It’s kind of nauseating to hear President Noynoy Aquino looking back to previous administrations, especially the Marcos Dictatorship, in a manner as though the crimes of these past regimes are not the very same crimes being committed by his very government. In an interview with Yahoo News, Noynoy particularly pinpoints the human rights violations perpetrated by the government of the late Dictator Marcos.
Well, this of course, this is Noynoy’s creative way of directing the minds of the people away from the realities of the prevailing mess he has made of this country. And for such creativity he expects us to reward him with a resounding “Wow! This is the kind of leader that has ever tried to employ the magic power of hypocrisy and lies and deceit with superb artistry!” O yes, I think there ought to be an international agency for such feats as this, in parallel prestige to the Nobel awards.
With regard to Marcos’ crimes, well, they have been archived in the museum of the people’s memory. And Marcos could not match the award-deserving hypocrisy, deception and lies of Noynoy. Marcos was open in his brutal inhuman attacks against the people. He did not pretend to be benevolent, he honestly declared his devilries. He did not hide his evil ways. And in fact, because of his open inhumanities, it was much much easier to fight Marcos because his was open tyranny.
Noynoy’s tyranny is much much more insidious! It is essentially “a stab in the back”—mercifully traitorous! That is what makes it more evil and hurtful!. His style of governance is a theatre tragedy. You are mesmerized by a song, while being made to walk dreamily via a dimly lit hallway [the very likelihood of his matuwid na daan], and enticingly led to a parlour where you are made to sip the nectary sweetness of death.
Well, for all these pretensions, hypocrisies and deceit done in artful style by Noynoy’s government, we are made to witness and or experience a different reality—a world alien to our concrete experience in our daily lives. This is a kind of cultural delusion that keeps the citizens in dreamlike state of existential experience, no different from what Rizal in exposing the tyranny of the Spaniards in his own time called “the opium of the people”.
One is tempted to ask: Is Noynoy living in a different Philippines—a Philippines that exists only in his fantasy— a kind of dreamland where everything is fine, its every citizen enjoying the fruits of social justice , and where there is freedom from hunger and want? Doesn’t he know he is the commander-in-chief of an armed forces who are cruelly abusing the people in the countryside, violating the human rights of the peasants and indigenous peoples on a daily basis? Are his eyes blindfolded and his ears plugged that he seems ignorant of these stark realities in his backyard?
Noynoy has no right to talk of human rights violations of any past regime if right before his very noses his own soldiers are doing these abuses with impunity. It is utterly nauseous for him to be babbling like an infant complaining of sins that his very own administration is committing every day against his own people.
Maybe , it would be good for President Noynoy to appoint his showgirl Kris as an ambassadress whose task is to guide her celebrity guests to the slums instead of elite restobars and plush tourist spots. That would be much nobler a program for Noynoy’s sister to undertake. In so doing she herself will be the eyes and ears of her brother President so that he will be appraised of the true situation in the country.
Another commendable act President Noynoy can do is to instruct OPAPP Secretary Teresita Deles to visit the guerrilla bases of the New People’s Army to see for herself the extent of the revolutionary victories and successes of the People’s War waged by the CPP-NPA. By that she will realize that it’s deserving for this political entity to be heard and for the government to officially invite CPP-NDF Chair Luis Jalandoni to the negotiating table. Instead of saying, “Why should we talk to them when they are always attacking the government?”
The apt response to that statement of Secretary Deles is ”And why not?” The CPP-NPA and the Government are locked in a kind of civil war. If the Moro people did not wage armed struggle, would the government listen to them? If they did not have an army, would they be invited to the negotiating table?
Without a revolutionary people’s army, the deprived, oppressed and exploited masses of the people of this country will never be listened to by a government who plays deaf and dumb and blind to the need for change in the social system that has failed to bring about development and squandered 70 years of its existence to uplift the people from dire poverty…
