ABSTRACT
The Mindanao purge gave chilling grist to government and military propaganda mills, which suggested that the fratricidal killings were a portent of things to come should the New People's Army ever come to power. The Communist Party of the Philippines has never concealed its goal of altering Philippine society in a most radical fashion. The initial draft of the Programme for a People's Democratic Revolution was a shrill blueprint for Maoist revolution. The National Democratic Front (NDF) program states that upon victory a "political consultative conference" of all revolutionary forces would be convened to form a council that would govern the country for a "short but reasonable span of time." In the late 1980s, the NDF appeared to be taking genuine steps to avoid the type of debilitating outflow of capital and people that had characterized the revolutions of China, Vietnam, and Cambodia.
