Chants, clenched fist, and the chorus of victory
As the youth embrace the struggle of farmers, workers, and the rest of the marginalized sectors, the time will come that the fascist regime will come after the youth next. But it will be another step anathematized for they have forgotten how the history told the narrative of the youth: chants and clenched fists caroling the chorus of victory.
For several months, the Polytechnic University of the Philippines (PUP) community has been struggling against the looming campus militarization. It was after the consecutive attacks from the law-making bodies as they put up, once again, their “anti-insurgency campaign” from the countrysides to the university halls.
It was the first crucial weeks of August, when Senator Ronaldo “Bato” Dela Rosa called for a Senate hearing to put several allegations on the progressive organizations in the state universities. According to Bato’s interview in a live radio broadcast, policies that restrict the military presence in the premises of universities are “detrimental” for the Filipino youth and the government; blatantly red-tagging the students of PUP and UP in the broadcast.
For him, the Senate must come up with a law deflecting the existing policies of the universities to remove the restriction and perform “parallel indoctrination” with the help of military personnel.
These attacks now manifest in Senate Committee Report 10, a proposal of Dela Rosa to legally deploy military forces inside and surrounding the universities in Manila to “secure the youth”.
Now, the question should be, how are they going to secure the youth when in the current political situation of the Philippines, children, women, and urban poor are being murdered by the police; while in the rural and ancestral lands, farmers, indigenous people, and journalists are also being killed in the broad daylight?
We have already witnessed these anti-insurgency campaigns not only from the past when former President Gloria Arroyo had conducted a witch-hunt — killing thousands of activists in the process — but also in the present times when farmers, human rights defenders, and advocates were killed for standing up against the worsening conditions in Negros and Samar regions, and urban poor communities.
Was it really security that they advanced for or the criminalization of dissent that they received from the youth sector? We, the youth, already know the answer to that.
For the youth, there is a significant difference for activists and the armed revolutionaries that these lawmakers, and the military forces — the state’s repressive apparatuses — cannot seem to draw the line. Activists are in the streets, maximizing all the legal means, to secure the line of the masses be served; while the armed revolutionaries are in the mountainsides, maintaining the class struggle through the use of armaments. Even in war, there is a distinction between the combatants and the non-combatants.
These actions of the government raised dubiety and there seems to be an answer for that: they are targeting the young activists simply because they cannot win over the civil unrest that seemed to dominate in the rural sites. Their pride, already-daunted, mandates them to start policing the urban communities because that’s where the echoes of injustice seem to notably resound.
Now, what is the face of looming campus militarization? Just recently, bountiful of leaflets red-tagging progressive organizations in PUP were seen distributed in the main building. It was threatening for the lives of those students who are part of the mentioned organizations, especially of their great numbers.
More than this, inside the SCR10 we can see several threats to the democratic rights of the students such as the monitoring of activities even if they are authorized, raised the issue of youth as “combatants”, never imply that the government is the enemy of the Filipino people, and the worst is, constant dialogues will happen between the parents, teachers, students, school admins, with the police and military as they planned to work together.
A part of the “de-radicalization” process that the fascists aim to metastasize in the school premises, Dela Rosa together with those who served as tentacles of de facto dictatorship, wanted to detach the youth from the struggle of the masses so that they can deter them from seeing the real conditions that the Filipino people suffer around the country. They might be soothed in madness but they knew very well that the youth will only descend to the illusions of peace that they fail to uphold if the ties of the youth are severed from the masses.
The thirst of the youth for knowledge is not confined to the academic walls so it is already embedded that the majority of the youth will inevitably take the streets to immerse with the tyrannized because that’s how the genuine knowledge can be acquired: by anchoring theory and practice altogether, through immersion.
Instead of developing repressive policies such as SCR10 and creating a mass hysteria by demonizing the youth and the progressive organizations; these lawmakers should perform their efficacy in serving the Filipino people by implementing policies that are opportune for the people of lower socio-economic strata both in the schools and the communities.
They should start looking at the material plight of the students: their tireless calls for genuine quality education, learning-conducive facilities, and pro-student policies. If the students only receive another unheeded retort, a clamor will always reverberate, the youth together with the marginalized are always ready to strike back.
This editorial is first published on The Catalyst, August 2019, in response to the recent attempt of the Senate and the Executive to target Filipino students and youth.
