Articles by Antonio C. Abaya (2)

Leftists and Comunnists
By Antonio C. Abaya
October 20,2005

Though I arrived several minutes late at ABS-CBN for our interview with Ces Drilon last week, I did hear my friend (and former colleague in the Kabataang Makabayan) Joel Rocamora twit National Insecurity Adviser Norberto Gonzales for estimating that 83% of those who demonstrate against President Arroyo were communists.Such “anti-communist rhetoric,” sniffed Joel, “should have gone away with the Berlin Wall.”

I do not know where Gonzales got his 83% figure, which may or may not be accurate, but he was, without realizing it, maintaining the fundamental balance in the universe.As physicists will tell you, everything comes in pairs: positive and negative, action and reaction, attraction and repulsion, matter and anti-matter, mass and energy, gravity and anti-gravity. Without the parity principle, nothing would make any sense.

So if it is acceptable for people like Joma Sison and Luis Jalandoni to spout “pro-communist rhetoric”, it should equally be acceptable for people like Bert Gonzales and Tony Abaya to spout “anti-communist rhetoric.”

And speaking of the Berlin Wall, exactly who won and who lost (they also come in pairs) in the ideological debate when that monument to Failure was torn down in 1989? Or when the Soviet Union collapsed all by itself in 1991? Or when China re-embraced the profit motive, starting in 1979?I happened to be in Berlin three days before the Wall was suddenly and hurriedly put up, in August 1961, by the East German (or communist) government, to stanch the flow of East Germans fleeing to the West. East Germany was hemorrhaging to death as hundreds of thousands of its people abandoned the East for the West, lured by its evident material prosperity and its open society. The Berlin Wall was an admission of failure, the failure of the Socialist Dream.

I stayed in a youth hostel or jugendherberge in the fashionable Wannsee district of Berlin, housed in what must once have been the servants’ quarters of the adjacent Kaiser Wilhelm Schloss or castle, hemmed in on three sides by a barbed-wire enclosure that was part of the boundary between East Germany and West Berlin.The hostel was overflowing with fluchtlinger or refugees.

As I can speak some German, I often got into conversation with them and with people on the other side of the barbed wire fence. The most common complaint was the lack of food and other basic necessities.And I often ventured into East Berlin on my Vespa to savor at first hand the joyless drabness of Unter den Linden and Alexanderplatz and Stalinallee in the capital of what was then billed as the most advanced socialist state in the world. If this was advanced, I shuddered to imagine what ordinary looked like. No wonder its people were leaving in droves.

In 1985, I wrote and published a booklet titled “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Communism.”In it, I wrote that the Socialist Dream that had begun with Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engels’ Communist Manifesto” in 1848 was unraveling because of catastrophic failures and was heading towards the garbage dump of history.

Only four years later, in 1989, millions of East Germans, Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Bulgars, etc – including their intellectuals, their artists, their civil servants, their students, their workers, their housewives – literally walked out on their governments, causing their communist regimes to collapse…with hardly a shot being fired in anger against anyone. The local flood that I had witnessed in Berlin in 1961 had grown into a giant tsunami in 1989 that swept everything away.

Two more years later, in 1991, the Soviet Union itself – where the Socialist Dream had first assumed concrete reality in 1917 – also collapsed from the sheer weight of its failures, without any help from the evil Americans, despite (some Soviet communists say, because of) the efforts of the last Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, to reform their sclerotic system with glasnost and perestroika.In “A Funny Thing,” I blamed the failure of the Socialist Dream on Marx’s Theory of Surplus Value which equated profit-making with exploitation and thus made all private enterprises ideologically unacceptable. Thus in the Soviet Union, all enterprises – even innocuous ones like taxicabs, shoe repair shops and cigarette kiosks – were owned by the socialist state. No one was allowed to make a profit from the labor of others.

I predicted in that 1985 book that the People’s Republic of China under Deng Xiaoping, which had gradually reintroduced the profit motive starting in 1979, would overtake the Soviet Union in economic development, which is exactly what eventually happened.Deng at first allowed entrepreneurs a maximum of eight employees each, to be exempted from the Marxist onus of exploitation. This limit was later raised to 50, then to 1,000; then, as I predicted, the limit would be removed entirely, thus spawning thousands, later millions, of rich, even millionaire, Chinese entrepreneurs, a tacit but total rejection of the Marxist theory of surplus value and a blanket repudiation of the Maoist ideal of anthill-like egalitarianism.Without that Marxist theory and without that Maoist ideal, the People’s Republic of China is just another one-party fascist state that uses its instruments of coercion to maintain a monopoly of power for the entrenched party, the Communist Party.

Yes, Joel, “anti-communist rhetoric” should have gone away with the Berlin Wall in 1989. But “pro-communist rhetoric” did not. Joma Sison and the CPP-NDF-NPA continued and continue to wage their revolution in favor of Failure as if 1989-1991 had never happened at all.

On the contrary, when the People’s Liberation Army sent troops and armored personnel carriers into Tienanmen Square in Beijing in June 1989 to sweep away with their machine-guns hundreds of thousands of students demonstrating for more democracy in their society – another monument to Failure – only Maoists Joma Sison of the CPP and Crispin Beltran of the KMU applauded the massacre. Consistent with the communist Golden Rule: Do not do unto Us what We will do unto You once we are in Power.

So why should “pro-communist rhetoric” enjoy a monopoly in the public discourse, without being challenged by “anti-communist rhetoric?” Is Failure the ultimate destiny of humankind, since Communism is claimed to be the last stage of societal evolution?

The questions for Filipinos in 2005 are a) why does a communist insurgency still persist in this country when it had long been extinguished in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore, and was never allowed to rear its head in Taiwan and South Korea? b) why do communists and pro-communists continue to be lionized in Philippine media as if they had anything substantial, original or meaningful to say? (which would never have been allowed in Indonesia or Malaysia or Singapore or Thailand or Taiwan or South Korea; onli in da istupid Pilipins) and c) why do Philippine media almost always refer to them as ‘leftists’ or ‘activists’ or ‘militants’, almost never by their correct label, which is ‘communists?’Question (a) would require an entire column or more to discuss, but questions (b) and (c) can be answered by two words: ‘compliant naivete.’

Most media persons here are either former partisans of the communist movement themselves, or (among the younger ones) consider it politically incorrect to profile anyone as a ‘communist,’ as if being a communist was a crime or a social disease or something to be ashamed of.But this is grossly inaccurate.

In American domestic politics, Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton are ‘leftists’ but they are not communists. In Western Europe, socialists and social democrats are ‘leftists’ but they are not communists. In Anglo-Saxon countries, Labour politicians are ‘leftists’ but they are not communists. In Spain, ETA Basque separatists are ‘militants’ but they are not communists. In Ireland, IRA guerillas are ‘activists’ but they are not communists.

By deliberately avoiding the use of the word ‘communist’ in favor of more innocuous terms when referring to communists, Philippine media in effect protect them from the opprobrium of being associated with Failure, which is the historical legacy of Communism, in Europe, in Asia and in Latin America (when Fidel Castro dies and Cuba unravels).Thus Philippine media are complicit in the prolonged adolescence of Filipino communists and, by extension, the continued persistence of the communist insurgency, about which Col. Ricardo Morales and other military officers expressed their frustration in recent installments of this column.

Admittedly, socio-economic conditions exist that nurture the discontent that favors the insurgency. But these conditions take time to correct, and they will never be corrected at all as long as media – the most influential sector of Philippine society - show a pronounced bias in favor of communists and pro-communists, either out of a misplaced sense of social justice or just plain, insurmountable ignorance of recent history.

Philippine media should learn to outgrow their own extended adolescence and learn to ask the hard question that I asked Renato Constantino Sr. and Joma Sison years ago, to which they never gave an answer: What makes you think that Filipino communists will succeed in building the Ideal Society that the Russian communists failed to build, even after 74 years of total and absolute political control?