IT is so despicable, and the height of duplicity, for communist mouthpieces, present and former Bayan Muna representatives Carlos Zarate and Teodoro Casiño, to claim — even in the halls of Congress that is a pillar of our democracy — that the Communist Party of the Philippines and its New People’s Army (CPP-NPA) are not their nor the Filipinos’ enemies.

How could they have the gall to claim this when the CPP-NPA is responsible for over 50,000 military, police and civilian deaths; when in their official publications, they boast of ambushing and killing the Republic’s military and police; when even its “chairman emeritus” Jose Ma. Sison two years ago publicly asked the NPA to kill at least one soldier a day?

Official records — i.e., combat reports and death benefits to soldiers’ families of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) — show that the NPA has killed 14,000 of its troops from 1975 to June this year. This is four times the 3,145 of our troops killed by both the Moro National Liberation Front and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and 82 times by the Islamic terrorists Abu Sayyaf.

But this is an underestimate of actual casualties, as these do not include the deaths that occur months or years after a soldier dies from a wound from an NPA bullet or mine. Many AFP records during the martial law period and the first years of the Cory Aquino regime, were also lost when the AFP headquarters building burned down from rebel fire during the 1989 coup attempt.

THIS newspaper’s editorial the other day titled “IATF should study the science and math of the pandemic” is so patently wrong. Contrary to that editorial’s claims. The coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) is not just like the flu, it’s far deadlier and more dangerous; lockdowns, with other measures such as mandatory face mask wearing and social distancing, work to fight the pandemic.

The piece claimed: “On October 5, the WHO finally confirmed what many experts and studies had been saying for months — that the coronavirus is no deadlier or dangerous than seasonal flu. The WHO’s top brass made this announcement during a special session of its 34-member executive board.”

Neither the World Health Organization nor any of its officials in that October meeting of its executive board, to this day, said that, not even anything close to that.

Neither did it issue any statement that could be misinterpreted that way. They did not compare — or even dare to compare — Covid-19 with the seasonal flu, which after all most of the world has come around to control for decades. Only very few experts but a number of crackpots, United States President Donald Trump leading them, pooh-poohed Covid-19 as “just like the flu.”

THE biggest lesson of this pandemic, which has been the biggest threat to humanity in this generation, is that the nation-state matters a lot, and its leadership as well. These two are the most important things that determine if a human being lives or not and, in a broader sense, whether he lives a satisfying life or a miserable one.

All the blah-blah about globalization, about being a global citizen have proven to be hogwash. The European Union even with its bloated expensive bureaucracy left its members twisting in the wind of the pandemic. It couldn’t even undertake a unified, coordinated campaign to fight the pandemic. The idea of a borderless Europe proved to be a naïve one as each EU nation decided for itself whether to close its borders or not.

Supposedly the most powerful and richest on earth, the US nation-state failed in fighting the pandemic and became the worst infected country: an unbelievable 12 million cases and over 250,000 deaths.

Compare that to that country which the United States has been continuously hectoring how to govern — the Philippines, which has 416,000 cases and 8,000 deaths. Even if one adjusts those figures to reflect the US’ bigger population (274 million as against our 110 million), we are so much better off: the US has 37,500 cases per million of its population as against our 3,784. Deaths from the coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) in the US is 789 per million; ours is 73.

What has been disastrous for the US has obviously been its leadership. President Donald Trump was in total denial mode that Covid-19 was a grave threat and therefore not only failed in mobilizing his country’s vast medical and logistics resources, but even worsened it by claiming that masks and social distancing were useless in fighting the pandemic.

NEVER in his wildest dreams did Communist Party founder Jose Ma. Sison imagine that this could happen in his lifetime.

The country’s top state academic institution for which taxpayers spend P20 billion annually, the University of the Philippines, has become practically the Communist Party’s cultural base, a center for its propaganda and one of the top recruiters for its cadres and for the New People’s Army’s Maoist jihadists.

It has become a university of the Reds’ sheep, the naïve and cowards. It is ironic that while the NPA has dwindled from its peak of about 20,000 guerrillas in the mid-1980s to at most 2,000 fighters now dispersed in squads in a few scattered jungles, the communists’ power at the UP has grown over the years.

NATURAL disasters are supposed to draw the noblest in humanity, as these remind us that while humanity is nothing really special in the face of nature’s wrath, or its total uncaring, we are one species with empathy and reason to care for each other.

Instead, the Yellows and the Reds take disasters, as in the recent Typhoon “Ulysses” devastation, as opportunities to pillory government and in the case of the most fraudulent vice president we’ve ever had, Leni Robredo, to portray herself as a more caring successor to President Duterte.

In the morning after Typhoon Ulysses hit, the Yellows launched their #NasaanAngPangulo social media campaign, apparently thinking that Duterte’s age and seeming frailty would keep him at home.

While I don’t think that really gained traction — and certainly not Duterte’s habit with his long experience as mayor — it is a testament to the power, or illusion, of social media that Palace spokesman Harry Roque Jr. had to debunk that campaign’s implicit claim that government was doing nothing to help the victims of the disaster.

This type of hurricane is a very strong tempest, so many and so strong hitting these islands that neither Virgil nor Ovid nor any other poet I have read can describe its destructive power. These occur very often and we suffer so much, that even after experiencing them, it is difficult to believe these can happen.

– Francisco I. Alzina SJ, a Jesuit missionary in the Philippines, 1668

TYPHOONS — about 20 hitting us every year — have been the curse of our geography described as early as the 17th century. The Philippines is not just among the countries hit regularly by typhoons. It is the worst hit by this terrifying natural phenomenon in terms of both frequency of occurrence and extent of destruction.

This conclusion is based on a 2006 United States government study that included such factors as damage wrought, number of people affected and number of years in which storms occurred to produce a “storm index,” a measure of a country’s “victimization” by typhoons for the years between 1970 and 2002. The Philippines came out with the highest storm index at 0.0370, followed by the Dominican Republic (0.0205), Jamaica and Haiti.

Other measures on overall climatic disasters put our country in the top ranks. The Climate Risk Index ranks it the eighth most affected by “extreme weather changes” for the period 1990 to 2008.

YELLOW mouthpieces Etta Rosales and Sheila Coronel astonishingly saw in Donald Trump’s electoral defeat some light in their depths of depression over President Duterte’s successful leadership of our country.

This is because they both see Trump and Duterte as woven of the same authoritarian cloth and, as Rosales put it, the US president’s defeat “serves both as a warning and reminder to Duterte and his minions that all tyrants, regardless of their popularity and power, will fall.”

Coronel, meanwhile, in her Washington Post contributed opinion piece, wrote that she “danced in the streets” as many Americans did in US cities “to mark the end of the Trump era,” and that she “had danced on the streets before” when Marcos fell. Coronel’s piece in fact was intended to “warn Americans” that the recent US election “does not suffice to exorcise the demons of authoritarians” like Marcos and Trump.

These two ladies should do more fact-checking instead of just watching CNN. Contrary to their delusions that Americans toppled a tyrant, 9 million more Americans voted for Trump in this 2020 election than in 2016, although Democratic Party Joe Biden did have 5 million more. Trump held on to most of the Red states that voted for him in 2016, while Biden’s victory in the so-called battleground states (the results of which in the past were unpredictable) were only by slim margins.

That is despite the fact of Trump’s gross mishandling of the pandemic, despite his penchant for spewing lies easily fact-checked, despite mainstream US media’s relentless bashing of him since he assumed the presidency, despite the serious allegations that he is a puppet of Putin, the head of what was once the US Evil Empire all Americans hate.

Last of 2 parts
I WROTE last Monday that, borrowing from the French poet Baudelaire’s aphorism referring to the devil, the Communist Party of the Philippines’ (CPP) greatest trick is to convince the world that it doesn’t exist.

By this I mean more precisely that it has succeeded exceedingly well in concealing its conspiracy, and have its cadres, or personalities supporting it, camouflaged as patriots, freedom fighters, human rights crusaders, and so on.

Here are examples.

For academics who have done intensive research on the communist insurgency, it is beyond doubt that the Yellow Cult’s martyr, the assassinated Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr. played, next to the first chairman Jose Ma. Sison, the biggest role in the founding of the CPP, and especially the growth of its armed wing, the New People’s Army (NPA). Aquino’s motivation was that it was one way for him to both politically weaken his arch enemy Ferdinand Marcos and have an armed group he could command or at least give him succor.

First of 2 parts
“THE Greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to convince the world that he doesn’t exist.” That’s an often quoted aphorism from the French dark poet Baudelaire. That adage refers not just to the Christian Satan, though, but to the reality of evil in the world, often to organized crime.

It is exactly the Communist Party of the Philippines’ (CPP) — and its founder Jose Maria Sison’s — greatest trick. Its cadres are on an all-out, furious campaign to stop the government’s ongoing efforts to expose their front organizations as tools of the armed insurgency because for the first time ever, this trickery, which has been communists’ most effective shield, is being laid bare for the public to see.

The subterfuge has been so effective that, so to speak, it has been rare for a CPP official to have been arrested or killed, and then only its very top leaders.

Only for us, the newspaper-reading strata of Filipinos, does a Communist Party exist. In the countryside, the masses have known only the New People’s Army (NPA), with hardly an inkling that there is a Communist Party that commands it. The masses knew at the peak of their power in the 1990s only the Kilusang Mayo Uno and the Alex Boncayao Brigade; Bayan Muna and the party’s over a hundred front organizations for nearly all conceivable sectors, except strangely for the LGBTQ sector.

IT’s a bit strange that while our elites, especially the intelligentsia, has worshiped the US as the epitome of democracy that we should emulate, its system for choosing its two most powerful leaders — the president and vice president — isn’t really the democratic system we know, and which many really don’t know much of.

In Philippine democracy, it is simply the majority of votes for a candidate that determines who will be our president or vice president. In the US, it is this bizarre entity called the “electoral college” that determines whether in the following days it will still be a President Trump or a President Biden together with their choice of vice president. Here’s how it works:

The current electoral college has 538 members. It is just a group of “electors” and is nothing like a college with its connotation of intellectual abilities.