The government launched an anti-communist insurgency campaign about 2 years ago. It has gone horribly wrong, with the main implementors exposing themselves as intellectual pygmies and incompetent buffoons.
This should be one of the least difficult jobs in the world. All over the globe, the communist ideology has been rejected by even its founding fathers- Russia and China. Russia has abandoned any semblance of its communist roots, simply morphing into a pseudo-democratic but in reality a dictatorial state and China, while maintaining a communist mask, is far more capitalist then most countries. The remaining die-hard countries that profess the Marxist-Leninist line are wallowing in poverty - Cuba and Venezuela and North Korea. At the end of the day, history has proven that the end result of communism is mutual poverty, except for the party apparatchiks.
The communist ideology is a failed ideology, completely failing to deliver on its promises of a worker’s paradise.
In the Philippines, we have the distinction of having the world’s longest running communist insurgency. This insurgency has been kept alive by slow economic progress and frequently corrupt and incompetent government. It also has been exacerbated by the delusional policy of hiring into government sympathizers and out and out communist party members. This has been based on the completely baseless thinking that communists or leftists are good and honest administrators. If they were, then the world would have widespread communist governments, but history has proven otherwise.
The local experience has demonstrated time and again that the vast majority of Filipinos have a loathing for the communist ideology. This has been shown in almost all past elections that the local leftists and their sympathizers are good only for government using the inutile partylist system. Any candidates running for higher office have failed miserably, showing that the vast majority reject the leftist/communist ideology.
Comes now the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict or NTF-ELCAC. Relative to its miniscule significance in current events, it is one of the best funded units of government, with a budget of P19.1 billion, which apparently has priority for funding over COVID concerns like vaccines and ayuda. Of this total amount, P10.68 billion has already been released. The funds are to be ostensibly used for aiding barangays exposed to insurgency influences. No details have been provided as to the deployment of the funds, but what little is known is that Davao City has gotten a substantial chunk of this funding, amounting to over a billion pesos. My naturally suspicious mind, coming as it is with few details of the application of the funding lends itself to the shaping of another great steal.
In the meantime, the leadership of the NTF-ELCAC, showing their possession of big mouths and small brains waste their time and resources by shamelessly red-tagging innocent people, with no apparent proof or evidence, picking fights with the Senate and denouncing the Community Pantry projects as tainted with leftist leanings. It has come to the point that the Vice Chair of the NTF-ELCAC has told his attack dogs to essentially shut up because their mouths were going ahead of their brains.
There is a real threat to national security caused by the armed communist insurgency. But any claim by communists that they are a force for reform are completely debunked by the NPAs documented extortion, illegal logging and drug trafficking activities. Yet, seeing all of the factors that should contribute to the success of the NTF-ELCAC, it has been one disaster after another. If they were truly serious about their tasks they would be better off deploying their humongous budget to:
- Revitalizing patriotic organizations/institutions such as the Cub Scouts, the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts, the PMT/CMT and ROTC programs.
- Supporting the parents of students/youth recruited by the left and organizing them into a voice to denounce the folly of schools letting front organizations operate in campuses.
- Setting up a reward system to locate and capture ARMED insurrectionists.
- Conducting campaigns, seminars to present the failure of the utter failure of the communist ideology. For example, how the Marxist programs of Venezuela has led to the collapse of its economy and mass poverty or the so called model of Cuban communism has only equalized poverty on a scale that they are so far behind in delivering progress to their people.
- Presenting a detail of the application of their budgets to show that it is not another big steal or kurakot… as it has taken precedence over more pressing concerns such as the purchase of vaccines and ayuda for the hardest hit.
There have been persistent rumors that the billions of pesos spent for the pandemic have been spirited away to prepare for 2022. There is hard evidence that there was an attempted steal through potential overpricing of vaccines, which fortunately was foiled by voices in the Senate.
Now NTF-ELCAC… do you deserve the billions entrusted to you or is this just another big boondoggle for 2022?