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Thursday, March 28, 2024

Stop the weird

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I thought this administration would run out of weirdnesses with which to surprise the public, but surprise! They haven’t, and reality is becoming even more distorted each day.

Let’s look at two things for now.

First, the Senate investigation into fake news. After much blustering over the previous months about her qualifications for her position, Assistant Secretary for Communication Mocha Uson admitted to Senator Bam Aquino that she is a “blogger” and “not a journalist” which is why, she said, she never bothered to get the other side of the stories she was posting.

This boggles the discerning mind.

A person in her position of public service, particularly someone in the field of communication, has the responsibility of making sure that whatever she releases is without taint—it should be factual and fact-checked. Truth is the main criteria, because lies and evasions will be found out sooner or later.

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With what we are seeing now, the propagation of fake news coming from high above is creating and normalizing a culture of fake news, which, as Senator Grace Poe rightly pointed out, “cultivates a culture of lying.” People share fake news, and the lies affect their reasoning and decision-making.

Second, the attacks the Palace has made against Ombudsman Conchita Carpio-Morales for her investigations into the Duterte family’s alleged unexplained wealth. The Office of the Ombudsman is, like the Commission on Human Rights, established by the Constitution. The former is tasked with monitoring the three branches of government for political corruption.

According to a primer at the Ombudsman’s website, the office is “is principally tasked to investigate on its own or upon complaint by any person, in any form or manner, any act or omission of any public officer or employee, including those in government-owned or controlled corporations, which appears to be illegal, unjust, improper or inefficient.”

So if Carpio-Morales is investigating Senator Antonio Trillanes IV’s allegation that Duterte has P2 billion in his bank accounts, she is only doing her constitutional duty and any attacks on her are unseemly, improper—and suspicious. Why? For the reason ‘methinks thou doth protest too much…’

Not too long ago, these unspeakable things would have been unthinkable. No one could have gotten away with doing these things, because during the dark days of the dictator, one man and his cohorts did, and a return to that would have been unconscionable. We have seen all these things happen before.

Since then the country has spun 180 and is creeping towards fascism. Have we not learned our lesson in the intervening decades? Why does it seem we are back to where we started?

“’The bad news is,” says Timothy Snyder in ‘On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century’, “that the history of modern democracy is also one of decline and fall.” He points out several instances of “major democratic moments” in Europe: after World War I in 1918, after WW II in 1945, and after the end of communism in 1989. “Many of the democracies founded at these junctures failed…”

Our country had its major democratic moments with People Power and Edsa Dos. Just like these and some other democracies, our own is floundering. Snyder says that history shows us that “societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands.”

He believes fascism and communism are “responses to globalization: to the real and perceived inequalities it created, and the apparent helplessness of democracies in addressing them.”

Outcomes, however, are not inevitable. Learning from history, as Snyder recommends, will reveal patterns and allow us to make judgments. Hopefully, this mindfulness will keep us from making the same mistakes.

Fake news and the assault on constitutional bodies are part of fascist tactics to gain control and implement totalitarian conditions. We’ve seen this before and we are seeing it again. It is weird and strange, and not in a good way, because we thought we were done with this. But because we do not remember the past, we are condemned to repeat it, as George Santayana remarked.

And as we wallow in the decline of our democracy and its institutions, expect things to get weirder still. There are, after all, five more years of this to go.

Dr. Ortuoste is a California-based writer. FB: Jenny Ortuoste, Twitter: @jennyortuoste

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