Seeing Red

By Conrado de Quiros

LAST TIME AROUND, I SAID THE REASON Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has launched a war against the Reds—notwithstanding that the Reds are no longer the force they were during Marcos’ and Cory’s time, indeed notwithstanding that they have become a pale shadow of it—is that she needs a scapegoat, no more and no less than Marcos and Hitler did, to channel the people’s resentments toward a manufactured threat and divert their attention from a very real one. That remains the primary reason we have a war whose justifications are worlds flimsier than the so-called “war against terror” which GMA also launched shortly after 9/11 with nothing to show for it.

But there are a couple of other reasons why she has done so.

The first is to solidify her hold on the military. At the very least, a war against the New People’s Army enables her to reward her favorite generals with largesse for services rendered in the past and to be rendered in the future. GMA bribes her generals under conditions of peace, it will be seen as a bribe. She bribes her generals under conditions of war, it will be seen as resolutely prosecuting a campaign—especially as the war is being advertised as achieving victory in two years’ time.

Will she be embarrassed if she fails to do as promised? Well, she did say she wasn’t going to run for president and did. Was she embarrassed? And in any case, however the war ends, even if her efforts to butcher the enemy succeeds only in swelling its ranks and strengthens its resolve to fight back, Mike Defensor, Ignacio Bunye and the two Prosperos (Nograles and Pichay) can always be counted upon to call it a smashing victory. These are people who are not particularly constrained by reality.

You have a war, nobody will look too closely at the budget and the emergency allocations thrown at the generals like scraps of meat to dogs. Or one can do so only on pain of being called a communist or a sympathizer, with nasty consequences. That is no longer facetious in these times.

At the most, GMA solidifies her hold on the military by pushing back the reformist-minded junior officers in favor of the reactionary and corrupt—and, therefore, “buy-able” senior officers. Lest we forget, Malacañang, with the consent or connivance of the AFP brass, has already tried to link some of the Magdalo officers to the communist cause, a thing the officers naturally and rightly have denied furiously.

For years the restive officers have been saying that the real problem in the AFP is that the top brass is staggeringly corrupt, stripping the rank-and-file of their sustenance and the combat soldiers in Mindanao, in particular, quite literally of their boots. For years, the officers have been saying that the real problem in society is not the insurgency but the roots of the insurgency, which are poverty and oppression; it makes no sense to shoot down people who are merely desperately seeking rescue or respite from them. For years the officers have been saying that the real problem in this country is not those who are hungry for power and are trying to grab it with force, but the one person who craves power like breath itself she has grabbed it by farce—and now keeps it by force.

But you declare a war against the Reds, and, voila, the disease becomes the cure, the problem becomes the solution, the bane becomes the boon. Suddenly, the same corrupt generals whose contribution to humanity consists of continuing to foist a usurper upon a hapless people become knights in shining armor ready to slay the dragon. Suddenly, the largely idealistic young men and women in uniform who take duty and honor seriously become allied with the enemy by opposing a corrupt and illegitimate regime. Suddenly, the one person who has brought plague and ruination on this country, such as has not been seen since the days of Marcos—and probably not even then—becomes the savior who will rid this country of its scourge.

The second, and more frightening, additional reason for the war is that it gives a legal or psychological mantle to the killings. As George W. Bush, has shown, you have a war, notably one propagandized as life-and-death, you can justify anything, including the mugging of civil rights with a Homeland Security Act and the invasion of a country that poses the threat not of harboring weapons of mass destruction but of withdrawing oil of gigantic proportions. GMA has lost her claim to fighting terror, not least with The New York Times suggesting she is its best recruiter the way the US Congress then suggested Marcos was the NPA’s best recruiter. GMA needs another war to justify the murderous consequences of illegitimacy and dictatorship, and has manufactured one against the Reds.

Without that war, the killings would remain a source of outrage here and abroad. They have already been singled out by the human rights groups, local and international, as a crime against humanity. And even a public grown tired and cynical is being roused to anger and protest by the sheer plethora of the dead and the brazenness of their murder.

You have a war against the Reds and suddenly the dead become “collateral damage,” a concept Raul Gonzalez has already explicitly advanced. You are tempted to say you wish he would end up one, except that if he did he would not be around to change his mind. But I don’t mind. His mind is already collaterally damaged as it is. You have a war against the Reds, and every dead turns up Red, activists and journalists alike.

But this is the part that takes my breath away. You have GMA relentlessly tearing down every fabric of decency—never mind democracy—in this country, and what are we doing about it?

Well, the opposition is still trying to stop the Cha-cha.