COMMENTARY

Reply to Conrado de Quiros

All the attacks and execrations that De Quiros has leveled against the national democratic movement over the past 10 years prove only one thing: He is not only against the NDF but he is also against the millions of masses comprising it.

By Edmundo Santuario III

Meet Conrado de Quiros, Inquirer columnist and editorial writer. He has a way with words and, as his admirers say, always writes with “passion.” We surmise that, for him, writing a column and appearing to be adversarial is a calling. And it is with this in mind that he reserves his most virulent, nay, most passionate and condescending attacks against the Left. He has been doing that for at least the past 10 years or so. We wonder why.

On the eve of the solidarity conference featuring the government and the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) this week, De Quiros let out his latest diatribes against the Left not just with one but with two successive columns, entitled “Left out.” There was a strong suggestion that the columns were written by somebody who used to be “in” and is now looking into the movement from the outside. His dissection is not only unclinical but also blurred by self-glorification—that he knows all the answers.

De Quiros—like Bobi Tiglao, another Inquirer columnist now presidential spokesperson—says he sympathizes with Antonio Zumel, former president of the National Press Club and now NDFP senior adviser. Zumel is in the country from a long exile in Utrecht (inaccurately, De Quiros says Zumel is sick with “cancer”). Like Tiglao, he predicts that the NDFP leader will have to henceforth battle with “the pall of the socialist vision (which) should prove harder to cross than the Pasig River on a cold rainy night.” Such words are devoid of any sense, let alone fair play.

For a columnist to say that to a sick man is not only grossly unfair but is far more despicable than the attacks he has so far unleashed against Estrada and Cardinal Sin combined. If he were physically able, Zumel would certainly grab his pen to write a reaction that would make De Quiros eat his own words. I am sure that if Zumel were recuperating in a barrio, all the village folk would be caring for him as one of their own who has joined them in their struggle; I’d like to see how De Quiros, who always claims to keep the people’s cause at heart, would react to such a sight. I learn, however, that he has never seen much of what it’s like in a rural village or in a factory.

Zumel, over the past 30 years, has been a consistent revolutionary who has used his pen to serve the people outstandingly -- unlike De Quiros who used to ghostwrite for Marcos. His conviction on the national democratic struggle and the socialist path is as firm as ever despite his physical condition. The fact that he is still in the revolutionary movement speaks for itself.

De Quiros wages his own battle with the NDFP on the basis of what he imagines are its two major weaknesses: first, that socialism has become moribund in the light of its failure—particularly in Eastern Europe and China—and that, therefore, history is no longer on the side of the Left (“it has been so for the last 10 years”); second, that it has yet to account for the bloody purges that occurred in the late ‘80s, lacks “transparency,” and is simply intolerant of “dissent.” These allegations have been repeated ad nauseam over the past years.

De Quiros’ past columns suggest the transformation of a man from one who claims to sympathize with the revolutionary movement to a non-believer. His transformation began more than 10 years ago in a visit to Germany at a time when its eastern side was undergoing a tumult with its “socialist experimentation” and was headed toward collapse. “Reunification” with the capitalist west was just moments away. It was while on a visit sponsored by a conservative German foundation that De Quiros saw, thousands of kilometers away from home, the “pall” of socialism. Like a psychic in a trance, he saw that socialism’s fall would -- like a prairie fire but in a reverse way -- contaminate the Philippines.

We didn’t know that De Quiros’ own contamination by Jesuit education and universalist or reductionist way of thinking is as serious as ever. This is no different from the American fascist John Foster Dulles’ own “domino theory”—the victory of the Vietnamese liberation forces would catch fire throughout Southeast Asia. At least Dulles had a clear agenda: his theory was concocted to justify imperialist armed intervention in the region.

The demise of “socialism” in the former USSR had been forecast by Mao Zedong as early as the mid-‘50s. Soviet “socialism” was of a type perverted by revisionism wherein bourgeois elements in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union tried to restore capitalism and embarked on global military adventurism and expansionism while maintaining a “co-existence” policy with the United States. Hence, the term Soviet social-imperialism: socialist in words, imperialist in deeds.

Unfortunately the same kind of bourgeois elements were able to seize power in China in the mid-‘70s, cutting short the initially successful socialist construction under Mao’s leadership.

Both cases of revisionist perversion of the socialist cause were soundly denounced by the revolutionary leadership in the Philippines. It was a stand that would be vindicated: internal power struggles, the advocacy of erroneous political lines and reducing the socialist struggle to a paradigm of merely economic progress resulted in the fall of the revisionist regimes in the USSR and the rest of Eastern Europe.

De Quiros entirely misses this point as he asserts, again and again, that it was “socialism” that failed in these countries and that therefore, ipso facto, socialism is a lost cause and will never take root in the Philippines.

He agrees that the concrete conditions still obtain in the Philippines to fuel the revolutionary movement. Yet he falls short of explaining why he believes that the people’s war won’t be able to address these problems. All he does is suggest that there’s no sense to it at all because socialism won’t work anymore.

He also takes the NDFP to task for its failure to account for so-called bloody purges, its lack of “transparency” and “intolerance of dissent.”

De Quiros reveals his bias for the so-called “rejectionists” and counter-revolutionaries who were unceremoniously expelled from the national democratic movement after plots to grab political leadership and attempts to steer the movement towards capitulationism. Among them were the elements found to have been responsible for what De Quiros alleges as “bloody purges.” They have since fled to escape the people’s wrath.

The fact that the revolutionary movement has recovered from its setbacks after a thoroughgoing rectification movement in the ‘90s belies De Quiros’ implied allegations that it is incapable of correcting its mistakes. But then these are complex issues that the columnist cannot possibly fathom, let alone appreciate; his allegations about non-transparency and “intolerance for dissent” by themselves betray his lack of knowledge on the nuances and rudiments of a revolutionary organization.

For all his passionate prose and the accolade he has earned, there’s not a hint of a grasp of Marxism much less even a liberal thinking.

All the attacks and execrations that De Quiros has leveled against the national democratic movement over the past 10 years prove only one thing: He is not only against the NDFP but he is also against the millions of masses comprising it. His expletives are directed not only against the leadership of the NDFP, they are also directed against the peasants, workers, students, women and children, professionals, artists and patriotic journalists and small businessmen who, in their growing numbers, continue to believe in the people’s war and in its socialist perspective.

It is De Quiros who is actually going against the tide of history. It is he who is left out.  #