‘If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck…’

INSTEAD of sympathy and support, the public’s general reaction to the request of the militant ‘Kilusang Mayo Uno’ (KMU) for the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) to “investigate” and “identify” those behind some social media posts identifying it as a “front organization” of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), is either amusement or derision.

According to the KMU, their being “red-tagged” on social media as a communist organization has placed the life and limbs of its top leaders in danger and jeopardy as they are now in the cross-hairs of anti-communist groups.

And by seeking the NBI’s help, the KMU has implied that it is NOT a communist-created organization in the labor sector.

But instead of sympathy, amusement and derision greeted the KMU’s claim. Somewhere in this issue is a picture of the KMU, in one of its many anti-government rallies, proudly holding the pictures of both Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, the two most recognized leaders of the world communist movement and who, during their lifetimes, advocated “class struggle” as the only way to establish a “socialist society,” as the first “stage” in the creation of a communist paradise on earth where “exploitation” of man by man would be finally ended.

If the KMU is a non-believer of communism and the violent means that Marx and Lenin advised for it to be realized, then why carry their pictures in their rallies?

Ditto, there is also that old, 1987 video, of CPP founder, Jose Maria Sison, who, in a speech in Belgium, specifically named the KMU as one of the party’s “legal democratic forces” in the Philippines.

Aside from the KMU, Sison also named Bayan (now known as Bayan Muna), Gabriela, the Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas, (KMP), the Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) and the League of Filipino Students (LFS), as also part of the CPP’s legal democratic forces operating here.

Now, this video has already made the rounds since it re-appeared some two years ago and if again, the KMU is not in anyway connected with the CPP, why did it not—until now by the way—called up Sison and forced him to make a retraction and a public apology over his statement that it was the CPP which is behind the KMU?

In the 1950’s United States, during the witch hunt for suspected communists in and out of the US government, the phrase, ‘if it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then by hell, it is a duck!’

To our mind, the KMU’s present claim that it is not a CPP-front organization is quite hard to believe given the facts discussed above. If it wants to be believed that it is not, then it should publicly denounce the CPP and Sison. For a start, of course.