Photo“>Photo courtesy of Popular Bookstore. In late March, Popular Bookstore in Quezon City and Solidaridad Bookshop in Manila City, two independent bookshops in the Philippines’ National Capital Region, became the latest targets of red-tagging: the practice of labeling individuals and organizations as radical, left-leaning communists, thereby framing them as subversive or terroristic to delegitimize and justify violence against them. Red-tagging has a long history in the Philippines. Popular Bookstore’s signage and façade were vandalized with the words “NPA terorista” on March 22, 2022. This slogan refers to the armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), the New People’s Army, which was designated a terrorist group by the Rodrigo Duterte government. The Solidaridad storefront was likewise spray-painted red on the morning of the same day. A wide array of academics, booksellers, publishers, and civil society organizations have denounced the red-tagging of the two independent bookstores as an attack on free speech and academic freedom. For Academics Unite for Democracy and Human Rights, an alliance of Filipino teachers, researchers, school administrators, and other education workers, it is no surprise that enemies of critical thinking and dissenting ideas should target one of the few remaining bookstores in the Philippines selling titles with intellectual substance and other hard-to-find books: Bookstore shelves are snapshots of how a nation thinks at every moment of its history. Bookstores with shelves empty of books or filled only with books containing a single idea or no ideas whatsoever reflect a nation's deep intellectual poverty. #HandsOffPopularBookstore pic.twitter.com/YnjTXVyguP — k. (@OneDividesToTwo) March 23, 2022 Founded shortly after the end of World War II, Popular Bookstore is no stranger to red-tagging—its owners were victims of anti-communist witch hunts in the 1950s for selling Marxist books. Solidaridad, founded by novelist and national artist F. Sionil Jose in 1957, is a long-time favorite haunt of writers, artists, and freethinkers in the nation's capital. Only those who fear knowledge and learning are threatened by bookstores like Popular Bookstore and Solidaridad. This comes after the purging of books in libraries in the #Philippines by the NTF-ELCAC. Photos by Popular Bookstore and Joel Pablo Salud pic.twitter.com/PXtqsbf8HD — Tinay Palabay (@TinayPalabay) March 23, 2022 The Congress of Teachers/Educators for Nationalism and Democracy (CONTEND), an organization of progressive faculty and academic employees at the University of the Philippines, points fingers at the Duterte government’s National Task Force to End the Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) as the only possible culprit behind the red-tagging of the bookshops. Starting in September 2021, NTF-ELCAC and the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) initiated the removal of so-called “subversive” books from libraries in several state-run universities and colleges. The books targeted include documents on the peace negotiations with the CPP’s political arm, the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP), as well as other titles on the communist insurgency and Marxism in the Philippines. Red-tagging had been a regular feature of Philippine politics since the period of American colonial rule in the early 20th century. American colonizers and local elites instilled anti-communist ideology to suppress the spread of what they perceived as a major threat to American-style capitalism and contain its power to mobilize workers and farmers in a society with extreme class divides. One of the early cases of red-tagging in the country occurred in 1927 with the deportation of Tan Malaka, an Indonesian independence fighter and leader of the PKI, the Indonesian Communist Party, who was in and out of the Philippines to escape Dutch repression and help organize Filipino workers. Because of his socialist convictions, Malaka was painted by US officials as a danger to the colony’s security and variously called a “Javanese Red” and a “Bolshevik Agent” in the newspapers of the day. Inspired by the 1917 Russian Revolution, radical unionists led by Crisanto Evangelista founded the old Communist Party of the Philippine Islands (PKP) in 1930 to advance workers’ rights and welfare and work for immediate independence from American rule. Just a year into PKP’s existence, the party was illegalized, and its leaders and members were arrested in a crackdown by colonial authorities.