First of all, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to all of you for coming today, especially to our guest of honor, Princess Nemenzo. This is such a wonderful gathering of people who have made a difference in different phases of my life—relatives, classmates, comrades, professional colleagues like Mary Racelis, friends and friends-who-have-been more=than-friends, intellectual and political sparring partners. All of you have contributed to making me what I am, mostly in positive, good ways. The bad in me I am solely responsible for and, hopefully, will be, to misquote Marc Antony, interred with my bones.

One of the folks who reviewed the memoirs advised her friends and followers to “read Walden’s memoirs and be tickled.” I was wondering which parts of the book tickled my good friend Aida Santos? Was it the dedication, which joined together such strange bedfellows as Princess and Dodong Nemenzo, Jose Maria Sison, and Hugo Chavez? Was it the passage, where the question was posed, did I have liaisons with married women, and I answered, “On this question, it is better to take the fifth, as the Americans say”? Was it that part where I said that in the midst of an intense sexual experience when I was in college, the words of the English mystic poet George Herbert came to mind and transformed a conjoining of the flesh into a mystical experience. Herbert wrote, “You must seat down, says Love, and taste my meat/So I did seat and eat.” And thus, I tell my readers, “I was initiated to the glorious pleasures of what the uptight English call ‘The French.’”

I did not write with the express intention of tickling anyone, but hey, I am sure that the director of Ateneo de Manila University Press, my good friend Prof Rica Remedios Santos, would not mind if you were to buy the book mainly to experience being tickled by its revelations. Let me just say that it’s not worth writing a memoir if all you’ll present is one side of yourself. To borrow a line from one of my favorite directors, Clint Eastwood, you have to write not only about the good but also about the bad and the ugly. And, if I might add, about the sexy as well, even at the risk of straddling...that grey zone between the politically correct and the politically incorrect when it comes to discussing matters of the flesh. Otherwise, like Bill Clinton, better known as “President BJ,” you’ll be presenting a saintly personality no one will believe and, moreover, would bore the reader to death. Besides, better you reveal your secrets than have a muckraking biographer disinter it from your bones when you’re long dead. At least you control the narrative.

One of those who read the book, the former Malaysian MP Charles Santiago, described me as an “accidental activist.” I would also say that I am a reluctant memorialist.

But first, on my being an accidental activist. Charles was referring to that morning in May 1970, when rushing to an early morning class at Princeton University, I stopped out of curiosity to watch a demonstration to close down a research unit funded by the US Defense Department. Suddenly, I found myself locked in arms with the students and some faculty members in a sit-down protest, then arrested by the “pigs,” our term for the police in that era. This took place during the invasion of Cambodia, which sparked massive demonstrations like those that greeted the genocide in Gaza in 2023-24. That incident began my career as a troublemaker, one that brought me to Chile during Salvador Allende’s presidency, and led to my becoming a cadre of the Communist Party of the Philippines, and later, a participant in the anti-globalization struggle and the movement against the US imperial enterprise in the Middle East—a career that my friend Jojo Abinales mischievously compared to that of Frida Kahlo’s rejected lover, Lev Bronstein, also known as Trotsky. As I wrote, when the war criminal finally, finally died at 100 in 2023, I owe my becoming an activist to Henry Kissinger and his invasion of Cambodia. So to all those that have not looked kindly on what I’ve done over the last 55 years, like the thieving Marcoses, the murderous Dutertes, the rotten IMF, and the sleazy World Bank, blame your buddy, Henry, who should have been sent to the International Criminal Court, even much earlier than Digong.

Let me now turn to my being a reluctant scribbler of a memoir. As I write in the first chapter, it took much prodding from friends before I started to write what eventually became Global Battlefields—in fact, it took seven years since my good friend the late eminent sociologist Erick Olin Wright first broached the idea in 2015 before I scribbled the first word. The reason is that while I was not without some interesting experiences as an individual, my consideration of my worth was tied up with movements that I was part of—the movement for national democracy and the broader movement for socialism. The struggle for socialism, the opening shot of which was the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917, was the epic, decades-long, battle for the soul of the 20^th century. The national democratic revolution captured the imagination and intense loyalty of my generation, which made it the spearhead of resistance to the Marcos regime before the EDSA Uprising. Both movements eventually derailed or lost their way at least in the short and medium term, and since my essential identity was bound up with them, I likewise considered myself a casualty, a victim rather than a maker of history, and thus one not worth a memoir.

But though reluctant, I did begin to write, at the gentle encouragement of my good friend Carol Hau, the distinguished professor of Southeast Asian studies at Kyoto University, and I began to realize that maybe I was too harsh in my judgment of my generation of activists, the so-called boomer generation that cut its political teeth in the protests against the Vietnam War in the 1960’s and 1970’s and spearheaded the fight against globalization and neoliberalism and against the US intervention in Iraq at the turn of the 21^st century. Our generation may not have brought about successful revolutions in the Philippines and globally, but, hey, our record wasn’t so bad.

Our efforts contributed centrally to the defeat of globalization and neoliberalism and to the weakening of the US adventure in the Middle East that ended in the panicky exit of a defeated empire in Afghanistan in 2021. And has not our generation led the way in the fight to save the planet, a movement that refused to buckle down in the face of Trump and the far right’s expressed intention of destroying it? Indeed, one way of viewing the rise of the far right in the US and globally, of Trump and his gang of yapping yahoos, is that they emerged in reaction to the initiatives of our generation. Their counterrevolution was in response to our revolution.

In the classic novel “All Quiet on the Western Front,” the narrator, one who has experienced the intense comradeship of the trenches during the First World War tells himself, “[M] en will not understand us. For the generation that grew up before us, though it has passed these years with us, already had a home and a calling; now it will return to its old occupations, and the war will be forgotten. And the generation that has grown up after us will be strange to us and push us aside. We will be superfluous even to ourselves, we will grow older, a few will adapt themselves, some others will merely submit, and most will be bewildered…the years will pass by and in the end we shall fall into ruin.”

I guess the main reason I ended up writing this memoir was to make sure that in contrast to the fate of the generation of Paul Baumer, the 20-year-old protagonist of “All Quiet on the Western Front,” the future will not forget our generation, what our generation, the rebel or revolutionary generation, was all about. We were a generation filled with the heady idealism of youth who reached for the stars, fell short, but still made a difference. To be sure, we made mistakes, but I will not be party to efforts on the part of those who are currently in power in our country and globally to erase what our generation did from historical memory. I want to make sure that when people refer to us as the Lost Generation or the generation that lost or lost its way, we will use that designation as a badge of honor, of our commitment to a revolution that may be late in coming, that may have been derailed, but is certain to arrive, though at some undetermined time and not without massive collective intervention by our generation and those generations after ours.

To the promoters of historical amnesia, I find no better answer than the defiant meditation of Kazuko, one of the characters in Osamu Dazai’s great novel, The Setting Sun, “The older and wiser heads have always described revolution and love to us as the most foolish and loathsome of human activities…Revolution and love are, in fact, the best, most pleasurable things in the world, and we realize it is precisely because they are so good that the older and wiser heads have spitefully fobbed on us their sour grapes of a lie. This I want to believe implicitly: Man was born for love and revolution.” Whatever was our political orientation or affiliation, whether national democrat like my friends Satur and Bobbie, social democrat like Ronald Llamas, popular democrat like Joel Rocamora, ecosocialist or post-capitalist like Red Constantino, Yeb Sano, Liddy Nacpil, and Tony LaVinia, or “liberation theologian” like Ed de la Torre and the man being buried in Rome at this very hour, our generation was in love with revolution and paid the price. (By the way, I stretched the borders of who belongs to my generation to include some much younger folks. I hope they won’t get offended since I am defining generation not so much by physical age but temperament.)

Whenever I visit memorials like our Bantayog ng mga Bayani or the somber Parque de Memoria in Buenos Aires, where some 30,000 names of the disappeared are etched in adjoining slabs of concrete about a kilometer long, I am reminded of how costly that love of revolution is. And how lucky I am to be still here, talking to you. I have had my scrapes with death, but I have never had to choose between life or death for my beliefs, as those whose names are written on the walls of the martyred at the Bantayog and the Parque de Memoria did. Seeing those thousands of names, I do not think that I have been a more consequential activist and public intellectual than others. Indeed, I think that in a world filled with contingency, I have merely been more lucky, having been spared the really, really tough situations and the really, really tough choices. So to the less lucky but more deserving revolutionaries, indeed to our whole magnificent but tragic generation, I dedicate this memoir.

We are part of the great Jamaican poet-singer Bob Marley’s generation of youth that reached for the sky, and some lines of one of the immortal songs he left us sum up in an unforgettable seven minutes our cohort’s remembrance of shared comradeship in the trenches and remind us that the best way to celebrate the memory of those who have gone before us is not to give up.

I remember when we used to sit
In the government yard in Trenchtown
Oba, observing the hypocrites
Mingle with the good people we meet
Good friends we have, oh good friends we’ve lost
Along the way
In this great future, you can’t forget your past
So dry your tears, I say

No, woman, no cry
No, woman, no cry
Little darlin’, don’t shed no tears
No, woman, no cry…

No, woman, no cry. It’s not over till it’s over. Di pa tapos ang boksing. Or as Ernesto Che Guevara, another lover of revolution put it, in terms more stark and dramatic: Our lives will not have been in vain “if our battle cry has reached even one receptive ear and another hand reaches out to take our arms.”

I will end this intervention by sharing an unusual experience related to those words of Che. I was writing the section on my experience in Chile in the memoir, when an incident, one long forgotten, pushed its way to the forefront of my consciousness. Sometime in November 1972, I was among hundreds outside the La Moneda Palace in Santiago waiting to have a glimpse of the country’s socialist president, Salvador Allende. When Allende’s motorcade passed by, I reached out, and among the dozens of outstretched hands, Allende shook mine. That memory somehow triggered my recollection of Che’s words: “Whenever death may surprise us, let it be welcome if our battle cry has reached even one receptive ear and another hand reaches out to take our arms.” Then it hit me. 51 years later. And a chill went through my spine. That handshake from a man who would be martyred less than a year later was not random. It was a passing of the torch.

Please don’t forget to pick up a copy of the book. Many of you are in it, hopefully portrayed in ways you approve of. But if you’re not, please don’t resort to filing a libel or cyberlibel charge. I already have my hands full going to Sub-tropical Davao almost every month for my trial in the case of “Republic of the Philippines versus Walden Bello” that the camp of our beloved Vice President is pursuing against yours truly. Instead, be a good sport, and just enjoy the book, if only, as Aida Santos says, to be tickled.

Walden Bello