STILL FIGHTING THE COLD WAR

Passion for Reason
By Raul C. Pangalangan
Philippines Daily Inquirer, November 13, 2009

FOR US IT'S AS IF THE COLD WAR HAD NEVER ended. We Filipinos are caught in a time warp and are still righting a war that has long been over. For us, the main threat to national security remains the communist rebellion. It is time we joined the rest of the world in recognizing that the main threat to our way of life is the rise of religious fundamentalism and its terrorist zealots. Why have we been so slow in doing so?

Globally the communist threat began to fade with the fall of the Berlin Wall almost 20 years ago to this day in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. For a long time al¬ready, the only Maoists in the world would not be found in China but outside—and even there they have by now been defeated. Albanians have torn down the monuments to the Maoist Enver Hoxha, and excised his name from his own memorial museum. In Peru, the leaders of Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) are now be¬hind bars. In Nepal, the Maoists have joined parliament, and had its leader elected (and lat¬er unseated) as prime minister.

It is only in the Philippines where a home-grown Maoist party arid its rebel army are still a formidable ideological and military force. But they have sustained their power by so indi-genizing Marxism that they have all but dilut¬ed their claim to a "scientific socialism." Their public face aspires to a populist charm no dif¬ferent from, come to think of it, that of Ramon Magsaysay, packaged by his US Central Intelli¬gence Agency handlers as the protector of the Filipino masses against the local elite.

For the rest of the world, the shift from fight¬ing the Cold War to winning the war on terror meant not merely hunting down a new enemy but fighting a new kind of war—from one where each side at least appealed to reason and claimed to have the better argument, to a new game that dispensed with reason alto¬gether but instead invoked the most backward impulses that appealed to our basest selves.

If Filipinos have lagged behind in seeing the fanatics' threat, it has little to do with practical realities. Sure we fixate on the communists be-cause they are more effective than the Moro Is¬lamic Liberation Front. They command more warm bodies, have historically recruited the best and the brightest of the youth of the '60s and 70s, have a tight organization, and have immense experience in political mobilizing. Who cares that they enjoy little support from crippled "fraternal parties" abroad? What mat¬ters is that locally they can call on enough cadres to rally to the cause.
But look at the flip side. It is the Islamic seces¬sionist movement in Mindanao that today has the benefit of foreign support. The communists before were backed by the Comintern. Today die MILF leans on the 56-nation strong Organization of the Islamic Conference. Marcos grasped that only too well, and signed the 1976 Tripoli Agree¬ment with Nur Misuari under the aegis of the QIC and Libya's Muammar Khaddafi. Finally, their readiness to commit acts of terror, usually through proxies like the Abu Sayyaf, has magni¬fied their political impact. The practical Filipino has equally compelling reasons to dread the MILF as much the CPP-NPA.

Why then the waffling? To start with, anti-fundamentalism has been sadly associated with George W. Bush and his misguided war on terror, he who wasted away the near-universal outpouring of goodwill for the American peo¬ple after the barbaric attacks of Sept. 11,2001. The politically correct Filipino struggles to shake off our "mendicant foreign policy" cap¬tured best in the inaugural address of our first president: "[We must] repose our fate in the ... comradeship [of] the United States ... the guarantor of our security ... the bulwark and support of small nations everywhere in the world." We balk at our image as America's gofer in Asia, so bad we were almost banned from the Non-Aligned Movement.

The deeper reason is that the true terrorist is the Arroyo government, the No. 1 suspect in the October 2007 bombing of the Ayala mall, found by the no less than the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings to be in "a state of denial" over the disappearances of several hundred ac¬tivists between 2002 and 2006. A government that has lost its human rights bona fides is a useless ally in the war on terror.

The deepest reason has all to do with the Fil¬ipino mind-set. For the Filipino public so bur-dened by day-to-day worries, all rebels—Maoist or Muslim—are generic troublemakers. The threat from the communists is more felt be¬cause, to the extent that they hold the franchise on redistributive justice, they genuinely engage the Filipino's profoundest longings.

On the other hand, this predominantly Chris¬tian nation has "othered" the Filipino Muslim so completely that even their rebellion is marginal¬ized, pushing them to desperate acts of terror just to be noticed. But it seems the Christian ma¬jority excludes their Muslim brethren not be¬cause they are fundamentalist but because they chose the wrong god. Apart from that, Filipinos of whatever religious stripe are generally funda¬mentalist in their attitudes about faith and life. Witness the Catholic clergy's hardline stance against the Reproductive Rights Bill. They op¬pose the use of contraceptives in a land where poor families living under the bridges have six to eight children. Who says the Talibans are found only in Afghanistan? Call upon the Pinoy to battle fundamentalism and he wonders: So what's so wrong with it anyway?

The religious terrorists are far away, can't be worse than the communists, are fundamental¬ist like the rest of us, but they came about only lately, and should merely queue up in the Philippine government's Order of Battle.

That's the unspoken logic we must overcome.

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