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”.