Around the World: “The Communist War against the Philippines and Why It Rages On”

An insurgency led by the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) is ravaging the nation’s countryside.1 Children as young as twelve are forced to join the “New People’s Army” (NPA) and to fight for the communist cause.2 Farmers are often killed for refusing to support or join the communist cause. Businessmen are threatened with death or the destruction of their property should they not pay taxes to the revolutionaries. Politicians in areas of strong communist influence either become puppets of the CPP-NPA or are murdered. This insurgency has killed more than 120,000 Filipinos to date, and the body count is rapidly rising.3

The communist insurgents’ ultimate goal is to conquer the nation, and they are fighting toward this end via two means. The first of these is armed force.

According to Jun Alcover, a former high-ranking Communist Party member turned anticommunist congressman, the CPP hopes “to win the revolutionary struggle and change the social, economic, and political landscape in the Philippines—[through] armed revolution, Mao Zedong style.”4 Yettan Verita Liwanag, a coauthor with Alcover of the book Atrocities & Lies: The Untold Secrets of the Communist Party of the Philippines, details the communists’ plan to carry out this bloody insurrection. The first step would be to draw a significant number of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) away from the island of Luzon (where the capital is) to the southern Island of Mindanao, where the NPA, allied with secessionist forces such as the Moro National Liberation Front and the Bangsa Moro Army, would be able to bog down the AFP. “Attacks from the combined forces would tie down a large part of the AFP in the south. By splitting the AFP, NPA forces in the Visayaz could then contribute to the uprising by simultaneously assaulting their areas of responsibility. Finally, after achieving strategic advantage over the elements of the AFP by dividing its attention,” the communists in Luzon could “then strike the National Capital Region by surrounding it with pockets of Red-controlled areas and enveloping it from the inside” with a massive uprising of armed and non-armed supporters, ranging from workers to leftist students.5

This is the communist dream of violent revolution as envisioned by the founder and leader of the New People’s Army—however, it is a long shot.6 The communists know that the AFP, which is far more powerful than their own modest forces, would almost surely win an all-out military conflict. So the communists are also fighting for control of the Philippines on a second, more insidious front.

The CPP-NPA is trying to increase its reputation as a legitimate political party within the international community; meanwhile, it is smearing the Philippine government and the AFP as human-rights violators and mass murderers. The communists hope ultimately to cause enough commotion to invite direct intervention in Filipino affairs from foreign entities (including the United Nations), leading to pressure from those entities to accommodate the communists and perhaps even create a coalition government with them.7 In this way the CPP-NPA could wield much power in the Philippines while reducing the damage to its insurgency force.

Even more amazing than the fact that a remnant of the Cold War severely threatens the Philippines is the fact that the Philippine government is permitting it to do so.

From its prime in the 1980 of tens of thousands of “comrades,” the NPA has been reduced to a few thousand—a number that the Philippine government could easily squash. Yet a continuous policy of accommodation and appeasement from the Philippine government has allowed the NPA to survive, threatening the prosperity and lives of all Filipinos.

During his presidency, Ferdinand Marcos imposed martial law on the Philippines to combat the growing communist threat.8 When asked in 1984 about his support for the Marcos dictatorship, U.S. President Ronald Reagan said:

I know there are things there in the Philippines that do not look good to us from the standpoint right now of democratic rights, but what is the alternative? It is a large Communist movement to take over the Philippines. . . . And I think that we’re better off . . . trying to retain our friendship [with the Philippines] and help them right the wrongs we see, rather than throwing them to the wolves and then facing a Communist power in the Pacific.9

As Reagan saw it, a committed communist movement was an even greater threat to the interests of Americans and Filipinos than the Marcos dictatorship it sought to overthrow. Whether America’s only alternatives were to support Marcos or to throw the Filipinos to the communist wolves is debatable, but the communists certainly were the worse of the two evils. For his part, if only to retain power, Marcos worked to squash that worse evil, most notably by imprisoning Jose Maria “Joma” Sison—the founder of the CPP-NPA who was responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Filipinos, among them police officers and soldiers. An unfortunate and ironic consequence of Marcos’s fall in 1986, however, was a change in attitude among the Philippines’ heads of state regarding the communist threat.

In the year Corazon Aquino succeeded Marcos as president, in the name of “national reconciliation,” she released Sison and actively defended him from the elements in the AFP who justifiably wanted to restrict his movement by, among other things, canceling his passport. Now safely operating in the Netherlands, Sison continues to mastermind the Communist Party’s plan to enslave the Filipino populace. In an August 2009 interview, shortly after Aquino passed away, Sison, along with the chair of a CPP-NPA front entity, acknowledged that Aquino did her best to protect him from the Filipino military, going so far as to relay personal messages to him in order to keep him safe.10

A more recent example of appeasement involves Aquino’s son, President Noynoy Aquino. In December 2010, while the government engaged in peace talks with the CPP, it withdrew AFP troops from certain provincial areas as part of a ceasefire agreement. During the withdrawal, the New People’s Army massacred ten soldiers and a little boy.11 The NPA, noted the commanding officer of the AFP force that was attacked, “took advantage of the announcement of the ceasefire. The soldiers were pulling out of the area and they were treacherously ambushed.”12

Such an attack should have roused the Philippine government to end the peace talks, and to find and kill those responsible for the massacre. Instead, the government stated that it was “disheartened” but still intends “to honor the agreed upon suspension of military operations.”13

Such cowardice and appeasement are the reasons a murderous Cold War remnant remains a threat in the Philippines. The Philippine government is sufficiently powerful to squelch the NPA, yet it allows it to commit atrocity after atrocity.

Why?

Neither the Philippine government nor many Filipinos accept the justness of a crusade to destroy the communist insurgency, because many Filipinos accept the notion that the communist insurgency is a justified reaction to poverty. As Vencer Crisostomo, secretary-general of a communist front group targeting the youth,14 put it: “Poverty, inequality, and injustice are the roots of armed resistance.”15 The Filipino government concurs. Shortly after an August 2010 massacre in Northern Samar, in which eight policemen were killed in an NPA ambush,16 the province’s governor, Paul Daza, conceded in the Leyte Samar Daily Express that “the national government should . . . provide more programs and projects to provinces where there remain [insurgencies] like Northern Samar.”

“The national government should show its sincerity in its fight against insurgency by also ending the poverty problem,” Daza said.

He said that insurgency breeds where there is poverty like in his province. Daza called on the national government for more aid programs which could address its problem on poverty.17

The current Aquino administration also agrees that the communist insurgency is largely a justified response to poverty. Even as Philippine forces and civilians are being massacred in the provinces, the Aquino government claims the problem “does not really need combat.”18 Rather than continue the “combat-heavy” campaigns of its predecessor (which clearly were not heavy enough), the administration has vowed to concentrate on “development-oriented” strategies—namely, increasing government infrastructure projects and monetary aid to the regions with a heavy communist insurgency presence.

This is insanity. In addition to providing the communists with material support, this strategy concedes the communist premise that the good of the collective justifies the sacrifice of the individual, including the enslavement of farmers, businessmen, and children—and, when “necessary,” the elimination of dissenters. By conceding that the goals of the insurgency are noble, this strategy morally disarms Filipinos, rendering them incapable of self-defense.

Further, the notion is based on a complete reversal of cause and effect. Poverty does not cause communism. Communism—like any form of statism—causes poverty. This can be seen throughout history (the 20th century is chock-full of examples), including recent Philippine history. Consider, for instance, the province of Mindoro Occidental, which from the late 1960s through the early 1970s enjoyed active cattle ranches and offshore fishing, pointing to a bright economic future for the province.19 In the midst of these positive developments, the CPP-NPA established a presence in the province and systematically deranged the landscape. The local government was taken over and turned into communist revolutionary councils. Dissenters were silenced and elected officials were turned into puppets of the communist movement.20 The domination of the province finally gave the CPP-NPA a free hand to impose their ideal of agrarian revolution, which included confiscating cattle ranches and land from their owners and redistributing them to the “community.” The CPP-NPA’s “governance” killed the industries that were creating prosperity in the province and soon turned the once economically healthy region into a poverty-stricken wasteland.21 In other regions of the Philippines in which the CPP-NPA has established a presence (e.g., ARMM, Caraga, and Region IV-B), similar economic trouble has followed.22

By contrast, consider the province of Bohol. In the year 2000, Bohol was among the top twenty poorest provinces in the Philippines; at one point, 28 percent of the villages were either directly controlled or heavily influenced by the communists. Recognizing that communist influence was to blame for its poverty, the local government, the military, and the local populace carried out a “decommunization” effort. The result? Bohol rapidly left the list of top twenty most impoverished Philippine provinces and became a bustling tourist destination as well as the most agriculturally productive province in the Islands of Visayaz.23 Just as Mindoro Occidental faltered when the communists took over, so Bohol began to thrive when the communists were eradicated and the rights of those in the province to keep the fruits of their production were substantially recognized.

Prosperity is the result of production, and because communism destroys those who produce by stealing what they produce, communism is at odds with prosperity. Communism denies man’s right to live for himself and profit from his own labor. It severs him from what keeps him alive. And when a man’s right to live for himself is denied, only slavery or death can follow.

The Communist Party of the Philippines and its New People’s Army would have ceased to threaten Filipinos years ago were it not for the appeasement and sanction of the administrations that succeeded the Marcos dictatorship, a cycle that finally drove one former president to recognize: “We talk peace, sign a ceasefire, but insurgencies continue, the bombings continue, the kidnappings continue.”24 The Philippine armed forces clearly have the means to destroy the communist threat; what Filipinos and their government need is the moral resolve to allow the military do so.

If Filipinos want peace, security, and prosperity, they must come to recognize that the communist ideal of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” is morally wrong, politically wrong, and thus economically disastrous. Filipinos must demand that their government end the peace talks with the Communist Party, destroy the New People’s Army, and demand that all communist groups terminate their activities immediately or face retribution. The alternative is a continuation of the bloody march toward a slave state.

About Joshua Lipana

Joshua (John M.) Lipana was, until his death in 2013, an assistant editor of The Objective Standard Blog and a freelance writer based in the Philippines. His writings appeared in numerous print and online publications, including Free Enterprise,Capitalism Magazine, NewsReal Blog, and The American Thinker.

View all articles by Joshua Lipana →