Playing God

It felt like reading pornography. Or pulp fiction of the cheapest variety.

These guys were so arrogant, so full of themselves and so afflicted with extreme megalomania, they kept minutes of their most devious meetings and even prepared a joint document stating their messianic (albeit warped) vision for a "revolutionary transition government."

The transcripts of two meetings between top leaders of the CPP-NPA and a band of military adventurers are terribly revealing – not only of people connected to the conspiracy but also of the mindset of men for whom drawing blood and taking casualties in a wooly coup plot. The military adventurers identified themselves as belonging to two conspiratorial groups: the older officers were from the Katipunan ng mga Anak ng Bayan (KAB) while the younger ones called themselves Makabayang Kawal Pilipino (MKP).

These transcripts (more like stenographic notes of the proceedings) were among the documents captured along with Lt. Laurence San Juan, Atty. Jose Christopher Belmonte and Albert Guyal. The coup conspirators involved in the meetings included the same personalities we all know from the RAM and the YOU. The CPP panel was top-heavy, including Leo Velasco, who heads the CPP National Military Commission, and Central Committee member Prudencio Calubid.

I have no doubt about the authenticity of these transcriptions.

The best fictionist and the worst propagandist could not fake the peculiar syntax, the curious jargon of the communists, the arrogant utterance native to the RAM personalities and the great amount of detail about a wide range of political personalities mentioned in the course of the two meetings. Many of these personalities were identified by their nicknames and the conversations were riddled with the respective slang of both the communists and the diehard military adventurers.

All the personalities named in the discussions – sitting senators, religious gurus and an assortment of power-brokers – are, on the basis of my own independent information and impressions, correctly placed by the plotters. One had to be deeply involved in the complex political and personal networks to know the interconnections among the diverse personalities named in these documents.

Their analysis of the political situation were personality-based. The possibility of bloodshed was discussed with the callousness of men who love war – especially if it is others die for their designs.

The discussions on record were clearly between megalomaniacs and braggarts of the most unbearable type.

For instance, the communists committed warm bodies in the streets in the tens of thousands – as if they owned these people. They so casually estimated delivery of twenty thousand persons for the Edsa rally on the 24th. Should that effort fall short, they committed half a million people to surround the Palace on May 1.

For their part, the military adventurers committed strike units to hit the police lines from behind in order to prevent dispersal of the demonstrations. Such a move would, of course, produce casualties both from among the uniformed ranks as well as from the unwitting demonstrators. But the certainty of casualties did not seem to unduly disturb the plotters.

I wonder if my friend, Randy David, who was leading the march from the Quezon City side last Friday was fully informed of these prospects. I surely hope he would read these transcripts.

The military adventurers demanded from their newfound communist partners assurance that they could hold their crowd in the streets for at least seven days if the whole thing falls into a stalemate. They expressed low regard for the mobs gathered by the pro-Estrada forces as these people tended to disperse in a hurry by nightfall.

Lapsing into their Maoist strategic inclinations, the communists proposed as a back-up plan that provinces be taken one by one if the initial strike at the National Capital Region failed. The military adventurers agreed to look into the feasibility of doing that.

These guys were playing God.

They were play-acting, pretending to be captains of the nation’s fate. They were considering moving whole mass organizations, church-based groups, military and police units and civil society formations like chess players were moving pawns.

They had no intention of being accountable or transparent to the people who they will be moving into the line of fire. They were plotting tactics that could cause lives to be lost senselessly without nary a thought of saving the innocents.

The most chilling thought that came to me after going through the transcripts was there were no lofty principles, fundamental values or well-formed visions discussions here. Both sides were cynically using each other for the purpose of taking power for themselves. These were people who, when all hell breaks loose, will sooner or later be killing each other as well.

It was clear that the renegade soldiers were thinking of the massed-up civilians from the left-leaning groups as nothing more than an unwitting human shield of unthinking but disciplined partisans so that they could maneuver their armed units to the desired physical and political vantage points.

It was clear that the communist leaders were willing to sacrifice the lives of their comrades in the open mass movements in exchange for a crack at power, using the strike capacity of the disciplined but totally obedient elite military units as a means to achieve their own ideological goals.

There was something totally unreal in the mindset of these power-grabbers.

Somehow, the renegade soldiers, in their lust for power, forced themselves to imagine that the communists will allow their political base to be decimated so that the militarists could take power. Somehow the communists, with the same lust for power, convinced themselves that, once the militarists complete their power grab, they would not turn their guns on their long-time ideological adversaries.

It was a treasonous pact they forged. And the most fantastic thing about it is that both sides hurried into an agreement to deploy their respective forces on February 24 without the wildest idea and without the slightest agreement on who would compose the "revolutionary transition council" once the coup is completed.

That detail is the most telling evidence that both sides intended to double-cross each other when the moment of triumph came. That malice is the root of their defeat.