A Generation's Dirge, Part 2

The anti-Sisonites have made their piece with certain segments of the oligarch, playing junior partner to the clans and their complicated agenda vis-à-vis governing. At the very least they are honest about their strategic shifts. Joel Rocamora admitted that Akbayan is losing and indirectly suggests that the best way to go is to work out the system in the hope of finding flaws in it for progressives to insert themselves (Joel Rocamora, “People power is alive and well”). The jury is still out on this “termite approach” to undermining the reactionary state. It was a communist and Joma loyalist who ironically invented the term. The CPP’s first secretary-general Nilo Tayag was one of the first cadres imprisoned before Marcos turn diktador. He languished in jail for 11 years and released in 1981. Tayag became an avid defender of Marcos’ Filipino ideology, justifying this compromise as his way of burrowing into the state and slowly destroying its ramparts like a termite does to a wooden architecture. EDSA 1 disrupted his political digging, and Tayag turned to religion, becoming a theologian of the Iglesia Filipina Independiente.