Category: Manila Times Columns

EACH year since Benigno Aquino 3rd stepped down from power, the commemoration of his father’s death is becoming more and more pathetic, with the crowd the other day at Ninoy’s tomb not even reaching a hundred.

This holiday really should be canceled, if only to spare Ninoy and his family the storm of insults — e.g., “Happy traitor’s day,” “Ninoy died. So what?” — he gets in social media every August 21.

What demonstrated this year that the Yellow Cult is all but extinct is that no high Liberal Party leader and others who profited from Noynoy’s rule were there: no Franklin Drilon, no Francis Pangilinan, no Edsel Lagman, no Risa Hontiveros. Antonio Trillanes 4th, a Nacionalista was there, to his credit, in gratitude to the Yellows for making him, a bungling coup leader, a senator for 12 years.

TODAY is a special non-working holiday, officially “Ninoy Aquino Day” as decreed by Republic Act 9256, signed into law in February 2004 by President Arroyo, when Speaker Jose de Venecia and Senate President Franklin Drilon headed Congress.

Curiously, the proclamation did not call Aquino a “hero,” nor did it explain why a holiday was being declared in his name. The terse six-paragraph text merely said it was a holiday “in order to commemorate the death anniversary of former senator Benigno “Ninoy” S. Aquino Jr.” That he is a hero is an interpretation from the fact that only two other persons have holidays declared in their honor, Jose Rizal and Andres Bonifacio, who were declared heroes in the same legislation that enacted their holidays.

Peruse the following facts and decide for yourself if you think Aquino is a national hero.

The superstar of the Liberal Party tipped to win against Marcos in the forthcoming 1973 elections, Ninoy was arrested in the hours after martial law was declared. He was found guilty of subversion and murder by a military court in 1977, together with New People’s Army (NPA) leaders “Kumander Dante” and Victor Corpuz.

In May 1980, Ninoy had a life-threatening heart attack. He refused to be put under the knife at the Philippine Heart Center, built by the Marcos regime in 1975, and Asia’s first specialized center for cardiac surgery, endorsed by the best cardiac surgeons in the world.

Aquino claimed that since it was a government hospital, Marcos could easily order its doctors to kill him, under the guise of a botched operation. While that was a slap on the face of the Filipino surgeons at the center, it was a clever move on Aquino’s part, for him to escape the country. Marcos feared that if Aquino died of a heart attack in prison, it would be blamed on him. That would have seriously undermined the semblance of stability that he had built after the 1978 interim Batasan Pambansa elections, in which the opposition leader ran and lost.

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SOCIAL media was abuzz in the past several days, with netizens cheering on as Krizette Laureta Chu, an ordinary but very active and audacious blogger, take on — and shame — the leftist Bayan Muna leader Teodoro Casiño, a three-term party-list congressman, for threatening her with a libel suit.

Casiño claimed that Chu’s posting of a photo in her timeline (that went viral) of him and his son (his face blocked out of course) in a La Salle school activity was a violation of their right to privacy.

Chu had posted the photo to show the hypocrisy of the Left who recruit — brainwash, really — students from schools that cater mostly to the lower middle class to join the New People’s Army and die in some jungle, while their leaders like Casiño put their children in expensive schools like La Salle, cloistered from the real world.

READ on, and I guarantee you’ll be shocked and angry at the sanctimonious European and US NGOs and media’s lies about our country and its President.

A few weeks ago, Global Witness, a UK-based entity purportedly championing issues, came out with its 2018 report, published like an expensive magazine with dramatic color photographs and graphs, and melodramatically titled Enemies of the State.

It claimed that last year, with “30 environmentalists” killed by state forces, the Philippines was the “world’s deadliest country for defenders of their land or the environment.” Global Witness is mainly funded by ideological imperialists, the tycoons George Soros and Pierre Omidyar. The two, through North Base Media and Omidyar Network, have also have been the main foreign investors in the stridently anti-Duterte website rappler.com.

Ours is the deadliest country, the report claimed, since Brazil — the country notorious for the killing of those resisting logging by businesses of its Amazon rainforest — had only 20 such deaths, Columbia 24, and India 23.

Western and local Yellow media bannered the claims, without taking an iota of effort to validate them. The New York Times even had a brutal piece by its editorial board that had a devious wordsmith’s trick, if you can detect it: “ In 2018, 164 defenders of the land and environment were killed, with the Philippines of the brutal President Rodrigo Duterte taking over from Brazil as the deadliest place to resist rapacious developers and governments.”* This indeed is another confirmation that Western media, especially those in the US, have long lost their professionalism and objectivity.

Fabrication
The Global Witness report on the Philippines is such a colossal fabrication.

To pretend that its findings are based on data, Global Witness listed the names of the 164 killed in the 20 countries it reported on. I checked each and every “victim” in the Philippines it listed.

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I FIND it astonishing that commentators with doctorates in political science who oppose the revival of mandatory college-based military training (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps or ROTC), miss one of the most important reasons why this is necessary.

This is the fact that one of the most essential features of sovereign states — the most important social organization in this stage of humanity’s history — is their military. There is no state that doesn’t have a military (except perhaps the Vatican). It’s a no-brainer that the strongest states in the world are those with the strongest military forces. Even the orthodox political science definition of a state is that it is the only entity within a defined territory which has the legitimate use of force — which the military and its cousin the police exercises.

A state’s military force does not just tell the world that its sovereignty is to be respected, thereby strengthening its citizens’ patriotism, and pride in it. Through military service, citizens of one country get to realize deep in their hearts and minds that they are members of a community called the nation-state, which is so important that they can be called to risk their life for it as soldiers. The ROTC is in fact the “lite” version of military conscription, the least demanding way of requiring a citizen to contribute to the nation. Continue reading

IT was indeed heart-wrenching to hear mothers tearfully relating at a Senate hearing, how their teenage daughters — for chrissake! daughters — abandoned their homes and schools as they were recruited to become full-time cadres of Anakbayan which, I will mince no words, is one of the fronts of the Communist Party of the Philippines.

To be honest, I am astonished at how the communists are still able to recruit students – by definition an educated, thinking sector – into their ranks, most likely to lose their lives for a useless cause, and be buried in unmarked graves in some jungle.

Maybe it’s self-serving, but in my time, there were so many things that would have easily convinced anyone to join the Communist Party. There was the global student movement against the “Establishment.” There was the Vietnam war which made “US imperialism” so real. Philippine elites were in deadly combat, so that two villages in the North were even ruthlessly burned to the ground because they didn’t vote for one gubernatorial candidate.

The Communist Party even succeeded in nearly pushing things to breaking point when it bombed with four grenades the Liberal Party’s miting de avance in 1971. Thousands of students marched to lay siege to Malacañang, with several killed or wounded by brutal “fascist police.” The biggest country in the world, China, was at the height of its Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which purportedly would make it the beacon for socialist revolutions worldwide. And of course, there was Che Guevara, of whom countless youths fancied themselves to be the reincarnation of.

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THE National Endowment For Democracy (NED), accused of being a venue for Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) propaganda and destabilization operations in Eastern Europe and most recently in Hong Kong, has added another Internet news site here to its stable of such outfits critical of the Duterte regime.

In what is practically an up-yours message to Duterte, the internet news site is based in Davao City itself, and purportedly covers mainly Mindanao: MindaNews.com.

Just two years ago MindaNews was a bare-bones internet site with very little following. Especially this year, it has surged as a full-blown website, obviously patterned after another NED-financed outfit Rappler.com, after that controversial US funder gave it $70,000 (P4 million in 2017 and 2018), and reportedly another $35,000 for this year. MindaNews doesn’t disclose this very important information in its website.

NED actually is just the implementing agency, with the funds provided by the US government’s State Department through its arm, the Agency for International Development, as reported in the latter’s website.

While purportedly a non-partisan news outfit (as Rappler also claims), MindaNews spins news reports into anti-Duterte propaganda, with its opinion writers clearly having a anti-government stance. (“Another extension of martial law in Mindanao is an abuse of power.”)

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THE National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a CIA-linked outfit, has been helping the opposition groups in Hong Kong that have been leading the massive demonstrations there in the past week, according to several accounts critical of the protest movement.

Yep, this is the same destabilizer now in Hong Kong, the NED, which has extended about P100 million in funds to vociferous anti-Duterte media outfits — the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, Rappler, Vera Files and the Center for Media Freedom and Democracy.

None of these outfits have denied these reports since I reported* it first in 2017 and subsequently, nor have they explained how and why their conscience allows them to receive money from a foreign power, known to have controlled our nation in the past and strives to continue to do so.

An article in the South China Morning Post (SCMP) the other day claimed that groups involved in the protests have received significant funding from the NED, “a CIA soft-power cut-out that has played a critical role in innumerable US regime-change operations.”

Solidarity Center
The report claimed that the NED has four main branches, at least two of which are active in Hong Kong: the Solidarity Center and National Democratic Institute.

“The latter has been active in Hong Kong since 1997, and NED funding for Hong Kong-based groups has been consistent, “ Louisa Greve, NED’s vice president of programs for Asia, Middle East and North Africa, was quoted as saying.

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PRESIDENT Duterte’s critics claim that his popularity and political acumen, as well as his allies’ overwhelming victory in the May elections, have made him so powerful that he is on the way to becoming an absolute ruler.

Yet in the case of the huge Coconut Industry Investment Fund-Oil Mills Group (CIIF-OMG), which just five years ago had revenues from its coconut oil milling operations of over P14 billion, its board of directors has managed to defy his orders.

A year ago, five of the group’s eight directors nearly got to stop the firm’s operations when they resigned and got all the key officers to go on mass leave, to protest Duterte’s nomination of a Davaoeño, one Rehan Lao. Duterte bent over backwards, and rescinded Lao’s appointment.

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LAWYERS Jose Manuel Diokno and Andre Palacios claimed they were counsels for 20 Palawan and Zambales fishermen when they filed a writ of kalikasan with the Supreme Court to compel government agencies to rehabilitate and protect the West Philippine Sea from “environmental damage due to poaching and other illegal activities being undertaken by Chinese nationals.”

It was all a lie, a total fraud. The fishermen, in very detailed sworn testimonies, said they knew nothing about such a suit, and were shocked when they read in the newspapers or were told by their neighbors that they were involved in the high-profile case suing the government.

Diokno and his accomplices are guilty of claiming in a court of law to represent people who did not authorize them to do so. What Diokno and his gang did is a patent violation of Section 27 of the Rules of Court No. 138, punishable by disbarment: “A member of the bar may be removed or suspended from his office as attorney by the Supreme Court for…for willfully appearing as an attorney for a party to a case without authority to do so.”

But not only that. These lawyers violated Article 171 of the Revised Penal Code, which penalizes falsification. Diokno and his gang fraudulently claimed in the petition before the high court that the fishermen were filing the kalikasan suit, and they attributed to the latter statements that they had not made.

This is an open-and-shut case, these lawyers are fraudsters, con men who lied to the Supreme Court. The Solicitor General wouldn’t be doing his job if he doesn’t pursue criminal and disbarment cases against Diokno and his gang.

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