Gloria, the Demon Infant

A jubilant Joma Sison called Gloria the "demon infant". Joma took a dig against Gloria after being freed by the Dutch government due to lack of evidence. "This demon infant", says the ideological head of the longest-running insurgency in the world, "..made all these trumped up charges against me, making my life a living hell." Hehehe. Now you know.

The last time I saw Joma seethed with anger was in 1990. That year saw the open confrontation between RJs and RAs. As a young activist at the University of the Philippines-Diliman, I also experienced being caught in the middle of the raging ideological debates. Some of us were tagged military informants, military adventurists, deviants and what-have-you. The mere mention of the 1959 Cuban revolution caused discomfort among the young cadres.

These clashes between the Politburo members and ex-Politburo members caused great calamity to the party. Many of my friends dropped out of the scene, never to be seen again. Others stayed but after a few years, dropped out. Some, like me, went on our lives, still struggling against a disordered society. We struggle yes. We are still socialists. But my method is now totally different. Its still a revolution. But it is closer to the 1959 Cuban coup and the Thai model than the 1949 Chinese revolution. It is more of Trotsky than Stalin.

Many of my comrades are still true-blue socialists but we don't want to be dragged into the debate that split the party. We are men of action. And what we aspire for is the creation of a military-civilian government with socialist bent. That is what I am fighting for.

Joma represents the old guards. Some of the new party members still see him as an idol, while many see him as just an icon. When demon infant smiled broadly with Joma's arrest, many actually laughed, not because of what happened, but because GMA could be a great fan of Joma. With this arrest, she has revived the shagging career of the man from Ilokos.

Gloria should let the CPP-NPA be. Whatever she says in public, the CPP-NPA-NDF will survive the ravages of time. It will survive even beyond Joma. It will not wither away. It will not be destroyed. Many regimes have tried, yet failed to even break its backbone. Why? Because those who believe in its cause remains in the party. It may probably evolve into something different a few years from now, after probably the demise of the party's ideologue, yet, still, it will espouse the Chinese model. The party will kill itself. No one can defeat it. It will either assume a different form to conform with modernization, but its soul will remain the same. Old dogs are hard to change. This is the same as the party.

Even a demon infant cannot defeat the party of the people