UNPOPULAR OPINION | No One Mourns Joma but the CPP

I recently came across a social media post by Panday Sining commemorating the death anniversary of Jose Maria Sison, the founding chairman of the Communist Party of the Philippines. It was intended, clearly, as a tribute. Yet it prompted a realization that outside the closed political universe of the CPP and its allied organizations, hardly anyone mourns Joma Sison.

This is not because Filipinos are unfamiliar with his name. On the contrary, Sison is one of the most recognizable figures in the country’s postwar political history. It is because the life he lived, and the movement he led, produced far more fear, division, and suffering than the heroism his followers continue to project.

The CPP portrays Sison as a revolutionary hero, a selfless intellectual who dedicated his life to the liberation of the Filipino people. While New People’s Army fighters endured decades of hunger, unforgiving weather and terrain, and relentless military operations in the mountains, Sison lived in comfortable exile in the Netherlands.

He lived most of his life with his wife, while countless fighters under the CPP-NPA were deprived of the right to see their own families, forced to abandon spouses, children, and parents. Sison was not a symbol of equality or sacrifice; he was privileged.

As the CPP approaches its anniversary every December 26, it will paint itself, again, as the savior of the Filipino people, a movement born of necessity and sustained by moral authority. In many rural areas, the CPP-NPA is not remembered as a liberator but as a source of fear. For decades, the NPA has played kings and queens in the countryside. They used the masses for food, money, intelligence, and logistical support while offering nothing tangible in return.

Sison was not separate from this reality. He embodied it. Even from hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, he remained the king of the movement. How he could exert such influence from exile only underscores the extent to which the CPP operated less as a mass movement of critical thinkers and more as a rigid hierarchy of unquestioning followers.

The continued veneration of Sison reveals less about his supposed greatness and more about the insularity of the CPP itself. Ordinary Filipinos, especially those who have directly experienced the consequences of the armed struggle, do not grieve his passing. Many regard it with indifference; others with quiet relief.