The NDFP commends the Kabataang Makabayan and other allied organizations for boldly propagating their revolutionary beliefs in several activities during the 56th anniversary of the New People’s Army. It is a fitting tribute to the NPA, the organization that has dedicated decades of fighting for the rights and freedoms of the most marginalized classes and sectors of Philippine society against exploitation and oppression by US imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism.
The successful lightning rallies, leaf-letting, sticker campaigns, fora and cultural activities by the Kabataang Makabayan, Armas, Kaguma, Masapa and other allied organizations in the days before, during and after the anniversary show that revolutionary fervor is burning brightly in the urban areas despite government repression that forces these mass organizations to resort to underground revolutionary work.
The US-Marcos regime has repeatedly declared the coming demise of the Philippine revolution. But so shocked was the NTF-ELCAC not only by the continued existence, but by the bold assertion of revolutionary organizations right in the urban centers that it could do nothing but attack the legal, democratic movement which it considers fair game.
Consistent with its notorious character of intentionally muddling people’s issues and spreading disinformation, the NTF-ELCAC takes a malicious swipe against democratic organizations that advocate for its abolition and the repeal of the Anti-Terror Law, as if these calls were not open, legitimate people’s demands for the realization of genuine democracy. By branding the advocates for its disbandment as “staunch supporters of communist terrorism”, the NTF-ELCAC is again exposing its twisted psy-war tactics of lumping together legal and underground organizations, its own blatant intolerance of the people’s right to free speech and assembly, its undemocratic schemes to criminalize political dissent and its zealous cover-up of the state’s violations of human rights and international humanitarian law.
The NTF-ELCAC’s sweeping allegations of NPA recruitment in the universities are schemes to justify ever heightening campus repression against students and teachers who organize and mobilize for their own specific as well as national issues. The NTF-ELCAC should be reminded that the phrase “wherever there is oppression, there is resistance” is not just a cliché, it is a reality proven everyday by the voluntary enlistment to the NPA of youth and students from varied walks of life, not just from universities but from the countryside, the factories, the urban poor communities, the indigenous people’s villages.
People support the revolution because it is the only viable solution to the long-standing misery imposed on them by government neglect, spiraling inflation, unemployment, hunger, land-lessness, environmental destruction, plunder of their ancestral land and natural resources–all because the government prefers to busy itself with corruption and to follow the neo-liberal dictates of its imperialist masters.
The youth join the armed revolution because state response to their legitimate dissent is to silence them by red-tagging, deadly psy-war, harassment, abductions, enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, massacres and aerial bombardment perpetrated by fascist troops and institutions, among them the NTF-ELCAC.
NTF-ELCAC has no socially-beneficial reason for being as it is. It is a fascist instrument that is anathema to democracy. The revolutionary movement is not only for the NTF-ELCAC’s abolition, it is for the replacement of the whole rotten government apparatus by a democratic, nationalist people’s government.
The NPA upholds the Filipino peoples’ right and duty to rise up in arms against tyranny and for national liberation against US semi-colonial rule. In the face of fast-rising international fascism driven by US imperialism under the Trump administration and the increasing puppetry of the Marcos regime that pushes the country to the brink of becoming a battlefield in an inter-imperialist war, every Filipino has a right to proclaim the need for revolution under this oppressive, fascist, and puppet Marcos regime. It is the duty of the revolutionary movement to call for the replacement of the reactionary state with a government truly for the people, and the duty and choice of the politically advanced sectors of society to rise to the call.
Elias Dipasupil
Secretary General, National Democratic Front of the Philippines
source: NDFP