To the Youth: Get Mad, But Only in Approved Ways
– A Critique of Managed Dissent
or: "A Reflection Upon Certain Admonitions Directed to the Youth"
By Maurice Montojo
In these troubled times, when the voices of elders and men of affairs rise to counsel the young, one encounters declarations cast in the language of prudence and civic duty. “To the youth,” they proclaim, “get mad. Protest. Fight for your rights. That is democracy. That is legal. But the moment you take up the gun and join an armed band, you cross from the estate of citizen to that of combatant. You forfeit the protections of law and stand exposed to the full rigour of RA 11479 and the Revised Penal Code. Change wrought through statute preserves life. Change pursued through bullets consumes it. Make not your fellow Filipinos the enemies upon your battlefield. Suffer not the recruiters to turn your idealism into an instrument of war.”
Thus speaks the voice of established order. It carries the measured cadence of responsibility, the sober warning of one who claims to stand guard over the republic’s peace. Yet he who reads with care discerns beneath the surface a familiar and ancient condescension: Be wroth if you will, but remain within the bounds we have inscribed. Let your anger expend itself in permitted marches and resolutions that disturb no deeper foundations. Leave the grave matters of statecraft and power to those who have grown gray in their exercise. Secure first your daily bread, pay your tribute to the treasury, and only then presume to question the very edifice that has denied many their just portion of opportunity and justice. This is not counsel born of pure neutrality; it is the idiom of managed consent, wherein dissent is indulged only whilst it remains spectacle—colourful, noisy, yet powerless to reorder the actual levers of dominion.
It is a simple matter, and one costing little, for men sheltered behind gates and guarded by the machinery of state to condemn the rebel who lifts the rifle. From such vantage, one may discourse gravely upon the forfeiture of legal safeguards under the Anti-Terrorism Act, whose broad phrasing has stirred unease among many observers for its capacity to cast a chill upon protest and organised grievance. The statute, while professing to exempt advocacy and mass action unaccompanied by intent of grave harm, has been criticised for the ease with which its provisions may be stretched when conjoined with practices of labelling and the older statutes against rebellion.
In this present day, the very notion of armed struggle is too often collapsed into the single category of “terrorism,” a reduction that serves the convenience of narrative. Long years of peace negotiations between the Government of the Republic and the National Democratic Front—representing the Communist Party and its armed force, the New People’s Army—have spanned more than forty rounds across several administrations. Agreements such as the Hague Joint Declaration and the Comprehensive Agreement on Respect for Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law emerged from these labours. They testified to the recognition that the conflict springs from profound roots: the ancient curse of landlessness, the grinding poverty that stalks the countryside, the capture of institutions by entrenched families, and grievances reaching back through martial law and earlier peasant risings. If every bearing of arms is forthwith branded terrorism, of what use then are such negotiations? Why convene panels to deliberate agrarian reform, social justice, and political restructuring if the mere fact of prior resort to arms strips all context and nuance, rendering dialogue a mere formality before condemnation?
That a faction should take arms against the prevailing order does not, of itself, stamp the act as terrorism in the classical understanding. History furnishes many instances—anti-colonial struggles, resistances against tyranny—wherein armed components arose precisely when avenues of peaceful redress appeared sealed or illusory. Terrorism, properly conceived, directs violence against the innocent to sow widespread terror for political ends. Armed rebellion, however savage its episodes, frequently conceives itself as contesting the armed apparatus of the state amid conditions of profound asymmetry. To equate the two is to erase the moral and historical space for legitimate political violence when systemic failure becomes intolerable, while conveniently overlooking the quieter, structural violences—procedural, economic, and institutional—that the established order may wield to perpetuate itself.
The present age is one of asymmetric contest, wherein warfare no longer arrays itself in the ordered ranks and clear frontiers of earlier epochs. All has become irregular: the cognitive and informational spheres no less than the physical. Traditional “civilised” warfare presupposed uniformed hosts, defined battlefields, and conventions honoured in the breach or observance. Today, power contends through hybrid instruments—disinformation campaigns, economic strangulation, legal manoeuvres, and operations upon the mind itself. The state commands police, army, courts, and channels of public voice. Those in opposition adapt with the tactics of the weak, yet they too engage in the battle of narratives. The advisory cautions rightly against the weaponisation of youthful idealism by recruiters. Yet it passes lightly over the capacity of the system itself to weaponise legality, delay, and selective indignation in the service of neutralisation.
Information warfare and the contest for cognition compound the difficulty. In an epoch when falsehoods masquerade as revealed truth, the smallest particle of resonant falsehood—appealing directly to the passions of the common man—often outweighs volumes of verified evidence. No matter how scrupulous the investigation, no matter how lucid the exposition of causes, a simple query—“Why were they present?”—or the invocation of quo warranto suffices in many quarters to eclipse inconvenient realities. Such devices function as instruments in the larger cognitive struggle, eroding confidence in evidence, institutions, and shared truth. Narratives that reduce complex insurgencies to undifferentiated terrorism, while portraying every state response as pure defence, operate squarely within this arena.
Those who urge the young to render their anger “constructive rather than destructive” frequently overlook—or choose to set aside—deeper currents of thought and experience. Karl Marx observed that the dominant ideas of an age are, in large measure, the ideas of its dominant class. When power itself delineates the permissible limits of protest and brands every fundamental challenge as criminality, it shields its privileges beneath the cloak of impartial law. The ancient Vedas and the philosophical traditions of the East speak of Dharma not as slavish adherence to statute, but as alignment with a higher moral and cosmic order. When rulers and systems depart grievously from righteousness—sustaining mass deprivation through corruption, exclusion, and entrenched inequality—the obligation to restore equilibrium may transcend the letter of enacted law.
Mao Zedong’s much-quoted assertion that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” is often repeated in truncated form, severed from its fuller context in his 1938 discourse on problems of war and strategy. The complete passage declares: “Every Communist must grasp the truth, ‘Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.’ Our principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party. Yet, having guns, we can create Party organizations… We can also create cadres, create schools, create culture, create mass movements. Everything in Yan’an has been created by having guns. All things grow out of the barrel of a gun…”
Mao spoke from the concrete crucible of China’s revolution—warlords, foreign invasion, and a fractured state—arguing that armed capacity served as instrument for organisational survival and societal transformation. He insisted, however, upon the political authority’s supremacy over the military instrument; the gun was servant, never master. This fuller comprehension complicates easy repudiations. It acknowledges that contests for power may demand material force when institutions have been hollowed or captured, while simultaneously cautioning against the weapon’s emancipation from disciplined political direction—a caution pertinent to protracted struggles, including those witnessed in these islands, where the rigours of prolonged conflict have at times tested discipline and accountability.
None of this renders the gun a romantic or preferable instrument. The armed conflict in the Philippines has exacted a fearful toll—tens of thousands of lives lost across decades, communities scarred, and generations brutalised on all sides. Idealism itself becomes weaponised, not by those who recruit in the hills as the order claims, but sometimes by politicians who inflame youthful fervour for transient electoral advantage before discarding it. Rifles neither erect schools nor fill granaries; they seldom yield enduring justice absent a coherent political horizon. Yet to dismiss those who repair to the mountains as mere criminals or romantic fools is to evade the more arduous inquiry: Why do certain young souls, cognisant of the privations of guerrilla existence and the certainty of state reprisal, nonetheless perceive no tolerable future along the sanctioned paths? What alchemy of land hunger, dynastic politics, institutional decay, and thwarted aspirations propels such a choice?
Exhortations to render anger constructive ring hollow when the permitted channels—elections tainted by patronage and machinery, tribunals sluggish in the service of the powerless, public discourse fragmented by algorithms and ownership—appear themselves captured or inadequate. The deeper intellectual evasion consists in pretending that the battlefield was not already delineated by structural violence long ere any youth shouldered a rifle: the quotidian violence of hunger, the denial of learning, killings outside judicial process that too rarely meet full reckoning, and an economy of power that concentrates dominion among a narrow circle of families.
Genuine maturity does not demand that the young forsake idealism upon securing their first wage. It requires instead that the republic confront why such idealism collides so violently with the necessities of survival. It demands that those who hold authority regard radical discontent not merely as a security disturbance to be suppressed under anti-terror statutes, but as a symptom of failings that reform through law alone has too often proven insufficient to remedy.
In the final reckoning, every instrument stands capable of weaponisation, for every tool may be turned to martial purpose. The state itself may transmute peace into “peacefare”—employing negotiations, truces, and dialogues less to address root afflictions than to intimidate, fragment, or delegitimise those who press for profound and systemic alteration, even when such alteration strikes at the order’s foundations. The pen, and in this electronic age the smartphone, may wield force akin to the rifle-even accompanies it as necessarily, shaping perceptions and marshalling multitudes across the ether.
The oft-repeated dictum that one cannot speak of peace whilst bearing arms possesses a beguiling moral clarity. Yet history records a more nuanced wisdom. In 1974, addressing the United Nations, Yasser Arafat declared: “Today I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.” He did not spurn peace; rather, he affirmed that the offer of peace must not disarm the oppressed while the architecture of domination endures intact. The gun and the olive branch together symbolise the twin necessities of resistance and diplomacy—pressure joined to negotiation—when either path pursued in isolation reveals its insufficiency.
The people would do well to guard against simply "romanticising the rifle" and the miseries it multiplies. Yet they should maintain equal vigilance against homilies upon the sanctity of law and democracy issuing from those who preside over, or draw sustenance from, a system that too frequently renders both terms ironic. In this era of cognitive and asymmetric strife, wherein narratives command legitimacy no less than projectiles, the true labour is not merely to admonish the people, especially the young against anger. It is to confront, with honesty and without instinctive recourse to criminalisation, the reasons why so many among them still discover such potent cause for it.
The way ahead cannot rest upon incantations of legality alone, nor upon any glorification of mere violence. It necessitates the frank admission that peace negotiations have persisted precisely because armed struggle, however grievous its cost, has repeatedly compelled attention to grievances that decorous reform has often contrived to evade. It calls for a reformation of the social order so thorough that recourse to bullets loses its desperate appeal—not through the expansive application of terrorism statutes to engulf all dissent, but through the concrete delivery of justice, opportunity, and accountability sufficient to render idealism and existence no longer mortal antagonists.
Until that day arrives, counsel urging the young to “get mad, but only within legal bounds” will strike many as hollow rhetoric—mere sophistry to those whose daily reality whispers that the contest was never fairly joined. History teaches that when avenues of law calcify into instruments of conservation rather than renewal, certain souls will inevitably seek recourse elsewhere. To comprehend that sombre dynamic, without thereby extenuating its human price, marks the commencement of wiser statesmanship, not its evasion.