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 November 1, 1971.")

Born of the People is the joint work of two renegades, Luis M.Taruc and William J. Pomeroy. Though presented as the authobiography of Taruc, this book was actually written by the hack and U.S. imperialist agent Pomeroy as his way of sneaking not only into the ranks of the Philippine revolutionary mass movement for a certain period but also into the leading organs of the old merger party of the Communist Party of the Philippines and the Socialist Party.

Elder comrades can testify today that after Pomeroy collected data for his book in Central Luzon in 1949 the enemy was able to conduct precision raids on places that he had visited. It was precisely because of certain suspicions of the Lavas themselves about him that it was decided that he would be "kept in camp" in Southern Luzon in 1950.

To read the Born of the People is to discover the ideological roots of the development of Taruc into an out-and-out anti-communist and the counter-revolutionary role of Pomeroy even long before he wrote later out-and-out revisionist works.

Born of the People has been disclaimed by its "author" Luis Taruc. In this regard, he has acclaimed the anti-communist book He Who Rides the Tiger, another "authobiography" written for him by the hack and C.I.A. agent Douglas Hyde. Pomeroy is left holding the trash. No one is surprised, however, that in sham pride he continues to hold it up as "the history of the revolutionary movement" more than the biography of a single person.

Such apologia is idle. The book itself presents its central character Taruc as saying:

A history of the Huk alone would be my biography, and if any of my comrades read these pages, I know that they would also say: "Look, there is my biography, too."

Indeed, throughout the book Pomeroy spruces up Taruc as the "paragon" of the HUKBALAHAP and the entire revolutionary movement in the Philippines. What a shameless calumny against the heroic Red fighters and the revolutionary masses!

Pomeroy can never wash his hands of being Taruc's hack. As late as 1963, the revisionist author in The Forest would still praise Taruc in superlative terms:

Instead of writing a history, I wrote his "autobiography", calling it Born of the People. I tried to put into that book not only Luis but the Filipino peasantry and the Filipino people in general, struggling to be wholly free of colonialism. For a man like Luis, a leader like Luis, was trully born of the lives and struggle of the peasantry of Pampanga, and I saw him as a symbol.

It is the task of this criticism to show that even at the writing of Born of the People both the real author and the fake author were already bent on promoting erroneous ideas to the detriment of proletarian revolutionary leadership and the revolutionary mass movement. Such erroneous ideas are in black and white in the book.

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