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

Pomeroy's Portrait: Revisionist Renegade

A Forest Nightmare

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 November 1, 1971 under the title "Pomeroy's Forest Nightmare".)

The Forest is a "personal history" of a special agent of U.S. imperialism who at the same time serves as a hack of Soviet modern revisionism. It is admittedly a subjectivist piece of work, harping on the theme of bourgeois pessimism and misrepresenting revolutionary struggle as a nightmare.

The vile purpose of William J.Pomeroy in writing the book is to frighten people away from armed revolution and to convince them that it is hopeless. He employs the cheap method of posing himself as a tragic hero against the forest amd makes the forest loom larger as his enemy than U.S. imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism.

It is convenient for Pomeroy to write on his own narrow experience under the Jose-Jesus Lava leadership from April 1950 to April 1952 in his malicious scheme to draw a bleak picture and a dark prospect for the Philippinerevolution and whip up erroneous and counter-revolutionary ideas. Though published in 1963, The Forest absolutely fails to shed light on the "Left" opportunism of the Jose-Jesus Lava leadership and the subsequent Right opportunism of the Jesus Lava leadership since 1955. Pomeroy goes as far as to single out the Lavas, Luis Taruc and even Sumulong for praise.

While a true proletarian revolutionary would make a clear Marxist-Leninist analysis and summing-up of historical events in order to illumine the road of revolutionary struggle, Pomeroy would rather wallow in the muck of bourgeois pessimism, set himself up as a "tragic hero" in a Greek drama, express disdain for the Filipino people and obscure the causes of failure in the revolutionary movement. The Party document of rectification, "Rectify Error and Rebuild the Party", has long ago shed light on the period of the revolutionary struggle about which The Forest tries to spread poisonous ideas.