Category: History

The @1Sambayan June 12 fiasco was a validation of Duterte and a vindication of Marcos

June 13, 2021 Ramon Ortoll 3 Comments

I was thinking of an epitaph piece for 1Sampayan yesterday after that fiasco of a launch. It seems the universe read my thoughts and here’s Randy David with his weekly Inquirer column. In today’s “Making the republic work”, David laments how “supposedly responsible and educated Filipinos” find appealing the idea “that a Sara Duterte-Rodrigo Duterte…

History, Politics

35 years of democracy has not freed Filipinos from entrenched oligarchic feudal rule

June 1, 2021 Ramon Ortoll 3 Comments

Richard Javad Heydarian has a fondness for historical context in relation to present-day situations. In his Inquirer piece “Why do we love dictators?” he laments how, “across the postcolonial world, where the pandemic has been most devastating, it seems many people can’t still shake off their collective fascination with despots, even the most tragically disastrous…

History, Society

Cory Aquino and the dumbing down of Philippine Media the root cause of decline in quality of Filipino legislators

May 31, 2021 Ramon Ortoll 1 Comment

Harry Roque’s law partner Joel Ruiz Butuyan complains about the quality of Senators but doesn’t put the finer on who should be blamed. Butuyan writes in his Inquirer column “Comparing past and present senators” today of “the faces of senators of the past renowned for their brilliance, juxtaposed with pictures of senators of the present…

History, Media, Politics

Lack of a strong national identity makes for dog-eat-dog Philippine politics

May 29, 2021 Ramon Ortoll 8 Comments

For a political and social scientist, Professor Antonio Contreras surely is naive. But he can also be pragmatic when it comes to his own self-promotion. Borderline personality disorder? Maybe. In his Manila Times piece he rails against the “dirty politics” of these times… Popular culture has reinforced the image of politics as devoid of virtue….

History, Politics

Looking back: Marawi City may have been sacrificed to allow US military interests to remain in the Philippines

May 27, 2021 Ramon Ortoll No Comments

The tangled web of the Philippine police and military which links the latter to criminal gangs and other lawless elements has long been whispered about specially in the provinces where it’s mostly an open secret. Friends who have close friends whose relatives are officers in the police and military establishments have informally confirmed these links….

History, Politics

The Opposition wastes time lying to themselves and to Filipinos about history and about Duterte

May 21, 2021 Ramon Ortoll 1 Comment

The Opposition can’t disabuse themselves of the notion that Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte is a Chinese puppet. PhilSTAR columnist Boo Chanco, for example, is fixated on the concept as is evident in yet another one of his pieces, today’s “Is China losing Duterte” where he suggests that “China will likely finance a candidate next year….

History, Politics

Opposition pleas to “remember” the “horrors” of the “Martial Law Years” starting to sound pathetic

September 26, 2020 benign0 56 Comments

Listen. Can you hear that? It’s the sound of the wailings of the Martial Law Crybabies. One wonders why they need to wax crybaby ad nauseum over the “horrors” of them “Martial Law Years” to anyone who cares to listen when they’ve already spent hundreds of millions of pesos on monuments, statues, two Aquino presidencies,…

History, Politics

Battle of the Heroes: NAIA name change vs. Ferdinand Marcos Day

September 4, 2020 zaxx 6 Comments

Whether you refer to heroes here as with or without the quotation marks, “heroes” in the Philippines appear to be defined by how well you can get history to side on you. And what better way to do that than name recall? So for anyone wanting to be remembered as a hero, naming roads and…

History, Politics