Philippines: We are not preparing for war, we are waging war

Fight Back New Service is circulating the following statement from Elias Dipasupil, Secretary General of the National Democratic Front of the Philippines.

The national democratic revolutionary movement is not only preparing for war, we are waging a revolutionary war in the interest of the Filipino people. We have been waging this for democracy and national liberation since 1969, and the reactionary government has been using all its military might against the people’s war these past decades.

When Lt. General Brawner called for the AFP to prepare for war in case of an invasion of Taiwan, he is only declaring his puppetry to the US, to fight a war not for the Filipino people but for his imperialist masters.

The US imperialist regime, through neocolonial agreements, continues to establish military bases and installations all over our country, to stockpile attack weapons including missiles, and provoke nearby China to war, while wallowing in plundered wealth in the safety of its own far-away mainland. With the coming “biggest ever” Balikatan which the puppet Marcos regime so proudly and willingly hosts, the Philippines is being prepped to absorb a war the US regime is so eager to wage.

It is extreme folly to believe in the US’s “iron-clad commitment” to the Philippines, because even iron is eroded by the rust of imperialist greed.

History shows us that US imperialist governments have an ignominious record of abandoning peoples in times of greatest crisis, of course always prioritizing their own imperialist interests. It abandoned the Philippines – including American foot-soldiers in the field in Corregidor—during World War II to shift to more “strategic” Europe where there were more imperialist industrial investments. We remember the Fall of Bataan this April.

It was the Filipino people who persisted in the war of resistance, who suffered the brunt of Japanese imperial brutality and militarism during the height of the world war. Just when the backbone of Japanese imperial might in Asia had been substantially broken by Asians themselves, the US returned to the Philippines to “liberate” it and reclaim its colonial rule. It also went to get a slice of the pie in Korea and in Vietnam, countries who fought against the Japanese and French during the world war.

The US mainland was never attacked though the US imperialists reaped tons of profits from their sales of war materiel to the Allies and new colonies from the defeated Axis powers.

Only more recently, the US abandoned its own puppet Zelensky in an attempt to gain favor with Russia against China and pushed its NATO allies to fend for themselves. Are the military minions of the US-Marcos Regime willing to suffer the same fate? Or will they, like the Quezons of old, fall over each other in fleeing the country?

The US-Marcos regime is hell-bent on offering the Philippines as a battlefield for US imperialist wars. But it is only by uniting the Filipino people in a revolutionary war against this puppet government that we can ensure our independence and establish a people’s government that will promote an active, independent and peaceful foreign policy.

#International #Philippines #NDFP