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IF the idea of reviving the anti-subversion law was a trial balloon,
it was immediately shot down by vigilant members of Congress and
media, and the Palace as quickly denied endorsing it. To put it in
another way, the resurrection of RA 1700 is recrudescence (a term
used by zoologist Agustin Rodolfo in the fifties), the breaking out
anew of a sore or disease not so quiescent for the last decade or
so. Here it is the cold war mentality of people still talking about
“communist infiltration” and “subversive documents.”
The arguments against the restoration of the
anti-subversion bill are cogent and to the point, and do recall the
struggle of the fifties where we had our first encounter with the
Filipino version of McCarthyite witch-hunting and red-baiting on
campus. The arrest in 1950 of the Politburo, followed by
writer/labor leader Amado Hernandez and the “invitation” to
military camps of media people like Philippines Herald editors and
staffers and Popular Bookstore Joaquin Po had made academics and
intellectuals cautious if not paranoid. We felt the presence of the
Military Intelligence Service agents on campus, a few of whom were
recruited from the students and faculty. The late Boni Gillego
confirmed this in civil liberties forums here and abroad.
The student paper Collegian throughout the
fifties sought to break the silence of the academe, which Prof.
Leopoldo Yabes attributed to the prevailing “fear of ideas” and
MIS surveillance. The Collegian under editor Jose Masakayan, with
Prof. Alfredo V. Lagmay as adviser, put out a landmark book on
academic freedom in 1957, the year RA 1700 passed Congress. From
then on, the new breed of Collegian writers (including Petronilo
Daroy, Perfecto Fernandez, Sonny San Juan, Jose Maria Sison, Luis
Teodoro and others) were unstoppable in what Senator Recto called
the Second Propaganda Movement. The Student Cultural Association of
the University of the Philippines (SCAUP, an acronynmic play on
UPSCA or U.P. Student Catholic Action) organized rallies against
congressional investigations of alleged Communists in U.P. The
nationalist student leaders and writers then would play key roles in
the mass movement of the sixties onto the First Quarter Storm and
martial-law period.
The Society for the Advancement of Academic
Freedom (SAAF) was formed by 154 professors and four administrators
on Aug. 6, 1956, to counter the “recrudescence of religious
intolerance” on campus and uphold the constitutional provision of
separation of church and state. At the time, a militant Jesuit,
Fr. John Delaney, acting as parish priest for the U.P. Diliman
community, launched a crusade, with the help of the UPSCA and the
faithful among the faculty, to “cleanse” the campus of
“atheists” and install a department of religion on campus.
Fr. Delaney started his campaign by focusing on
the abolition of fraternities, eventually turning on the department
of philosophy headed by Dr. Ricardo Pascual, whom Fr. Delaney
accused of teaching philosophy that encourages atheism. Actually,
logical positivism was the school of thought in Pascual’s
department. But the U.P. president, from whom Fr. Delaney got his
cues for his militancy on campus, tried to replace Philosophy 1
(Symbolic Logic) with Math O (Deductive Reasoning) as General
Education requirement. At the faculty assembly, Dr. Pascual was
able to convince his peers that Math 0 would shortchange the
students, missing out on inductive reasoning included in Symbolic
Logic.
I wrote then: “The God-centered idea of
education for the university was originally made explicit by Dr.
Vidal A. Tan in his 1952 inaugural address. Tan pursued it in his
philosophy of education speech in the local observance of the
Columbia bicentenary. The 1956 commencement address on academic
responsibility also emphasized ‘our Christian heritage’ within
which framework teaching must be conducted.” The proposed religion
department was part of the scheme.
Not long after, Fr. Delaney died and the UPSCA
was left rudderless. His visible legacy on campus is the Chapel of
the Holy Sacrifice which now serves surrounding communities as
well. Lacking support from the board of regents, President Tan
resigned in 1957, with Dr. Enrique T. Virata, executive
vice-president acting as president until Law Dean Vicente Sinco took
over in 1958 as 8th president. The so-called sectarian strife was
over but the red-baiting continued.
Publications of the fifties
Before I left for study abroad, four of us
(Sunday Times Magazine associate editor Frankie Sionil Jose, poet/UP
instructor. Alex Hufana, magazine editor Godo Burce Bunao, and
myself, all in their 20s, were able to convince printer/publisher
Bert Benipayo to underwrite Comment, which we simply called a
“quarterly devoted to Philippine affairs.” Among the
journal’s aims was “to provide a vehicle for the immobilized
intellectual minority whose inarticulateness on important issues
has become patent.”
The response to our call for articles was
heartening. The first issue came out October 1956, with writers
including Jose A. Lansang, Ricaredo Demetillo, Leopoldo Y. Yabes,
Agustin Rodolfo, O.D. Corpuz, Josefa Cabanos-Lava, Pascual Capiz
and Armando Bonifacio. The topics discussed were politics in the
Third World, Nick Joaquin’s past, the university and fear of
ideas, academic freedom, Dr. Pascual’s Partyless Democracy, the
dilemma of the Filipino intellectual, US bases, and a critique of
dialectical/historical materialism.. A visiting Sri Lankan
economist also wrote on Philippine foreign trade. Rey Gregorio
reviewed Teodoro Agoncillo’s Revolt of the Masses. Alex Hufana
added a poem.
While most of its contributors were academics,
Comment was a departure from the Diliman Review (edited by NVM
Gonzalez), which had the format of Sewanee Review, a literary
academic journal. At the time we were reading Dissent, Partisan
Review, and Encounter without fully knowing the ideological
backgrounds of the publishers, editors, and writers. Jose Luna
Castro of The Manila Times and Jose A. Lansang of the Herald would
help enlighten us. It was a period of finding ourselves in the
political spectrum.
I edited three issues of Comment before leaving
in August 1957 and would be back in January 1963 to find Comment
kept alive by Frankie and additional editors like O.D. Corpuz. By
then I was caught up with new duties on campus and new interests. I
begged off from Joma Sison’s invitation to be part of the
editorial board of a new journal called Progressive Review.
In 1965 a group of professors including Jose
Encarnacion, Armando Bonifacio, Raul Ingles, Alex Hufana, Pete
Daroy, Pepe Fernandez, and myself tried to put out a new journal
called Politika. I edited two issues with the help of Frank Llaguno,
Agustin Que and Horacio Morales as business manager. We realized the
difficulty of sustaining a publication from individual donations,
and that ended the life of the journal. Student leaders were
joining Rafael Salas in the Palace.
Hence, I was glad for Frankie that he made
Solidarity (that replaced Comment) last for four decades. That’s a
record for a little magazine anywhere in the world. His participation
in the activities of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (which
published Encounter then edited by Stephen Spender who later resigned)
caused him some inconvenience when student leader Ernesto Macahiya
called Frankie a CIA agent. Frankie sued for libel and won the case.
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