Celebrating hatred, murder, and revenge

I just read last week on GMA News Online that a group of soldiers had been ambushed and killed by the New People’s Army (NPA) in Ifugao province in northern Philippines. This time, the casualties were 11 Army soldiers, including a captain, and a civilian, with one civilian wounded.

 

I hate to start my day with the all-too-familiar “here we go again” attitude. It is this sort of news that triggers a political relapse and fatigue, as a sense of déjà vu sets in. The pictures of the dead and wounded dishearten me but the images of mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, wives, and children grieving over the senseless death of their loved ones (military, militants, or civilians) jar my nerves the most. I repeatedly ask myself “What for?” and “Is this really going to help one’s cause?”  

 

I must confess that they’re not easy questions to answer especially in a country with a hopelessly dysfunctional democracy that is representatively skewed and susceptible to corruption.

 

Although I wish it to not happen anymore, unfortunately, it still does.

 

I am not trying to single anyone out, and I hope it will not be taken the wrong way, but I am going to make a huge assumption regarding the ideological basis of this ambush. 

 

In many ways, the ideology of armed struggle is still being played very much as it was a century ago. Those who are committed to its ends and means of revolutionary change deny any affection whatsoever for the status quo and only confess revulsion to the government in power.

 

The notion that "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun", as Mao Tse-Tung would have his adherents believe, is accepted as necessary, expedient, and presumed that it will always remain so. As such, it is almost impossible to convince especially the hardcore Filipino communists to behave otherwise. 

 

But the armed struggle has changed in at least one fundamental respect: It is still being played despite the absence of any successful precedent model or a shining example to emulate. In the context of the collapse of communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, to the genocidal communist experiment in Cambodia, to the “born-again” capitalism of communist China, or to the bipolar brinkmanship of communist North Korea, one wonders whether this ideology really possesses any rational or moral import to guide our country’s future.

 

What is its prospect of success in the Philippines?

 

Well, in the past if those communists never fully grasped what was happening to the societies they created, why would Filipino communists expect to be privileged in their insight? If in the past, the feasibility of its general and sweeping version of history had been obscure to its theoreticians and practitioners, why would it be transparent to us now? If in the past, it failed to come up with a practical as well as a functional system that works, why would it work for us this time? 

 

I reckon that only people who have lost their marbles can display a happy moral face with such an ideological stance. In other words, this is a conflict that the communists will never win. History is not on their side.

 

The thing is, one can no longer go on killing soldiers and civilians in the name of revolution and expect that eventually everything will be swept under the rug. I think it is indulgent to think this way and to revel in the celebration of a successful ambush and killing without nurturing an easy hatred and subsequent revenge from the opposing side.

 

As William Shakespeare aptly puts it: “If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that…Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction (The Merchant of Venice, Act III, Scene I).”

 

In the end, few important questions stand out that we have to honestly ask ourselves.

 

Given our differences, is there some other way we can act towards one another besides dutifully murdering one another for the sake of an ideology? Are there any terms through which we could come to share together this lovely country of ours for a lengthy future without the lesson of hatred, murder, and revenge?

 

I believe, there is.