"Now that they’re parents, aging activists ought to know better."
"Now that they’re parents, aging activists ought to know better."
Last week was another good one for the President. After skipping one quarter due to the pandemic, Pulse Asia came out with its 3rd quarter survey, which polled 91 percent trust AND approval ratings for Duterte.
I’m still amused by the emotional shock and mental gyrations with which Duterte’s critics greeted this confounding news. From expressing outright disbelief, to casting aspersions on Pulse’s methods, to blaming the “climate of fear,” government’s media machinery, even the people themselves for lacking the spine and intelligence to come up with the correct opinion of Duterte—que horror!
Also last week, the UN Human Rights Council passed a resolution by consensus—without even having to vote—that called for “technical assistance and capacity-building support for the country in its continued fulfilment of its international human rights obligations and commitments”.
To quote the clearly disappointed reporter from the yellow rag Inquirer, the resolution “fell far short of expectations for an actual investigation into state violence in the Philippines.” Again, I could hear the yellows gnashing their teeth and tearing their hair.
It’s quite possible that some kind of quid pro quo was in play between Du30’s General Assembly speech and the subsequent Human Rights Council resolution. But if that happened, for all those people who’d prefer to substitute our internal political and judicial processes with the meddling of international busybodies—hey, welcome to global realpolitik.
We can only hope that Maria Ressa and her fellow “fact-checkers” won’t try to take down the UN’s Facebook pages.
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In fact, Maria’s crowd has already succeeded in taking down our government’s anti-terrorism pages. As a commercial enterprise, Facebook is perfectly within its rights to practice yellow-directed self-censorship. Given its global ubiquity, there really is very little anyone—even governments, for that matter—can do about it.
But couldn’t we at least plead fair and equal treatment and ask them to also take down the FB pages of the armed communist movement in the country? The only defense FB might put up is that the communist pages aren’t examples of “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” But if you think that the CPP-NPA-NDF really isn’t coordinating a hundred (and counting) pages that provide a social media umbrella for violent uprising, then you’re smoking some mean weed.
Many of the government pages taken down by FB were linked to “Hands Off Our Children”, a movement started by the parents of children who were recruited from street activism into guerrilla violence.
It’s been argued that those kids were already—or about to reach– the age of maturity when recruited. This kind of denial of filial authority based on the arbitrary cross-over age of 18 years old—it bespeaks a degree of cynicism and ruthlessness that has no place in the culture we’ve been brought up in. Unfortunately for us, though, it may be working for the communists–and, of course, Facebook.
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I was minded of all this when I recently came across the online photos of nearly two dozen very young NPA rebels “before and after.”
Before—when they were still smiling, decked out in their graduation gowns, alive with all the beauty of youth. After—when they were slumped on the ground, bloodied and lifeless, snuffed out in one encounter or another.
Such grief, such a waste. But not, apparently, according to former Makabayan party-lister Teddy Casiño, who’s still rooting for his armed comrades in the hills. In a recent FB post, he intoned, “How can we denounce a movement that fights for national democracy and socialism? We may not be part of their armed struggle but we recognize and respect them as a revolutionary movement.”
Significantly, the Makabayan folks are no longer criticizing “red-tagging”; now they prefer to call it “terror-tagging.” After unintentionally revealing posts like Casiño’s, the shift in labelling is understandable.
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Half a century ago, one could live with the deaths of comrades because of what activists shared: a doomed idealism, disbelief that we would ever die, a hopeless longing for a perfectible humankind. But today, half a century later, we’ve become parents. Those dead kids in the photos are no longer our peers, but our children and grandchildren.
Having lived full lives, we now understand just how much can be irrevocably snatched away from a boy or girl who dies too young–a whole lifetime of happiness and fulfillment from building careers, finding love, starting families.
Nonetheless, people like Casiño, who has school-age kids of his own, will not be stayed. They’ve chosen instead to age gracelessly, closing their eyes to—and even praising—the tragedy of young deaths. There’s got to be a special circle in hell reserved for the likes of him—and for communities like Facebook who prevent the parents of those children from speaking out.
Readers can write me at gbolivar1952@yahoo.com.