Parlade and NTF-ELCAC’s faux pas

What makes Lt. Gen. Antonio Parlade, Jr. think that he is scoring a victory for his McCarthyist agenda?

His ridiculous but dangerous statement about actress Liza Soberano and the women’s organization Gabriela, as well as his insinuation that Manila Mayor Isko Moreno is “welcoming terrorists” in his turf, is but the tip of the iceberg. Nor is it new. Even before the red-tagging agency National Task Force to End the Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) was instituted, Parlade had been at the forefront of the witch-hunt instigated by Rodrigo Duterte’s regime against communists.

In this same month exactly two years ago, Parlade — as the military’s deputy chief for operations — co-authored a badly-written fiction about how an alleged ‘unholy alliance’ between the Liberal Party, the communists, and Magdalo was stirred in order to execute an alleged ‘Red October’ plot out to overthrow Duterte, in line with the anniversary of the Bolsheviks’ victory in Russia way back in 1917.

His fiction didn’t pan out.

Two years after his fiction failed to gain traction, he now poses to be the holy angel of Duterte’s anti-communist crusade, positioning himself as an all-mighty figure who pretends to know any and all angles about communism, the Communist Party of the Philippines, and armed struggle — when, in fact, he cannot even give his own elaboration as to what constitutes Karl Marx’s radical theory.

From being a deputy of former Armed Forces of the Philippines chief-of-staff Carlito Galvez, Jr., Parlade is now the butcher face of both the NTF-ELCAC and AFP’s Southern Luzon Command (SOLCOM). But, instead of waging full-blown armed confrontations with actual New People’s Army rebels in the hinterlands of this country, Parlade chooses to squander everybody’s time spewing out lies, distortions, and disinformation in his social media accounts and in the media.

And he nurses the idea that he is winning over the CPP?

His excrement of a fiction that was ‘Red October’ failed to dampen the armed struggle waged by the communist movement in the countryside. In fact, it did not even weaken the mass movement and broad unities formed to confront and dismantle Duterte’s emerging dictatorship.

Almost two years into the promulgation of Executive Order 70 — which institutionalized the Duterte government’s whole-of-nation approach to “end” the communist movement by creating NTF-ELCAC and implementing its bloody counter-insurgency handiwork Oplan Kapanatagan, a model patterned after the United States’ formula — there are no signs of defeat on the CPP’s end.

By “warning” (with a veiled death threat) Liza that her appearance in a Webinar on sexual harassment and abuse hosted by Gabriela Youth that she “might suffer the same fate” as University of the Philippines-Manila student and activist Josephine Ann Lapira, does Parlade think the communists are now on their knees?

CPP leaders and revolutionaries must be laughing out loud now.

The strongest focal point of Duterte’s slow regression into totalitarianism has also become his regime’s Achilles Heel: fascism. Threats, political vendetta, and lies will only work for some time. Parlade, the NTF-ELCAC, and the butchers of this regime should revisit history, or learn the lessons from the CPP’s 52 years of struggle.

But anyone can’t expect Parlade to understand that, since he is pre-occupied with his dream of being the Philippine version of American senator Joseph McCarthy.

A cursory view into the tactics employed by the Duterte government, through NTF-ELCAC, would give anyone the impression that it is more of the same methods employed by all presidents prior to Duterte (including pre-Marcos ones): state-sanctioned terrorism, deception, and attempts at building a garrison state.

But a deeper, more incisive, understanding of the history of armed struggle in this country — and the ways through which different administrations tried to defeat the communist movement — would tell anyone, too, that all of these attempts became monumental failures. Not one of them had totally banished armed rebellion in the countryside, much more communism’s allure in a country wrought with skyrocketing levels of poverty, State impunity, and economic inequality.

In fact, if Parlade and his red-tagging agency maintains this obsolete “anti-communist” method, it would merely attract more sympathizers for the communist movement the way Ferdinand E. Marcos’ dictatorship bolstered the number of armed revolutionaries in the countryside rather than enervate CPP’s growth — despite the ferocity martial law had strived to exert on the terrorized populace.

For instance, Parlade and the NTF-ELCAC’s persistence in creating connections, however fictitious or harebrained, between the progressive Makabayan bloc legislators and the CPP’s underground movement is a sordid throwback to the time when Manuel Roxas’ administration had thrown out of Congress the 8-man Democratic Alliance through a disqualification case because of employing “terrorism” to win their seats.

At that time, the Democratic Alliance was composed of anyone between personalities with a more liberal background to socialists like Luis Taruc — all under a common anti-collaboration ground. Rowena Carranza’s 2001 article in Bulatlat about the Left’s venture into electoral, parliamentary arena of struggle elaborates further:

Before Bayan Muna, the most recent significant experience in legislative participation for the Left was the victory of the Democratic Alliance (DA) in the congressional elections of 1946. The DA was led by peasant and union leaders, together with urban middle and upper class liberals who had been active in the resistance during the Japanese occupation of the Philippines (1942–45).

United by a common anti-collaborationist stand and desire for change, the DA was a coalition of organizations with liberal to radical orientations. It consisted of three guerrilla groups (the Hukbalahap or People’s Army Against the Japanese, the Free Philippines and Blue Eagle), a peasant group (Pambansang Kaisahan ng Magbubukid or National Peasants Union), a labor group (Committee on Labor Organization) and four progressive organizations (League for National Liberation, Anti-Traitors League, Anti-Japanese League and Civil Liberties Union).

Sounds familiar?

The manner through which Roxas’ government ejected the Democratic Alliance out of the legislature, and his reasons behind such tyrannical move, sounds much more familiar.

Early on, the Alliance posed a threat to the US-backed Roxas government. Since the period of his ascension to Malacañang came on the heels of the nerve-wracking damage brought about by the Second World War and the Americans’ heavy bombardment of Manila, and because he was the merger of a president in the “transition” between the Commonwealth regime directly working under American tutelage and that of a puppet republic clinging on to a neocolonial relationship with Washington, Roxas had to heavily rely on the largesse of the United States.

The “package” of this master-servant primarily included the promulgation of unjust laws and treaties tilted heavily in favor of the Americans. Quoting Amado Guerrero’s Philippine Society and Revolution (a seminal text which has also become Parlade’s favorite punching bag, although he has not read it in its entirety), Roxas’ first order of business after the Philippines obtained that “sham” independence from the Americans was affixing his signature on a law nullifying that ‘independence’: the US-RP Treaty of General Relations. Guerrero explicated further:

[The US-RP Treaty of General Relations] empowered the US government to retain its supreme authority over extensive military bases which it could expand at will, guaranteed the property rights of US corporations and citizens as being equal to those of Filipino corporations and citizens, and put Philippine foreign relations under US government direction.

Following the Treaty of General Relations were successive treaties, laws, and agreements that hinged upon what Guerrero noted as “basic colonial subservience” of the Philippine state, represented by Roxas at that time, to American imperialism. This slew of pro-American, iniquitous treaties included these ‘landmark’ treaties:

1. Property Act, which signified that any and all “real estate property acquisition” made by the American government and their agencies “shall be respected”;
2. Bell Trade Act, which stipulated the inclusion of a parity rights agreement into the colonial 1935 Constitution, under which Filipinos and Americans were to be given equal rights in, say, exploiting the country’s natural resource or the operation of public utilities — and which also placed the country’s free trade relations with US and the Philippine tariff and peso currency under Washington’s dictation;
3. US-RP Military Bases Agreement, which provided American imperialism with 99 years of extraterritorial rights (it was later shortened until 1991) over American military bases which were scattered across 20 strategic points in the country, including the twin major American bases in Subic Bay and Clark;
4. US-RP Military Assistance Pact, which ensured the unabated American control over “the local reactionary armed forces” through the Joint US Military Assistance Group (JUSMAG), which until now holds a headquarters right in the heart of the AFP’s command base in Camp Crame.

Furthermore, Guerrero noted, the Americans’ repayment for damages it had inflicted on the Philippines through the Tydings Rehabilitation Act of 1946 (which created the US-Philippines War Damage Commission, authorized the release of $400,000,000 in war damage claims, and another $120,000,000 for “public property restorations”) had necessitated the ratification of the unequal Bell Trade Act, including most importantly the parity rights amendment, before Washington complies with its payment of Manila’s war damage claims. The Americans imposed on Roxas the identical dilemma with the Vogelbach Treaty, the document concerning the transfer of US war surplus properties to the imperialist-backed regime.

Against the backdrop of this context, what the nationalist historian Renato Constantino delineated as the Democratic Alliance’s five-point program — full independence (against “conditional independence”), democracy against fascism, anti-collaboration, social security and agrarian reform, and industrialization — was clearly at loggerheads with the American-Roxas post-war rehabilitation blueprint.

The Alliance envisioned a country free from the enslavement of imperialist control and elite rule, whilst the roadmap laid out by Roxas and his American masters enabled that rotten system.

For this reason alone, Carranza explained,

having seven DA legislators was already too much for Roxas who viewed the DA as a threat to the restoration of the pre-war oligarchy. The peasants of Central Luzon (the Hukbalahap’s bailiwick), the CLO unions and other members of the DA all opposed the re-establishment of old economic ties which exploited Philippine resources.

Consequently, the Alliance made noise against the Bell Trade Act’s enactment. This move placed in jeopardy the core of Roxas’ plans and course of action, which the Americans held with strings attached. Simply put, the Alliance’s vociferous opposition to the Bell Trade Act, the heart of American maneuvers into the Roxas regime, made them a clear enemy to the ruling political dispensation.

For Roxas, there was one way to go around it: unseat the Alliance.

Activist, author, and political scientist Roland Simbulan’s historical narrative about contemporary political parties’ evolution in the Philippines, which appeared in the book Oligarchic Politics (published in 2007), shed light on the undemocratic path Roxas had taken to get rid of the Alliance:

Heavy-handed government policies, electoral fraud, and crackdown against Democratic Alliance (DA) candidates of the organized Left, such as in the elections of 1947, largely discouraged the emergence of issue-based ideological party groups in the electoral arena. In the case of the PKP-initated Democratic Alliance which participated in the 1947 elections and won six congressional seats, the DA representatives-elect were all barred from sitting in the legislature on charges by the landlord-dominated Congress that they had committed fraud and terrorism.

Carranza’s essay treads along the same line:

Narrated Constantino in his 1978 book entitled The Philippines: The Continuing Past: “His [Roxas] first point of attack was to get the Liberal majorities in both houses to refuse to permit the Nacionalista senators and eight congressmen, seven from the Democratic Alliance, to take their seats pending investigation of charges of alleged frauds and terrorism in their election. The DA congressmen had been elected mainly by the votes of the organized peasants of Central Luzon. The administration charged that voters had been coerced and that therefore the results were not reflective of the popular will.”

Through such manipulations, coupled with the personal persuasion and offer of pork barrel funds, Roxas managed to get his needed amendment. But the competition was so strong that the final vote, according to Constantino, was only the minimum needed votes in the Senate and a one-vote margin in the House. Thus, had the DA legislators not been booted out, the parity law would not have been passed.

This episode in the history of the Left’s engagement in electoral politics, which historically was its first attempt in permeating through the halls of the parliamentary ballgame, illumined three things: that the ruling elite had still exercised too much control over a supposedly democratic elections and institution; that undemocratic paths had been taken by previous regimes to serve their self-serving interests and that of their foreign patrons; and that this fascistic move did not smother the revolutionary fervor even among those who engaged in State-controlled elections.

Political theorist Dante C. Simbulan’s book, the expansion of his 1963 essay on The Modern Principalia, extrapolates the Democratic Alliance’s example as a failed venture on the Left’s side to “compete” directly with the elite for political power. The Alliance’s election, Simbulan explained, “marked a deviation […] from traditional elite political groupings.” The institutionalization of the party-list system, and the persistent victories of the left-leaning Makabayan bloc in consecutive elections since their first try in the 2001 elections, are in the same spirit as this.

What was the effect of Roxas’ despotic move to extirpate the Congress of the Alliance? The more radical leaders of the Alliance, like peasant leader Luis Taruc, were forced to go underground and wage an armed struggle under Hukbong Mapagpalaya ng Bayan’s banner — which lasted for a little over a decade, until Ramon Magsaysay’s negotiations with Taruc and other Huk leaders led to their eventual fallout.

Dwelling over this episode in both the history of Philippine elections and the Philippine Left is crucial to the discussion of Parlade, NTF-ELCAC, and the Duterte regime’s campaign of red-tagging even elected party-list legislators because this unravels the faux pas, the major blunder, that the regime refuses to see — but it is also bound to suffer from.

Roxas’ red-tagging of Democratic Alliance, and their expulsion based on false charges by a coopted Commission on Elections, did not put an end to the communist movement. In fact, it led to an insurgency which emphasized the role of armed struggle in achieving basic social reforms that a government rife with landlords, compradors, and politicians beholden to American imperialism cannot even enact.

If Parlade, the NTF-ELCAC, and the Duterte regime’s state machineries insist on taking this bloodied path of red-tagging and slanderous campaigns against activists, dissenters, and even celebrities like Liza Soberano and Catriona Gray, the entire regime is in for the greatest debacle in its ‘wet dream’ of effacing the communist movement from the country’s sociopolitical geography, which is nothing more than a repeat of the botched Marcosian counter-insurgency techniques that merely led to the relentless expansion of the same ghost it envisages to trounce.

Fidel Ramos, Juan Ponce Enrile, Rolando Abadilla, Fabian C. Ver, and their network of devious intelligence systems and torture chambers all galvanized under Marcos’ watch to stifle, repress, and uproot “subversive” forces and voices. These officials even had the benefit from both Proclamation 1081 (martial law declaration) and Proclamation 1835, the tyrannical expansion of the Garcia-era Anti-Subversion Law.

History was clear about how gruesome, grisly, and ghastly the record of abuses perpetrated by Ramos, Enrile, Ver, and their thousands of mercenaries during the entirety of the US-Marcos dictatorship was. Yet, it was no less than their American masters themselves who recognized that such tactic of terrorism did nothing but burgeon the forces who work under or who were sympathetic to the CPP. Armed struggle became the sole recourse of resistance under a regime that did not care about its death and torture toll because it was consumed by its rabid, almost fanatical, and American-backed anti-communism.

The same fate befell Gloria Arroyo and her menacing Oplan Bantay Laya. The poster boy of extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances of left-leaning activists under Arroyo, Jovito Palparan, employed the worst techniques under his arsenal to stamp out the communist movement — but to no avail. He is now languishing in detention over the abduction of Karen Empeño and Sherlyn Cadapan, but the CPP still exists. The communist movement had outlived most of Marcos’ generals who exerted all efforts at bloodshed to stem the tide of their growth.

History has a clear verdict on McCarthyist witch-hunts: unalterable, axiomatic defeat on the side of the fascists.

The communist movement will not be vanquished by tarpaulins with poor graphics, veiled death threats on any and all voices of dissent, and slanderous claims coming from today’s insidious symbol of fascism that is Antonio Parlade, Jr.

With Parlade and his ilk leading Duterte’s bloody counter-insurgency pogrom, it is bound to meet and achieve nothing but an ignominious, spectacular show of failure.

After all, Cold War politics has always had a reverse effect on the construction of a fascist regime:

Downfall.