HUMAN RIGHTS AGOG IN BARBARITIES & MADNESS

Erle Frayne D. Argonza

Pleasant day to you all!

The Maoists in Manila have just released the update news that an activist (Left-leaning) is killed every week during the incumbency of President Aquino. Maoists constitute the largest Left group in the country, with an organized force large enough to participate in electoral contests and win legislative posts.

That report is surely a very revealing fact. Not only activists, but media men are also the target of summary executions and assassinations in this country, supposedly a bastion of free press in Asia.

Just recently, a topnotch botanist, Leonardo Co, was sprayed with automatic rifle bullets while conducting research on field, killing him and two of his associates. The army unit that is subject of investigation as culprits claimed that the research team was caught in a crossfire between state and rebel forces.

Human rights constitute a totality of entitlements that we have won after so many hard struggles. So much blood has been sacrificed just to make our world a livable one, blood poured to erect the edifices of prosperity, good working environments, balanced ecology, and exercise of our basic freedoms.

During the regime of the previous president Arroyo, an economist with a doctorate among her credentials, hundreds of human rights-related deaths, largely through summary executions by army and police forces, were recorded. No less than the United Nations Commission on Human Rights sent a team to investigate the human rights situation here, with the findings clearly indicating a bad situation for human rights.

Just recently, another team of experts, this time from the Human Rights Watch, did the investigations about the same theme, with focus on those committed in Mindanao. The feudal-fascistic Ampatuan family became the most focal subject of the research, with findings of gory stories of murders committed by Ampatuan politicians blindly intoxicated with power, using state paramilitary forces to commit heinous crimes.

It surely takes time for civility to take shape everywhere else in our planet. Even the bastions of democracy such as the Philippines fail in the tests of indicating successes in building human rights. In the USA, martial law was almost declared during the Bush era, a cryptic act that could have seen millions of Americans jailed and hundreds of thousands exterminated in concentration camps.

In Europe we are witness to the massive prejudices against immigrants, with Muslims appearing to be the key target of slanders and employment discriminations. Sarkozy expelled Romanian Gypsies just a few months ago, and he seems to watch with glee as his economy burns down like hell.

Power assymetries that we though would disappear with the advent of modernity, keep on being recycled in new forms. Rationality—authentic reason characteristic of authentic persons—is fading and giving way to Madness, as lamented by the contemporary philosophers.

Human right is synonymous to civilization, and the full respect of human rights can only happen in a society of rationality, wisdom, and universal love. Such a society operates on the culture of dialogue, the respect for differences, recognition of talents and competencies, and the essential respect for one’s humanity.

Sadly, such a society is not around yet, even as we need to do colossal spade works to build it. I still recall the likes of Jurgen Habermas, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse pontificate about the ‘sane society’, the ideal society that is rational, full of compassion (loving behavior), and productive. I resonate well with the minds of these thinkers who contended that no matter how bad the situation is, hope is there in building that culture of civility in a ‘sane society’.

Such a dream of building a future world can be done in a non-exclusionary way. Let us not tire in doing our spade works to build it.

[Philippines, 02 December 2010]

[See: IKONOKLAST: http://erleargonza.blogspot.com,

UNLADTAU: https://unladtau.wordpress.com,

COSMICBUHAY: http://cosmicbuhay.blogspot.com,

BRIGHTWORLD: http://erlefraynebrightworld.wordpress.com, ARTBLOG: http://erleargonza.wordpress.com,

ARGONZAPOEM: http://argonzapoem.blogspot.com]

VILLAR-BASHING: PHILISTINE JOURNALISM OF OLIGARCHIC MEDIA

VILLAR-BASHING: PHILISTINE JOURNALISM OF OLIGARCHIC MEDIA

Prof. Erle Frayne D. Argonza
University of the Philippines

Good day!

It is Holy Thursday as I wrote this piece. I normally put a halt to all of my analytical engagements on this sanctified day, but this time I decided to take some minutes to scribble my thoughts about the current Manny Villar-bashing coming from various quarters, particularly from media personalities (opinion writers, broadcast journalists).

I will zero in on those journalists who are in the employ of big tv/broadcast networks and major news dailies. The cacophony of malicious heraldries from these intellectual prostitutes (if you can even regard them as ‘intellectual’ at all) had reached a crescendo that had magnified confusion in the voters’ mind.

Resorting to the typical emotionalist discourse and therefore short-circuiting the rational-analytic faculties of information consumers, the malicious attacks on the person of Sen. Villar, which do not the least contain substance worth our wise reflection, have altogether triggered a mass panic. The decline in the latest survey rating of Villar by 6% shows how little do people see the underlying motives behind the black propaganda peddled by the same cabal whose words they followed.

Let it be recognized, first of all, that these journalists, no matter how mentally adroit they appear to be, are in the payroll of oligarchic media. The mega-hoarding greedy oligarchs have their own respective pockets to fatten, and if the malicious, sensationalizing, irrational heraldries from the Villar-bashing journalists would yield enormous sums for the fat hoarders, then let there be more such destructive onslaughts from the journalistic cretins.

Too few are those journalists who would be considered informative, balanced, and exuding wisdom in their countenance, for such true thinkers reside outside the media circuits. Not even those so-called multi-awarded journalists would count among the truly erudite, awarded as they are only because they were able to whet the appetites of the judges who, likewise, are in the payroll of oligarchic institutions, while some other judges are private pals of writers and creative ‘artists’ who are happy enough to make cronies win.

If there is any attribution I can offer to the oligarchic media for now, it is this: that philistine journalism had taken the upper hand. This eventuality marks the fragmented state of the mind shapers (media), even as they are contributory to the fragmentation of the human psyche as a whole.

Mental cretins who are in the employ of the media moguls, no matter how erudite they may pretend to be, are among the harbingers of a Dark Age where the flames of reason have simply snapped off. These same philistines have elevated the Primal to a high level of discourse, thus further eroding the rational-analytical that has been subordinated tragically to the greedy ends of oligarchic hoarders.

There is nothing to gain from the articulations of those quack intelligentsia, but only great things to lose if one would yield to their contorted peregrinations. The more that a reader or audience would succumb to the seductions of the philistine pen & tongue, the more that his/her reason recedes into atrophied state, the more mis-comprehension of the political dimension of life.

Only the fecal-minded idiots would succumb to such dis-informative articulations that only serve to mask the greedy pursuits of the oligarchs who have been openly supporting the equally oligarchic candidate Noynoy Aquino. The nation shall grieve all the more as the masking of the true reality—that global oligarchs are mounting economic, political, covert offensives to destroy the Philippines—will be reinforced in no small measure by the philistine journalists and their oligarchic employers.

To my fellow Filipinos, beware of these philistine journalists and expose their falsehoods in diverse venues. Stand up and together we shall smote the dragons of oligarchism and poverty, end an eon of colonial history, and proclaim a truly free nation. Stand up for the nation, and a stronger nation means the installation of a nationalist leadership and patriotic political coalition.

We shall overcome!

[Philippines, 01 April 2010. See: https://unladtau.wordpress.com, http://erleargonza.blogspot.com ]