Progressives in the Philippines that marched today for the hero’s 154th birth anniversary amid news of state-perpetrated killings of human rights defenders, possible rules of war violations, aerial bombings of civilian and national minorities’ communities and intensified militarization.
Traditionally a protest day for the toiling masses—the peasants and the workers—and the youth whose organizations the revolutionary Kabataang Makabayan and national democratic Anakbayan that founded their groups on the great plebeian’s birthday, this date in history today marked a resistance to the pronounced ‘crackdown’ on activists by President Rodrigo Duterte.
Protesters also said that Duterte’s revolutionary government is anything but.
His rule of taking cues from the United States and other foreign powers, petting his police and military, and subjecting the poor to murderous ‘all out’ war and sham ‘war on drugs’ is the exact opposite of what Bonifacio and the Katipunan fought for—liberation from colonizers and unshackling the people from poverty.
And to call on Bonifacio’s legacy or use the word revolution, to them, is to take on the revolutionary hero’s path to true national liberation and democracy.
