by PNA
MANILA — The Communist Party of the Philippines – New People’s Army (CPP-NPA) has failed to attract the masses with its ideology due to its lack of credibility and blindness of reality, National Artist F. Sionil Jose said.
In an opinion column published by Jose in the Philippine Star and in his online blog, he said this lack of touch on reality “doomed” the communist party.
“Wide social divide, as evidenced by widespread poverty, is in itself the “objective reality” that every revolutionary must understand. From the very beginning, however, the Communist Party and the NPA were blind to this and to the other objective realities in this country. This willful blindness doomed the Party,” he said.
Jose noted the “supreme irony” of the CPP-NPA collecting revolutionary taxes from businessmen.
“By exchanging the revolutionary tax for protection, the NPA has emasculated the very foundation of the revolution itself and has joined the ranks of the very enemy it wants to destroy,” he said.
Jose said the CPP-NPA should have worked with the Philippine Army instead of treating them as their enemy.
“What they ignored is that the Army, including its officer corps, is composed primarily of the very poor. It is also a patriotic institution, its heroism tested in Tirad Pass, in World War II. It is also the Army, and only the Army, that can hold the country together. The Party should have worked to win the Army to their side,” he said.
Jose, who was awarded as National Artist for Literature in 2001, blamed CPP founder Jose Maria Sison for numerous deaths and huge amount of money wasted due to the CPP-NPA’s armed fighting for 50 years.
He called Sison “a brilliant ideologue, a narcissist, and a second-rate poet”.
“The Party (CPP-NPA) must eventually be led by selfless leaders like Ho Chi Minh, who are willing to live poorly as their own people,” he said.
Sison has been in exile in The Netherlands since 1987 after peace talks with then-President Corazon Aquino’s government failed.
Aside from being a National Artist, Jose has been known for his writings on national sovereignty and social justice since the late 60s.
He has also been a publisher, lecturer on cultural issues, and the founder of the Philippine chapter of the international organization PEN.
The US State Department and the European Union have both tagged the CPP-NPA as terrorist bodies.
