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Filipino people must renew nationalist fervor
against Aquino puppetry
Communist Party of the Philippines
June 12, 2012
There is great urgency in the need to renew the Filipino people’s
nationalist fervor in the face of the ruling Aquino regime’s all-out
subservience to the policies and agenda of the US imperialist government.
Since ascending to power, Benigno Aquino has virtually surrendered the
country’s sovereignty and right to self-determination as he submits to all
of the military and economic dictates of the US imperialists.
It is ironic that the Filipino people today
mark the 114th anniversary of the June 12, 1898 Declaration of
Independence just a few days after Aquino paid homage to his imperialist
masters. In his meetings with imperialist chieftain Barrack Obma and key
security and defense officials of the US as well as the heads of the
biggest monopoly capitalist companies, Aquino expressed his government’s
willingness and determination to serve their needs in the name of
“enduring friendship”.
Emboldened by its recent consolidation of
political power, the ruling Aquino regime is now working to further
trample on Philippine national sovereignty by allowing the unimpeded
buildup of the number of interventionist and hegemonist US military troops
and in pushing ever more vigorously the breakdown of economic barriers
against all-out foreign plunder and exploitation.
Andres Bonifacio and the Filipino people’s
other revolutionary heroes are surely turning in their graves as the
banner of national freedom which they waved high is now being desecrated
by the Aquino regime and its coterie of Amboy officials. The so-called
“new freedom” being touted by Benigno Aquino III is nothing but empty
rhetoric to conceal the state of “unfreedom” which his government is
pulling the country into.
Aquino’s subservience to US military dominance
For two years now, Benigno Aquino has served
well the foreign policy direction of US imperialism to build an “American
Pacific Century” where it seeks to establish itself as an unrivalled
economic and military power in the Asia-Pacific region. US imperialist
officials have outrightly declared its aims of pouring “unprecedented
economic, diplomatic and military investment” in the Asia-Pacific region
as its solution to its prolonged economic crisis.
Ever the puppet, Aquino has openly welcomed
the arrival of more and more American ships to dock and unload its armed
troops onto Philippine soil. Goaded by his American advisers, Aquino has
gone the lengths of rousing diplomatic and military tensions with China
and sacrificing friendly relations with the Chinese government in order to
justify before the Filipino people increased American military presence in
the guise of support for Philippine claims over certain South China Sea
territories and land features.
Dockings of American warships and submarines
have been increasingly frequent especially over the past year. There have
been successive visits by high-ranking officials of the American defense
and military establishment. Over the past several months, officials of the
US and Philippine governments have been busy forging new agreements to
provide the US military with facilities for US warships, fighters jets,
military drones and soldiers on “rest and recreation.”
In a recent meeting with the Chairman of the
US Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey, Aquino gave assurances to
the US military that its forces will be given access to facilities in its
former military bases in Subic, Zambales and Clark, Pampanga. The US has
long sought to make use of its former naval and air base to accomodate the
increasing number of “rotational” American troops that will have similar
access arrangements in Australia, Singapore and other countries in the
region. Such arrangements with the Philippines will serve well the
recently declared intention of the US to redirect as much as 60% of its
foreign naval troops in the Asia-Pacific region.
At the same time, at least 700 interventionist
troops belonging to the Joint Special Operations Task Force-Philippines (JSOTFP)
continue to be permanently stationed in its headquarters inside an
exclusive zone of Camp Navarro in Zamboanga City. Soldiers belonging to
the JSOTFP carry out interventionist armed operations, participating
directly in counter-guerrilla operations or providing logistical,
intelligence and other technical support to operating troops of the AFP.
Through its officials attached to the JSOTFP,
the US military can direct the “counter-insurgency” operations of the
Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) both at the strategic planning level
as well as in tactical operations. The Aquino regime has adapted almost to
the letter the 2009 Counterinsurgency Guide issued by the US Department of
State which gives premium to psywar and political gimmickry to cover up
the brutality of the war of suppression directed against the people and
their revolutionary forces.
In the guise of so-called “joint military exercises,” the US military can
direct the AFP’s tactical operations.
The US military has long been conducting
aerial, satellite and electronic intelligence work in the Philippines from
which it gathers information to direct the AFP at the tactical level.
Earlier this year, American-supplied “smart bombs” were dropped by AFP
pilots in Basilan while being directed by US soldiers.
US interventionism is set to further heighten
with the plan to set up a satellite office of the New York Police
Department (NYPD) inside Camp Crame in the guise of “coordination against
terrorism.” In doing so, the US security and defense establishment can
more actively carry out intelligence operations within the Philippines and
direct as well the operations of the Philippine National Police. Recently,
the US government also declared it will work with the Philippine
government in setting up the National Coast Watch Center (NCWC) in order
to allow the US to conduct maritime surveillance.
Completely lacking a sense of national
integrity, the Aquino government does not see anything wrong in allowing a
foreign government to conduct combat, intelligence and training operations
within the Philippines. Aquino himself declared that he supports the US
air force in its conduct of drone-intelligence operations over Philippines
airspace, without any qualms that such operations violate the Philippine
territorial integrity and sovereignty.
Aquino’s subservience to US economic policy
The US military’s power-projection activities
in the Asia-Pacific region helps fortify its hegemonism and seeks to
prevent or contain the growth of China as a military power. At the core of
such a military strategy is the objective of influencing economic policy
in China and the rest of the Asia-Pacific and pave the way for US
companies to carry out heightened exploitation of cheap labor in the
region.
By flexing its military muscle in the region,
the US seeks to further push the discredited neoliberal policies. It seeks
to make China further break up its state enterprises, a measure which the
US considers crucial in allowing US companies to more effectively
penetrate China. In the name of “freedom of navigation,” the US is
building up its military presence as a counterfoil to the military
cooperation between China and Russia and prevent the Shanghai Cooperation
Organization from effectively drawing the rest of the Asia-Pacific away
from US influence.
There is a growing trend of economic
cooperation outside the ambit and actively against US influence
characterized by multilateral and bilateral economic agreements among
Asia-Pacific countries. Despite US efforts in the past years, the US
initiative to build “free trade” agreements under the so-called
Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) has failed to gather a significant number
of adherents.
Less powerful imperialist and capitalist
countries and even some semicolonial countries see the need to broaden
their economic horizons beyond the US, which has been sliding on the path
of economic and industrial decline for the past several decades. Yet, the
Aquino regime has chosen to put all its efforts in support of the US by
agreeing to comply with the all-out liberalization requirements of joining
the TPP.
The ruling Aquino clique intends to use its newly consolidated political
power to push for such liberalization policies mainly by amending the
reactionary 1987 Philippine to remove the provisions that set limits to
foreign ownership of land and those that prohibit foreigners from owning a
majority of locally-operating enterprises. In an interview a few days ago,
Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile, one of the US’ most reliable allies
and baton wielders for the reactionary ruling class revealed that
congressional leaders are discussing efforts to convene a constitutional
convention to undertake “cha-cha” in order to remove what he referred to
derisively as “nationalist provisions” as if these were unwanted remnants
of the past.
In line with economic policy dictates of the US, the International
Monetary Fund and World Bank, the Aquino regime stubbornly sticks to the
neoliberal policies of the past three decades, even if these have clearly
caused great harm against the economy. It has been pursuing the same
anti-industrial and anti-land reform thrusts and continues to rely on
foreign debt, foreign investments and export of labor as solutions to the
perennial and critical problem of unemployment.
The anti-nationalist economic policies of the
Aquino regime further consist of increasing the tax burden on the people
while slashing budgetary appropriations on social spending, keeping wages
low while refusing to regulate oil prices and other key industries and
services and promoting education for cheap labor for both the domestic and
foreign employment markets. With World Bank sponsorship and financing, the
Aquino regime has engaged in a myopic doleout scheme that is both a cheap
publicity stunt and counterinsurgency psywar tack that purportedly
addresses poverty without actually addressing the people’s oppression and
exploitation which are at the root of their abject socio-economic
conditions.
Raise high the banner of nationalism
Philippine sovereignty since the granting of
nominal independence in 1946 is a sham. For more than six and a half
decades, the Philippines has been under a neo-colonial state ruled over by
American-educated and colonial-minded politicians, bureaucrats and
technocrats. Aquino’s puppetry to US imperialist dictates and military
dominance underscore the absence of genuine national freedom and
sovereignty.
The prolonged economic depression of the US compels it to more vigorously
push its weight around in an attempt to override the crisis. It wants to
fortify its hegemony in order to seek and expand areas of trade and
investment. US efforts to intensify the exploitation of labor and tighten
control of trade routes in order to ride over its economic depression are
resulting in ever worsening socio-economic conditions in semicolonial and
semifeudal countries such as the Philippines.
Aquino’s claims of “freedom from poverty” as
the supposed fruit of his so-called “righteous path” is full of air and
completely baseless. Afer two years under Aquino’s US-imposed neoliberal
policies, the Filipino people are suffering more than ever from
unemployment, hunger and massive poverty.
In the face of the US-Aquino regime’s extreme
contempt for Philippine sovereignty, there is urgent need for the Filipino
people to reaffirm and reassert their nationalist aspirations and struggle
for national liberation and self-determination.
There must be a renewed vigor in upholding
nationalism or anti-imperialism. The people must oppose the
imperialist-sponsored notion that under a “globalized world,” nationalism
and the need to build a dynamic, self-reliant and industrialized economy
is an antiquated idea. Apologists of imperialism ignore the fact that the
imperialist countries and other secondary capitalist countries are among
the most zealous ultra-nationalists in terms of economic protectionism.
American officials have openly asserted that its drive to build an
“American Pacific Century” is in line with its national interests.
The Filipino people are in a crucial historic
juncture where upholding nationalism in the field of economic policy and
foreign relations is of utmost importance. US imperialism and their
puppets seek to extinguish the fire of Filipino nationalism. They
depreciate the meaning of nationalism to a narrow concept of pride for
national heritage or individual accomplishments by Filipinos.
Nationalism or anti-imperialism should be
brought to the core of the people’s mass struggles against oil price
increases by exposing foreign monopoly control of the oil industry; in
struggling for wage increases by exposing the policy of cheap labor as a
way of attracting foreing investments; in demanding greater social
subsidies by exposing the IMF-WB policies of deregulation and
privatization; in fighting the demolition of urban poor communities by
exposing the big foreign interests behind the Private-Public Partnership
program of the US-Aquino regime; and in demanding the abrogation of the
Mutual Defense Treaty and the Visiting Forces Agreement by exposing US
military interventionism and the master-client relations between the US
imperialists and its puppet state.
The Filipino people, especially the young
generation, must look back to the Filipino people’s history of
revolutionary resistance and struggle for national freedom. They must
recall the all-out brutalities unleashed by the US against the Filipino
people in their attemmpt to suppress their revolutionary resistance. They
must give serious effort and time to nationalist studies in order to gain
knowledge which has been stricken off the World Bank-designed curriculum
of Philippine education. They must study, promote and seek inspiration
from the heroic revolutionary resistance of the Filipino people in
launching people’s wars against Spanish and American colonialism, as well
as in the struggle to achieve national and social liberation in the past
four decades.
They must look back to the works of Jose Rizal
and Andres Bonifacio of the late 19th century, the nationalist ideals of
the heroes of the working class movement in the early 20th century, the
nationalist assertions of Lorenzo Tañada, Claro Mayo Recto and Renato
Constantino from the 1950s as well as the more recent expressions of
Filipino nationalism set forth by Jose Ma. Sison and the national
democratic movement from the late 1960s to the present.
As before, the Filipino youth will play a
crucial role in making the nationalist studies movement take root and
impact on the Filipino national consciousness. In so doing, the Filipino
people can further raise the banner of national freedom to unprecedented
heights.
The revolutionary movement led by the
Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) has been waging a war of national
and social liberation which is a continuation of the Filipino people’s
unfinished revolution. They have achieved great victories in the past and
are poised to achieve bigger victories in the next few years.
The nationalist movement is an intrinsic aspect of the national democratic
revolutionary movement, with the revolutionary forces as among the most
determined nationalists of the Filipino people. As the national democratic
revolution advances, so does the cause of nationalism. At the same time, a
broad nationalist movement enables the national democratic revolution to
reach out to the people in their numbers. The cause of Filipino
nationalism and the national democratic revolution advance hand in hand.
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