An Overview of the Political Career of Jose Maria Sison (Part 2)(with a special section on the Plaza Miranda bombing of 1971)

When Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in 1972, the movement that Sison worked so hard to raise by leaps and bounds out of the waning decade of the 1960’s shifted the weight of its resistance ethos directly against the Marcos regime. Marcos’s fateful proclamation would be a galvanizing focal point for the Sison and the CPP.

Martial law would provoke a flight from government repression among activists, reformers, and progressive idealists. Their beating of a hasty retreat from overt confrontation with the state would lead them into the welcoming arms of the CPP. Any of these brave recusants who may have had previous reservations about the radicalism of the CPP shed their reluctance once the outrages of martial law became clear.

Probably the most singular affair that occurred in the period leading up to martial law was the Plaza Miranda bombing in Manila on August 21, 1971. With the charged atmosphere of the First Quarter Storm protests stubbornly hanging over the political scene, the bombing would have major ramifications for both the Marcos government and the CPP.

----------------------------

PLAZA MIRANDA: THE GUILT OF THE INNOCENT, THE INNOCENCE OF THE GUILTY

Conventional historical wisdom has laid the blame for the bombing on the Marcos administration. Ostensibly, the bloody act was intended to put Philippine communists under the spotlight of an alarmed and indignant public opinion. Marcos hoped to demonize the left-wing as a haven for communist-sponsored terrorism against the Filipino people. By allegedly orchestrating the Plaza Miranda attack, which killed nine people and wounded nearly 100 others, Marcos would manufacture a shockingly resonant pretext for suspending the writ of habeas corpus.

But history, it must be remembered, is always subject to reconstruction. This is certainly no less the case with Philippine history. Over the decades since Plaza Miranda new information and revelations about the incident have come to light. The assortment of details and particulars, to say nothing of the compelling interviews and testimonies of individuals who were said to be in a position to know, have pulled conclusions in another direction. In other words, the prevailing theory that Ferdinand Marcos masterminded the violence is not standing the test of time as steadfastly as it used to.

The notion that Jose Maria Sison was the prime mover of the Plaza Miranda atrocity would probably not make immediate sense given the context of the bombing. 1971 was a period of great upheaval in the Philippines as the country was rife with speculation that Marcos was bidding to extra-constitutionally extend his presidential term through the mechanism of martial law.

The idea that Marcos, notorious for his perfidious political manuevering, would resort to extreme, amoral measures to further his covert authoritarian interests was not a hard sell to many. In a setting suitable to that expedient methodology, following Plaza Miranda there were a series of suspicious bombings in the Metro Manila region. The ever-opportunistic Marcos, perhaps exploiting the fear and trauma caused by the Plaza Miranda bombing, wasted little time in accusing the Philippine communists for conducting the terroristic campaign. 

It went without saying that the communists, together with other Marcos oppositionists, diverted the accountability back on the president. For what it's worth, intelligence and military sectors from both the Philippines and the United States implicated Marcos administration operatives post-Plaza Miranda.

However, based again on the available evidence, there has been a growing disquiet among his heretofore supporters as Jose Maria Sison’s name has been exposed in authorial connection to the bombing. This begs the question of what motivations would Sison possibly have in carrying out the plot.

In an August 4, 1989 Washington Post article by Gregg Jones, interviews were done with several former ranking CPP functionaries. The interviewees asserted that SIson was behind the Plaza Miranda episode in order “to provoke government repression and push the country to the brink of revolution (article quotation).”

The article goes on:

“According to four former ranking party officials, chairman Sison had become convinced by early 1971 -- less than three years after the party was founded -- that it would take only a well-timed incident to spark a great upheaval leading to an early Communist victory.”

So it can be conceivably surmised that motive and opportunity for Sison and his movement dovetailed into the engineered “disrupting” of the Plaza Miranda rally. As Philippine society appeared to be coming apart at the seams, Sison purportedly took advantage of the situation and in the process, mobilized legions of new fighters for the CPP-NPA. A majority of these new fighters were college students who were aggrieved and thus energized by the moral affront perpetrated in Plaza Miranda and by the Marcos regime throughout the country as a whole. Armed with weapons from China, these fighters represented a serious threat to the Marcos administration.

Caught in the crosshairs between truth and fiction of the identity of the Plaza Miranda’s architect is the chance for a closing argument. The final verdict in the Plaza Miranda case remains enigmatic for it has been prone to revision.

As theoretical historian Hayden White wrote:

“In my view, ‘history,’ as a plenum of documents that attest to the occurrence of events, can be put together in a number of different and equally plausible narrative accounts of ‘what happened in the past.’”

The once-received ideas and accepted judgments on the bombing have been rendered into a transitional, contingent space in which American philosopher Richard Rorty’s “liberal ironist” would complicate and defamiliarize the notion of the absolute truth being “out there” accessible to all.

Along that theme, the raw historical nerve that is Plaza Miranda has found its way into the art of fictional writing as exemplified by Mia Alvar in her 2015 collection of short stories “In the Country.” Her short story specimen of the disorder just goes to show how history is an easy mark for dissolving what might have really transpired into a free-floating portrayal.

In “Old Girl,” Alvar creatively gleans together a contrarian manipulation implying that former senator and freedom icon Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino could imaginatively have been part of a conspiracy to frame Ferdinand Marcos for what would be the pretextual epitaph of Philippine democracy:

“Was [Ninoy] behind those Plaza bombings, one year earlier?…There are degrees of being ‘behind’ something, anyway. He didn’t throw the hand grenades onto the podium, where all the major candidates in his party were standing. He couldn’t have killed those people…His party fingered the President; the President fingered him…[his] appetite for theater ended where someone--on his side, no less--might actually get hurt. Didn’t it?”

The afterlife of the Plaza Miranda entr’acte (the bombing was a definitive interlude between the pre-martial law and martial law eras) has yet to concede a hardened coda. Whether we take or leave this lack of an immutable denouement there is always the option to accept what Milan Kundera called the “wisdom of uncertainty.” Seeing history as skeptics would see it, we would be wise to keep the door open to new chapters and verses before really arriving at the Plaza Miranda corpus delicti.

With the historical accounts unsettled about Plaza Miranda in recent years, the controversy over responsibility was a gut punch to the presumption that the bombing smacked of Marcosian stratagems. But even reimagining it otherwise really does not change the eventual outcome that was martial law. In any respect, Philippine democracy was engulfed in a doom loop after August 21, 1971.

The two main strands of malefaction in the Plaza Miranda undertaking interlock, thereby joining both Ferdinand Marcos and Jose Maria Sison at the hip. It’s only ironic that whichever one of these men are truly guilty of the act that both can be said to be at once culpable and innocent. If Marcos deserves to answer for the murders and maimings on that late summer evening, then Philippine history posterior to Plaza Miranda doesn’t alter. If it’s Sison, he would obviously be the agent provocateur at large. For all that though, Sison would be so within a noxious socio-economic and political environment created by Marcos’s corruption and duplicity. Either way, martial law and dictatorship were foregone conclusions.