To be Red-tagged and proud

Remember “Je suis Charlie (I am Charlie),” how caricaturists and other artists in the French press and all over the world rose up to identify with Charlie Hebdo, the satirical French magazine that suffered a 2015 terrorist attack? Killed were 17 people including 11 journalists. The magazine had carried an image of the prophet Muhammad, a no-no for the Islamic militants who stormed the magazine’s editorial office in Paris. The massacre gave rise to international condemnation; it resulted in heightened vigilance and furor among media practitioners. “Je suis Charlie” was a declaration: We are many Charlies and you cannot kill us all.

Remember, too, how Filipino women came out individually on social media to claim that they were the woman in the sex video that its purveyors said was former senator Leila de Lima? The “I am the woman in the sex video” meme was a hit. The male lawmakers who salivated over the video got punched on their groins. As chair of the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) and later, as secretary of justice, De Lima had tread on a political minefield of sorts and exposed what she had discovered about killing fields and drug cartels. Tagged and tarred, she later would spend almost seven years in solitary detention to the delight of her chief tormentor, then President Rodrigo “IWKY” Duterte, until her accusers recanted one by one.

Looking back, one can see that there could be power in owning a tag—with defiance, with pride.

I bring up those unforgettable situations to stress a point about tagging by government and other malicious elements who endanger the lives of those who march to a different drummer, who answer to a different calling, who do not hew to the standard of service of public servants.

To be Red-tagged is to be associated with the “Reds,” that is, with the Communist Party of the Philippines that the previous administration had declared to be a terrorist group. Being tagged could put one in the military’s watch list, or worse, in a sniper’s crosshairs. And so the passing of the Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA) or Republic Act No. 11479 during the Duterte presidency. Disclosure: I was one of the petitioners from the media sector in the 13th petition filed before the Supreme Court in 2020 for ATA’s junking. In our 73-page petition, we stressed that ATA poses “a clear and imminent danger to free speech … a weapon against constitutionally protected speech and speech-related conduct … It creates a new speech crime of inciting to terrorism and then ties this to a new definition of the crime of terrorism.”

After those meandering thoughts of mine, I say with pleasure that, at last, the Red-taggers allied with the military’s National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-Elcac) have again, become the target of complaints, this time, filed by the Environmental Defenders Congress (Envidefcon) with CHR. NTF-Elcac and their mouthpieces have been using the Sonshine Media Network International (SMNI) of pastor Apollo “Appointed Son of God” Quiboloy to Red-tag persons and their activities. The pastor, by the way, is being investigated by the Senate for alleged abuse of minors; he is facing various cases in the United States, sex trafficking, among them. He is said to be Duterte’s spiritual adviser. SMNI is home to the NTF-Elcac which, I presume, pays for air time with public funds. That is the short of it. (Read “’Green’ coalition accuses SMNI, AFP of ‘Red-tagging,” News, 2/13/24).

If you get my drift, I am trying to turn the tables around. To recall, it is actually those labeled as having communist/terrorist connections that have been using the words “Red-tagging” to refer to the accusations, and “Red-tagged” to refer to themselves. My proposition: Why not use the Red-tag as a badge of honor and courage? Then let the taggers transmogrify into villains. Greening the landscape, as in the case of Envidefcon, is a “red” or terrorist undertaking?

A “Je suis rouge (I am red)” declaration in Filipino languages would make NTF-Elcac and its minions stand on their heads. Mass identification with the Red-tagged might shift the focus, the onus, if you may, from the victim to the victimizer, from the tagged to the tagger. Yes, as in the case of “Je suis Charlie” and “I am the woman in the sex video” barrage on social media by feisty women who stood by their fellow woman under siege.

I am thinking out of the box, about ways of outwitting the witless and those who use public funds for malicious endangerment, who tar and tag the innocent who are marching to a different drummer. One day, these taggers might hear the owl calling their names.

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