Author: Admin

IT borders on the hilarious how the Yellows’ apologists undertake mental contortions or tear their hair out in exasperation to explain President Duterte’s overwhelming popular support, as demonstrated in his power to convince Filipinos in the recent elections to vote into office such candidates as Bong Go and Bato dela Rosa, unknown barely three years ago.

A trying-hard intellectual explained it away as reflecting the global drift toward authoritarianism, as if nations followed fads, and committing the logical fallacy of confusing the particular with the general. An academic has-been reduces it to the phenomenon of Dutertismo, as if giving something a name explains it. The head of the US-funded Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility (CMFR), like a grumpy old man unable to understand a teenager, condemns his countrymen, pontificating that they have the president they deserve.

While there are many factors explaining Duterte’s popularity, as is true for all phenomena, there are two main explanations.

THE Duterte government is the first ever post-EDSA administration to expose the Communist Party of the Philippines’ most successful strategy in its 50-year insurgency.

This strategy is its use of fronts and of organizations it had infiltrated and whose leadership it had captured. These are exploited not just to recruit people into their ranks but to disseminate its propaganda and to acquire finances, especially from gullible Western do-gooder NGOs and foundations.

In sharp contrast, past administrations, especially the two Aquino administrations, had very opportunistically coddled them, hoping to get their political and even voter-base support. Even media had hesitated to expose these Red fronts and puppet organizations for fear of being called Red-baiters, afraid that they could be targeted by the New People’s Army assassination teams.

ON the suggestion of a reader, I emailed a letter to the New York Times (reproduced in the latter part of this column). It is my comment on a piece which retired editor Vergel Santos managed to get the newspaper to publish recently. It contained so many lies about our country, at the rate of nearly one per paragraph, that I thought I had to do something about it.

The NYT has also distributed the piece internationally, and it has been published in several websites of global broadcast media, such as Al Jazeera.

The difficult position of our country, illustrated by Santos’ success in having his piece published, is the result of four factors.

THE so-called “Bikoy” black propaganda that maligned President Duterte and his family boomeranged against the Yellows, and contributed to voters’ anger toward their candidates, which led to their electoral rout.

It will also likely be another case that will help to finally bring the troublemaker Antonio Trillanes 4th to jail.

The episode though will likely be a boon for Bicolano businessmen Elizaldy Co and his partners in the Misibis Bay resort in Albay. Co last week filed libel charges against Google Philippines, the owner of YouTube and Facebook, and demanded P1.1 billion in damages under the country’s Cybercrime Act.

I’D certainly understand it if American journalists, many with a secret racism against non-whites, do so. The website Rappler’s Maria Ressa for instance is an American, who took on Filipino citizenship for convenience, later in life.

But it baffles me why a few Filipino journalists patently lie to the world to bash their own country, and to portray their countrymen as so stupid as to support President Duterte, or accuse media people here of being cowards for not defending the press which they claim is under siege by this government.

They are either bird-brained, or too egoistic to accept the reality that doesn’t conform to their political stances.

THE following is a letter I emailed yesterday to Shawn Crispin, the Southeast Asia correspondent of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), in reaction to his recent blog entitled, “Rappler-CIA plot claim is attempt to cut funding, Philippine journalists say.”

Dear Shawn,
I was surprised that in in your strident tirade against the present administration posted as a blog of the Committee to Protect Journalists, you referred to me as “ex-government spokesperson Rigoberto Tiglao.”

That would be as if a current news article referred to ABC News chief anchor George Stephanopoulos as “former Bill Clinton spokesman.” For chrissakes, I was the spokesman and then chief of staff of President Arroyo over 15 years ago!

You should know better as I was your colleague at the Far Eastern Economic Review, where I worked as a correspondent and then Manila Bureau Chief for 10 years. You even visited Manila once and we had drinks with my close friend, the late Rodney Tasker, who recruited you to the Review straight from college in Ohio.

You refer to me as such because that obviously helps your false narrative that the present government is out to suppress media. Continue reading

ONE of the first things the new Congress should do is to kick out of office Commission on Human Rights chairman Chito Gascon, one of the remaining hold-outs of the Yellow Cult in this government.

A Liberal Party stalwart, Gascon has been using his position to spread lies to the world about the country, in effect claiming that Filipinos are afraid, immoral, or stupid that they have allowed their government to undertake massive human rights abuses, and even applaud the Duterte regime.

While impeachment is unfortunately the only official way to remove Gascon since the CHR is a constitutional body, we cannot allow Gascon to spread for another three years his lies about the country. Instead of championing human rights in the Philippines, which is the CHR’s constitutionally assigned task, he has used his post to spread lies about the country to the world.

THE results of the recent elections, especially the total rejection in the Senate of the Yellow-Red candidates, demonstrated in such stark manner the huge chasm, the colossal difference in the worldview of the elite and the masses.

This is most dramatized in the case of President Duterte’s Ronald de la Rosa, his police chief who presided over his anti-drug war until April 2018, which the Yellow-Reds claim was the bloodiest first phase of that campaign. The Yellow-Reds have been crying to high heavens— as a New York-based comedian quoted Rappler’s lies—that the anti-drug war represents the country’s “worst human rights crisis.”

The Filipino masses, however, have roundly rejected that view. The 81 percent of Filipinos in the most recent survey applauding the Duterte government, is basically the same 81 percent supporting his anti-drug war, ignoring the allegations of extrajudicial killings.

The masses’ more concrete, undeniable support is the fact that 18 million Filipinos voted de la Rosa— unknown outside Davao just three years ago—to the Senate, the poster boy of that campaign, beating such household names as Aquino, Roxas, Estrada, and even the action star Lapid.

How do we explain such a stark contrast in the elite’s and masses’ views? Continue reading

OF course the Yellow ideologues, and those brainwashed in US neoliberal ideology will be aghast. But I dare propose the thesis that because of the massive popular support for President Duterte, his control of the Congress could be our version of Japan, Singapore and Malaysia’s decades-old single-party rule.

And such single-party dominance, with democratic mechanisms such as elections and government accountability, has been the political structure of countries which have been among East Asia’s miracle economies.

They were called “miracle economies” — or the East Asian “tigers” — in that they grew, as the title of Lee Kuan Yew’s book that narrated the case of Singapore put it, “From Third World to First” in just three decades, leap-frogging at least the century it took Western nations to become industrialized.

Since 1986, our thinking had been, because of the Yellow’s propaganda machines, that the choice is solely between one-man rule supported by the military, or “democracy.”

That is a false dichotomy. Japan, Singapore and Malaysia weren’t military dictatorships. They had regular elections for parliaments and local governments. But for decades their central governments were ruled by one party. Economic historians all agree that this was a crucial factor that enabled them to develop rapidly from Third to First World economies. Check these out: Continue reading

THE most important consequence of the elections the other day is this: The political landscape has been cleared for our country to finally take off, not just in terms of its economy and its nationhood.

The results of the senatorial contest prove without an iota of doubt that there is massive support for President Duterte. He has presided over the funeral of the elite-based Yellow Cult that had ruled the country for 18 years under Cory, Fidel Ramos and Aquino 3rd.

Outside of Davao, practically nobody knew who Duterte’s aide Christopher “Bong” Go was. Yet the senatorial contest shows him in the same league as two personalities — Cynthia Villar and Grace Poe — who are household names not just because they are incumbent senators. Villar’s husband ran for President in 2010, while Poe did so in 2016.

Filipinos simply took Duterte’s word that Go would be a good senator. He is basically Duterte’s trusted political proxy in the Senate.

Former police chief Rodolfo “Bato” dela Rosa was, after Duterte, the face of this administration’s war against illegal drugs. Its alleged “extrajudicial killings” had been the focus of the Yellows’ propaganda, supported by American media and the press outlets the US government and its proxies have been funding. De la Rosa was even fading from public consciousness, since he retired seven months ago — a long time in politics. Continue reading