By Jose Maria Sison, CEGP Alumnus
Dear Campus Editors,
I wish to express my warmest greetings of solidarity to you, the College Editors Guild of the Philippines on the occasion of your 89th founding anniversary and your observance of National Campus Press Freedom Day. This is a time for you to celebrate the glorious history and great achievements of the Guild and to discuss the significance and necessity of campus press freedom.
It is appropriate that the theme of your celebration underscores the protracted struggle of the Guild for genuine press freedom and people’s rights and the urgent necessity of asserting and exercising these against the worsening conditions of oppression and exploitation imposed on the people by the current malevolent regime.
So long as the semicolonial and semifeudal ruling systems persists, the student youth and the people suffer an alternation of blatantly anti-democratic and pseudo-democratic regimes. Therefore, you must have a long-term view of the struggle for national and social liberation of the student youth and the people. You must wage well and win the current struggles to change the unjust ruling system in the long run.
You must reassert and promote the role of the campus press as a bulwark of the people against disinformation and deception and against the malevolent scheme of the tyrant Duterte to impose state terrorism on the people and realize a full-blown fascist dictatorship through charter change. You must uphold, defend and advance the national and democratic rights of the people against imperialist domination and the rule of the big compradors, landlords and corrupt politicians.
There is the urgent necessity to build a broad united front of the toiling masses of workers and peasants, the middle social strata and the enlightened among the conservatives against the traitorous, tyrannical, genocidal, plundering and swindling Duterte regime. But the long-term objective of the national democratic movement of the people is to build a Philippines that is fully independent, democratic, socially just, all-roundedly developed, progressive, prosperous and peaceful.
It is the duty of the Guild to inform and educate the student youth so that they are aroused to organize and mobilize themselves and contribute their revolutionary will and vigor to the people’s struggle for national and social liberation. All of the Filipino people today suffer the escalating conditions of oppression and exploitation under a despotic regime in an unjust and rotten ruling system whose crisis is daily worsening in conjunction with the crisis of the world capitalist system.
The crisis conditions are intolerable but at the same time they drive the people to wage all forms of resistance. They have no choice but to stand up and fight while the imperialists and the local reactionaries always try to use the general crisis and particular crises like the COVID-19 pandemic to grab more power and wealth and further repress and dispossess the people.
While the neoliberal policy has become bankrupt and is unravelling, the reactionary forces in all types of exploitative societies are unleashing all kinds of monstrosities, including fascism, racism, gender discrimination, wanton plunder of the environment, wars of aggression and the most violent forms of counterrevolution.
The student youth and the entire people must therefore stand firm on the general line of the new democratic revolution with a socialist perspective. We must join and intensify the struggle for the ouster of the current evil regime and in the process build our strength for changing the entire ruling system.
Mabuhay ang College Editors’ Guild of the Philippines!
Ipaglaban ang kalayaan ng pamamahayag sa kampus at mga karapatan ng bayan!
Mabuhay ang lahat ng kabataang estudyante!
Isulong ang kilusan para sa ganap na pambansang kalayaan at demokrasya!
Mabuhay ang sambayanang Pilipino!
