[PRWC Party Documents] Pomeroy's Portrait: Revisionist Renegade, April 22, 1972

Pomeroy's Portrait: Revisionist Renegade

Counter-guerilla views

Basahin sa Pilipino

Amado Guerrero

April 22, 1972

Revolutionary School of Mao Tse Tung Thought, Communist Party of the Philippines

(This essay originally appeared in the Ang Bayan special issue of June 1,1971 under the title "The Counter-Guerrilla Views of the Revisionist Pomeroy".)

The small book Guerrilla and Counter-Guerrilla Warfare is essentially a presentation of the counter-revolutionary and counter-guerrilla views of the revisionist William J. Pomeroy, an American G.I. adventurer who has turned into a political and book-selling capital the short period that he spent with the "Left" opportunist leaders of the old merger party of the Communist Party and the Socialist Party in Manila and the Sierra Madre.

In the style of a repentant adventurist turned capitulationist, Pomeroy takes all pains in trying to downgrade armed struggle, particularly guerrilla warfare, as a revolutionary weapon; use the "Left" opportunist errors of the Jose Lava leadership to justify Right opportunism and modern revisionism; slander the great communist leaders and omit Chairman Mao Tsetung on the subject of armed struggle; preach "peaceful coexistence, peaceful transition and peaceful competition" as the general line of the world revolution and insist on unprincipled accommodation with U.S. imperialism.

Like his Lava revisionist colleagues in the Philippines today, Pomeroy takes the style of giving faint praise or lip service to what he considers the "partial neccessity" of armed struggle but only to carry out sinister aim of disarming the reader, putting him the state of ambivalence and stupor and laying him open for sly or overt counter-revolutionary prattle that assails the essence of Marxism, the doctrine of revolutionary violence against the bourgeois state machinery.

Let us analyze Pomeroy'a book. We have the advantage of doing so in the light of the seven years since the book came out in print in 1964 on the eve of Khrushchov's downfall from his revisionist throne.