SOMEONE ELSE’S WINDOWS | Comrade Robinhood

MALAYBALAY CITY (MindaNews / 16 July 2026) – Don’t begrudge Senator Robinhood Padilla for declaring during the impeachment trial of Vice President Sara Duterte that he is a communist.

Being a communist or socialist doesn’t necessarily mean supporting or participating in the armed struggle being waged by the Communist Party of the Philippines-New People’s Army, or any other similar groups. Any person may believe in or even espouse socialism or communism in a peaceful manner. There’s no law prohibiting that.

So let’s give Padilla the benefit of a doubt. Let us grant, for the sake of argument, that he is a communist at heart, that he is all for social justice – Utopia, if you will.

Really, there’s nothing outwardly wrong in the Senator announcing on national TV and social media that he loves the hammer-and-sickle emblem symbolizing the worker-peasant alliance. In fact, in a moment of fancy he may have worn the Che Guevara cap not merely as a fad but out of enduring faith in an ideology he professed to have embraced.

But was he serious, or did he simply want to excite us by uttering words that could put the security sector on panic mode if it was an ordinary citizen who made such a revelation?

Were his words sincere? Did they echo the deepest longing of someone who is willing to turn the world upside down, if only to see every Filipino enjoy “food and freedom, jobs and justice,” as envisioned by Senator Jose W. Diokno, a brilliant mind whose Bar exam rating was way higher than Duterte’s supposed 80%.

(Diokno topped the Bar exams in 1945. Interestingly, the senator’s son, Rep. Chel Diokno, ranked second in the 1987 Bar exams, was among the House prosecutors present during the impeachment hearing where Padilla announced his being a “communist”.)

The elder Diokno floated the six-letter phrase as the core agenda of the peace negotiations with the National Democratic Front in 1986. It may not exactly jibe with how the revolutionary alliance would frame the social order it envisions. Nonetheless, it captures the elementary essence of what it requires to attain lasting peace – short but succinct, profound in its simplicity.

I would have loved to listen to Padilla expound on his own concept of social justice – never mind dialectics – with or without some help from AI. But he did not because he could not. For a long time, he was in the business of pretending (acting), which he carried over to the onerous job of lawmaking. He pretends to know the job. He pretends to have an acumen for it.

Yet, the greatest proof that his “admission” was just a comic relief from the drab environment of the impeachment trial is the silence from habitual, unremorseful red-taggers like Lorraine Badoy. The military, too, is unperturbed.

Their nonchalance was anything but surprising as Padilla shares nothing in common with communists. For one, many of the latter were charged with illegal possession of firearms in relation to their political involvement. He, meanwhile, was convicted of the same offense, not because of a commitment to a lofty cause but as a consequence of embracing guns to enhance his macho image.

Go ask Osang. She knows more.

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