WHILE the late President Fidel V. Ramos wasn’t the highest ranking officer in the military establishment that supported Ferdinand E. Marcos’ martial law when it was imposed — Armed Forces Chief of Staff Gen. Romeo Espino who served until 1981 was — he was widely viewed as its strongest pillar.

This was not only because he was Marcos’ second cousin, who under Filipino culture would profess undying loyalty to the strongman. Ramos was head for 14 years until 1985 (when he was appointed acting AFP chief of staff), of the powerful and centralized Philippine Constabulary (PC).

It was the PC which had the main task of going after “subversives,” which included all civilians that were plotting against Marcos. The other three service commands were tasked mainly to go after the Moro insurgents. It was the PC’s dreaded Constabulary Security Units in each region which captured most of the Communist Party’s leaders, in my case, with members of the Manila-Rizal regional committee, the 5th CSU.

I AM referring to Bajo de Masinloc, also called Scarborough Shoal, which has an area of 58 square miles, or 233 billion square inches. The Aquino 3rd regime lost it to China in 2016. To recover it must be the priority of the new president, his foreign relations’ principal goal, and I propose how.

But to do that he has first to clear his mind — and that of his officials — of the brainwashing by the Yellows and the US of our dispute with China.

Indeed, I was surprised President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. couldn’t help but resort to the kind of vacuous oratory President Aquino 3rd was famous for, even in his otherwise technocratic, no-nonsense State of the Nation Address last week.

Its depiction in the movie “Maid in Malacañang” — the first ever big-screen film not complying with the Yellow-created narratives and portraying Marcos as not the bloody dictator they depicted him — which has thrown the Yellows into a paroxysm of protest.

The first account validating the movie’s assertion is the report dated May 1986 by a subcommittee of the US 99th Congress armed services committee, titled “Investigation of the costs involved in moving former President Marcos an his party from Manila to Hawaii.”

TO say that President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. has his predecessor President Rodrigo Duterte’s huge shoes to fill in, is a big understatement.

Duterte’s approval ratings throughout his term have been the highest among his predecessors, ending at a remarkable 87 percent in June just before he stepped down from office, according to a recent Pulse Asia report. That news, I was shocked, appears to have been suppressed, reported only in a Facebook post, a demonstration of the continuing hold of the Yellows of media.

There is another aspect that emphasizes how phenomenal has been the Filipinos’ nearly universal support for their most recent president. Duterte’s 87 percent is the highest among nine “global” leaders of major countries in the world and four heads of Asean countries.

WHAT’s wrong with these guys? Claiming to be the “guardians of historical truth,” they pounced on a remark of actor Ella Cruz in an interview to promote a not-Yellow film “Maid in Malacañang,” about the Marcoses’ last days in power.

Cruz said: “History is like tsismis. It is filtered and dagdag na rin… Andoon na iyong idea, pero may mga bias pa rin talaga.” Historian Ambeth Ocampo, the famous collector of historical trivia, was livid and pontificated, in a Facebook post: “Don’t confuse history and chismis. History may have bias but it is based on fact, not opinion. Real History is about Truth, not lies, not fiction.”

This 26-year-old actor — I’m not sure if she even completed her college degree in communications arts at Angelicum — seems to have more insights into what history is than Ocampo, a PhD and professional historian, at least on the subject of the role of gossip and history.

INTRODUCED by the “kapihan” host as ” the deputy national security adviser designate,” Rommel Banlaoi said in the forum that the National Security Council will stop the practice of exposing certain organizations as communist fronts. The Reds cleverly call it “red-tagging” to make it seem wrong. The term however only means exposing Red fronts as such. What’s wrong with that?

That’s nuts. It is because of communist fronts that the communist insurgency has grown since 1968, and continues as a threat to our democracy. Without these fronts, the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) could not have recruited tens of thousands of our idealistic youth to their ranks, to die for a failed God.