Manolo Quezon is #TheExplainer Newsletter - Issue #14: Radical Left Carousel
Passion Project weekends usually focuses on The Philippine Diary Project but here's an instance where some interesting readings deserve wider dissemination --and also connect to The Philippine Diary Project.
Some time ago I encountered this talk online, and it made for a gripping read, exploring, as it did, the story of President Duterte and his relationship with the Communist Party of the Philippines and other groups; along the way it also explored Jose Ma. Sison's past affiliations with different governments, from the Macapagal to the Marcos administrations, and individual candidates. You should read the whole thing for a crash course in radical politics since the 1960s.
First as Tragedy, Second as Farce: Marcos, Duterte and the Communist Parties of the Philippines - World Socialist Web Site — www.wsws.org On August 26, Dr. Joseph Scalice delivered this lecture at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore on the support given by the Communist Party of the Philippines, and the various organizations that follow its political line, for Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte in 2016.
Martial law: but what kind?
There's a portion I want to focus on for the purposes of this newsletter, however:
The architecture for police-state rule in the Philippines had been written by US imperialism, which wrote martial law into the constitution of its former colony and wrote trial by jury out. Numerous prior presidents, including Macapagal and Garcia and Quirino, had all indicated that they would employ these clauses and declare martial law.
Why did Marcos succeed where they had failed? His success rested upon context of social crisis that led to the rise of global authoritarianism, and a universal sentiment among the elite that they could no longer afford the trappings of democracy. If I could use an analogy: the implementation of dictatorship by Ferdinand Marcos was like a game of musical chairs or, as we call it in the Philippines, Trip to Jerusalem. All of the ruling elite were engaged in a game circling Malacañang, knowing that when the music stopped, when martial law was imposed, whoever was seated in the presidential palace would be dictator.
Scalice argues that regardless of who succeeded him, Ferdinand Marcos' idea of implementing martial law wasn't one far from the minds of others. Most (in)famously, Benigno S. Aquino Jr. was quoted as saying were he elected president, he would impose martial law too.
What is overlooked here, is one involved in all counterfactual history; it is assuming an alternative history might include similar endings. The crucial distinction that has never been made is that one has to explore and define what that martial law would have been. We know what martial law Marcos had in mind; everything we learn only fortifies what we know. It was what a generation later Alberto Fujimori baptized as an "autogolpe," a "self-coup."
Just as Marcos' audacity --thoroughly preplanned or improvisational-- led many unable to grasp how far he was prepared to go, so to does the eventual outcome of what he did disguise a basic due-diligence question. What did others mean when they said they expected they would have to impose martial law, too? In contrast to Marcos' looking outward and forward, they perhaps were looking backwards, to past precedents: the handling of the Huks, for example, or World War II, even Lincoln in the American Civil War because of the orientation of Filipino lawyers to examine American jurisprudence.
What do I mean? Taking The Philippine Diary Project alone, we get some indications of how martial law was viewed and what they imagined it to be, for Marcos' contemporaries.
Martial law as others imagined it
Augusto Caesar Espiritu was a delegate to the 1971-73 Constitutional Convention, and considered Left-of-Center; two entries of his sketch out what the parameters of the usual understanding of martial law was, to Marcos' contemporaries:
Diary of Augusto Caesar Espiritu, Sunday, September 24, 1972 - The Philippine Diary Project
At the Capitol Hills Golf Club, I had a little discussion with Compadre Josefino (Pepe) Cenizal’s guest, the executive judge at Quezon City Hall. The judge said that he was glad that according to the text of the presidential proclamation, several specific cases were to be taken out of the civil courts—cases, for example, of subversion; of the validity, legality or constitutionality of any acts of the President pursuant to his orders, etc.
“You know, I read the U.S. Federal Constitution and went through some American cases last night,” I told the judge, “particularly the well-known Ex Parte Merryman and Ex Parte Milligan cases. The U.S. Federal Constitution hardly makes provision for a state of emergency; indeed, it is fairly strong in rejecting the concept. The U.S. Constitution simply provides that the power to suspend the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus rests exclusively with the Congress of the U.S. when, in cases of rebellion or invasion, the public safely may require it. It does not make clear whether such suspension must be limited to those areas immediately affected by the rebellion or invasion, and does not specify the agency of government that may order the suspension.”
When can martial rule be properly applied in the U.S.?
I gave the judge the gist of what I read so carefully last night:
If in the foreign invasion or civil wars the civil courts are actually closed, the U.S. Supreme Court said, and it is impossible to administer criminal justice according to law, then on the theater of actual military operations where war really prevails, there may be a necessity to furnish a substitute for the overthrown civil authority to preserve the safety of the army and society. As no power is left but the military, it is allowed to govern by martial rule until the laws can have their free course. As necessity creates the rule, so it limits its duration. If the government is continued and the courts are reinstated, the continuation of martial rule would be a gross usurpation of power. Martial rule can never exist, said the court, where the courts are open, and in the proper and unobstructed exercise of their jurisdiction. It is also confined to the locality of actual war. Thus, in Duncan v. Kahanamoku, in 1946, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus and the complete supplanting of the civil courts by military tribunals in which civilians were tried for crimes by summary procedures were invalidated.
Of course, I added, the Constitution of the Philippines did not only state that the President is commander-in-chief of all armed forces of the Philippines, he was also given the power to suspend the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus or place the Philippines or any part thereof under martial law. This lodges too great a power on the President, I continued without pause, we should amend the Constitution so as to lodge these powers on him only for a brief period, following which Congress should ratify his actions or the state of emergency must cease.
The good judge swallowed hard and blinked at hearing my “lecture.”
Diary of Augusto Caesar Espiritu, Saturday, October 7, 1972 - The Philippine Diary Project
Pimentel had appeared at the Supreme Court yesterday.
“It was quite beautiful the way the thing had proceeded.” He was almost ecstatic. He had told the judges point-blank that if the Supreme Court did not do its duty now, they may find themselves in the same predicament as Chief Justice Taney in Ex Parte Merryman during the U.S. civil war. Taney had pitifully bewailed the illegality of Lincoln’s suspension of the writ of habeas corpus and his (Taney’s) own inability to release those arrested.
He said that the conditions did not warrant the declaration of martial law. To begin with, the bombings could not be used as an excuse. For example, Pimentel warmed up, who were caught after the grenade bombing of Plaza Miranda a year ago? There were some convicts among them, but there was absolutely no proof that the NPAs have really done it.
Again, who bombed Joe’s store at Carriedo? A PC trooper, not NPAs. Who was suspected of bombing the Con-Con? Two men dressed in PC uniforms were seen running away; in fact, it was probably because he was yelling and telling everyone that he saw two soldiers coming out of the toilet (which was the epicenter of the bombing) that Pepito Nolledo was later arrested.
Nene told the Supreme Court that it was their historic duty to do something to avert disaster. He apologized for speaking that way, but he was before a court of justice and if he could not speak there, he would not be able to speak anywhere else.
Nene said that he had discerned from the interrogations that Chief Justice Concepcion and Justices Fernando and Teehankee and possibly Fred Ruiz Castro were probably sympathetic.
It’s too bad, I said, that JBL Reyes is no longer in the Supreme Court.
According to him, the responses to the interrogation of the solicitor general, Titong Mendoza by Chief Justice Roberto Concepcion, showed that Titong himself was quite skeptical about the government’s actions.
It's well to underscore what people even closer in age and background to Marcos thought set apart his martial law, from the commonly-understood parameters of martial law.
Then-Senator Arturo M. Tolentino, recounting September 24, 1972, in his memoirs, Voice of Dissent:
“This is a coup d'etat!” I exclaimed.
We were gathered in the office of Senator Roy the day after Senator Aquino’s arrest. Senator Pelaez had just returned from Malacañan where he obtained a copy of the proclamation (No. 1081) of martial law and General Orders No. 1, under which President Marcos announced that he “shall govern the nation and direct the operation of the entire Government, including all its agencies and instrumentalities” in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Philippines.
“This is a coup d'etat by AFP Commander-in-Chief Marcos of the Philippine Government,” I repeated.
Probing the radicals' intramurals
An extract near the end of his presentation, is a valuable summary of half a century of radical politics:
Mao, meanwhile, went a very different way. Confronting the threat of a possible Soviet invasion in the wake of the crushing of the Prague Spring and the declaration of the Brezhnev doctrine that the Soviet Union would interfere with the affairs of any socialist country that threatened Soviet interests, Mao crushed the Cultural Revolution, ostracized Lin Biao, reached out to Kissinger and Nixon and established ties with US imperialism, with Washington.
Mao then turned to countries around the world and, like the Soviet Union, established relations with dictators. He embraced Marcos and Pinochet. Salvador Allende was tied to the Communist Party of Chile, which was oriented to Moscow, and when Pinochet crushed the Communist Party and the Chilean working class, the Communist Party of China immediately welcomed Pinochet.
Marcos used martial law to carry out the repression of the working population on an industrial scale, crushing the social unrest of the time. When Marcos visited Beijing to establish trade and diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China, Mao issued a public statement that the CCP would not interfere in the “domestic affairs” of the Philippines.
Sison proclaimed that Mao’s opening of relations with Marcos was a “diplomatic victory for the People’s Republic of China and a victory for the Philippine revolutionary struggle.” The word “lies” is inadequate to encapsulate this argument.
It is impossible to defend human rights, not simply within these organizations, but on the basis of their political line. The CPP and its allied organizations do not represent a force defending democracy. That is my historical summation.
The party was responsible for purges within its own ranks that killed 1,000 of its own members. It also recruited child soldiers, producing comics and reading primers, so that they could recruit children as young as ten and eleven years old to the New People’s Army in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Those who are interested in defending human rights need to look elsewhere. This is not that I don’t defend the human rights of the CPP and its front organizations. I read an explicit defense of them against the violence of the state at the beginning of this lecture. My point is otherwise. If you are interested in defending democracy, preventing the rise of dictatorship and defending human rights, these are not the social forces that you should be looking to.
My final appeal is to all scholars and to broad public who have listened to this lecture. The rhetoric of Sison and company, with his bald-faced assertion of “outright lies,” his violent vulgarities—he told me that I should “wallow in my own saliva”—and his circulation of doctored images—these are the tactics of the far-right. The language of the CPP is indistinguishable from the Diehard Duterte Supporters, the DDS, on Facebook. You could do a little online quiz, “Who said it: Joma Sison or a DDS troll?” You’d be hard-pressed to tell the difference.
The CPP has no interest in defending historical truth. I would like to conclude by quoting what Trotsky said about the Stalinists in this regard. “With every zig and zag they are compelled to revamp history all over again.”
The Stalinists allied with Macapagal, but then declared that he was reactionary and they buried the evidence of ever having supported him. They allied with Marcos, but then, of course, he was reactionary. This pattern has repeated again and again. They allied with Cory Aquino, but then she was reactionary. They allied with Duterte, but now declare him a fascist, and they denounce me as a “paid CIA agent” for bringing up the evidence of their own history.
“The lie serves, therefore,” Trotsky continues, “as the fundamental ideological cement of the bureaucracy.” It’s what holds the whole thing together.
“The more irreconcilable becomes the contradiction between the bureaucracy and the people, all the ruder becomes the lie [I think we’re witnessing that now], all the more brazenly is it converted into criminal falsification and judicial frame-up.”
Don’t rely on what’s being said at present. Find the contemporary written record. It is the only thing that we can be certain is accurate. Check it for yourself, review the evidence for yourself. This applies not just to my own field but to scholarship in general. We are in a period where historical truth, the very idea of truth, is under assault, and where authoritarian figures are rising to power the world over on the basis of outrageous lies.
Marcos, the Huks, and the Kremlin
Anyway, the other day, Scalice went online to promote a recent article of his:
Ferdinand Marcos secretly worked with a communist party, the PKP, to conduct informal diplomacy with Moscow. The PKP aided Marcos in his 1972 imposition of dictatorship and entered the martial law cabinet.
While Marcos publicly denounced the "Communist threat," and used it as his pretext for martial, he employed leading members of the Stalinist PKP in his government and they wrote the justifications for his dictatorship.
The article is not a significant revision of the history of the martial law regime, it also calls for a reexamination of cold war historiography. Why did Marcos, the anticommunist and close ally of the United States, ally with the PKP and conduct secret diplomacy the USSR?
An examination of the class function of Stalinism and the informal networks which it established, through the movement of cadre and ideas, on behalf of sections of the ruling elite throughout the underdeveloped world in the mid-twentieth century, allows us to see past the traditional top-down geopolitical division of the world in the cold war to a richer understanding of the development of political and social struggles within these countries. Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, from 1965 to 1975, engaged in secret and wide-ranging informal diplomacy with the Soviet bloc using the transnational connections of the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP) [Communist Party of the Philippines]. The PKP, while officially an illegal organization, had endorsed Marcos for president in 1965 and he had appointed some of its members to positions within his government as salaried “researchers.” The party was split along lines drawn by the Sino-Soviet dispute, and a rival party, the CPP, was formed in 1967, with ties to Beijing. Marcos sought two things from the PKP: the secret negotiation of diplomatic and economic relations with Moscow, and the eventual support of the party for his imposition of dictatorship, giving martial law a progressive veneer. The economic ties with Moscow, arranged through these secret channels, were meant to provide leverage for renegotiating the unequal economic terms of the Bell Trade Act and the Laurel-Langley Agreement with Washington. The PKP meanwhile sought Soviet funds to secure national industrialization and the military might of the Marcos dictatorship to suppress their rival, the CPP. The informal network of the PKP, both its salaried ‘researchers’ and exiled representatives in Europe, allowed Marcos to circumvent the political barriers imposed by both domestic rivals and geopolitical ties with Washington. The informal network of the PKP provided Marcos with a domestic incentive as well, as the party endorsed Marcos’ dictatorship, ghostwriting his justification for martial law, and made support for his military rule a component of their constitution.
I recall criticism of Luis Taruc back then. But this must all be seen in context of divide-and-conquer, and following path of Nixon going to China (diplomatic relations removed PRC support for NPA).
Joseph Scalice in his Twitter feed responded,
It was certainly bound up with the Sino-Soviet split. The details, however, are fascinating and previously undocumented. The roles of Teodosio Lansang, Ruben Torres, Merlin Magallona, Haydee Yorac, and so on. I have a new article out in *History and Anthropology*! It details for the first time the close ties between the Marcos regime and the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP).
Replying to someone else he wrote,
Again, you might want to read it first. The PKP cadre were being employed by Marcos on salary as early as 1966. These salaried Marcos officials oversaw bombings in Manila, conducted international diplomacy, and murdered scores of their own cadre.
Tales of splittists and revisionists
Related reading by the same author:
The geopolitical alignments of diverging social interests: the Sino-Soviet split and the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas, 1966–1967: Critical Asian Studies: Vol 53, No 1 — www.tandfonline.com
In April 1967, the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP) broke in two. This article examines how a contradiction at the heart of the party’s program, which sought to retain leadership over both a mass movement and an alliance with a section of the elite, fragmented the party along the lines of the Sino-Soviet dispute. The ideological expression of the rival national interests of the Soviet Union and People’s Republic of China found congruent alignment with the diverging social forces in the PKP. The Soviet bureaucracy offered attractive terms of trade to countries of belated capitalist development. Sections of Filipino capitalists saw this as a means of developing national industry, and leading layers of the PKP allied themselves with the Marcos administration in support of these ends. In contrast, a cultural revolution and a protracted people’s war expressed the geopolitically imperiled position of China. University-based youth were drawn to this perspective. Over the course of 1966, the PKP was torn apart along the fault-lines of the Sino-Soviet ideological split, as this global dispute gave political form to the diverging social interests within the party.
Learn more about Joseph Scalice
Joseph Scalice | historian. wordsmith. wanderer. — www.josephscalice.com historian. wordsmith. wanderer.
Joseph Scalice | Research — www.josephscalice.com
My first book, The Drama of Dictatorship: Martial law and the Communist Parties of the Philippines, under contract for publication with Cornell University Press in 2023, analyzes Ferdinand Marcos’ imposition of martial law on the Philippines in 1972 and the critical roles played in this by the two rival Communist Parties of the Philippines, the CPP and the PKP. The book builds upon my 2018 dissertation, “Crisis of Revolutionary Leadership: Martial Law and the Communist Parties of the Philippines, 1959-1974,” which was the product of more than five years of research funded in part by a Fulbright IIE scholarship. By focusing on the social unrest and political machinations of the period from 1969 to 1972, I uncover the complex developments which made the dictatorship possible. Drawing on the voluminous contemporary literature of the Communist Parties and their front organizations in both English and Tagalog, a wide range of daily newspapers and weekly journals, and newly declassified material from the US State Department and the CIA, and using material from a range of archives in the Philippines, the United States, the Netherlands, and Canada, The Drama of Dictatorship constructs the first detailed scholarly account of the historical causes of the imposition of martial law in the Philippines.
Additional Readings
The Delegate and the President: Contrasting Diaries on Martial Law - The Philippine Diary Project — philippinediaryproject.com
September 23 marks the 41st anniversary of the proclamation of martial law by President Marcos, although Marcos himself insisted on September 21.
The Philippine Diary Project has two diaries that give contrasting views on martial law. The first is the diary of Ferdinand E. Marcos, the second, the diary of Constitutional Convention delegate Augusto Caesar Espiritu.
Rogue Magazine: An Unfinished Portrait – Manuel L. Quezon III
In late September, Juan Ponce Enrile launched a personal biography—and a political bombshell that had his detractors accusing him of attempting to rewrite history. Manuel Quezon III reads between the lines for the real motives behind this seemingly disingenuous memoir
Thoughts on The Kingmaker, a Documentary About Imelda Marcos Nearly a generation separates Ramona Diaz's documentary, "Imelda," from Lauren Greenfield's documentary, "Kingmaker," also on Imelda.
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