Originally posted by ginapeterb@Jun 17 2005, 06:01 PM
Pete's Letter from the Philippines
British Guy and Filipina wife taken to court for not standing when Lupang Hinirang played
At the time I was reading this story in last Sunday's copy of the Phil Star I was sitting in my nice little 3 seat ........
Take your Alien Certificate of Registration and stick it up where the sun dont shine Pal !!!!!
If anyone has any replies please feel free to make a objective reply, please guys no jokes or p...taking, this is serious subject.
Serious reply? Ok.
The Philippines is a country which has, mostly through its own ineptitude, incompetence, lack of education and rampant, unchecked corruption, managed to secure all of the disadvantages of democracy with absolutely NONE of the advantages.
For democracy to work, you need an educated, enfranchised and mature electorate who are advanced enough to absorb information and analyse it themselves, rather than relying on the local tribal warlord (for that is all a barangay captain is) to tell them how to think because they don't have the brains or capacity to think for themselves.
You need an electorate which is intelligent enough to realise that every individual act of corruption is actively working to bring the country down further, from the multi-million peso thefts of senators, down to the local provincial policeman who forces the illegal street vendor to give him 20 pesos a day or face being arrested.
In short, you need a population which is genuinely prepared to work hard to better themselves, rather than an electorate which seizes any opportunity to outdo their neighbour and inch up a rotting ladder which itself is falling downwards faster than anyone can climb up.
A huge generalisation I know - I'm referring not to individual filipinos, many of whom do not fit the above description but find themselves trapped and helpless within a system that embodies the above and therefore unable to break out.
In order to secure their stranglehold on power, the tiny, tiny elite of rich (and mostly corrupt) filipinos have stolen from their country, kept the electorate uneducated and then fed them pipe dreams and simplistic notions of the road to success to keep them in line, the way a farmer rounds up his cattle. For example, Gloria's urging the nation that "we all need to sacrifice" and within a few months (MONTHS???) everything will all be better and we'll be on a par with the US. Fernando Poe's cynical election campaign, where he had no policies, refused to take part in policitical discussions, but simply said he will "help the masses" was enough for him to get HALF the electorate voting for him!!! OVER 200 PEOPLE were killed during the election, and yet Gloria hailed it as a success!!
And when the masses do start getting a little restless, as cattle sometimes do, the elite whips them back into line with an unhealthy dose of nationalistic fervour. They conjour up an imaginary alien threat and tell the populace, who believe whatever they're told, that they all have to unite to fight this impending menace waiting to destroy them, and they have to therefore be "proud to be a filipino" and put the filipino above every one else. A filipina wife is expected to betray her foreign husband in favour of her filipino brethren, whether they are immediate family or not. It is a classic Orwellian technique for keeping the proles in line - telling the people they are fighting an imaginary war and they all need to unite or face destruction, thereby diverting attention away from the horrors the filipino elite is inflicting upon the 'cattle'.
And so, the national anthem, a turgid, depressingly dull pile of musical cow-..... with words telling the filipinos that they have freedom and have vanquished their enemies, is played out and filipinos will tell you they respect their anthem, but they won't tell you the reason why, and that is because they are MANDATED to respect it. Fear of arrest is not respect. And because the anthem tells them they have freedom, they believe it. They believe most of what the elite tells them, even though the exact opposite is staring them directly in the face. Estrada could stand there waist deep in dollars outside of a jeutung hideout with 5 signs pointing to his head labelled "Head of Jeutung" and a big van labelled "Joseph Estrada's Jeutung Money" and tell his supporters that he only wants to help the masses, and they will believe him!!!!! And still vote for him.
So what better way to distract the masses from the horror of their own poverty stricken situation...? Why, round all the cattle up to form a witch hunt and burn the evil foreigner at the stake who refused to be compelled to stand up for the national anthem of a country which has no doubt, from the minute he came off the plane, sought to rob him of his money whilst continually reminding him he is a foreigner and therefore inferior.
Respect is a two way street. My wife told me a few years back (after I refused to stand for the anthem in a cinema, of all places) that if you hear the anthem and don't stand, then you will be arrested. I told her that was rubbish, it's unenforceable, and then proceeded to whistle the national anthem in front of other filipinos and say "look, he's not standing, and he can hear the anthem, arrest him". But that was in my early days over there, before I had fully come to appreciate the machinations of the Philippine Thought Police (betray your neighbour in the hope of seeking some small favour from an official). A country which allows its taxi drivers and everyone else to steal from foreigners and is complicit in every form in all the schemes designed to part foreigners from their cash, a country which denies its own citizens the very freedoms democracy is supposed to protect, including the freedom of whether or not to stand for the national anthem, a country which systematically is destroying its own people simply to keep the elite in power, a country which willingly and knowingly sends its young girls off to Japan to be abused as sex slaves just so that it can live off the dollar remittances, and then OPPOSES measures by Japan to stop this dreadful practice for fear of losing those dollar remittances, a country which puts money above the lives of its own citizens, a country where parents will knowingly and willing send their children off to be prostitutes because they would rather see their children be abused instead of getting off their own lazy backsides and working to earn money themselves, a country where the bigotry and hatred of religion is allowed to dictate national policy, in complete defiance to the Constitution's requirement for the separation of church and state, and a country where the leaders use religion for their own cycnical purposes to keep the masses in line (how many times does Gloria tell the people 'we must all pray for our nation - she's supposed to be the leader of a 21st century republic, not some 2nd century backwards cult), a country which does all this to its people is not a country which I respect. In turn, I don't respect it's national anthem, whose very words guaranteeing freedom and independence are wholly anachronistic to the utter non-freedom and servitude, even slavery most filipinos find themselves in.
Which isn't to say I don't respect the filipino as an individual. I do. They continue to overcome the most dire, appalling and horrific living conditions and they still don't lose their will to live. They are denied basic freedoms, but still they hope for the future. A good many have, sadly, allowed their oppresive country to strip them of their own morals, to the point where they, too, think it is acceptable to expect, even demand handouts from foreigners, to rob them in taxis, to do everything they can to fool them into parting with their own hard earned money. But not all.
For a country so wrapped up in the Bible, they are probably the country most ignorant of its content. Pride is one of the seven deadly sins. National pride is still Pride. I have yet to decide whether it is a supreme irony or simply an accurate description that the head of the Catholic Church in the Philippines is called Cardinal Sin.
Sadly, the philippines is a country that is not learning from its own mistakes. From the near election of Poe, 3 years after Estrada got turfed out, to the continued alienation of foreigners and foreign investors, which in turn is sending the country down the sinkhole, the country doesn't look at what it is doing and say "my god, it's all going wrong, we need to think again", they simply blame the "foreign menace" for all their ills, carry on blindly as they already are, as if they are doing nothing wrong, and wait like sheep for the third coming of Jesus so that he can then save them all.
Sadly, in its current state, it's doomed. The odd hiccup like arresting a british guy for not standing to the national anthem is merely a sideshow to distract attention from the Titanic disaster getting ever closer.
I know its heartbreaking seeing these poor kids with no food or shoes on their feet, but IT AINT MY PROBLEM and giving them money only encourages the problem.
