Benjamin Pimentel’s and Gemma Nemenzo’s Sleights of Hand

The latest assault on the Philippine movement, ideological counterpart to the current reactionary military encirclement and suppression campaign, are two featured columns and a news item in the March 2003 issue of U.S.-based Filipinas magazine about the slaying of Romulo Kintanar by the NPA.

By Pete Victoria
Posted by Bulatlat.com

In the spirit of Engels’ support for conventional trade unions, when the workers have just started organizing, as a step forward in the development of their class organization and consciousness, I welcomed the appearance of Filipinas magazine in the U.S. as a step forward in the development of Filipino-Americans’ self-identity and ethnic consciousness and pride.

Edited by Rene Ciria Cruz, who previously edited Katipunan, a tabloid published by KDP/Katipunan ng Demokratikong Pilipino, the anti-martial law U.S. organization aligned at first with the Philippine progressive movement (Ciria Cruz lay low and then fled the Philippines after being arrested at a rally in Manila at the end of 1969; KDP at the end of the 1970s separated from the Philippine movement and with its companion organization, Line of March, aligned with the Soviet camp, which unbeknownst to them, was entering its death throes), Filipinas had high production values although it was not generally political and not progressive in content.

Owned by the Filipino-Chinese big bourgeois Yuchengco family, Filipinas magazine, though unlike Katipunan not mainly political, was like the later Katipunan in that it would publish from time to time articles extolling renegades, opponents, or fallen-away leaders of the movement. (The Philippine progressive movement has not had good press in the U.S., whether, unsurprisingly, in the bourgeois media, or even in the alternative media, except for Workers World, Revolutionary Communist, and Monthly Review magazine on a few occasions. William Pomeroy’s book on Philippine history, issued by the leftwing International Publishers, which purports to be a progressive work, is an out-and-out attack on the Philippine movement, and paints up the infinitesimal old CPP as a major force in the contemporary Philippine resistance. Against the Current at the height of the anti-RJ (Rejectionist) struggle toward the mid-1990s published an attack by a couple of followers of Walden Bello associated with the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington.)

The latest assault on the Philippine movement, ideological counterpart to the current reactionary military encirclement and suppression campaign, are two featured columns and a news item in the March 2003 issue of Filipinas magazine (with a gushing cover story on the anti-immigration, rightwing Filipino-American writer Michelle Milken, soulmate of the uncle toms Dinesh D’Souza and Clarence Thomas), about the slaying of Romulo Kintanar by the NPA. One is "The Betrayal of Edgar Jopson" by Benjamin Pimentel (who wrote a book on Jopson commissioned by the Mindanao mafia where Kintanar figures as a hero, and is closely related to an associate of Kintanar’s), whose argument is that Kintanar married Jopson’s widow and raised Jopson’s children and was Jopson’s close comrade and friend, so that it was a betrayal of Jopson to kill him.

Martyr

Jopson was a martyr killed by the Philippine military. But Jopson is Jopson, and Kintanar is Kintanar. So conversely, it could be construed as a betrayal of Jopson by Pimentel to lump him with Kintanar and with Kintanar’s later life and deeds, if Kintanar did indeed later betray the movement for which Jopson sacrificed his life. Such are the dialectics of history.

Pimentel in his article also puts the cart before the horse. What made Jopson a hero was his casting his lot with the movement and the masses, but Pimentel presents it the other way around - as if Jopson and others of privileged background like him were the only saving grace of the movement and the masses. Repeatedly Pimentel gushes over their leaving behind their privileged lives whereas they could have become instead reactionary politicians like Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. So what and where would they be (and some indeed like Bobi Tiglao have become) if they followed Pimentel’s "conventional route"?

Moreover, Pimentel ignores the role Jose Maria Sison and the movement he principally launched and led had in the revolutionary upheaval of Philippine politics and Jopson's loyalty to Sison.

Even the anecdotes Pimentel cites he did not quite get right. The "politico" whose party Jopson picketed was actually the brother of a politico - businessman Eugenio Lopez, brother of Vice President Fernando Lopez. Pimentel also makes out Jopson as the hero in the burning of homes in Ilocos by the warlord Crisologo, when it was Victor Corpuz as a young Philippine military officer, who was actually the one who had a major role in this episode by providing security for the victims. And this episode shows exactly the point about the relationship of great and would-be-great men and masses: when Corpuz served the people, he was a hero; when he threw in his lot with the other side, he became a traitor. (Maybe he could change colors again and redeem himself but he seems to be too far gone for that.)

Jopson’s meeting with Marcos after the January 30-31, 1970 "Battle of Mendiola" did not make Jopson "a legend." Indeed, Jopson and all the others in that meeting, including the radical activists, got pressured and indeed intimidated by Marcos into calling off the February 12 protest against the massacre. Only at the last minute, upon instructions of Sison and a direct plea to the Kabataang Makabayan (KM) general secretary by a couple of activists to reject the agreement and go through with the protest rally, did the KM general secretary, to his everlasting credit, dash off a press release announcing that the rally would go through after all, and it was a tremendously successful rally, filling up Plaza Miranda. Even a progressive personality like Renato Constantino who did not usually attend rallies was there to show solidarity - I know as we sat side by side. The February 12 rally was highly important as the revered First Quarter Storm (dubbed by Sison) would possibly not have materialized without it.

I don’t know about the La Tondeña strike mentioned in the Pimentel article as I wasn’t around then, but again in that episode Pimentel practically Jopson defines as the movement.

Renegade

Then Pimentel contrasts this idyllic picture of idealistic activists to "arrogant," "brutal," "hardened ideologues." But guess who his authority is? Nathan Quimpo, a renegade who Pimentel deceitfully does not identify as one of those principally responsible for the worst depredation to be laid at the feet of the movement: the Mindanao anti-DPA (deep penetration agent) hysteria in the early to mid-1980s.

Finally, Pimentel claims Kintanar stayed out of politics in the 1990s, only helping his former comrades in their livelihood and his family. Actually, he went into business with movement funds. More critically, Pimentel doesn’t mention and disregards what President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo herself confirmed to the press that Kintanar was an agent of the government, working with the intelligence and military. A top police official earlier revealed that Kintanar was in charge of the Estrada government plot to assassinate Sison.

Gemma Nemenzo’s featured column in the same issue of Filipinas magazine also deals with Kintanar. She likewise trots out Quimpo as her authority. In a display of either ignorance or deceit, she condemns the Mindanao hysteria as the worst tragedy even while citing one of its leading authors, Quimpo, as her guide, without mentioning the link between the two. Quimpo was drummed out of the movement for being unrepentant for these crimes he is pontificating about, a Kafkaesque twist in keeping with Gemma’s literary inclinations, except that she purposedly misleads unsuspecting readers.

In a column sometime back, Gemma (who was married to Ariel Almendral, another renegade who allegedly worked for the Philippine military and intelligence), perpetrated a similar deceit in recounting the liquidation by the old CPP of some of their members who she was apparently close to, but leaving the impression among readers - who can hardly be blamed for not knowing that the infinitesimal old CPP still is around, if barely - that it was the reestablished CPP and NPA which she was talking about.

Disinformation about Sison

To cap this horrendous issue of Filipinas magazine (progressive Filipinos in the US: stop buying it!), which should be widely circulated by the U.S. and Philippine governments as disinformation, a news item in it blatantly fabricates that "Sison admitted that he ordered the assassination of Kintanar who belongs to a rival CPP faction." An out-and-out concoction, as Sison has repeatedly rejected the allegation in the press, but it doesn’t matter to this "respectable" magazine, which bets I suppose that it can get away with it in W’s America.

These people can’t even get their lines straight. Pimentel claims that Kintanar had become "non-political" since the start of the 1990s, but in the very same pages the magazine asserted that he belonged to a rival CPP faction. Non-political, my foot; but what can you expect of someone who takes Quimpo as his mentor? At best it is nothing but the blind leading the blind. Posted by Bulatlat.com

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