WALDEN BELLO EXPOSES HIMSELF
AS A PRO-US PSEUDO-PROGRESSIVE
By Prof. Jose Maria Sison
NDFP Chief Political Consultant
In his column in Viewpoints of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, December 29, 2004, Bello persists in his canard that the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) is out to eliminate him and others physically just because they hold ideas counter to the CPP and the new democratic revolution.
He uses this lie in order to accuse me of being “the one that literally calls the shots” and in order to reinforce the baseless “terrorist” listing made by the US, Dutch, European Council and other governments.
The malicious attack made by Bello and others on my person is orchestrated with attacks unleashed by the psywar and intelligence agencies of Washington and the Manila government.
In two press statements, one on December 26 and another on December 27, I made the observation that a diagram of the organizational fragmentation of petty bourgeois anti-communist groups in the Philippines and their ideological and political connections with Trotskyite and social democratic groups abroad cannot be a “hit list” (the pejorative term Walden Bello and Etta Rosales used in their December 26 open letter).
I also commented that if Bello, Rosales and the like had complaints of human rights violations against any revolutionary force and/or personnel they could submit their complaints to the NDFP section of the Joint Monitoring Committee (JMC). The JMC has been created jointly by the Government of the Republic of the Philippines (GRP) and the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) in compliance with the GRP-NDFP Comprehensive Agreement on Respect for Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law (CARHRIHL).
False Accusations in Bello’s Anti-Communist Propaganda
Since the establishment of the Joint Secretariat of the JMC in Manila a few months ago, with the active support of the Norwegian government, only two formal complaints of human rights violations have been filed against units and personnel of the New People’s Army (NPA) in sharp contrast to the 275 charges made against the reactionary armed forces of the Philippines, Philippine National Police and related armed personnel of the GRP. Bello and Rosales are big liars in making the revolutionary forces appear as human rights violators and the AFP and PNP regulars as not.
So far, Bello, Rosales and Akbayan have not submitted any formal complaint and evidence to the JMC about their claims to being the subject of what they consider as grave threats to their lives related to the diagram. Neither have they made any formal complaint and presented any evidence for their claims that the revolutionary forces impose taxes on electoral parties and candidates. They are merely interested in spewing out anti-communist propaganda and trying to malign the Communist Party of the Philippines from the flanks.
As exponent of civil society so-called, Bello is a well-behaved and obedient citizen of the violent state of the US-lining comprador big bourgeoisie and landlord class. He is also a highly paid hack whose air miles of traveling and hotel bills can compete with those of high ranking officials of the US State Department. He can sell ideas for conferences on a wide range of topics in quick succession in different capitals of the world. Thus, I am not at all surprised that he is vigorously and stridently opposed to the organized forces and people waging the new democratic revolution through people’s war.
Bello has a purpose for inventing the canard that the revolutionary forces are out to get him and others merely for talking and writing against the revolution.
He calculatingly obscures the fact that Romulo Kintanar and Arturo Tabara were publicly accused of grave crimes like murder, gross malversation of funds, robbery and the like so many years before the NPA sought to arrest them.
His real purpose is to gain another platform for attacking the CPP and its revolutionary line. He goes so far as to claim that he was once a CPP insider in order to present himself as a credible informer. He asserts that I am not just a consultant but something else worthy of the orchestrated attacks unleashed against me by the US, the local reactionaries and their special psywar agents. Bello started to openly attack the CPP in 1986. That was nearly two decades ago. He cannot be a reliable source of current information about the internal affairs of the CPP.
In trying to do a witchhunt and make me appear as one deserving of the imperialist attacks inflicted on me, Bello states, “While you have been busy drawing diagrams of your perceived opponents and dreaming of your of world revolution in the safe confines of Utrecht, your so-called counterrevolutionaries have actually been engaged in helping create a truly global movement for change…”
He has absolutely no factual basis for accusing me of drawing.the diagram, which he has misrepresented as a “hit list” of the CPP. Personally, I would have preferred to draw a diagram of his anti-communist US connections, especially with certain institutes and agencies that manufacture new slogans for glossing over the extremely oppressive and exploitative character of US imperialism. Bello’s bravado comes
from his being bankrolled by US-controlled conduits and from assurances of protection by the coercive apparatuses of the state in the US, Thailand and the Philippines.
The Second Great Rectification Movement of the CPP has criticized, repudiated and rectified the ideological and political errors, including those that led to the bloody witchhunt Kampanyang Ahos. It has condemned the vicious crimes associated with Kampanyang Ahos. But Bello has the temerity to blame these on the CPP even as he protects and collaborates with Ricardo Reyes and Nathan Quimpo. In CPP publications, these two have been identified as among those most responsible for the unjust killings and torture of some hundreds of CPP cadres and members, NPA commanders and fighters and mass activists..
According to the CPP, all those who were chiefly responsible for Kampanyang Ahos and other criminal outrages have fled the CPP and have formed various pseudo-progressive groups connected with the GRP and big compradors and landlords as well as with Trotskyite and social-democratic groups abroad. Bello and Rosales are in one of these groups (Akbayan) and are allied to others on the common ground of opposing the CPP and the revolutionary movement. However, I would not say that those who belong to these small groups are all criminally liable.
Bello’s vile anticommunism drives him to a frenzy of ranting in accusing the CPP of having given a bad name to the left because of “fanaticism”, having “degenerated into an Al Qaeda type fundamentalist sect”, being “an ally of US hegemony”, having “murderous behavior”, being responsible for deforestation and the floods, and making “left wing fascism” “one of the basic problems”, “along with feudal landed structures, transnational capitalism and US imperialism.”
Bello as Phoney Progressive and as Pro-US Propagandist
After his vicious outburst of invectives, he concludes triumphantly that he and his ilk have gained the world with their happy wishes for “pluralism”, “democratic debate” and “nonviolence” and that in the 21st century under conditions of US dominance as sole superpower, ever worsening crisis and ever escalating plunder and war, the CPP and all revolutionaries are “fossils left behind in the mud of the 20th century”.
But why would the political and ideological masters of Bello consider the CPP as the biggest threat to the ruling system? Are not the revolutionary people and the forces of national liberation and socialism on the rise again after all the failed attempts of US imperialism and its camp followers to wipe them out completely with the use of ideological, political, economic and cultural offensives in the wake of the temporary success of modern revisionism in destroying socialist systems from within and likewise the effectiveness of neocolonialism in coopting the nominally independent countries?
Bello exposes himself as a phoney progressive and as a phoney anti-imperialist by mocking at the revolutionary forces of national liberation and socialism and showing off his Philistine sense of comfort within the confines of the imperialist system. Could he have been able to gather large amounts of funds from imperialist agencies through various conduits for holding international conferences were these not for countering the anti-imperialist movement?
His Focus on the Global South is well connected to the imperialist-funded conduit Transnational Institute and the Trotskyite and reformist ATTAC of France (begging for a percentage of cross border currency transactions as Tobin taxes supposedly for funding priorities such as the prevention of global warming, disease, and poverty). The funds flowing into the projects of Bello can be traced ultimately to foundations and institutes linked to the US government and the US monopoly bourgeoisie.
Bello’s usual tack is to pretend at criticizing “globalization” and “war”, with the objective of trying to head off real progressives and anti-imperialists and then to swing the conferences he organizes into reformist channels for improving the imperialist system. In the style of the Jesuits in the Counter-Reformation, he employs the time-worn tactics of semantically appearing to be anti-imperialist and yet being in essence for the preservation of the imperialist system by attacking the revolutionaries and harping on reformism against the revolution.
It is absolutely untrue that Bello and his kind were ever genuinely cooperative with the patriotic and progressive forces in the Philippines. While the Filipino people were struggling to overthrow the Marcos fascist dictatorship in the period of 1984 to 1986, he was spreading the line that Marcos ought not to be overthrown because the US considered him not only as part of the problem but also as part of the solution. He was also trying to conjure the illusion that ”popular democracy” could replace “elite democracy” without armed revolution and that low-value added semimanufacture were the “cutting edge of industrialization”.
After the overthrow of Marcos in 1986, he started to attack the CPP in a series of articles. He used the criticism of the militarism and Kampanyang Ahos and the 1986 boycott policy to call for the liquidation of the CPP and the end of the revolutionary armed struggle in favor of reformism. He spread the line that the armed revolution in the Philippines was unnecessary and hopeless because the US and World Bank were determined to help the Aquino regime to carry out land reform. He also harped on the line that the revolutionary movement should shift to opposing Japan as the main target because this was supposedly displacing the US as No. 1 power in East Asia. What he meant in fact was to tout as the better option keeping US hegemony with the assistance of Europe.
In the struggle against the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation in the 1990s, he positioned himself against the national democratic mass organizations. He relished being the loyal and friendly critic and consultant of the US and the multilateral agencies like the IMF, World Bank and WTO. In the days and nights of the Battle in Seattle in 1999, imperialist funding afforded Bello and his kind expensive hotel billeting The mass activists in the streets denounced him and his ilk as tools of the WTO for his role as a subsidized pseudo-critics of US imperialism.
Now, Bello once again claims to have fought and frustrated the WTO in Cancun. But no imperialist conduit-funded entity could have done better than more than 20 third world countries (including such big countries as China, India and Brazil) that resisted the excessive US impositions. After the massive anti-war mass actions of 2003 by tens of millions of people in hundreds of cities, coordinated by ANSWER, Not in Our Name, United for Peace and International League of Peoples’ Struggle (ILPS), Bello belatedly managed to raise the funds for conferences to misrepresent himself and his kind as leaders of the movement against the US war of aggression in Iraq and as defenders of the peoples of Iraq and Palestine.
In fact, the futile objective of the pseudo-progressives, who are in the pay of conduits of US imperialism, is to seize the initiative from the genuine anti-imperialist forces and put up a platform for opposing wars of national liberation, condoning the official violence of reactionary states and broadcasting reformist slogans in support of imperialism and its puppet states.
These pseudo-progressives spread counterrevolutionary notions, such as that “transnationalism”, “globalism” and “environmentalism have invalidated the struggle for all-round national independence, that national industrialization is “environmentally unsustainable” and that “civil society” and “culture of nonviolence” are the politically correct expressions. The primary objective of all these expressions is to discredit armed revolutions and to uphold the “legitimate” monopoly of violence by the imperialist and puppet states.
Even in the most glittering phrases, the reformist and counterrevolutionary notions cannot gloss over the fact that the biggest tragedies of the 20th century are those arising from monopoly capitalism or imperialism. US imperialism has been responsible for the worst tragedies, such as the unbridled plunder and wars of aggression, in the latter half of the century. These continue to this day because imperialism .persists as the scourge of humankind.
The proposals of Bello and his ilk for the 21st century would continue to mire the Filipino people in the same tragedies they experienced under the US empire of the 20th century. However, the proletarian revolutionary movement and the broad anti-imperialist movement of the people of the world are resurgent and are growing in strength through revolutionary struggle. ###
-- Michael Pugliese