Movement Against Tyranny Press Statement
January 29, 2021
The Movement Against Tyranny calls on the Filipino people to come to the defense of our institutions of higher learning, which are now under attack from officials of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) and other rabid members of the Duterte administration.
This week, NTF-ELCAC spokesperson Gen. Antonio Parlade Jr. revived his list of 18 schools supposedly in cahoots with communists, which he first revealed in his infamous Red October plot expose of 2018.
Not to be outdone, presidential communications office undersecretary Lorraine Badoy, who is also an NTF-ELCAC spokesperson, came out with a longer list of 38 colleges and universities allegedly serving as recruitment grounds of the New People’s Army.
The pronouncements of Parlade and Badoy follow defense secretary Delfin Lorenzana’s unilateral and arbitrary abrogation of the UP-DND Accord which, for the last 30 years, have protected the country’s premier state university from illegal and unreasonable searches, arrests and surveillance, as well as prohibited state security forces from interfering in peaceful assemblies and protests in campus.
The security sector insists that such means of protecting academic freedom turns our campuses into breeding grounds of rebels and terrorists. This is not only an attack on the reputation of these schools but on academic freedom itself and the role of educational institutions in nurturing critical thinking among our youth.
The freedom to think and challenge the status quo is precisely what makes the academe a dynamic source of novel and radical solutions to such fundamental problems as mass poverty, underdevelopment, systemic corruption, rampant human rights abuses and blatant violations of our sovereignty. It is also this freedom that nurtures righteous dissent against all kinds of tyranny and oppression.
Thus, academic freedom is a key element in any democracy. This is precisely why the Constitution guarantees it. To impinge upon that freedom by stoking the fear of communism is straight out of the fascist playbook. Let us not play into the hands of those who would have us return to the dark days dictatorship. Let us defend academic freedom and say no to tyranny!#
