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.

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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.

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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.

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CONTRARY to communist mouthpieces’ claim that there has been a pushback against the government’s campaign to inform the country, especially its youth, of the Communist Party of the Philippines’ (CPP) front organizations, there has actually been a massive support for this unprecedented — I say historical — initiative.

I can even quantify this: 98 percent of Filipinos embrace this campaign being undertaken by the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict, with its articulate spokesmen being the intrepid Lt. Gen. Antonio Parlade and the unflinching Lorraine Badoy of the Presidential Communications Operations Office.

My evidence: my column titled “We need more Parlades, Badoys to defeat the insurgency” generated “likes” of an incredible 18,000 — a spike, in that my columns normally have 1,000 to 4,000 likes, depending on the topic.

The Manila Times is the only newspaper that dares to be transparent by having a “like” button for each of its opinion columns and articles in its internet version. A reader registers his agreement with the column by clicking it.

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CAVITE Gov. Juanito Victor “Jonvic” Remulla Jr. was passionate in his rebuke of Lt. Gen. Antonio Parlade for warning two actresses and a beauty queen that the Gabriela organization they are consorting with is a communist front. Perhaps seeing himself as a lady’s knight in shining armor, the bodybuilder governor even went to the extent of practically challenging the general to a fist fight: “May I suggest that you try knocking out someone in the same weight class?”

Remulla Jr. doesn’t know what he is talking about, both about the communist insurgency and the history of his province.

At least in this case, he is certainly not his late father’s son. He is clueless about the fact that Cavite’s prosperity today owes much to his father Juanito “Johnny” Sr.’s well-known, tough anti-communist stance and programs so that foreign and local businesses flocked to the province. 

Rather than being a softie toward the communists, he should emulate his father, who made Cavite a totally Red-free province. The younger Remulla in his Facebook post claimed that the communist insurgency can be defeated only with “good governance, the availability of jobs, and justice.” This is total hogwash, and such an ancient leftist propaganda line.

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I AM referring to Lt. Gen. Antonio Parlade, the chief of the Southern Luzon Command. He is also the spokesman of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-Elcac), created by President Duterte in 2018 under Executive Order No 70. Going by its performance these past two years, this body could be in our history as the spear of the nation that finally took down, after 50 years, the scourge that is the communist insurgency.

Badoy is Undersecretary Lorraine Marie T. Badoy of the Presidential Communications Operations Office assigned to the task force.

Both have been bold in calling a spade a spade, tearing down the many masks Communist Party insurgents have been using for decades to fool the idealistic youth, shanghaiing them to join a movement which — as proven in the case of dozens of my former comrades — only lead to pathetic wasted lives, death in some forgotten jungle or expiration in a charity hospital ward from some disease that afflicts the elderly or the malnourished. 

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FOR Filipinos monitoring the United States elections, it has been more like watching an entertaining telenovela, in fact one in which reality trumps fiction.

After all it would have been an award-winning flight of imagination for a fiction writer to have the US president, in the middle of the campaign, infected with the coronavirus — said to be deadly to seniors like Donald Trump — and brought to hospital.

And just when the likes of CNN and the New York Times had probably asked some writer to draft his page-one obituary, Trump alights from the Marine One chopper, arrives at the White House, dramatically rips off his mask, and gazes at the small crowd of well-wishers at the Rose Garden in a pose as arrogant as Benito Mussolini. 

The next few days, he becomes the virus-spreader-in-chief in rallies as if there were no pandemic, entertaining his redneck base with the old slogans he used in the 2016 elections such as “Lock ‘em up”.

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SUPREME Court Associate Justice Marvic Leonen, by sitting for a year now on candidate Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s election protest against Vice President Maria Leonor Robredo, is mocking our democratic system.

The message Leonen is sending — a precedent-setting one, in fact — to those who aspire to elective posts: “Cheat all you want, by the time the electoral tribunal rules on your opponent’s protest, it would be just a few months before you step down.”

A former UP law school dean, Leonen knows that the very essence of a modern democratic system is its electoral system. With a flawed electoral system, democracy is a joke, a very expensive charade. Worse, this is not just any body hearing the case but the Supreme Court itself, constituted as the Presidential Electoral Tribunal (PET). 

If the highest court of the land, supposedly manned by the country’s most experienced and competent judges (except for Leonen, as discussed why below), can’t resolve fast an electoral protest involving the second highest post in the land, then how can we expect other electoral tribunals deciding on lower positions to be more efficient?

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I SAY Supreme Court Justice Marvic Leonen has no integrity, using his colleagues’ criteria. In the quo warranto case which booted out Aquino 3rd’s chief justice, Maria Lourdes Sereno, the Supreme Court declared that her failure to file her statements of assets, liabilities and net worth (SALN) for six years meant she lacked integrity, and therefore was unfit for the post.

But not only that, the court ruled that her failure to file the SALNs “defeats any claim of integrity as it is inherently immoral to violate the will of the legislature and to violate the Constitution.”

Well, Leonen did not file his SALNs for fifteen years, as I incontestably showed in my column of September 7, which was based not on speculation but on data I secured invoking President Duterte’s freedom of information executive order. Using the court’s definition, Leonen is not just without integrity, but immoral. 

I may as well borrow from Dr. Dante Ang’s column title on Tuesday (“Do we have a functioning democracy?”) and ask: Do we have a functioning Supreme Court? Or do we have another exclusive club, concerned more about defending one of their own rather than fulfilling its constitutional mandate of upholding the Republic’s laws?

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THE Energy department’s go-signal for the resumption of exploration for oil and gas in the disputed part of the South China Sea off Palawan is either a bold move, an “insane” one or a cheap stock market play. You decide; here are the facts.

First, it could be a bold, urgent move since the Malampaya Gas Field, also near Palawan, which has been providing one-fifth of our energy needs since 2002, will be drying up starting 2024. We need to replace that.

The most promising area where commercial-scale gas deposits — in fact about twice that of Malampaya’s — is in the Reed Bank. The Arroyo and Aquino governments in 2009 and 2010 awarded a “service contract” (No. 72) for the exploration and development of hydrocarbons to PXP Energy Corp., a subsidiary of the Hong Kong-based First Pacific Co. Ltd., mainly owned by the Indonesian magnate Anthoni Salim. 

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