Love Your Nation, Hate Your System: Independence Day in a still-Continuing Past

Love Your Nation, Hate Your System: 

Independence Day in a still-Continuing Past

Every June 12th, the Philippines undertakes one of its most solemn civic rituals. The flag is raised, the anthem is sung, wreaths are offered, and the nation is once again invited to remember Kawit, 1898, and the men and women who struggled to bring a people into political self-consciousness. The language of the occasion is familiar: freedom, sovereignty, sacrifice, nationhood, duty, and hope. No republic can live without such words. No nation can endure without memory. Yet memory, when separated from social reality, risks becoming not a source of renewal but an instrument of political consolation. 

This is the recurring difficulty of Philippine Independence Day. It is celebrated by the state as an achievement, yet received by many citizens as an unfinished question. The Philippines possesses the outward symbols of independence: flag, constitution, armed forces, diplomatic recognition, elected officials, and national territory. Yet the practical substance of independence remains contested by poverty, corruption, weak institutions, political dynasties, foreign dependency, social inequality, and the continued power of entrenched interests. The result is an annual ceremony in which the Republic praises freedom while many Filipinos continue to live under conditions that make freedom appear partial, fragile, or merely formal. 

The 128th anniversary of Philippine independence made this contradiction especially visible. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and Vice President Sara Duterte both issued messages that invoked truth, accountability, sovereignty, freedom, and national duty. Their words, taken individually, were proper to the occasion. They were solemn, patriotic, and morally defensible. Yet their political force was weakened by the historical and institutional burdens carried by the very figures who delivered them. 

President Marcos reminded Filipinos that June 12 marked the assertion of the Filipino people’s right to govern themselves. He stated: “It was the moment we formally asserted our right to govern ourselves and determine our own destiny. The years that followed tested our resolve as we built institutions, strengthened national unity, and sustained a truly independent Republic.” 

The statement corresponds to the official narrative of Philippine history. The declaration at Kawit was indeed an assertion of political will. It represented the emergence of a people prepared to claim the dignity of nationhood before the world. Yet the President’s emphasis on institutions and national unity invites examination rather than mere applause. If the Republic has built institutions, the public is entitled to ask what kind of institutions they have become. If national unity has been strengthened, citizens are entitled to ask why the political order remains marked by patronage, dynastic rivalry, regional inequality, elite bargaining, and distrust. 

The President further observed: “Yet through wars, crises, and uncertainty, the Filipino spirit endured, and the determination to build a better Philippines prevailed.” 

This sentiment is familiar in Philippine political rhetoric. It speaks to the endurance of the people, and in that sense it is true. Filipinos have endured colonialism, war, occupation, dictatorship, debt crises, natural disasters, migration, inflation, and political instability. Yet endurance should not be mistaken for deliverance. A people may survive despite a system, not because of it. The repeated celebration of Filipino resilience can become a convenient substitute for asking why the nation has required so much resilience from its ordinary citizens. 

The President’s most direct appeal concerned truth and public trust: “We must protect truth from distortion, harness technology wisely, and restore trust in a time increasingly marked by division and distrust.” 

Again, the statement is sound in principle. No democracy can function without truth, and no state can govern well without trust. But trust cannot be commanded by proclamation. It must be earned by conduct. In the Philippine setting, distrust is not merely the product of distorted information or reckless technology. It is also the product of lived experience: corruption scandals, failed public works, selective accountability, slow justice, political impunity, and the perception that the state frequently serves the powerful more efficiently than it serves the poor. 

The difficulty is sharpened by the President’s own political inheritance. His surname remains inseparable from martial law, authoritarian rule, crony capitalism, debt, human rights violations, and the long struggle over historical memory. When he calls upon the nation to protect truth from distortion, the statement inevitably returns to the unresolved question of the Marcos legacy. Truth cannot be defended selectively. It cannot be invoked against present division while softened in relation to past abuse. An Independence Day message that calls for truth must also be prepared to confront the ghosts that still walk within the Republic. 

Vice President Sara Duterte, speaking separately, placed emphasis on accountability and corruption. She declared: “Let us choose truth. Let us choose accountability. And above all, let us choose hope.” 

Her formulation was direct and morally forceful. It recognized that citizenship requires more than commemoration; it requires judgment. Yet the Vice President’s own political situation complicates the authority of her statement. She has faced serious controversies and charges involving the alleged misuse of confidential funds, including the notorious names associated with the “Mary Grace Piattos” issue. Whether these matters result in final legal liability is for the constitutional and judicial processes to determine. But politically, they already raise the central question: how can accountability be credibly preached by those who themselves stand under the shadow of accountability? 

The Vice President also warned that sovereignty is not threatened only by foreign invasion. She said: “We fought for our sovereignty against foreign invaders. But sovereignty is not lost only to those who come from foreign shores.” 

This is perhaps the most useful insight in her message. It acknowledges that sovereignty can be hollowed out from within. A state may retain its flag and anthem while allowing its public resources, security apparatus, economic policy, and diplomatic posture to be shaped by private interests, foreign pressures, or factional advantage. Yet the same statement also exposes the burden of the Duterte name: Oplan Tokhang, Double Barrel, allegations of extrajudicial killings, the politics of fear, questions involving illegal gambling networks, and a foreign policy often criticized as an appendage to Chinese interests. When sovereignty is discussed by those associated with such legacies, the question becomes not only whether foreign powers threaten independence, but whether domestic power itself has often weakened the meaning of independence. 

The Vice President’s strongest passage concerned corruption: “Every peso stolen from the people's treasury steals a child's freedom from hunger. It steals a student's freedom from illiteracy or substandard education. It steals a patient's freedom to obtain quality healthcare.” 

The statement deserves attention because it defines corruption not simply as theft but as the destruction of social opportunity. It recognizes that corruption is not an abstract offense against clean government but a concrete injury against the poor. A stolen peso is a delayed classroom, an absent medicine, an unfinished road, an unfunded scholarship, a hungry household, or a community denied development. In this sense, corruption is not merely illegal enrichment. It is the privatization of the future. 

Yet the same passage also illustrates the moral tragedy of Philippine politics. Leaders often speak most accurately about the evils from which they themselves are not entirely free. The denunciation is correct, but the speaker is compromised. The result is a politics in which truth is expressed through tainted vessels and accountability is demanded by officials whose own records invite scrutiny. 

This contradiction is not limited to two personalities. It belongs to the Philippine system itself. The President speaks of truth while bearing the unresolved history of martial law. The Vice President speaks of accountability while facing controversies over public funds. Both speak of sovereignty while the Philippine state remains pulled among American strategic dependence, Chinese pressure, foreign capital, domestic oligarchy, bureaucratic patronage, and dynastic power. Both commemorate independence while presiding over a social order in which wealth, justice, and political influence remain unevenly distributed. 

This is why Independence Day rhetoric often sounds noble yet insufficient. The Republic repeatedly declares its love of freedom while tolerating structures that limit the freedom of ordinary Filipinos. It praises sovereignty while permitting dependency. It invokes the heroes while preserving many of the inequalities and injustices against which the nationalist imagination originally arose. 

The phrase “love your nation, hate your system” captures this distinction. It does not express contempt for the Philippines. It expresses fidelity to the nation against the failures of its political order. The country is not identical with the administration. The people are not identical with the state. The flag is not the property of those who temporarily govern beneath it. A citizen may honor the nation while condemning the institutions that deform its promise. 

Indeed, the revolutionary tradition itself supports such a distinction. The heroes of the nineteenth century did not become patriots by flattering the existing order. They became patriots by judging it. Rizal exposed social hypocrisy and colonial abuse. Bonifacio organized against submission. Mabini warned against opportunism and compromised independence. Luna condemned incompetence and indiscipline. Their patriotism was not passive reverence but active dissatisfaction. 

To remember them merely as statues, therefore, is to diminish them. They were not ornaments of the state. They were critics of an unjust order. Their legacy cannot be honestly invoked by a Republic unwilling to subject itself to criticism. 

It is therefore not surprising that Independence Day in the Philippines has long been associated with protest. For many citizens, June 12 is not merely a holiday of state ceremony. It is a day of anti-imperialist commitment, labor mobilization, student dissent, peasant assertion, and civic criticism. This tradition is often dismissed as disorderly or unpatriotic, but it may be closer to the spirit of independence than official pageantry itself. 

The nation was supposedly born into freedom on the day when a people, molded into a nation by cultural evolution and by a sense of oneness born of common struggle and suffering, announced to the world that it asserted its natural right to liberty and stood ready to defend that right with blood, life, and honor. A people formed in that manner cannot be expected to remain silent, mum, and contented when independence is reduced to ritual while injustice continues. 

The protester on Independence Day may therefore be less a contradiction of the celebration than its continuation. He insists that independence must be more than sovereignty in law. It must become sovereignty in life. It must mean food, work, education, healthcare, justice, land, dignity, public accountability, and freedom from both foreign domination and domestic exploitation. 

This is where the business of nation-building meets the morality of independence. A country cannot build lasting prosperity on a foundation of distrust. It cannot sustain investment, productivity, innovation, or social peace where corruption is treated as normal. It cannot claim democratic maturity where political families monopolize power. It cannot speak convincingly of sovereignty while its economic and strategic decisions are shaped excessively by external patrons. It cannot expect citizens to believe in institutions that appear strong against the weak and negotiable before the powerful. 

From a business and society perspective, corruption is not only a moral failure. It is an economic cost. It raises the price of public works, distorts procurement, discourages honest enterprise, rewards connections over competence, and weakens the developmental capacity of the state. It turns government into a market for influence rather than an instrument of national purpose. 

From a political perspective, corruption is not only a legal offense. It is an assault on citizenship. It teaches the poor that government is inaccessible unless mediated by patrons. It teaches the middle class that taxes disappear into networks of privilege. It teaches the young that merit matters less than proximity to power. It teaches communities that public service is episodic, selective, and transactional. 

From a nationalist perspective, corruption is a form of internal colonialism. It extracts wealth from the people while leaving them with ceremonies of belonging. It replaces foreign domination with domestic predation. It allows the Republic to speak the language of freedom while reproducing conditions of dependency and exclusion. 

This is why the statements of President Marcos and Vice President Duterte must be read against their opposites. When the President speaks of truth, the public remembers historical distortion. When he speaks of trust, the public remembers institutions that have repeatedly failed to earn it. When he speaks of a “Bagong Pilipinas,” the public asks whether the old arrangements of power have truly changed. 

When the Vice President speaks of accountability, the public remembers confidential funds. When she speaks of corruption stealing from children, students, and patients, the public asks how public money under her own authority was used. When she speaks of sovereignty, the public remembers a political era associated with violent policing and foreign policy concessions. 

Such scrutiny is not unfair. It is the proper burden of public office. Leaders who invoke the heroes must expect to be measured by the moral vocabulary they themselves employ. 

The tragedy is that the Filipino people are often asked to choose between rival factions that speak the language of reform while representing different versions of the same political structure. One camp denounces corruption when out of power and rationalizes discretion when in power. Another invokes sovereignty against one foreign patron while accommodating another. One side invokes law against its enemies and mercy for its allies. The rhetoric changes, but the social order frequently remains intact. 

This is why the old Independence Day question persists: independent for whom, and independent toward what end? 

Independence cannot merely mean the existence of a Filipino ruling class. It cannot merely mean the replacement of foreign administrators by local dynasties. It cannot merely mean that laws are passed by Filipinos, contracts awarded by Filipinos, and abuses committed by Filipinos. Nationality alone does not sanctify injustice. 

The purpose of independence was not to create a native version of domination. It was to open the possibility of a more dignified national life. 

The business community, the professionals, workers, peasants, students, and overseas Filipinos all have a stake in that question. A country with weak institutions cannot build a durable economy. A society with deep inequality cannot sustain political legitimacy. A government that consumes public trust cannot expect national unity in times of crisis. A Republic that confuses ceremonial nationalism with developmental seriousness will continue to produce patriotic speeches over unfinished roads. 

The country does not lack talent. It does not lack labor. It does not lack memory. It does not lack sacrifice. What it has lacked too often is a governing system capable of converting these national assets into broad-based human development. 

Thus, the Independence Day speech has become an annual mirror. It reflects what the Republic says about itself and what the people know from experience. The distance between the two is the measure of the unfinished revolution. 

To love the country, therefore, is not to suspend judgment. It is to sharpen judgment. It is to insist that patriotism must not be monopolized by those in office. It is to reject the convenient fiction that criticism weakens the nation. On the contrary, criticism may be the only means by which the nation prevents the state from betraying it. 

A mature patriotism does not ask citizens to be silent before abuse. It does not ask them to confuse stability with justice or order with legitimacy. It does not ask them to accept poverty as destiny, corruption as culture, or dependency as realism. It asks them to remember that the nation was born through dissent before it was celebrated through ceremony. 

This, finally, is the meaning of the phrase “love your nation, hate your system.” It is not a slogan of despair. It is an argument for national seriousness. It recognizes that the Philippines remains worthy of loyalty precisely because its people deserve better than the arrangements that have too often governed them. 

The Nation may continue to celebrate Independence Day with speeches, flags, and commemorations. It should do so. But it should also understand that every June 12 carries a verdict. The people are not merely remembering the past. They are judging the present against the promises of the past. 

Until truth is defended without selectivity, accountability applied without factional convenience, sovereignty practiced without foreign dependence, and development pursued without corruption, Independence Day will remain both celebration and indictment. 

The nation is free in law. But the people still await freedom in fact.  

Beyond the label of "Terror": When People still calls Dissent and Struggle against the system as justified

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. 

Soon They’ll Say: Forget Change, Be Young, Be Innocent

Soon They’ll Say: Forget Change, Be Young, Be Innocent 

By Kat Ulrike

In these latter days, when the guardians of the established order sense the rising pulse of discontent among the young, they offer counsel wrapped in the measured tones of paternal prudence. “To the youth,” they declare, “get mad. Protest. Fight for your rights. That is democracy. That is legal.” Yet the admonition invariably carries its stern reservation: the moment the young take up the gun and join an armed formation, they pass from the estate of citizen into that of combatant. They forfeit the protections of law and expose themselves to the full severity of RA 11479 and the Revised Penal Code. Change wrought through statute, according to them, preserves life. Change pursued through bullets consumes it. "Let not fellow Filipinos become the foe upon your chosen battlefield" as they say as to defend the status quo wrapped in the promise of the need for reform and change. "Suffer not the recruiters to turn your idealism into an instrument of destruction."

But beneath this seemingly balanced rhetoric lies a deeper and more insistent direction, one that grows clearer with each wave of unrest. The message, once its polite veneer is stripped away, edges steadily toward this: Soon they will say—"forget change altogether. Be young. Be innocent. Enjoy the permitted pleasures and fleeting freedoms of youth. Do not burden yourselves with the heavy architecture of power, injustice, and systemic transformation. Leave such grave matters to your elders, who have learned the wisdom of accommodation and the limits of what is possible." The progression is familiar and almost mechanical. First comes permission for contained protest. Then follows the warning against crossing into armed resistance- even unarmed ones. Finally arrives the quiet summons to abandon the pursuit of fundamental change and retreat into a cultivated, harmless innocence. 

It is a counsel as ancient as power itself, yet renewed in every generation of challenge. From positions of comfort and security, it is easy—almost costless—to condemn the rebel who lifts the rifle. One may discourse gravely upon the loss of legal safeguards under anti-terror legislation without ever descending into the conditions of poverty, landlessness, dynastic capture, and institutional decay that drive some among the young toward the uncertain path of the hills. In our time, the very idea of armed struggle is too often reduced to the flat category of “terrorism.” This simplification serves the convenience of narrative. It dismisses decades of peace negotiations between the government and the National Democratic Front—talks that at times produced agreements acknowledging profound socio-economic roots: ancient grievances of landlessness, the grinding poverty of the countryside, the capture of institutions by entrenched families, and resentments reaching back through martial law and earlier peasant risings. If every bearing of arms is forthwith branded terrorism, of what genuine use then are such negotiations? Why deliberate upon agrarian reform and political restructuring if the mere fact of prior rebellion strips away all context and nuance? 

That a faction should rise in arms against the prevailing order does not, of itself, constitute terrorism in the classical sense. Many movements now remembered as liberatory once included armed components precisely when lawful avenues appeared blocked or illusory. Terrorism directs violence chiefly against the innocent to sow widespread fear. Armed rebellion, however terrible its toll, often conceives itself as contesting the coercive machinery of the state amid conditions of deep asymmetry. To equate the two is to erase the moral and historical space for legitimate political violence in moments of systemic extremity, while conveniently overlooking the quieter structural and procedural violence through which the established order perpetuates itself. 

People inhabit an age of thoroughly asymmetric contest, wherein warfare has escaped the ordered lines and clear frontiers of earlier epochs. All has become irregular—including the domains of information and cognition. Traditional “civilised” warfare presupposed uniformed hosts and defined battlefields. Today, power contends through hybrid instruments: disinformation, economic pressure, legal manoeuvres (“lawfare”), and operations directed upon the mind itself. The state commands superior material force—police, army, courts, and channels of public voice—yet its opponents adapt with the limited weapons available to the weak. Warnings against the weaponisation of youthful idealism carry merit, yet they frequently pass lightly over the capacity of the system itself to weaponise legality, procedural delay, and selective moral outrage in the service of neutralisation. 

Information warfare and the struggle for cognition compound the difficulty. In this epoch, a mere particle of emotionally resonant falsehood—appealing directly to the passions of the street—often outweighs volumes of documented evidence. No matter how scrupulous the investigation or lucid the exposition of causes, a simple query—“Why were they there?”—or the invocation of quo warranto suffices in many quarters to eclipse inconvenient realities. Such rhetorical devices function as instruments in the larger cognitive battle, eroding confidence in institutions, evidence, and shared truth. Narratives that reduce complex insurgencies to undifferentiated terrorism, while portraying every state response as pure defence, operate squarely within this contested terrain. 

There are those who quote Gandhi: “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” There are those who quote Zig Ziglar: “Change begins with you, but it doesn’t start until you do!” These maxims are invoked with apparent sincerity by many who claim to recognise the idea of change. Yet in truth, such voices tend to diminish the fuller meaning of change in favour of a narrowed focus upon the self—not the human person embedded in community, history, and moral obligation, but the atomised individual, isolated and tasked solely with personal improvement. By reducing transformation to private self-cultivation, they subtly deflect attention from the structures of power, inequality, and institutional failure that demand collective confrontation. Personal responsibility is real and necessary, but when it is elevated as the sole theatre of change, it becomes a sedative that leaves the larger edifice untouched. 

Those who urge the young to render their anger “constructive rather than destructive” would do well to recall deeper currents of thought that have animated humanity across ages and civilizations. Karl Marx demonstrated how the ruling ideas of an age are largely the ideas of its ruling 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. What presents itself as neutral legality is often the crystallized will of the dominant class, shaped to preserve existing relations of power. The law, in such hands, does not merely regulate conduct; it defines the very boundaries of legitimate grievance. Any demand that strikes at the roots — land reform, dismantling of dynastic control, genuine redistribution of opportunity — is swiftly recast as subversion, sedition, or terrorism. Thus the powerful maintain the appearance of order while insulating themselves from meaningful accountability.

The great sacred traditions of mankind likewise bear witness to a higher standard. The Bible thunders against unjust decrees and the oppression of the vulnerable: “Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed” (Isaiah 10:1-2). It commands the faithful to “learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression” (Isaiah 1:17) and declares that “righteousness and justice are the foundation of [God’s] throne” (Psalm 89:14). The apostles themselves affirmed, “We must obey God rather than men” when earthly authority conflicted with divine command. The Quran repeatedly enjoins justice as a divine imperative: “O you who have believed, be persistently standing firm in justice, witnesses for Allah, even if it be against yourselves or parents and relatives” (Quran 4:135). It condemns oppression in the strongest terms, declaring that Allah does not love the oppressors and that the world itself cannot long endure under zulm (injustice), for “Allah commands justice and excellent conduct” (Quran 16:90). Even the Vedic tradition and broader Eastern philosophies conceive of Dharma not as mechanical obedience to statute but as alignment with a higher moral and cosmic order — the eternal law of truth, duty, righteousness, and harmony that sustains the universe. When rulers and systems depart grievously from this righteousness—sustaining mass deprivation through corruption, exclusion, and entrenched inequality—the obligation to restore equilibrium may transcend the letter of enacted law. In such moments, conscience, informed by transcendent principle, stands in judgment over mere positive law. 

Even the urge to study, to investigate, to seek understanding becomes itself an act of rebellion unless it is carefully confined within the parameters of legality approved by the order. Yet reality has a stubborn way of escaping such parameters. Honest investigation and rigorous study, when pursued without fear or favour, lead inexorably to conclusions that reform is not merely desirable but inevitable. The deeper one probes into the actual conditions of landlessness, corruption, dynastic dominance, and blocked opportunity, the more apparent it becomes that cosmetic adjustments will not suffice. But here arises the further difficulty: is reform itself permitted only within the narrow parameters imposed by the existing order? When change is reduced to superficial measures — token programs, rhetorical concessions, or temporary palliatives — it serves merely as a cosmetic intent meant to appease a growing angry populace, including the youth who stand ready to turn every tool into a weapon when all other avenues appear sealed. 

As Mao Zedong observed with characteristic directness: “To take such an attitude is to seek truth from facts. ‘Facts’ are all the things that exist objectively, ‘truth’ means their internal relations, that is, the laws governing them, and ‘to seek’ means to study. We should proceed from the actual conditions inside and outside the country… and derive from them, as our guide to action, laws that are inherent in them and not imaginary… We must rely not on subjective imagination, not on momentary enthusiasm, not on lifeless books, but on facts that exist objectively.” 

He even further warned against superficial thinking such as "book worship": “You can’t solve a problem? Well, get down and investigate the present facts and its past history! When you have investigated the problem thoroughly, you will know how to solve it. Conclusions invariably come after investigation, and not before. Only a blockhead cudgels his brains on his own, or together with a group, to ‘find a solution’ or ‘evolve an idea’ without making any investigation. It must be stressed that this cannot possibly lead to any effective solution or any good idea.”

Once, Friedrich Engels captured something of the radical edge that disturbs the comfortable in his poetic commentary upon Max Stirner during the time of Die Freien: 

"Look at Stirner, look at him, the peaceful enemy of all constraint.

For the moment, he is still drinking beer,

Soon he will be drinking blood as though it were water.

When others cry savagely “down with the kings”

Stirner immediately supplements “down with the laws also.”

Stirner full of dignity proclaims;

You bend your willpower and you dare to call yourselves free.

You become accustomed to slavery

Down with dogmatism, down with law."

Engels’ lines, sharp with irony, anticipate the discomfort felt by those who today counsel the youth to remain strictly within legal bounds—and who may soon counsel them to abandon the pursuit of change itself. 

Why do they speak in this manner? Are they haunted by the spectres of future Andreas Baaders, Ulrike Meinhofs, and Gudrun Ensslins—those figures of the West German Red Army Faction who, emerging from the student movements of a prosperous yet spiritually restless society, turned toward militant action against what they perceived as a hollow, imperialist order? The Philippines is not West Germany, with its distinct history, culture, and circumstances. Yet the underlying dynamic bears troubling resemblance: when a system blocks meaningful avenues for transformation while breeding frustration among the idealistic young, it may engender conditions that prove disruptive rather than orderly by nature. Everything becomes an option. Those who seek to impose limits upon dissent often strive to diminish the uncomfortable truth that the system itself creates the very conditions it later deems “necessary” to suppress. In such a climate, the book and the pen become the gun itself—tools of critique and mobilisation that the powerful fear no less than armed bands, for ideas, once kindled, possess their own inexorable force. 

In the end, 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, ceasefires, 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 foundations of the order. The pen, and in this electronic age the smartphone, may wield force comparable to the rifle, shaping perceptions and marshalling multitudes across the ether. 

Ernst Jünger, the chronicler of storm and steel, understood the magnetic pull that danger and the extraordinary exert upon a generation raised in security. “Grown up in an age of security,” he wrote of his own comrades, “we shared a yearning for danger, for the experience of the extraordinary. We were enraptured by war.” In our own context, such yearning does not always seek conflict for its own sake, but it reveals a profound dissatisfaction with a world that offers only managed dissent and domesticated dreams. 

Oswald Spengler, in his sombre morphology of civilizations, saw late-stage societies as places where “eternal youths” reappear—immature yet fervent, hostile to established forms of state, property, and rank, clinging to theories and badges while the deeper cultural fire dims. In the winter of a civilization, he suggested, instinct and elemental forces reassert themselves against the reign of abstract reason and financial power. The call to “be young and innocent” may thus serve as a sedative precisely when the social order senses its own senescence and fears the disruptive vitality that authentic change demands. 

Genuine maturity does not require the young to surrender their idealism upon securing their first wage. It demands instead that the republic confront why such idealism so frequently collides with the necessities of survival. It requires those who hold authority to treat 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. 

The youth would do well to guard against both the romanticisation of the gun and the seductive call to cultivated innocence. 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 to instruct the young to cease being angry, nor to urge them toward a false and convenient innocence. 

It is to confront, with unflinching honesty and without instinctive recourse to criminalisation, the reasons why so many among them still discover such potent cause for anger—and why the established order fears that anger when it refuses to remain merely youthful and contained. 

The path forward cannot rest upon incantations of legality alone, nor upon any glorification of violence. It demands the honest recognition 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 that swallow dissent, but through the concrete delivery of justice, opportunity, and accountability sufficient to render idealism and daily existence no longer mortal antagonists. 

Until that day arrives, the evolving counsel—“get mad, but only legally…" soon, "forget change, be young, be innocent”—will strike many as little more than sophisticated counsel to accept the world as it is, rather than labour to remake it as conscience and necessity demand. History records that when legal avenues harden into instruments of preservation rather than renewal, certain souls will inevitably seek other means. To understand that sombre dynamic, without thereby extenuating its human price, remains the beginning of wiser statesmanship.        

To the Youth: Get Mad, But Only in Approved Ways – A Critique of Managed Dissent

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.   

The Blood of Salamanca: Blood That Fertilizes the Soil of Conquest

The Blood of Salamanca: Blood That Fertilizes the Soil of Conquest 

By Maurice Montojo

Let them hate. Let the decadent scribes from the press, the comfortable reactionaries in their Manila salons, with their edgy voices pour out their contempt and their vulgar jests. Let the official communiqués twist the facts with the impudence of colossal lies, as that Austrian demagogue once noted in his manual of power: the greater the distortion, the more readily swallowed by those who cannot conceive such brazenness. None of this changes the iron dialectic of history. In the Philippine countryside—still semi-feudal, despotic, chained by landlord interests and the shadow of foreign capital—the situation has hardened into a necessariable condition. No “controlled” operation, no tactical maneuver by the Armed Forces of the Philippines, can avert the violent eruption that the objective contradictions of class and nation now impose. 

On April 19, in Barangay Salamanca, Toboso, Negros Occidental, the 79th Infantry Battalion carried out what they pompously label a “legitimate encounter.” Nineteen bodies fell: Red fighters of the New People’s Army together with unarmed civilians—journalists, student leaders, peasant organizers, overseas human rights workers, local residents, and even two children. The military speaks of neutralized communist terrorist groups, recovered arms, and a blow struck against the Northern Negros Front. Some commentators, with the safe cynicism of those who have never known hunger or the muzzle of a rifle, reduce the dead to “corned beef”—mangled flesh processed like cheap canned meat. 

But let the concrned look back with clear eyes, without the hypocrisy of selective outrage. Does this crude comparison include only the revolutionaries? When soldiers of the AFP themselves fall, torn apart by command-detonated explosives along patrol paths in the hills, are they too mere “corned beef”? The New People’s Army calls these devices what they truly are in the harsh arithmetic of asymmetric struggle: the people’s counterparts to aerial bombings. The establishment brands them “landmines” and screams “terrorism,” yet it forgets—or deliberately erases—that every ruling order in history has reserved for itself the monopoly of heavy destruction while condemning the improvised weapons of the oppressed. The state possesses jets, artillery, and foreign-backed logistics; the peasant in the mountains has only ingenuity and resolve. These explosives level, however imperfectly, a field long tilted by imperial superiority. 

True indeed that there are instances of being killed or maimed from those weapons meant against the opporessor, but, the willingness to apologise, even to punish itself, enough to rectify errors as necessary to gain back the lost trust of the people. But the order? Can they? Or again create another narrative enough to blame the revolution as intended to?- remember, years ago one scientist doing research work was killed in a crossfire, even called him a participant in the battlefield at first, and as the narrative failed, blamed him for not coordinating with authorities or worse being mockingly asked why was he there? In that sense, is seeking truth from facts a mistake in the first place? And if the fallen of Salamanca are reduced to canned meat in the jests of cowards, then consistency demands the same label for AFP casualties strewn across the same revolutionary terrain. Yet such symmetry is never granted. This selective gloating reveals the moral rot of a class that cheers state terror but recoils when the people answer in kind. 

What, then, is this so-called tactical defeat for the New People’s Army? The revolutionary forces, forged in their own long march—the winding path of advances and retreats, bitter defeats and hard-won victories—understand the deeper law: every drop of blood spilled in Salamanca or any other place fertilizes the soil. Whether armed combatants who fought to the last round or civilians swept into the fire of a militarized zone, the dead become seed. The countryside has not changed. Feudal exploitation persists. State terror grinds the peasant. Grinding poverty continues to drive men and women to take up arms. Far from extinguishing the flame, such operations pour gasoline upon it. The “enemy” studies its lessons, adapts its tactics, and multiplies. New Red fighters will emerge, tempered and hardened by the memory of Toboso. 

To those outside the direct combat—the investigators, the writers, the organizers who dare enter the militarized hinterland to study, document, and expose—the label “terrorist” or “subversive” is fastened with mechanical brutality. Why travel from the United States? Why conduct research in a “hot zone”? Why show concern for Filipino peasants? These questions are not concern; they are mockery disguised as prudence. The unarmed are deliberately conflated with combatants because the ruling order fears the truth they embody: the documentation of abuses, the organization of the dispossessed, the forging of international solidarity. Among the dead: a journalist, a student leader, peasant organizers, two children. These are not regrettable “collateral” but the logical consequence of a desperate regime that equates any inquiry into its despotism with insurgency itself.

The aftermath confirmed the method of reaction. Forced evacuations of local residents, cordoned zones, an information blackout to prevent independent media and human rights groups from interviewing witnesses or conducting genuine investigation. Days later, a military-organized entourage is permitted its staged “fact-finding mission”—a sham designed to manufacture an AFP-certified fiction of heroic operation, palatable to the man in the street. This is the classic technique of the old order: fabricate the narrative that sustains its power, downplay contradictions, and rely on the masses’ unwillingness to believe that anyone could distort truth so infamously.

Yet history does not yield to press releases or official body counts. The blood of the Toboso 19—whether from ten armed revolutionaries who honored their final stand or from civilians caught in the maelstrom—irrigates the revolutionary earth. It lays bare the bankruptcy of the comprador state: a regime forced to resort to indiscriminate killing to prop up feudal remnants in an age that cries out for genuine national and democratic transformation. The people’s war does not advance despite these losses; it advances through them. Every tactical setback becomes a strategic school. Every act of brutality recruits fresh cadres from the ranks of the oppressed.

The situation is necessariable. The contradictions between landlord and peasant, between the puppet state and the toiling masses, between foreign interests and national sovereignty, cannot be “managed” forever by repression. They must erupt. And when they erupt, the revolutionary forces—tempered in the crucible of mountain and plain—will drive forward toward the conquest of the state. The old order may trumpet its fleeting triumphs in Negros Occidental, but the future belongs to those who grasp that violence, when seized by the people against their exploiters, is no moral aberration but the historical midwife of a new order.

Let them hate. Let the reactionaries mock and the establishment lie. The revolution scorns their approval. It requires only the inexorable logic of conditions that render it not merely possible, but inevitable. The blood spilled nurtures the ground from which fresher, more resolute Red fighters will spring—until the feudal countryside is transformed and the state itself is conquered in the name of the nation and the people. 

Of Red Carnations, Yellow Ribbons, and Rosaries: Notes on Two Revolutions, Their Echoes, and the Burden of What Followed

Of Red Carnations, Yellow Ribbons, and Rosaries:

Notes on Two Revolutions, Their Echoes, and the Burden of What Followed

There are moments in the life of nations when the accumulated weight of history yields not by gradual reform but through rupture—moments when the logic of continuity falters and the question of power is no longer abstract but immediate. Such moments do not emerge from sentiment alone; they are the product of contradictions long embedded within the structure of society—contradictions economic, political, and moral—which, when intensified beyond accommodation, compel a break. These breaks, however, do not carry within themselves their own resolution. They merely open a field of possibility. What follows depends not on the drama of the rupture but on the direction taken thereafter.

On April 25, 1974, in Lisbon, the Carnation Revolution represented such a rupture. The Estado Novo, shaped by António de Oliveira Salazar and sustained by Marcelo Caetano, had long rested on an uneasy equilibrium: a controlled political order, limited economic modernization, and a stubborn insistence on maintaining an imperial presence in Africa. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, this equilibrium had broken down. The colonial wars in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau had become not only militarily untenable but politically corrosive. The war did not simply drain resources; it undermined the ideological coherence of the regime itself.

It was within this context that the Armed Forces Movement emerged—a formation of officers who, having borne the burdens of the colonial wars, recognized the unsustainability of the system they served. Yet even here, one must be precise. The initial intervention of the MFA was not conceived as a social revolution but as a corrective—a removal of a regime that had lost its capacity to govern effectively. What transformed this intervention into a revolution was not its design but its reception. Civilians entered the streets, not as passive observers but as active participants. The symbolic act of placing carnations in the barrels of rifles did more than soften the image of the uprising; it marked the moment when the coercive apparatus of the state ceased to function as intended. The state, confronted with the refusal of its own agents to act decisively, revealed its fragility.

Yet to speak of April 25 as an event is insufficient. Its significance lies in what followed. The Processo Revolucionário Em Curso that unfolded in its aftermath transformed rupture into process. Political authority became diffuse, contested across multiple sites. Workers organized commissions within factories, asserting control over production and challenging managerial authority. In the agrarian south, landless laborers dismantled the latifundia system, redistributing land and reorganizing agricultural production. The state itself became an arena of struggle, with competing factions within the military and civilian leadership articulating divergent visions of the future.

This insistence on process—on the unfolding of contradiction rather than its immediate resolution—distinguishes the Portuguese experience. It was a revolution that did not seek closure but confrontation, that allowed the question of power to remain open. It is for this reason that the phrase “25 de Abril Sempre” continues to carry weight: it invokes not merely a memory but a commitment to an unfinished project.

Twelve years later, in the Philippines, another rupture occurred along Epifanio de los Santos Avenue. The People Power Revolution has since been enshrined as a defining moment in Philippine political history. The dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, sustained through martial law, patronage, and the selective use of coercion, collapsed in the face of mass mobilization. As in Lisbon, the armed forces hesitated. Soldiers refused to fire upon civilians. The presence of unarmed citizens—many bearing rosaries, invoking faith rather than force—altered the dynamics of confrontation.

At the level of form, the parallels are evident. Both revolutions demonstrated the vulnerability of regimes when their coercive apparatus falters. Both revealed the capacity of collective action to disrupt entrenched systems of power. Yet it is in the aftermath that the divergence becomes most pronounced.

Whereas the Portuguese experience extended itself into a prolonged process of transformation, the Philippine experience appeared to compress itself into a moment of resolution. The objective of EDSA was clear: the removal of a regime and the restoration of democratic institutions. Once achieved, the momentum of the uprising shifted toward stabilization. Under Corazon Aquino, the emphasis was placed on constitutional reform, culminating in the 1987 Constitution. This document restored civil liberties, reestablished institutional checks, and signaled a return to democratic governance.

Yet this return also marked a limit. For while the political superstructure was reconstituted, the underlying socioeconomic structures remained largely intact. The agrarian question—central to the country’s historical contradictions—was addressed only partially. Patterns of land ownership persisted. Economic inequality, though recognized, was not fundamentally altered. The structures of oligarchic influence that had sustained the previous regime were reconfigured but not dismantled.

It is in this context that the post-EDSA experience must be understood. The immediate aftermath of 1986 produced not a consolidated transformation but a vacuum—an absence between expectation and realization. Into this vacuum entered the language of the “spirit of EDSA,” invoked by media institutions, policy advocates, and various sectors as a means of asserting continuity. This spirit was presented as enduring, as a moral and political inheritance that continued to guide the nation.

Yet such invocations raise a critical question: can a spirit persist in the absence of structural change?

For even as the rhetoric of EDSA was sustained, the material conditions that had given rise to the uprising remained. Movements advocating for land reform, labor rights, and national sovereignty encountered resistance. In certain cases, these movements were delegitimized, their concerns dismissed as disruptive or subversive. The language used—branding dissenters as extremists, as threats to order—served to marginalize rather than engage.

This dynamic suggests a tension between the ideals articulated during the uprising and the practices that followed. If EDSA represented a collective assertion against injustice, then the subsequent marginalization of demands for structural reform indicates a narrowing of its scope.

The economic trajectory of the Philippines further complicates this picture. In the decades following EDSA, the country increasingly aligned with global neoliberal frameworks. Policies of liberalization, privatization, and market integration were pursued as strategies for development. While these policies contributed to certain forms of growth, they also reinforced existing inequalities and introduced new forms of dependency. The concentration of wealth persisted, and the structural conditions underlying poverty remained largely unchanged.

One must therefore ask whether this trajectory represents a continuation of the spirit of EDSA or a departure from it. If the uprising was, in part, a response to systemic inequities, then the persistence of those inequities raises questions about the extent to which its transformative potential was realized.

The contrast with Portugal becomes particularly instructive when examining the role of counter-movements. In Portugal, reactionary forces emerged in the aftermath of the revolution, including groups such as the Movimento Democrático de Libertação de Portugal, Movimento Maria Da Fonte, Comandos Operacionais de Defesa da Civilização Ocidental, and the Exército de Libertação de Portugal. These groups sought to reverse the gains of the revolutionary process. However, their efforts were largely contained within the broader dynamics of the revolution. The attempted coup of March 1975 failed, and the subsequent consolidation of authority occurred within a relatively defined timeframe.

In the Philippines, by contrast, the post-EDSA period was marked by a series of coup attempts that extended over several years. Military factions such as the Reform the Armed Forces Movement (RAM), the Soldiers of the Filipino People (SFP), the so-called "Nationalist Army of the Philippines" (NAP), and the Young Officers Union repeatedly challenged the authority of the civilian government. These groups framed their actions in terms of reform and national interest, yet their interventions contributed to a prolonged period of instability.

Unlike Portugal, where counter-movements were addressed within a compressed revolutionary timeframe, the Philippine experience required sustained engagement with internal challenges. This prolonged instability reflects the incomplete nature of the transition, suggesting that the rupture of 1986 did not fully resolve the contradictions that had given rise to it.

It is in this light that contemporary developments must be considered. The return of Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to Malacañang Palace, alongside figures such as Sara Duterte, invites reflection on the durability of the post-EDSA order. It raises questions about the extent to which the transformations of 1986 were institutionalized and whether the conditions that produced the uprising have been adequately addressed.

The persistence of inequality, the marginalization of dissent, and the reemergence of political dynasties suggest that the work initiated in 1986 remains incomplete. The invocation of the “spirit of EDSA” thus risks becoming a substitute for substantive engagement with these issues—a rhetorical device that obscures rather than clarifies.

Pardon this writer for returning, perhaps insistently, to comparison. It is not intended as a definitive judgment but as a means of illuminating trajectories. The Portuguese experience, encapsulated in the enduring phrase “25 de Abril Sempre,” continues to evoke a commitment to transformation, even as its outcomes have been moderated. The Philippine experience, by contrast, often treats EDSA as a concluded chapter, emphasizing restoration over continuation.

In the final analysis, the relationship between the Carnation Revolution and EDSA is not one of direct causation but of historical resonance. Both demonstrate the capacity of collective action to disrupt entrenched systems of power. Both reveal the contingency of authority when confronted by unified resistance. Yet they also illustrate the divergent paths that such moments can take—one extending into a process of transformation, the other resolving into a restoration of order.

The enduring question, therefore, is not whether one inspired the other, but what each reveals about the possibilities and limits of revolutionary change. For if the spirit of any revolution is to endure, it must be grounded not only in memory but in the ongoing effort to align political institutions with social realities.

Red Carnations in Lisbon. Yellow Ribbons and Rosaries in Manila. Between them lies not a simple narrative of inspiration, but a complex dialogue—one that continues to unfold, and whose conclusions remain, even now, unsettled.  

Carnations and Contradictions: April 25 and the Unfinished Revolution

Carnations and Contradictions: 

April 25 and the Unfinished Revolution

On April 25, 1974, a sequence of events unfolded in Portugal that would reverberate across the late twentieth century as one of the last great revolutionary ruptures in Western Europe. Known to history as the Carnation Revolution, this moment marked not merely the overthrow of an authoritarian regime, but the sudden and dramatic opening of a revolutionary situation in which the social, economic, and political foundations of the state were contested from below. What began as a military coup executed by the Armed Forces Movement rapidly transcended its initial parameters, becoming a mass upheaval that exposed the contradictions of Portuguese capitalism, fractured the apparatus of state power, and raised—if only briefly—the question of socialist transformation. 

To situate April 25 within its proper historical frame, one must return to the long durée of the Estado Novo, established under António de Oliveira Salazar and continued by his successor Marcelo Caetano. This regime, often described as corporatist-authoritarian, was in fact a rigid system of class domination that fused bureaucratic control with ideological conservatism. It sought to regulate labor through state-sponsored syndicates, suppress dissent through an extensive surveillance apparatus, and maintain social hierarchy under the guise of national unity. Salazar’s oft-cited assertion—“We do not discuss God and virtue; we accept them”—captures the epistemological closure of the regime, a political order that rejected contestation in favor of imposed consensus (Salazar, as cited in Wiarda, 1977). 

Yet beneath this façade of stability lay structural fragilities. The Portuguese economy, though experiencing periods of growth in the 1960s, remained dependent on low wages, limited industrial diversification, and the outflow of labor through emigration. As scholars have noted, this so-called “economic miracle” was sustained by what can only be described as systemic underdevelopment—an accumulation model that privileged industrial-financial conglomerates while marginalizing the working population (Maxwell, 1995). The concentration of wealth in elite families such as the Mellos and Espírito Santo group underscored the oligarchic character of the regime. 

The most acute contradiction, however, emerged in the form of colonial war. Beginning in 1961, Portugal engaged in prolonged military conflicts in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau. Unlike other European powers that transitioned toward indirect forms of imperial influence, Portugal persisted in direct colonial domination, deploying military force against national liberation movements. This decision was not merely ideological but structural: Portuguese capitalism, lacking the flexibility of its counterparts, depended on colonial extraction to sustain itself. As Amílcar Cabral incisively observed, “Portugal is not a colonial power like the others; it is a colony of its colonies” (Cabral, 1973). The wars thus became both a material drain and a political crisis, exposing the limits of the regime’s capacity to reproduce itself. 

It was within this context that the Armed Forces Movement emerged. Composed largely of mid-ranking officers—captains and majors drawn from petty-bourgeois and working-class backgrounds—the Movement was initially motivated by professional grievances. The promulgation of Decree Law 353/73, which allowed militia officers to bypass career ranks, catalyzed dissatisfaction within the officer corps. Yet as historical analysis suggests, such grievances served as an entry point into broader political consciousness. The lived experience of colonial warfare—its brutality, futility, and human cost—transformed technical discontent into systemic critique. 

Here, the role of the Portuguese Communist Party assumes critical importance. Operating clandestinely under conditions of repression, the Party had developed extensive networks within labor unions, student movements, and segments of the military. Under the leadership of Álvaro Cunhal, the PCP pursued a strategy that linked immediate grievances to structural analysis, reframing the colonial war as an imperialist project contrary to the interests of the Portuguese people. Cunhal’s formulation—that the war was “not a national cause but a war against the people”—articulated a shift from nationalist to class-based interpretation (Cunhal, 1976). 

The events of April 25 itself were meticulously coordinated. The signal for the coup—the broadcast of the banned song “Grândola, Vila Morena”—marked the commencement of military operations aimed at seizing strategic points in Lisbon. The efficiency of the operation reflected both planning and the erosion of regime loyalty within the armed forces. Yet the decisive transformation of the coup into a revolution occurred not within barracks but in the streets. Defying instructions to remain indoors, thousands of civilians mobilized, converging upon sites of power and confronting the remnants of the regime. 

The symbolic act of placing carnations in soldiers’ rifles has entered the historical imagination as a gesture of peace. However, its deeper significance lies in the dissolution of the boundary between military and civilian spheres. In theoretical terms, this moment represents a fracture within the coercive apparatus of the state. As Vladimir Lenin argued, the stability of any state depends upon the cohesion of its repressive organs; when these organs fragment, the conditions for revolutionary transformation emerge (Lenin, 1917). The fraternization observed in Lisbon thus marked not merely a symbolic reconciliation but a structural rupture. 

The aftermath of April 25 gave rise to the Processo Revolucionário Em Curso, a protracted period characterized by intense class struggle and institutional instability. The collapse of the dictatorship created a vacuum in which competing forms of power coexisted. On one hand, provisional governments sought to establish a framework for liberal democracy. On the other, grassroots organizations—workers’ commissions, neighborhood assemblies, and peasant collectives—asserted direct control over economic and social life. 

This phenomenon, often described as “dual power,” reflects a classical revolutionary situation in which the legitimacy of the state is contested by emergent forms of popular authority (Lenin, 1917). Across industrial sectors, workers occupied factories, removed management, and instituted collective decision-making structures. In rural areas, particularly in the Alentejo, land occupations dismantled the latifundia system, redistributing agricultural production under cooperative models. These developments were not centrally orchestrated but arose from the spontaneous initiative of the masses, demonstrating what Marxist theory identifies as the creative capacity of the working class in revolutionary conditions. 

The state, responding to these pressures, enacted a series of nationalizations in 1975, encompassing banking, insurance, and key industries. While these measures aligned partially with the programmatic objectives of the PCP, they also exceeded them, indicating the extent to which mass mobilization drove policy beyond institutional frameworks. As one observer noted, the revolution “moved faster than any party could anticipate” (Maxwell, 1995). 

Nevertheless, the revolutionary process was neither uncontested nor unidirectional. Conservative forces, both domestic and international, mobilized to contain the upheaval. NATO and Western governments viewed developments in Portugal with concern, given its strategic position. Internally, right-wing groups engaged in acts of sabotage and political violence, seeking to destabilize the revolutionary movement. 

Within the revolutionary camp, strategic divergences emerged. The PCP emphasized a gradualist approach, advocating alliances with progressive military elements and cautioning against premature confrontation. In contrast, far-left groups prioritized the expansion of autonomous workers’ power, often criticizing the Party’s institutional orientation. This tension between organizational discipline and grassroots spontaneity became a defining feature of the period. 

The attempted coup of March 11, 1975, led by António de Spínola, represented a critical juncture. Its failure, due in part to mass mobilization, temporarily strengthened revolutionary forces. However, the subsequent months revealed the fragility of the process. The events of November 25, 1975, in which moderate military elements reasserted control, marked the effective end of the revolutionary phase. The dismantling of radical structures and the consolidation of parliamentary democracy signaled a reconfiguration rather than a complete rupture of state power. 

In the years that followed, Portugal underwent political stabilization and economic integration into the European Economic Community. While these developments are often framed as successes, they also entailed the rollback of many revolutionary gains. Land reforms were reversed, nationalized industries restructured, and grassroots institutions dissolved or marginalized. The revolutionary potential of April 25 was thus contained within the parameters of a reconstituted capitalist order. 

Yet the historical significance of the Carnation Revolution cannot be reduced to its outcome. It remains a critical case study in the dynamics of revolutionary change within advanced capitalist societies. It demonstrates the centrality of the armed forces as both instrument and potential site of rupture. It underscores the importance of political organization, particularly the role of parties capable of articulating and sustaining mass movements. At the same time, it reveals the limitations of strategies that seek to mediate between revolutionary transformation and institutional continuity. 

As Álvaro Cunhal later reflected, “the revolution was not defeated in its essence; it was interrupted in its development” (Cunhal, 1976). This characterization invites a reconsideration of April 25 not as a closed chapter but as an open question—an episode whose lessons remain relevant for contemporary struggles. 

In the final analysis, the Carnation Revolution stands as both achievement and warning. It affirms the capacity of collective action to dismantle entrenched systems of domination, while simultaneously illustrating the complexities of sustaining revolutionary momentum in the face of internal divisions and external pressures. The carnations placed in rifle barrels symbolized a moment of unity and possibility; their fading reminds us that such moments are contingent, requiring not only courage but continuity. 

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References (APA Style) 

Arendt, H. (1963). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil. Viking Press.

Cabral, A. (1973). Return to the source: Selected speeches. Monthly Review Press.

Cunhal, Á. (1976). The Portuguese revolution: Past and future. Editions Avante.

Lenin, V. I. (1917). State and revolution. Progress Publishers.

Maxwell, K. (1995). The making of Portuguese democracy. Cambridge University Press.

Wiarda, H. J. (1977). Corporatism and development: The Portuguese experience. University of Massachusetts Press.