Halfway through its term, the US-Marcos puppet-fascist regime plods on with its Ambisyon Natin 2040 with nothing to show but grinding poverty, starvation wages, endless oil price hikes, landlessness, continued destruction of the environment and unaddressed services for victims of calamities. Its pompous statements of economic development are “full of sound and fury signifying nothing” but unmitigated corruption and plunder.

But not to be outdone, the regime has also set its sight on surpassing the record of the previous Duterte regime in “counterinsurgency” and repression by recently unveiling a National Action Plan now couthed in civility—peace, unity and development. This NAP-UPD (National Action Plan-Unity, Peace and Development) for 2025-2028 though an extension of Duterte’s infamously repressive “whole of nation approach” promises more in crushing the revolutionary movement.

Insidious tactics of weaponizing the laws, military-controlled local peace talks, instigating fake surrenderers, blatant disinformation, deceptive amnesty offers, red baiting, red tagging, fake organizations, harassments, surveillance, abductions, killings or massacres, intensified militarization and bombing of the countryside, and giving increased powers to the notorious NTF-ELCAC are ever present in the current regime’s counter-revolutionary plan.

It ups the ante by specifically focusing on schools, youth, teachers, mass media and social media in its attempt to manipulate the rising tide of legitimate protest and revise history, in its bid “to dominate the information environment.”

As has been obvious from the start, Marcos Jr’s plan for “unity, peace and development” is a spawn of the US imperialist design for world hegemony. The fascist puppet regime claims “unity” in its bid to unite the ruling class to harness the whole might of the reactionary bureaucracy and military against the people. It shamelessly spouts “peace” while exposing the whole nation to the dangers of war and unpeace in giving the US a launching pad for war in Asia by allowing US bases and missiles in Philippines soil. It mouths “development” with its neoliberal and zero tariff policy opening the nation’s people and resources to even more plunder by imperialist big business and local bureaucrat capitalists.

But NAP-UPD’s distinctive mark is the regime’s boast that a sizeable number of targeted areas including peasant villages, schools, factories and urban poor communities when declared “cleared” shall be so “capacitated” (read: hamletted, controlled, manipulated) that no revolutionaries can ever return to their former base.

Indeed, such is another stellar claim that has shamed every puppet-fascist regime as the revolutionary movement persevered and persisted despite monumental odds for over half a century now. It is the Philippine crises—the state of the nation—that breeds revolutionaries. No amount of wars of repression can stifle a revolution. The people will always get back on their feet.

The people’s democratic revolution shall live from generation to generation. Today’s revolutionaries continue to learn from those before them and from their own experiences. As the movement undergoes its rectification process, the revolutionaries steel their fighting spirit, deepen their understanding of Philippine society, get closer to the basic masses, expand and consolidate their organizations, be good at united front tactics, and march forth.

Revolutionaries continue to persevere in leading the people in their struggle for genuine agrarian reform, democratic rights, and independence from US imperialism which even now is pushing the Philippines to the abyss of war. Indeed what the NAP-UPD faces is a formidable challenge not only from revolutionaries but much more so from the broad masses of the Filipino people who daily become victims of poverty and repression. As long as the puppet-fascist regime continues to serve its US-imperialist masters and its ruling class cohorts, NAP-UPD shall reap not only the disgust and anger of an already impoverished nation, but people rising to their own liberation.