Beyond the label of "Terror": When People still calls
Dissent and Struggle against the system as justified
It has become increasingly convenient for the establishment and its apologists to reduce every expression of dissent, every cry for justice, and every call for structural change into the language of “terrorism.” What was once prosecuted under the old vocabulary of rebellion, sedition, subversion, or illegal possession of firearms is now more easily condemned through a single, frightening label: “terrorist.”
Such a word is not neutral. It is meant to isolate, to frighten, and to silence. It tells the ordinary citizen not to listen, not to ask questions, not to examine the causes of unrest. It discourages sympathy for the poor, the landless, and the dispossessed by turning their grievances into a security problem rather than a social question.
By reducing complex social struggles into simplistic security narratives, the deeper causes of resistance are often ignored: landlessness, poverty, exploitation, political exclusion, and the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few. Rather than confront these enduring injustices, those in authority often find it easier to portray organized resistance as criminality, and every demand for radical reform as a threat to national stability.
Yet behind every label lies a history. Behind every accusation lies a countryside marked by hunger, debt, tenancy, displacement, and broken promises. The question, therefore, is not merely what name the state gives to those who resist. The more important question is: what conditions gave rise to resistance in the first place?
A genuine mass movement does not arise from selfish ambition, nor from a desire to terrorize the people. It is born from principle, conviction, and love of country. Its aims are not hidden. They are rooted in the urgent needs and long-denied aspirations of the Filipino people.
1. Genuine Land Reform and National Industrialization
At the very heart of the struggle lies the demand for genuine land reform and national industrialization — a demand written in the sweat, labor, and sacrifice of generations of Filipino farmers, workers, and toiling masses.
For centuries, those who till the land have remained landless, while powerful landlords rule over vast estates like private kingdoms. The farmer plants, harvests, and feeds the nation, yet too often remains poor, indebted, and dependent on those who own the soil beneath his feet. This is not merely an economic injustice; it is a social wound passed down from one generation to the next.
The aim of genuine land reform is simple and just: land to those who actually cultivate it. It seeks to break the chain of rural poverty by ending landlord domination and giving farmers the means to live with dignity, security, and independence. Land must cease to be a privilege of birth, inheritance, or political power. It must become the foundation of livelihood for those who make it productive.
But land reform alone is not enough. A nation of small farmers cannot fully prosper if it remains dependent on imported goods, foreign capital, and raw-material exports. Genuine land reform must be joined with national industrialization — the building of industries owned, directed, and developed for the needs of the Filipino people.
National industrialization means creating factories, tools, machines, processing plants, transport systems, and technologies that serve national development rather than foreign profit. It means transforming agricultural produce into higher-value goods within the country, creating decent jobs for workers, and ending the cycle in which the Philippines exports raw materials cheaply and imports finished products at great cost.
Together, land reform and national industrialization form the basis of real economic freedom. Land reform frees the peasantry from feudal bondage; industrialization frees the nation from dependency and underdevelopment. One gives the farmer land and dignity; the other gives the worker employment, skill, and a future.
Only through these twin pillars can the country build an economy that serves the many rather than enriches the few — an economy rooted in the countryside, strengthened by industry, and directed toward genuine national sovereignty.
2. Genuine Freedom and National Sovereignty
The struggle also calls for true national freedom — a country not dictated upon by foreign powers, foreign capital, or foreign military interests.
The aspiration is for an economy and political order directed by Filipinos and for Filipinos. It rejects a system in which the country’s natural resources, labor, markets, policies, and even its security direction are bent toward the interests of foreign corporations and powerful outside states.
Amid the current geopolitical setting, Philippine policy remains too often subservient, mendicant, and vassal-like — a condition its apologists prefer to call “interdependence.” Yet interdependence cannot be genuine when one nation merely follows, adjusts, and obeys while stronger powers decide the terms. Whether the pressure comes from the United States, China, or any other dominant power, the lesson remains the same: subservience is still subservience, even when dressed in the language of alliance, investment, aid, or development.
The effects of such dependency are often downplayed because these powerful countries are presented as “developed,” modern, and benevolent. But no foreign power, however advanced, should be allowed to determine the destiny of the Filipino people. A nation that relies on others to define its economy, defense, diplomacy, and development cannot claim full sovereignty.
Sovereignty is not merely a flag, an anthem, or a seat in international assemblies. It means control over the nation’s land, wealth, industry, defense, resources, and future. It means that the Filipino people must be the authors of their own destiny — not clients of empire, not pawns of great-power rivalry, and not tenants in their own homeland.
3. Ending Exploitation and Social Justice
The struggle likewise seeks to dismantle a system in which a privileged ruling class enjoys the wealth of the nation while the majority remain trapped in hardship and deprivation.
It challenges the domination of a few over the country’s industries, resources, land, and means of livelihood. It opposes a social order where workers create wealth but receive only survival wages, where farmers feed the nation but cannot own land, where families remain homeless despite vacant estates and idle properties, and where ordinary people are told to sacrifice while the powerful continue to prosper.
As history attests, exploitation continues to prevail in many forms: landlessness, homelessness, low wages, high costs of living, corruption, disenfranchisement, and the many arrangements that benefit the ruling establishment at the expense of the many. These are not isolated misfortunes, but symptoms of a social order designed to preserve privilege while demanding patience from those who suffer under it.
To end exploitation is to insist that the wealth of the country must serve the many, not merely enrich the few. It is to demand social justice not as charity, but as a right: decent wages, secure homes, land for the tiller, dignity for labor, and a society where power is no longer used to protect greed against the needs of the people.
The branding of dissent as “terrorism” often becomes a convenient veil that prevents meaningful discussion of poverty, inequality, and injustice. It reduces political questions into police matters and turns social grievances into criminal accusations. It allows the powerful to evade the harder and more honest task of answering why so many people feel abandoned, dispossessed, and betrayed by the very system that claims to represent them.
Yet history reminds that many struggles once condemned by the powerful were later understood as movements for justice, dignity, and national liberation. Labels imposed by authority do not settle the truth of history. Fear may delay change, but it cannot erase the conditions that make change necessary.
No label can extinguish the truth that so long as injustice persists, so long as farmers remain without land of their own, so long as workers remain at the mercy of compradores and exploiters, and so long as the nation itself remains an appendage of an unjust establishment blessed by foreign masters, there will always be those who continue to stand and struggle.
The fight for national democracy and genuine freedom is, ultimately, the struggle of every Filipino who believes in justice, dignity, sovereignty, and the liberation of the common people. It is the assertion that a nation must belong to its people — not to landlords, not to compradors, not to foreign interests, and not to those who use fear to silence the demand for a more humane and just society.