SOMEONE ELSE’S WINDOWS: Love your enemy

MALAYBALAY CITY (MindaNews / 7 December) – “The best weapon against an enemy is another enemy,” so goes a popular quote by Friedrich Nietzsche. The ongoing political skirmishes in the country – apparently a preview of the showdown in 2028 – reflect somehow an application of this tactic.

Consider the committee hearings in the House of Representatives where lawmakers allied with Speaker Martin Romualdez and members of the Makabayan bloc have apparently joined forces in pinning down Vice President Sara Duterte with questionable transactions involving her confidential and intelligence funds.

There’s no love lost between the progressives in the House and the Marcos-Romualdez camp. The Left remains critical of the current administration in matters pertaining to human rights, economic programs and foreign policy, particularly its moves toward revitalizing defense ties with the United States.

However, the inevitable breakup between the Marcos-Romualdez and Duterte camps provided the Left an opportunity to get back at former President Rodrigo Duterte, whom they supported in 2016 but eventually turned against them. They know the current administration isn’t clean, either. But it would be senseless to fight a war on two fronts.

Between Sara Duterte and President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the former is an easier target – at least for now. With the President’s control and influence over the organs of the State, it would be best to “side” with him in [his] efforts to declaw the “eagle” from the South. It’s an uneasy, undeclared alliance, although both sides are enjoying the show.

It’s anything but a new tactic. In his Selected Works, Mao Zedong wrote that during World War II he refused to commit the bulk of his revolutionary army to the anti-Japanese campaign despite having formed the Second United Front with Chiang Kai-shek. Mao let Chiang’s Kuomintang forces do most of the fighting, to preserve his own military strength for the civil war that continued after the global conflict and which he (Mao) won in 1949.

(MindaViews is the opinion section of MindaNews. H. Marcos C. Mordeno can be reached at hmcmordeno@gmail.com).