THE COMMUNIST PLOY!

Civil Society, in using a new façade "One Voice", seems strong in their intentions to oust President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Their new impeachment complain, filed last Monday, speaks of their real motives. The vigil they staged, primarily to block any other impeachment case that would be filed by any Filipino including Atty Oliver Lozano, clearly tells us what character they are made of.
Without any after thought, this is an affront against the so-called "people's rights" that they have openly professed. Surprisingly, the communist Party list Congressmen are silent. Is this due to the effect of the all-out war against the communist-terrorist New People's Amy declared by President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo?
While their silences very obvious, media hype are focused on stories that would bear heavily against the Arroyo administration thus obliterating the positive moves and gains of our country.
Opinion writers, especially those who are known to be "sleeping" with the enemy of the state, are toying with a new nomenclature "leftist militants," "legal progressives" ad others. Obviously, all these are intended to sugar coat and hide the real character of theses personalities.
However, the Filipinos should be warned against this unworthy and malignant impersonation. They are the dangerous s specie of "militants" and progressives, if there are any, for they do not envision the reforms, improvement, or strengthening of our present system of governance. Their ulterior motive is the overthrow of our country's democratic governance and trampling the very freedoms that our forefathers had fought and shed blood.
They are not simple militants or progressives. They are communists whose ultimate goal is the complete destruction of the very fibers of our democratic life. In reality, they are the devouring monsters manipulating our people's minds and hearts, inflame emotions, and has contrived a web of deception spawned ll over the Filipino community.
To quote Rico Hizon, a Filipino business and finance anchorman of BBC-World during the program "Straight Talk" aired over a news television station, while exuding pride, he said, "…. In my work, I tried my best to raise the Filipino flag. I'm proud to be a Filipino. I am happy that while going over the wire reports, I read so much positive gains achieved by our country in terms of investments and foreign capitalist confidence. But these are not highlighted by our country's national media. Only the negative political stories are given prominence. I am sad, deeply sad'" he said. Explaining that despite foreign investors' upbeat on the gains achieved by our country, the negative reports have stymied their interest. "That is bad for our country," he pointed out.
We surmise that Rico is oblivious of the fact that the communist led media operators are currently having a heyday mounting black and bleak propaganda against government. Indeed, while the communist personalities, who are now masquerading as militants, progressives and members of Congress are now going "low-profile", they are efficiently manipulating non-communist Filipinos to step-in and do the 'front act' facing the camera.
This is a blatant display of character that only skilled manipulators could accomplish and exploit to the hilt. Manipulation and situation exploitation are the main ingredients of deception that only the Maoist communist are popularly known to be experts of.
Efficiently they have towed religiously the doctrine of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, one of the pillars of communism, as he said, "Use democracy to destroy democracy, Use nationalism to destroy nationalism, Use parliament to destroy parliament."

Joma Sison unmasked

By Honesto General
Inquirer


JOSE MARIA SISON ORGAnized the Communist Party of the Philippines along Maoist lines.
Sison believed that, if he controlled the countryside, the cities would fall like overripe fruit, as what happened in China.

Funded by communist groups abroad, Sison organized the New People’s Army (NPA) under the command of Dante Buscayno.

Sison also organized communist cells in the cities. He later boasted that the NPA was already spread over 100 guerrilla fronts, and party membership had swelled to 2 million all over the archipelago.

Marcos jailed Sison for rebellion. But, Cory Aquino, in the worst decision of her presidency, released Sison and allowed him to go to Holland where he asked for, and was granted, political asylum.

From Holland, Sison regularly sent his opinions on what was going on in the Philippines. While the NPA struggled in the mountains, and the front organizations mounted protest rallies in city streets, Sison rambled on from the safety of his comparatively luxurious life in Holland.
Even when the Communist world had collapsed around him, Sison bragged that he had the secret formula (without giving any details) for leading the masses to paradise.

Today, except for an occasional raid on an isolated AFP outpost, or an ambush of an Army patrol, the job of the NPA is now restricted to collecting the 10 percent revolutionary tax on everything that moves and grows in the far distant barrios.
The tax is also applied on public school teachers’ salaries and sari-sari store sales. If the priest or pastor would allow it, the NPA takes a bite out of church collections.

The NPA has deteriorated into an extortionist gang preying on the poorest of the poor in the far-flung barrios.

But after all these years, the Armed Forces can go to any area that the NPA claims it controls. And none of the cities have fallen. The Maoist/Sison strategy is a complete failure in the Philippines.

The AFP estimates the NPA collects P200 million a year. This is probably an exaggeration. But the real figure still makes the Communist party the richest in the country.
Where does the money go? It surely does not stay in the barrios. There is nothing there to spend it on. The money ends up with front organizations in the cities to fund protest rallies, the media offensive, and finally, the candidacies in the party-list system.

The US and the European Community have tagged the NPA and the Communist party as terrorist organizations. As a result, the flow of money across national borders has been stanched.

The front organizations in the cities have splintered. When the communist party-list representative Satur Ocampo and four of his cohorts holed up in the House of Representatives to avoid arrest, nobody came to storm the place to liberate them. The vaunted mass base had vanished.

The arrest of Sison in Holland on two counts of murder has hardly created a ripple among Filipino communists. There was a pitifully small crowd of hard-core communists in front of the Dutch Embassy in Makati that nobody noticed. The provinces have been silent. To Sison, this silence must be deafening.

Sison has been unmasked as a leader without followers, a chief with no Indians. The local communists have sent him a clear message: You are on your own, comrade.
Sison’s biggest problem now is that he is caught in a criminal justice system that no amount of his money can buy.

Impostor

By: Alex Magno
The Philippine Star
September 11, 2007

Unlike the National Security Adviser, I cannot say I am “excited” by the arrest and detention of Jose Ma. Sison in the Netherlands. This is an old, sick man has ceased to resonate with his time.

His megalomania might be incurable. But he is more pathetic than despicable.
He imagines himself coming home a returning hero; is the next President of the Republic; is, by his own enumeration, Reynato Puno, Loren Legarda or Jamby Madrigal. That can only be the musing of a cardiac patient totally alienated from the dynamics of politics in his homeland.

I suspect that if he ever musters the common courage to return home, it will be as a disgraced ex-convict rejected by his generation, hated by the victims of his cruel political enterprise and laughable to a new generation of Filipinos nurtured in a more cosmopolitan mentality.

But what really gets my goat is the manner his local flunkeys- like Teddy Casiño of Bayan Muna –so self- consciously refer to him as “Professor Sison”. And they commit that fraud with such theatrical veneration.

The honorific “professor” is sacred to full-time academics like I am. One works hard to earn that title, mastering a field of expertise and impressing one’s peers.

By addressing Sison “professor”, Casino and his ilk are not humoring the deluded old man desperately wants to be called “professor”- because it reinforces his self- appointed role as the ultimate bearer of wisdom for the revolution he still imagines to be forthcoming.
Casino and his ilk are humoring us. He wants us to subscribe to Sison’s delusional self-image, to buy into his atrocious vanity and to be part of his megalomania.

For the record, Sison is not a professor. He did serve, for a brief period, as an instructor of English literature at the UP decades ago. For that short stint, he has nothing to show in terms of academic production. He is not considered an authority in English literature, much less an important contributor to Filipino literature in the English language.

When he was already a fugitive from the law, his ideological sympathizers did put out a slim volume of mediocre poetry Sison supposedly wrote. That, apart from a few polemical essays, is the only thing he has published under his own name.

Those were, as I remember them, poems of self-promotion-something no true poet does. He guises himself as a warrior who writes poetry, as a poet who bravely conducts war.

That guise has no relationship to reality. There is no memory of him ever carrying a gun, slithering through the jungle and engaging in a real skirmish. His whole life he was huddled in secret meetings speaking ill of other people and decimating his rivals to maintain control of a political movement he always treated as his property, as an extension of his grandiose estimation of his place in our nation’s unfolding history.

That bizarre self-image is reflected in the aliases he chose for himself.

In the early sixties, he plagiarized the work of an Indonesian Maoist who, in turn, simplistically applied Mao’s elementary analysis of Chinese society to explain Indonesian society. By simply changing names and places, he put out Philippine Society and Revolution under penname “Amado Guerrero” (Beloved Warrior).

That truly lame-brained analysis of Philippine society was imposed on young militants who did not know any better as some sort of gospel truth that is beyond question. When that analysis was subsequently questioned by many bright minds in a movement that had, by the eighties, gained some ideological and political sophistication, Sison ordered a “reaffirmation” campaign. That meant, “reaffirming” the simplistic analysis he had offered two decades earlier.

The “reaffirmation” campaign produced a gory purge within the Philippine communist movement. In that purge, thousands of party cadres and brave guerillas were tortured and killed by their own comrades from the late eighties to the early nineties. To this day, the authorities are still discovering one mass grave after another containing the skeletal remains of the victims of that purge.

Long after that insane purge had subsided, Sison’s rivals for leadership of the leftist movement continued to be assassinated. Among them, senior communist leaders like Felimon Lagman (who once headed the powerful Manila- Rizal regional committee of the CPP), Arturo Tabara (who once headed the CPP’s Visayas Commission) and Romulo Kintanar (who commanded the NPA during its height, when sison was in prison).

It is for those assassinations, conducted while Sison was in self-exile in Holland, that the Dutch police is now indicting the man for conspiracy to commit murder. The complaints against Sison were filed by the widows of Tabara and Kintanar.

From the comforts of exile in Holland, Sison continued to shape the idiosyncratic orthodoxies of the local communist movement under the penname “Armando Liwanag”—which sounds like “armadong liwanag”(armed light). Shades of the Peruvian Maoist movement Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) that dissipated after its food-addicted leader was captured and forced to eat normally.

He continues to deny, with tongue obviously in cheek, that he is Armando Liwanag-mainly to maintain the thin veneer that he is merely a “consultant” to the NDF peace panel, a cowardly ploy to maintain his comfortable status as a political refugee.

There are many just reasons to call Sison an impostor. Of those, what aggravates me most is thisvain-glorious attempt to present himself as a “professor.”
Here is a quack who insists on being called “doctor”.

Betraying the Dutch treat

Over the weekend I listened intently on the radio as Luis Jalandoni, a citizen of Holland (if I remember correctly) lambasting the Dutch government for placing Jose Maria Sison a.k.a Joma Sison in solitary confinement.

In the course of the interview, Jalandoni drew a picture of how the Dutch authorities arrested Joma Sison, raided his office, threw Joma in the same prison facility that was used by Nazi soldiers as a prison for captured Dutch resistance fighters, he also made mention that it was in the same prison where Serbian President Slobodan Milosovich was imprisoned (for war crimes) and died awaiting judgment.

Jalandoni also talked of protesters in front of the prison demanding for justice for Joma and condemning the US-RP alliance behind the incarceration of Joma.

I’m sure many ignorant and gullible people would have been mesmerized by Jalandoni’s story, but not all Filipinos are ignorant and not all Journalists or Broadcasters are gullible either. Regardless of our political leanings, the truth must never be allowed to be twisted. Not even once and certainly never repeatedly just to draw sympathy or to distract from the facts.
Jalandoni’s interview on radio was very disturbing because it painted the Dutch government as an oppressive state, violating the human rights of Joma Sison, casting suspicion related to the natural death of Milosovich and suggesting that the Dutch government could be manipulated by the US-RP leadership.

To begin with let us set the record straight. Joma Sison and Jalandoni are at war against the Philippines and are proponents of Communism by way of armed struggle. Joma & Jalandoni moved the leadership of the National Democratic Front or NDF to Europe first to save their necks from a government set on letting them rot in jail and second to generate political and financial support.

To legitimize and prolong their stay in Europe, Joma sought political asylum in Holland. Jalandoni who started out as a Roman Catholic priest, shed his priestly vows and subsequently shed his Filipino citizenship and became a citizen of Holland. He is currently the alter ego of Joma Sison and long time spokesman of the NDF.
For more than 20 years, the two have benefited from the protection of the Dutch legal system. Even when the Dutch government felt that Sison was no longer in need of political asylum, his right to contest the matter was respected and he remained free from threat or harassment.

This is a reflection of how the Dutch government honors and abides by its laws, to a fault even when their “guests” turn into ingrates, they still respect their rights.

In the same breath, The Dutch government is duty bound to accept and act on any formal complaint brought to them especially against someone whose stay is no longer welcome and now accused of murder. Dutch authorities study charges and evidence seriously and don’t simply place the accused before Kangaroo courts nor do they exercise extra-judicial killings.
Now that Joma Sison is on the other side of the fence, Jalandoni must do no less than respect the Dutch legal system which respected their rights for more than 20 years.

Unfortunately for Sison and contrary to the insinuations of Jalandoni, The Dutch government has evolved certain laws to cope with international terrorists.

The law gives authorities the right to detain you for several days without having to tell you why. The NDF as we all know has been labeled by US authorities as a “Terrorist” organization. As the Americans are fond of saying: “What goes around, comes around”.

Since my wife is from Holland, I have had many opportunities to drive by, walk past the prison facility that has held many interesting guests. The place which is walking distance from my brother-in-law’s house is a very drab, unassuming place which looks more like a factory than a prison.

Dutch citizens make a joke for a short tern imprisonment because the living standards in prison are so high you could shoot a high-class version of “Big Brother” (which is originally from Holland) or ‘Bahay ni Kuya’ and people might think it’s in a condo. On my last visit, the law required that every prisoner has a bed, if not he goes home. Serious!

When Milosovich died in the same facility, it was not because of poor care. He simply died. Nothing has ever pointed to the contrary. The prison was used to detain Dutch freedom fighters, the same way Rizal memorial was used to imprisoned Filipino fighters and rape Filipinas. That’s the ugliness of war that has no bearing on Joma and the charges against him.
I have always been against the misuse and abuse of media and its facilities. Whether its Jalandoni, a politician, an actress or even a false prophet, we cannot and we should not allow any misuse and misinterpretation of facts through media.

How many times have reporters talked about a “Big” group of protesters marching here or there only for us to find out that there were no more than fifty? In Burma or in China, two or ten protesters would be a significant number, but in the Philippines that’s nothing but a group of Jaywalkers.

Unfortunately it happens because of “One Upmanships” or media bosses demanding NEWS when there is none. So the reporters turn a none-event into a flash report or a scoop. Of course it would be a scoop the scoop group was so insignificant no one noticed it.
Sadly the more experienced are so jaded that they lose sight of the fundamentals. I remember when I was a Radio host for DZMM and was hooked up with a guy called Father Luis Jalandoni launched his standard “isms” and tirade at the government
I quickly asked Jalandoni about his citizenship. I guess he realized where I was headed and dismissed the question as irrelevant. I politely pointed out that a Dutch Citizen certainly had no business interfering in a purely Philippine matter and hung up.

Once again the same “foreigner” as well as an enemy of the state has been given access to Philippine Media and allowed to attack the Dutch government which is never good for diplomacy. The matter concerns the legitimate and legal exercise of a Filipino against a Filipino and not the NDF.

Reds just getting dose of own medicine

Communist Front Organization (e.g., Bayan, Gabriela, Anakpawis are protesting against the antiterrorism law as well as the killing of their militant members. They claim that the human rights of their slain members have been violated. They portray the "victims" as innocent and helpless.

The fact is, they are not that innocent or helpless. They have a 7,000-strong private army, the New people's Army, which operates outside the law. When militants infiltrate a barangay to preach rebellion, recruit members and supporters, and agitate the residents, the barangay officials opposing their activities are immediately liquidated by the NPA.

The NPA has been declared by almost the entire world as a terrorist organization. Surely, the militants, although identified with "above-ground" organizations, are secret NPA members. They share the same objectives, that is, to take over the country. When militants join front organizations, they are fully aware that they become part of a terrorist organization that sanctions the killing of people and the violation of civil rights. Why would the government bother about the militants' human rights?

When arrested or doing something illegal, militants say that it is for the courts to decide on their innocent or guilt. But we all know that our prosecutors and judges are totally terrified to prosecute militants.

"Human rights violation" became a common phrase in the United States mainly due to the abuses committed by the police against blacks. However, invoking human rights for members of a terrorist organization which has 7,000 armed defenders is an entirely different matter.

While the communist militants denounce the violation of their rights, they want to want to put up a dictatorship that will not respect human rights. If you denounce human rights abuses in communist countries, you are likely to land in jail, or worse, get a bullet in the back of your head. So it is pure hypocrisy that militants denounce human rights violations.

The militants are really ant-Filipino. They make no bones about engaging in activities that will keep the people poor. They drive away investors from the country side with their extortion activities. They agitate against industries like mining which can employ hundred of thousands of our people.

After Edsa I, They engaged in wildcat strikes which forced many factories to close shop, thus causing the layoff of hundreds of thousand workers and frightening foreign investors.
The communist want our people to be mired in poverty since it is the only way they can take over our country. No rich country has ever turned communist.

The overwhelming majority of our people do not want our country to fall into the hands of communist who, once in power, will probably slaughter millions of Filipinos, as what happened when communists giving the militants a dose of their own medicine.

By: Danilo Alvero, Pasig City

The Irrelevant Pinoy Communists

Let me say, first of all, that I find it unseemly for the AFP chief to be talking about restarting the peace process with the communists. He is, after all, not the civilian authority nor is he the actual head of the armed forces. Their commander-in-chief is still the president, not the chief of staff.

The chief staff takes orders from the commander-in-chief. Yet, in this case, the reaction of Malacañang to General Hermogenes Esperon is that they are leaving it up to him to declare all-out war against the inhuman killers who beheaded the Marines that they had killed in a firefight. He is obviously also left to make whatever pronouncements he wants to make about anything else such as suing for peace with the communists. There seems to be a reversal roles here with the military taking the upper hand, probably because of an intended vacuum caused by the civilian authority's unwillingness to lead the military.

On the other hand, the reaction of the Communists to General Esperon's peace overture also shows up the irrelevance that the Communists struggle has become. Why are they bombing communications tower and burning bulldozers and making pests of themselves in what would otherwise be a peaceful country?

Jose Maria Sison hides behind a designation of "consultant" even when heis the actual head of the Communists rebellion. He lays down pre-conditions to talking peace. These are for the government to do three things:

"1. It must stop the extrajudicial killings, abductions, tortures, mass displacement of more than one million people and other human rights violations perpetrated by the reactionary armed forces.

"2. It must declare that it is against the "terrorist" blacklisting of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), New People's Army (NPA) and the NDF chief political consultant.

"3. It must indemnify the victims of human rights violations during the Marcos fascist regime."

That's it? Actually, we would like to do all that ourselves but what makes it difficult to do so is that the NPA is in a shooting war against us and is into terrorizing those who do not pay them "revolutionary taxes." If only the communists would go away, perhaps, we could have a much more peaceful and progressive country.

Jose Luis Jalandoni, the spoke person for the NDFP Negotiating Panel that would sit down with the government in the event of peace talks had this to say:

"General Hermogenes Esperon speaks with a forked tongue. He pretends to be for the resumption of peace talks but says his recommendation is "to crush the insurgency in forms of peace and negotiation." So, his proposal for a three-year-cease-fire as a pre-condition for the resumption of formal talks is mere cheap propaganda."

He restates Sison's three points and then adds:

"General Hermogenes Esperon does not care to address the root causes of the armed conflict. He shows utter disrespect for GRP-NDFP peace agreements which stipulate addressing the roots of the armed conflict through fundamental economic, social and political reforms before coming to a prolonged ceasefire or cessation of hostilities.

"He wants only the pacification of the revolutionary movement."

It is clear that no one needs to talk to the Communists. We do not need them and their armed force to get these things for ourselves. As a matter of fact, the Communist's armed presence may precisely be among the pressures that cause extrajudicial killings and disappearances as well as the continuing non-resolution of the "root causes of the armed conflict."

What needs doing is to rout the Communist in the battlefield; then, we can begin the "fundamental economic, social and political reforms" which are difficult to do while we are in a shooting war.

The Communists have become irrelevant. Communists are no longer a vehicle to the reforms that need to be done and which all of our leaders already accept as necessary. They may actually be unwittingly delaying these reforms by insisting that they can get it through the power that their guns give them.

There are no more Communists in this world except in name only and only in such desolate places like Cuba, Laos and North Korea. China and Vietnam are still also listed as Communists countries but these two look more and more capitalist in their pursuit of economic progress and personal wealth.

These countries used to be Communists but are no longer:

Formerly part of the Soviet Union: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan.

In Asia: Afganistan, Cambodia, Mongolia and Yemen.

Sovier-controlled eastern bloc countries: Bulgaria, Czech republic, Germany (East), Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia.

The Balkans: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, rep of Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia.

Africa: Angola, Benin, Dem Rep. of Congo, Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea and Mozambique.

There are only five countries left that still continue to call themselves Communists. And the Communists here want to turn this country Communists? Maawa naman sila.
Should we also, perhaps, go back to using the Betamax?

written by Ducky Paredes

REMEMBER COMMUNISM

More than a decade after the collapse of what Roland Reagan rightly called the Evil Empire, some continue to not take the evils of communism seriously enough. According to the Black Book of Communism, this monstrous ideology killed over 100 million people. Yet for some reason, many people don’t intuitively view it as being as evil as Nazism. Stalin’s name does not arouse the same visceral loathing, the same recoiling in the face of pure evil, Hilter’s does.

British novelist Martin Amis has written a new book Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million to increase public familiarity with Stalin’s crimes against humanity. We know nazism is evil because the images of Auschwitz and trains full of naked human beings stuffed together like sardines en route to gas chambers is written indelibly into our minds. This horrific genocidal slaughter is known as the Holocaust, but communist must murder, such as the slaughter of 20 million in the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1933 Amis alludes to in his book’s title, has no equivalent name.

Hence, when hard-right and neo-fascist political parties win a surprising number of votes, when clownish anti-Semites and figures like Vladimir Zhirinovsky gain public support, there is storm of protest throughtout the fre world as people warn of the consequences of a resurgence of fascism and Nazism. Renamed and reformed communist parties throughout Western Europe do not elicit the same reaction when they win elections; similarity, few people have expressed concern about the level of support being enjoyed by Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva in Brazil’s upcoming presidential elections.

It is considered quaint to find college professors and intellectuals who are former communist, or who even retain some vestigial affection for Marxism. If they were former Nazis or had any lingering affinity for such noxious ideas, they certainly wouldn’t talk about it. To do so would besmirch their reputations and damage their careers.

Nazism of course, is synonymous with concentration camps and the cold-blooded murder of 6-million Jews. By contrast, communism is often thought of as communism in the theory-the writings of Marx and Engels –rather than communism in practice, the gulag and the liquidation of the Kulaks.

Amis seeks to right this wrong in his latest book, to carve a place for Soviet atrocities in the public consciousness. He notes that while Auschwitz and Belsen are well known, relatively few people have heard of Vorkuta and Solovetsky. But he doesn’t stop with describing the horrors of the Soviet police state-he dares to criticize those writers and intellectuals who defended the Soviets during those years while living in the comfort and freedom of the West. This procession of dupes and useful idiots stretches from H.G Wells andGeorge Bernard Shaw all the way through Christopher Hitchens.

I have not read more than a few excerpts of Ami’s book, so I don’t want to pretend this is a review. But his book is an occasion to remember how truly evil communism was the naivete-and in some cases, duplicity-of all the leftist who led it out as a beacon of idealism and progress.

Amazon.com cites a review of Koba the Dead from the New York Times: Amis create(s) a compelling narrative, summarizing vast amounts of information and presenting it in a lucid, accessible form.” No word on whether that review contained a denunciation of Walter Duranty, the infamous Times reporter who lied about Stalin’s man-made Ukarainian famines, claiming that “no actual starvation” was occurring and any reports to the contrary were simply “malignant propaganda “some of the worst reporting to appear in (this) newspaper” as it published favorable views of S.J Taylor’s biography Stalin’s Apologist. But Duranty is still listed in the paper’s annual honor roll of Pulitzer Prize winner.

Why was communism so attractive to so many in the free world? Why is it still not judged by the same standard as Nazism, the 20th century other totalitarian nightmare, today? ”Unlike Nazism, “Cathy Young wrote in a column about Amis’ book that appeared in the Boston Globe, “Communism claimed to champion the noble ideals of equality, fairness and brotherhood. To many well-meaning liberals and progressives, it was an expression of the enduring human hope for a good and just society; a nostalgic fondness for that hope, Amis argues, endures to this day”. Writers Joseph Sobran and Tom Bethell might be less charitable, arguing that liberalism and communism belong to the same collectivist “hive”.

Whatever the reason, it matters. Collectivist and totalitarian impulses are still strong today. While most people understand the evil that can be done when racial hatred is incited, few understand the negative consequences of class warfare. We rightly condemn genocide while turning a blind eye to equal-opportunity killers. Political persecution remains real and governments are still willing to use famine as a lethal weapon-witness Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.

Lessons learned about the Third Reich will help us avoid future horrors and tragedies of that variety. But the same is true for communism, if only enough people will gain an appreciation for what a horror and tragedy it represented. And why it belongs on the ash heap of history.

Note:
To my fellow youth, please do not be fooled by those communist. Do not join the communist bandits. They only use the youth for their vested interests. Communism is evil. Look at what communism and the communist had done to Russia, China, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, etc. In Cambodia alone, almost 2 million Cambodians were murdered by the khmer rouge. Some were murdered just because they wore glasses-to the khmer rouge, a sign of education which they abhorred. Look at what the Chinese communist party did to the youth at Tiananmen Square in 1989. Communist do not have respects for life and human rights. Communist are the top human rights violators in the country. They kill, rob, burn, and destroy. They burnt schools in eastern Mindanao. They want us all to be poor so that they will have more followers. The evidence of this is their continued sabotage of peace and security. They also destroy much business equipment. Now, who suffers from these acts? The people, the same people that the communist claim to be fighting for. Killing soldiers and civilians is not revolutionary work. It is plain murder. Demanding money fro people is not taxation, it is extortion. It is only the government that has the right to tax us. And the government taxes us without a gun, unlike the communist who use the threat of a gun to rob people of their hard-earned money. These are the evils of communism. And they only form the tip of the iceberg.