After six years, the New People’s Army (NPA) and the Filipino people have defeated the US-Duterte regime’s annual declaration of crushing the revolutionary armed struggle. Instead, the people’s spirit and determination to resist are heightened in the face of relentless fascist suppression and state terrorism and widespread suffering brought by the crisis-ridden moribund ruling system.

Like rabid dogs, fascist soldiers, police and paramilitary forces were unchained to furiously attack the people. The monsters charged wherever people have been awakened, and are united and struggling in order to terrorize, blindfold, silence and shackle them.

On orders of their bloodthirsty master Duterte, they maraud and sow violence on villages. They made no distinction between the armed and unarmed. Defenseless people have been killed, abducted, arrested, tortured and imprisoned left and right and forced to “incrimate themselves and surrender.” Their communities have been hamletted and fenced off to guard their every movement. Farms and forest resources have been left untended. Their villages, fields and mountains are being bombed, shelled and strafed.

Mining companies, plantations, ecotourism projects, bridges and roads are rushed in to make profits flow and fill the pockets of gluttonous big capitalists, big landlords and big merchants, and the corruption-addicted military officers. The minority masses are driven away from their land and forced into “housing projects” away from their forest homes. Millions of peasants impoverished by importation of rice and other products are dislocated, forced to sell their land and left mired in poverty and hunger.

But the people and their people’s army are undeterred. Instead, these have heightened their spirit and determination to resist and confront all hardships and sacrifices to advance the people’s well-being.

With the help of the NPA, the basic village mass organizations of peasants, youth, women, children and cultural workers continue to be built. They are learning to overcome their fear and the means of fighting. They are holding meetings and study sessions without being seen, heard or detected by fascists in their midst. They collectively defy the left and right orders of wannabe masters to fetch water and firewood or to clean or repair their camps. Walls are painted slogans expressing the people’s grievance and anger. They closely watch the monsters to stop their terrorist plans against the people, and act collectively to protect their neighbors. Military camps and barracks are quiety approached or aimed from a distance by units of the NPA and people’s militias.

Assisted by the people’s army, the peasant masses are rising up to demand less burdensome land rent, higher wages of farmworkers and increased farmgate prices for their products. They collectively solve their economic, security, health and education problems. They iron out contradictions among the masses to further raise their unity in confronting bigger problems.

With the people’s army and the masses working together, the people’s war is certain to advance across the country. There are limits to the terrorism of the fascist reactionaries, to their use of bombs and artillery, or the number of mercenaries who can surround or lay siege on tens of thousands of villages that are rising up and resisting.

The people’s army and the Party must exert all effort to shoulder the heavy tasks to continue strengthening the NPA, recruiting and training thousands of new Red fighters from young peasants, workers, pettybourgeois intellectuals, women and other sectors. The conscious iron discipline of Red fighters must be further steeled by raising their political and ideological consciousness. The people’s army must heighten their capacity in guerrilla warfare, in their methods of secrecy in their trails and camps, in order to keep the enemy blind and deaf and render ineffective their modern equipment in surveillance and bombing. Through strict secrecy, the NPA can always wield tactical initiative in war, and maintain strong ties and collaboration with the people.

Every unit of the NPA must learn lessons from the losses of some units over the past years of the enemy’s onslaught. These prove the correctness of waging extensive and intensive guerrilla warfare on an ever widening and deepening mass base in order to prevent units of the people’s army from being besieged. With firm and widespread mass support, they can counter-encircle, deny the enemy of a target, shift quickly and strike the enemy from the flanks and rear.

The armed revolution is certain to further intensify and widen as the NPA frustrates the enemy’s heightened strategic offensives, strengthens its bonds with the masses, defends them against fascism, strengthens their basic mass organizations, and creatively and determinedly resists the fascist enemy and advances the antifeudal struggles.

The Party, the NPA and the Filipino people must steel their minds in fighting major and intense struggles against fascism and state terrorism. As we celebrate the upcoming 53rd anniversary of the NPA, let us look forward to greater advances in the coming years and strengthen our determination to march forward along the path of armed revolution.