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WORM’S EYEVIEW: Barangaynons must help secure the perimeter

CAGAYAN DE ORO CITY (MindaNews/04 July) — We need the communitarian approach to development and national security, a community-based system that consolidates the grassroots, firms up the base of the Republic—which must be anchored on people—and secures every community against treachery from within and without.

When people of the barangay—barangueños—cooperate and work together, they secure our basic political units, make its government a bulwark of freedom, strengthen local initiative and enterprise, and exemplify democracy as the embodiment of people power, the true foundation of a republic.

Without the barangueño’s participation, the community becomes the soft underbelly of our republic instead of its bedrock foundation. It then becomes vulnerable to attempts by saboteurs and other ill-motivated people to manipulate it for selfish reasons, or worse, for treasonous intentions.

It should worry us all that as many as one-fourth of our 42,000+ barangays are infiltrated, influenced, or involved in some way with Communist rebels.

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The so-called National Democratic Front and its armed partisans, the New People’s Army, seek to take over Philippine society and superimpose an alien, totalitarian, and Godless regime over it. They are traitors and a menace to our way of life and faith.

Because of their intentions and their ruthless, violent ways, it is treason to cooperate with them, to offer comfort or aid to them or be their agent or supporter for any reason. There is no place for a totalitarian ideology like Communism in our Christian-Muslim-Lumad society.

Yet many misguided Filipinos join or support them, marching in parades and protest movements, waving banners, destabilizing government. At the same time, their armed operatives in the countryside wreak havoc to business, factories, farms, even rob defenseless folks of livelihood.

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Make no mistake about it: Operatives of the NDF and the NPA are traitors to our nation and to our democracy. They seek to destroy all that our free society stands for.

Fired by misguided zeal, these communists seek the downfall of our social, cultural, and economic institutions—wreaking destruction, sowing anarchy, attacking government installations everywhere.

They do so in hopes of replacing our democratic order with a totalitarian system, a fascistic one, one that they hope will enable them to take charge and control all political and economic power including all the means of production in our society.

This insidious ideology, already admitted as a failure and discredited since the fall of the Soviet Union, speaks with a forked tongue, acts through multiple incarnations, and disguises its presence on varied fronts in varying contexts.

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Closer to home, its armed partisans roam northeastern and southeastern Mindanao at will in a bid to divide our island region into two dominions: one for itself, the other for the Bangsamoro. Both possessing deadly firepower, unsuspecting Mindanaons face deadly peril.

They even have a megaphone under cover of Congress, a legitimizing façade—the Party-List groups that serve as their parliamentary front, who raise their voices in Congress except on issues that serve their own agenda.

Do they take issue with the bullying tactics of Communist China in grabbing islets, reefs, and shoals in the West Philippine Sea? No!

Do they denounce the reckless endangerment Chinese Communist warships subject our unarmed fishermen to in the Spratlys, ramming and threatening them with annihilation? Never!

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But mention America and any accord our government enters into with the U.S, you can count on these homegrown Communists—posters and maybe Molotov cocktails in hand—to take to the streets straightaway and threaten the gates of the U.S. embassy and all who disagree with them!

More to the point on today’s hot issue: Do they denounce Janet Lim-Napoles or the pork barrel scam? No! And does anyone know why?

The pork barrel has been a gold mine for them through the years—years preceded by penury, when what kept them afloat was robbery at gun-point, takings from permit-to-campaign fees, and “revolutionary taxes” extorted from plantations and other enterprises.

Drinking deeply from the pork barrel, the Party-List fronts created a bonanza for the Communist forces at P70 Million+ per year each—with no one bothering to ask for an accounting.

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Meanwhile, has anyone noted the effect of their sudden prosperity? As the pork barrel craze took Congress by storm, their street marches suddenly sported wide, multicolored, huge banners and flags during parades—well-equipped with transport, snacks, posters, megaphones, public address systems, cell phones, electronic gadgets, and whatnot during rallies, sit-ins, and protest marches!

Talk of eating your cake and keeping it too! Let no one forget: Corrupt money fattens up even power-hungry and corrupt Communists!

So, ask not why they’re silent on the pork issue; it wouldn’t make sense for them to kill Janet’s golden goose, would it?

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But, mind you, where other forms of pork may emerge, thanks to evil geniuses known as trapos, you can be sure these communist predators will be right there at the head of the line! Why fight it?—as conventional wisdom in the outer world would put it.

Besides, for them it makes eminent sense to make pork or DAP—the handmaids of corruption—rise to intolerable levels till it causes the republic to implode and collapse from its own rotten weight.

Let’s be forewarned therefore. The existence of these Communist malcontents in our society is a threat to all. Thus, Barangueños: Be vigilant! If possible, flush them out from the interstices of your community! And secure the perimeter!

Manny is former UNESCO regional director for Asia-Pacific; secretary-general, South East Asian Publishers Association; director, development academy of Philippines; member, Permanent Mission to the United Nations; vice chair, Local Government Academy; member, Cory Government’s Peace Panel, and PPI-UNICEF awardee for outstanding columnist. valdehuesa@gmail.com

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