Just about the best argument against the brain-dead calls for the Philippines to escalate the situation in the South China Sea—or the West Philippine Sea, if you want—that I’ve heard goes this way: If we can’t even evict squatters using valid court orders in our own cities, what makes you think we can remove the Chinese from their reclaimed military installations, now that we have a favorable verdict from a tribunal in The Hague?
The truth of the matter is, the orphaned Yellow faithful have gone on a jingoistic rampage on traditional and social media, calling stridently for aggressive counter-measures against the Chinese, now that we have in our possession a unanimous and resounding verdict from the UN’s Permanent Court of Arbitration. And these are the same Yellows who have betrayed their true political colors by accusing the newly installed Duterte administration of “going soft” on China and implementing a “policy of appeasement” over the sea dispute.
It is best to explode the potentially dangerous saber-rattling of the Yellows—online and in traditional media—before they do some real damage, much like you detonate abandoned land mines before they kill or maim non-combatants. Like most right-thinking Filipinos, the Yellows don’t really want war; their objective is simply to point out how much better the previous administration was, compared to the new one.
But they do get carried away in their desire to illustrate how great Noynoy Aquino is. Even if what he did was just to mouth the US line in the whole dispute, in exchange for a couple of decommissioned former Coast Guard cutters.
First, they started calling for a “Chexit,” as if Facebook posts and petitions would make the Chinese quake in their combat boots and abandon their newly formed “islands.” Then, as soon as the verdict came out, they published the list, complete with photographs, of the entire team that went to The Hague to file the depositions before the tribunal in 2013.
(People close to the case recounted how the usually staid and sparsely populated The Hague court got a full dose of the Filipino fiesta mentality when an entire battalion of government officials descended on it during the filing, which is ordinarily done only by lawyers. It was similar to the sight of entire jeepney-loads of people going to the airport to send off a Middle East-bound migrant, I’m told—except that those who accompanied the lawyers were really traveling on government expense and went along only to squeeze in a freebie tour of Europe.)
In the meantime, the Aquino orphans started attacking Duterte and his Foreign Affairs secretary, Perfecto Yasay, for being “pro-China” and even for not reacting nearly as sanguinely as they did to the issue and the eventual verdict. Yasay, in particular, was singled out for espousing the official government position that Manila will have to study the verdict and use bilateral diplomacy—as against, say, the vaunted might of our navy and air force—to resolve the dispute.
But when the Yellows began turning warlike as a natural progression of their paeans to Noynoy (a.k.a. “the architect of our great foreign policy,” as one washed-up singer declared), they may have crossed the line. It’s one thing, after all, to get a know-nothing slacker like Aquino elected to the highest office in the land and to inflict him on the nation for six years with the help of social media and quite another to go to war with the biggest military and economic power in the continent, simply because the same keyboard warriors say so.
The last thing any party in the dispute right now needs is escalation of the already-tense situation. And even the hawkish Yellows must understand that the PCA verdict in no way alters the actual balance of power in the region; we won a ruling but we will still not win a war.
Indeed, even publicly gloating about the verdict should remain a fad among the Yellow minority and not be construed as the national attitude. It doesn’t look good for Filipinos to laugh at our neighbors, especially since an international tribunal has already slapped them in the face; let the “decent” followers of Aquino engage in this unseemly pastime alone.
What the remaining followers of Aquino are doing is attempting to incite us to go to war with China, just to prove how great their idol is. And to this proposal—as to most proposals coming from that idolatrous political cult—the only sensible reaction should be: “Thanks, but you’ve done enough.”
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One proposal that does bear mentioning here calls for the Philippines to do its own reclaiming around one of the rocks or features that the PCA ruling says is clearly within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone. But with a twist: The reclaimed Philippines island will be transformed into an Alcatraz-like prison for the convicts currently in the New Bilibid Prison.
Priority accommodation will be given to the so-called “Bilibid 19” VIPs of the penitentiary, who will no longer be able to communicate by cellular telephone or enjoy Internet connections in their new prison in the middle of the sea. From time to time, just like she used to, Senator Leila de Lima should be allowed to “raid” the prison to see if the convicts have been stocking up on sex dolls and other contraband.
How about it, Manay Leila?
