Recently AFP Deputy Chief-of-Staff for Operations Major Gen. Edgardo de Leon in a state-sponsored interview ludicrously blathered about “hatred as primary weapon of CPP-NPA in pushing for change.”

The people, especially the toiling masses of workers and peasants, abhor the semi-colonial and semi-feudal ruling system represented by the fascist US-Duterte regime and fanatically defended by Gen. de Leon for the intolerable exploitation and oppression it brought on them.

The series of neoliberal economic programs implemented by Duterte further deteriorated the already destitute economic condition of the people and now made even worse by the pandemic lockdowns and restrictions. Unbridled corruption smoke-screened as urgent efforts to help the people brace themselves during the Covid-19 pandemic have landed the country with an P11 trillion total debt.

This abysmal condition drives the people to launch all forms of struggles to assert their democratic rights, demands and welfare. And in the process, especially in lieu of the brutal campaign and dirty war the regime unleashed to suppress their struggles, they come to grasp the necessity of armed revolution to fundamentally change the rotten system.

Clearly, Maj. Gen.de Leon is grossly ignorant of the fact that no amount of hate speeches and rhetoric can incite a revolution much more sustain it for more than five decades. This mentality also showed his contempt for the people whom he viewed as brainless and uneducated mobs who can easily be manipulated or brainwashed.

The objective situation for waging a revolution is more favorable than ever as Duterte imposes more imperialist neoliberal economic prescriptions to raise funds for the forthcoming elections and desperately cling to power through fascist means.

This has nothing to do with generating public hate as Maj. Gen. de Leon imagined.###