philippine
national
liberation and socialism. While on a foreign tour it was decided that
it was
too dangerous for JoMa to return and he went into exile in the
Netherlands.
There, among other duties, he has served as the chief political
consultant to
the NDF in its formal though intermittent negotiations with the
Government of
the Republic of the Philippines (GRP) under a series of U.S.
imperialist puppet
regimes.
On September 18, 2001,
exactly one week
after the September 11th incidents in the USA, as the
General
Consultant to the International League of Peoples Struggle (ILPS), an
international anti-imperialist united front organization with which Northstar
Compass has been affiliated, JoMa Sison wrote movingly: “The US has
practiced the evil of terrorism for so long and this is now recoiling
upon the
US itself… At any rate, no amount of terrorism perpetrated by the US
imperialists can justify any avowed anti-US force in perpetrating
terrorism
against the American people…Terrorism from any quarter is reprehensible
and
must be combated and eradicated. The people will ultimately defeat US
imperialism as it increasingly uses terrorism. The few avowedly anti-US
elements that use terrorism will only destroy themselves on the road of
nihilism. Only the revolutionary mass movement can defeat US
imperialism and
the local reactionaries and sweep away terrorism from any direction.”
(“Sympathy for the Victims and Condemnation of Terrorism”)
As Sison biographer
and personal friend,
Ninotchka Rosca, has observed: “In the midst of whatever adversity,
Jose Sison
constantly gives Filipinos a reason to affirm and celebrate themselves
as a
people. The governments of Europe, the United States, Canada, and the
Philippines keep trying to bury Jose Maria Sison and only succeed in
having
songs sung in his praise.”
Thus, in 2002, when
JoMa was first placed
on the terrorist list, former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark
praised JoMa
as follows: “Those of us who are working to stop the unbridled
aggression
against the world that has been unleashed by the Bush White House
should make
every effort to defend Professor Jose Maria Sison, and to support the
Filipino
people as they struggle to defend sovereignty and build peace.”
Likewise, then
Philippine Vice President, Teofisto Guingona, in direct contradiction
to
President Macapagal-Arroyo, defended Sison as a great Filipino patriot!
At its Second
International Assembly in
2004, the ILPS elected JoMa as its Chairman, a post he continues to
hold. In
this capacity, he has helped point the way forward for workers and
oppressed peoples
in many places: from Katrina survivors and immigrant workers in the USA
to
Iraqi Resistance fighters against the US imperialist occupiers of their
country.
More recently, JoMa
Sison experienced two
major legal victories, in June and July of this year when the
European
Court of First Instance annulled the decision of the Council of the
European
Union that had originally placed him on the EU terrorist list and the
Supreme
Court of the Philippines dismissed the two recent criminal charges
against him
(and about fifty other Filipino progressives) and nullified all
purported
evidence against him from 1968 to 2006. These actions took place in an
environment in which the GMA Regime in the Philippines as well as its
Bush
Regime sponsor in the USA were increasingly isolated and exposed as
terrorists
in their own right.
Seemingly, in order to stop
this
progressive momentum, almost immediately after these courtroom
victories, JoMa
Sison was abruptly arrested on August 28th and held
incommunicado in
the Hague. The limitations of legalism were brought home to Sison and
his
comrades when, simultaneous with his arrest, his apartment was forcibly
invaded
with his wife inside and his family’s computers and other property were
seized.
And more than a half dozen other premises occupied by his Filipino
colleagues
in the Netherlands, including the NDF Office, were broken into by Dutch
authorities in concert with the GMA and Bush regimes.
Fortunately, there was
a mass response in
the Philippines, in the Netherlands, and in many other countries around
the
world protesting this blatantly extralegal conduct. On September 13th
the District Court of the Hague released Jose Maria Sison on the basis
of
insufficient evidence against him. The Dutch Court of Appeals, on
October 3rd,
not only upheld the District Court’s
ruling but found that there is no direct evidence linking him to the
alleged
crimes at all and even questioned the veracity of (and the political
bias
behind) the witness testimony against him. As Sison himself has pointed
out,
“The Court of Appeals has clarified that for anyone to play a prominent
role on
behalf of any revolutionary political party or movement in general… is
no proof
of criminal wrongdoing.”
Nevertheless, the
Dutch prosecutors have
not dropped the charges yet; nor has the European Union Council taken
Sison’s
name off of its most recent terrorist list. To the forces of
reaction – the
imperialists and their comprador puppets – Jose
Maria Sison is
the worst
kind of terrorist. For he threatens their paradise on earth based
on
exploitation, oppression and plunder of the overwhelming majority of
mankind.
For us,
for the billions of
toiling masses of humanity, Jose Maria Sison is the best kind of
hero.
He tirelessly and eloquently represents the just aspirations of the
Filipino
people for a full and equal role among nations; he also fights
relentlessly in
the interest of the working class and the oppressed everywhere and for
the
elimination of the system of exploitation of man by man from the face
of the
earth. He remains one of the modest giants of our movement for global
justice
and for peace --- for socialism and communism. We need to vigorously
defend and
to cherish Jose Maria Sison. For defense of Jose Maria Sison is defense
of us
all!
Close this page to return.