The Terms of The Jester-in-Exile

Written on Friday, September 12th, 2008 at 7:41 pm | by The Jester-in-Exile

(I write this post hoping that my brazenness will be forgiven by Nick, Dean, Benign0, Abe, Grace, Juned, Ding, Rom, and the rest of the Filipino Voices crew supportive of peace in the South.)

(I write this post keeping in mind the members of my family who are based in Mindanao, and I write this post conscious of my friends who right now stand their ground between the civilians and those such as Ombra Kato and their apologists, who say one thing but do another.)

(I write this post for the love of my life and her people.)

I am no hawk. I want nothing but peace for my people. However, I have come to grow tired of all this conflict. I am tired of all the death. I am tired of all the suffering.

After years of bleeding the countryside white, I believe that the time has come to finally put an end to the pain felt by tthe people of the Republic, caused by the terrorists styling themselves the New People’s Army and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. After years of getting in the way of real peace, the time to nail their coffins shut is at hand.

After all, these groups have demonstrated their distaste for the cessation of hostilities. Hell, these groups seem to relish the taste of blood, and have even entered into what seems to be an understanding. Likewise, these groups have been successfully cowered behind sympathetic parliamentarians, quite obviously using the respite to regroup and rearm.

Well, then. I have had enough of their duplicity. I have had enough of their lies. I have had enough of their cowardice.

These are the terms I wish the Republic will demand of these terrorists — the terms I wish to call for our people to demand from the terrorist NPA and MILF:

Surrender. DDR. Now.

Or die.

That said, I wish the boots all the support they deserve. Since the NPA and the MILF want some, go ahead and give them some. Give it to them hard and fast; they are gagging for it.

Good luck, gentlemen and gallant ladies. Good hunting.

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About The Author: The Jester-in-Exile is an engineer by training and profession turned law student, and he writes of the Philippines because of his love for it. He blogs at The Journal of The Jester-in-Exile, and can often be found daydreaming about giving Robespierre haircuts to corrupt officials.

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5 Responses to “The Terms of The Jester-in-Exile”

  1. Dean Jorge Bocobo on September 12th, 2008 9:57 pm

    (Now this is what I call a blog rant. Right on, bro!)

    In the olden days, defeat in a revolution usually meant you literally lost your head. But the invention of modern guerilla warfare, which is 1% warfare and 99% agit prop cum peace talks, changed this calculus. You could launch some armed revolutionary movement like the CPP NPA or MILF ASG, and even if you can’t win, you also cannot be completely defeated. This is exactly the situation of the CPPNPA and the MILFASG. If they cannot win, they can still “prevent” the government and the people from winning simply by surviving and continuing to threaten peace and order. This fouls the next and drives away the good spirits of free and fair trade, foreign direct investment and other ornaments of a peaceful existence.

    By using armed might to punctuate their demands, they are guaranteeing that even if they cannot attain the victory they dream of, they can at least keep the society in a gridlock of poverty and armed conflict, keep themselves relevant, by becoming a sword of Damocles dangling over everybody’s heads.

    They just slap the adjective “protracted” to their struggle, issue basically the same manifestoes decade after destructive decade, and voila, you have the longest running insurgencies in Asia.

    Of course the most visible harm done by these groups are the direct and indiscriminate violence visited on civilians in their rampages of murder, arson, and kidnapping.

    But even when they aren’t actually rampaging and blaming Allah’s greatness for their murderous behavior, these twin insurgencies are in fact preventing the normal, natural process by which democratic societies advance, because they are in effect able to prevent the fulfillment of these gradual but powerfully ameliorative processes of a democracy that is fully at peace internally.

    That is the insiduous thing about the insurgencies. While they claim to be a fight for justice and the good, their mere existence even after the clear rejection by the people of their movements, is tantamount to holding the entire country hostage and advertising the fact to the rest of the world.

    Whether “at war” or “at peace” the terrorism of the MILF and the CPP/NPA lies mainly in their ability to turn and keep the Philippines a leper of global society, unable to deal with its own peace and order, feasted upon by two different sets of rebels, and paralyzed by ideologies of self-loathing and dhimmitude.

    This they are able to do because they ARE armed, and previous peace negotiations didn’t care about that as long as there was “ceasefire.” But even when not pulling on the trigger, the effect of grave threat remains, and is tantamount to a perpetual hostaging of the entire nation. In the MILF’s case the ransom demanded is Mindanao itself!

    DDR or war. Either way, peace will be attained.

  2. J on September 13th, 2008 12:58 am

    Spot on!

  3. cocoy on September 13th, 2008 7:56 am

    ditto what jester said.

  4. benign0 on September 13th, 2008 3:55 pm

    Mate, thanks for the citation, but I’m for peace ONLY if all forms of banditry in Mindanao or anywhere else in the Philippines is crushed decisively and all war crimes investigated and punished.

    There is no negotiating with terrorists and certainly none with bandits/outlaws.

  5. The Jester-in-Exile on September 13th, 2008 4:21 pm

    There is no negotiating with terrorists and certainly none with bandits/outlaws.

    on that we agree.

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