The information was manipulated to spread faster than facts. The algorithm then leveraged, fake news was produced. That is how Duterte Diehard Supporters troll.
This is a tale of selective red tagging, of two New People’s Army enablers. One is real but uncondemned for it. The other one is imagined and fake, but whose red tag is promoted by DDS as gospel truth and therefore condemned as such.
It takes only to revisit recent history.
The funeral march permitted through the streets of Davao City was massive, said to number at least 10,000. It included 45 buses and 15 dump trucks. The date was July 10, 2015.
The dead man in the paraded bier draped by the hammer and sickle standard of the Communist Party of the Philippines was Leoncio Pitao, a.k.a. Commander Parago, said to have been slain by the Philippine military the previous June 28 in Davao City’s hinterland district.
His supporters marched from the city’s Freedom Park to a private memorial park, clenching their fists. The police and the military could only watch in disbelief. The city’s strongman Rodrigo Duterte was a friend of Pitao. He even permitted the wake at the Davao City Recreation Center.
This was a “classic people’s burial,” said Satur Ocampo. It was, by all intents and purposes, a “hero’s burial” (albeit it wasn’t the first such in Mindanao that this writer had witnessed).
The loquacious Mayor Duterte was, true to form, mouthful with justifications.
He said that while Pitao was a communist, he should be respected for his ideology.
He also said he was not against the New People’s Army and its ideology of social equality.
In 2013, the mayor told agribusiness investors in the city to just pay revolutionary taxes. Earlier, Duterte had openly announced that Davao City was paying P125 million in revolutionary taxes annually to the NPA.
Asked if he was running for president, Duterte answered, “I will be the joy of the NPA.”
A year later when he was a leading contender for the presidency, one of his first acts was to call Jose Maria Sison, the CPP leader, by Skype. It was a conversation of two mutual flatterers.
Duterte: Kumusta po kayo?
Sison: Mabuti naman. Pagkakataon ito na magpasalamat.
From the DDS, there never was condemnation of all these open antics of Rodrigo Duterte that could have merited him the pejorative “NPA enabler.” Ten years later today, using the disinformation technique of stripping vital context, a completely false narrative was constructed of Sen, Risa Hontiveros as “NPA enabler.” The illogical reason given: because she is a member of Akbayan.
It only takes to revisit recent history. Just like Duterte’s.
At the very least, the red tag of Hontiveros is insane. There never has been any judicial or official evidence that connects Hontiveros with the CPP or the NPA. Those who study the phenomenon of political spectra in fact see her as consistently aligned with center right and administration policies rather than the political left.
A very recent example: she was closely allied with the last Aquino government.
But here’s the twist: Akbayan is actually the ideological rival of the CCP-NPA. In fact, they clash over a basic defining principle: Akbayan is against armed struggle. As such, it doesn’t have an armed component and is not under the CCP (where they will never pass its ideological rules of engagement).
Akbayan was founded in January 1998 as an electoral vehicle for fhe marginalized sectors to challenge dynastic governance and reform decision-making.
Some things are deliberately left out by DDS troll propagandists or else they will risk being branded as mediocre (that they already are).
When Akbayan was founded, some of its founding members were former allies of Sison who had purposely left his movement over ideological differences. In fact, they had split from Sison in the early 1990s, subsequently abandoning armed struggle to become social democrats. That was a good number of years before Akbayan was founded.
But here’s where DDS propagandists are mediocre: if Risa Hontiveros was an NPA enabler, why did she marry a Philippine Military Academy graduate who became a captain of the Philippine Constabulary?
Francisco Baraquel Jr. died in 2005 of a cardiac attack caused by severe asthma.
Now who is the NPA enabler?
The views in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of VERA Files.
