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<img src="https://cdn.kahimyang.com/resources-10/firstquarterstorm-sm.webp" alt="First Quarter Storm" />
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(A scene from the First Quarter Storm)
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<p>
Inspiration and the deed: First Quarter Storm started January 1970; Plaza Miranda bombing, August 1971.
I put those events within apostrophes because there is something fake about those terms, as it is demonstrative of how Communist Party of the Philippines founder Jose Ma. Sison was a master propagandist, quick to grab credit for those historic events by tagging them with labels of communist origin.
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<p>
Sison plagiarized the term "First Quarter Storm" from Mao Zedong's "January Storm" in January 1967, the uprising of his Red Guards in Shanghai that was the start of his "Great Cultural Revolution" that turned out to be a political and economic catastrophe for China.
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<p>
"Diliman Commune" on the other hand was copied from the "Shanghai People's Commune, set up also that month, which became that city's ad hoc government during the Cultural Revolution. Thus, in the Diliman Commune, slogans, even if totally irrelevant, of the Shanghai Commune were painted on the UP walls such as "Set up rebel Committees," "Dare to think, dare to act" and "To rebel is justified."
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<p>
The Diliman Commune, however triggered, only a ripple rather than a revolutionary flow on the scale of the FQS: after all many of its participants had already been recruited into the communist fronts or their sympathizers in the wake of the FQS.
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Sison and his core group - the Communist Party's top leadership called the executive committee of the central committee - started to de-romanticize those events and began separating propaganda from reality.
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<h3>
SONA
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<p>
The FQS, one of Sison's core group members lectured us, was triggered by sheer accident. The "moderate" National Union of Students of the Philippines had managed to mobilize the biggest number of students ever for a demonstration January 26 in front of Congress during Marcos' State of the Nation Address.
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Indeed, a witness to the event, Rodel Rodis, who migrated to the US in late 1971 and became a successful lawyer in San Francisco, wrote in a 2015 article in a local broadsheet:
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"Marcos and his First Lady, Imelda Marcos, were about to board the presidential limousine when someone hurled a crocodile papier-mâché [figure] in their direction. It missed its target, but it ignited a fury of retaliation by a phalanx of riot police who swung their rattan truncheons at the heads of students - moderates and radicals alike - unifying us in our common pain, as a stunned nation watched transfixed on live TV. (Those students weren't affiliated with the communists' youth organizations, and it's not clear if they deliberately threw the crocodile effigy or just slipped from their hands when they were abruptly blocked by the couple's cordon sanitaire. – RDT)
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"In the days that followed, indignation rallies denouncing police brutality were held in campuses throughout Metro Manila culminating in the January 30 March to Malacañang from Plaza Miranda through the Mendiola Bridge. By nightfall, thousands of students had surrounded the heavily fortified palace when suddenly the lights were shut off.
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<p>
The Metrocom riot police retreated into the night, replaced with battle-hardened army soldiers armed with high-powered Armalite rifles out to quell a rebellion. Before that long, dark bloody night was over, four students lay dead, scores paralyzed and hundreds maimed from gunshot wounds."
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<h3>
Outrage
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<p>
The Communist Party exploited the widespread outrage over police brutality, and with its experience since 1968 in organizing the youth and in many demonstrations - mainly at the US embassy in line with their view that imperialism was the root of the country's underdevelopment – it easily took leadership of that revolutionary flow. Its cadres undertook interventions that provoked further police brutality, and therefore bigger demonstrations.
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I was surprised that an article on the FQS in the Philippine version of Esquire magazine reported something very few people know:
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 "The protests weren't just events created by a few organizations and their members. KM struck up a sort of alliance with Manila's lumpen proletariat - the petty thieves and gang members from the city's poorest. KM would bring the fury while the lumpen would bring the fire, oftentimes literally."
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<p>
That is only partly true. I know since I was close to many of those "lumpen" who were the KM's little NPA of sorts, its muscle that guarded the KM's headquarters along Quezon Avenue, who in demonstrations provoked the police not just with rocks and Molotov cocktails. It was these "lumpen" who made a gang weapon called pillboxes - balls of firecracker powder mixed with nails that exploded upon impact - a weapon of the parliament of the streets. But these reformed thugs from the Tondo, Caloocan and Quezon City slums, had become true believers, converted into the cause by several cadres. Some were sons of former Huks and cadres of the old Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas. The fiery, popular speaker in demonstrations who uttered the vilest of words against Marcos and Imelda - Nonie Villanueva - was the "lumpen" idol.
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<p>
The so-called Diliman Commune was as much triggered by an accident, a tragedy really.  Makeshift, but really merely symbolic barricades, taking up less than half the road, were set up by the two main radical organizations on campus - the Student Cultural Association of the University of the Philippine and the UP-based Samahan ng Demokratikong Kabataan (which broke away from the Kabataang Makabayan in the late 1960s) along the UP's entrance to convince buses to join the transport strike that had been called to protest the increase in gasoline prices.
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From "First Quarter Storm" and "Diliman Commune" to the Plaza Miranda bombing