By RAFAEL A.L. AQUINO
In his tribute to Lean Alejandro, Jojo Abinales observed that UP was Lean's "first love and mistress." While such a statement could easily be misconstrued by the narrow-minded as an academic's sectarianism, it also happens to be accurate.
Toward the end of our term in the 1981-1982 University Student Council, Lean received several earnest invitations to serve in the larger off-campus protest movement. He needed no convincing that his services were indeed needed. But still he agonized over the prospect of leaving Diliman. He would repeatedly assert that he would gladly work as clerk, typist, and janitor in either the Third World Studies Center or the Main Library, if only to be near the books and journals he so dearly loved.
Even as Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (BAYAN) Secretary General, whenever he met friends from his UP days, Lean would enthusiastically reminisce about his life in academe. Even amid the worries of national campaigns, he never tired of propounding new ideas on UP and the student movement.
The richness and dynamism of the man's activism was firmly anchored on a thorough understanding of the interaction of political struggle and intellectual clarification. By his readiness to listen and learn, observe and doubt, he glowingly displayed the essential attributes of the authentic intellectual. His was a mind unfettered by dogma and orthodox categories. His worldview was in a constant state of approximating the infinite complexities of reality, as he processed his own experiences in trying to change that reality. He had no patience for the sanctimonious, ex cathedra pronouncements of others—reactionaries or progressives. He could not abide by the arrogance of most activists which he derided as a pathetic mask for intellectual sloth, ideological bankruptcy, political incompetence and personal insecurity
Lean's intellectualism served him well in his profession as a political activist. As early as 1981, he had the consistent ability to reduce a complex situation to its essential contradictions and to discern the ways and means of resolving the same in our favor. His timing and political decisions, which frequently drew intense opposition from his colleagues, were almost invariably vindicated by subsequent events. And on those occasions he was proven in error, he was the first to abstract the lessons from his mistake.
In every move he made, Lean was guided by his own visions. These visions in turn, were the product of a continuing social critique made more potent by an assiduously cultivated scholarship and intellectual rigor.
Lean envisioned a student movement which represented not only a political force but also a distinct ideological current; an activist trend existing not in the peripheries, but in the mainstream of intellectual discourse in UP: a movement of activists able to assert the superiority of its ideas in an arena of clashing ideologies. The intellectualization of the student movement was, to him, the precondition for UP's continuing role as social critic, and its future as training ground for a new political leadership.
As what happens only too often when men like Lean pass away, there will be those who shall come forward claiming to be the inheritors of his legacy. They shall constantly invoke ideas proposed by Lean isolated from the intellectual vitality that produced these ideas to justify their own doctrine-bound mediocrity. As the theoretical inflexibility of these false prophets, who would deify Lean and his words, desecrates his example of radical intellectualism, one must be careful.
For like all of us, Lean was a product of his time, of his particular ideas about particular moments. To consider these as universal truisms is to miss the point. The point is that Lean would have insisted that his monument be the creation of a new tradition of intellectual clarification in the UP student movement.
The introductory remarks of Lean in our last summing-up session in the Student Council could have been addressed to UP activists in general. They best encapsulated the quintessence of Lean Alejandro's success: "As circumstances become more involved, and as the confrontation becomes more intense, the need for the activist to distance himself from, and to reflect upon, that reality becomes even more urgent. The activist who discards study and reflection cannot act to change reality, but is instead powerless to prevent himself from being engulfed by that reality.” ●
Published in print in the Collegian’s October 30, 1987 issue. Rafael A.L. Aquino, a graduate of UP College of Law, is a partner of law firm Santos Parungao Aquino and a member of the Free Legal Assistance Group (FLAG).
Lean Alejandro wrote features for the Collegian and established the Center for Nationalist Studies (CNS) in 1983. He served as chairperson of the University Student Council, from 1983 to 1984, and in 1985 became the first secretary-general of Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (BAYAN). On September 19, 1987, Alejandro was assassinated on his way to the Bayan office in Rosal St. in Cubao, after a press conference at the National Press Club where he had called for a nationwide strike against the military. A van intercepted his car, rolled down the driver's window, and gunned Alejandro down with a single shot. His death triggered widespread condemnation of extrajudicial killings during Corazon Aquino’s presidency.
