Avoid Marcos’ military solutions to everything

The Army, Navy, and Air Force commanders dispel any rebellious stirrings in the ranks. The Armed Forces chief clears the Liberals and Senator Trillanes of plotting a government overthrow. Only the Communist Party is into a “Red October” offensive. President Duterte must have misread intelligence briefs. Contrary to his declassification, soldiers and politicians are unlikely to align with insurgents to oust him. They are, in communist parlance, irreconcilable class enemies. At worst, as the generals clarify, the communists will try to get legitimate groups and personalities involved unwittingly through “cutouts and linkages.” Duterte’s un-battletested civilian squawk boxes have the temerity to dispute the generals, wanting the LP and Trillanes jailed. He must beware of them. History is full of accounts of courtiers who blindsided leaders with conspiracy theories, in order to curry political or financial favor. With candidacy filings this week the election season is on.

Duterte must avoid too Marcos’ mistake of employing military solutions to non-military problems. That will exacerbate the situation. Imagine the Armed Forces so dull as to believe that the political Opposition is in cahoots with the New People’s Army to topple the government. Malacañang might order a military crackdown on dissent. Congress and the Judiciary would be sidelined. Institutions would be coopted. Citizens would be killed or tortured. Investors would flee. Cronies would loot industries. The economy would collapse. That in a nutshell was what happened during 14 years of Marcos martial law. Never should it recur.

“Red October,” from intelligence findings, is to be a communist push this month. Why October? Because it fetes communist victories in Russia and China, and Philippine indigenous peoples whose tribes the insurgents are striving to recruit. For communists 2018 also marks Marx’s 200th birth year, and the 50th anniversary of Jose Maria Sison’s Maoist party.

Through “Red October” the communists supposedly will attempt strategic stalemate against the Armed Forces. Thence it would launch a strategic offensive to “proletarian victory.” That sounds more like a propaganda movie in Sison’s mind. Strategic stalemate, to communists, means parity in arms and facilities, training and troop numbers with the Armed Forces. Now how can NPA guerrillas acquire camps, cannons, tanks, helicopters, fighters, and warships to match the Armed Forces? To raise the required multibillion pesos, how long will they need to extract a few hundred thousand pesos a month of “revolutionary tax” from mines and plantations? The NPA has been in strategic defensive for the past five decades. It will likely remain there till Sison, as Malacañang wishes, dies soon of serious illness. “Red October” may be nothing more than a last effort by remnant loyalists to humor him.

The crux of “Red October” purportedly is the recruitment of students from ten campuses in Metro Manila. Having already exposed it, the Armed Forces would do well to avoid a military response. It is up to the political leadership, not men in uniform, to confront that Leninist tactic of united front. If smart, Malacañang would mobilize key Cabinet members, not the proven obnoxious ones, to reach out to the academe, Catholic church, and youths. The administration must show tolerance of alternative views. It is said that “Red October” would include film showings and forums about the horrors of Marcos’ martial law. There is nothing wrong with that. Denouncing abuses of power and plunder of the national wealth is in fact patriotic and democratic – anathema to communist dictatorship.

There’s a problem though. Not a unifying President, Duterte has managed to antagonize the institutions. One educator of a city college complains that the government should dialogue with them, since they have not monitored any communist activity in campus. An administrator of a Catholic university suspects that Duterte is singling them out for their religion. Duterte not only has been bickering with Catholic hierarchs but also insulting church tenets. That probably makes the administration insecure. Where there is oppression, there is revolution, Duterte must have learned from his Leftist youth.

In the end, there might be nothing to fear about “Red October.” The communists have a tendency to isolate themselves. Despite Duterte’s open despise for America, their agitation predictably will be against an imagined “US imperialist-Duterte regime.” The campus recruitment would be in support of Maoist armed struggle of “encircling the cities from the countryside.” Unrecognized, however, is that city and rural folk are becoming increasingly globalized in information. Through the Internet they know that the prime example of communist leader is that one in the north who, wanting fireworks on his grandpa’s death anniversary, let loose a hail of missiles to unnerve neighbor states.

“Red October” only distracts Duterte from solving people’s complaints against inflation and peso decline. His preoccupation with it severely will affect how his administration will fare in the 2019 mid-term elections.

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