If for any reason you cannot find the paperback version of Playing the Indian Card at your favourite bookstore or online retailer, please ask them to carry it. Protest and picket the store entrance if necessary.
I recently attended a reading of a memoir by someone who had been in Korea to teach, as so many of us now have. He recalled running into a group of Filipinos there, and was shocked to discover that they all seemed to like “that madman Duterte.”
I know a lot of Filipinos. have yet to meet a Filipino who does not like Duterte, and wishes he were still president.
I find it rather arrogant of North Americans to think they know better than Filipinos whom they should elect as their country’s leader. It is a colonialist attitude.
And they do not understand life on the ground in the Philippines. I have lived there. They are labouring under a grave misperception; which perhaps extends to their understanding of the less-developed world generally.
In a country like Canada or the US, we need to fear too much government. Government sticks its nose in everywhere, there are regulations about everything. Government collects half our income in taxes, and spends it erratically. We have reason to fear totalitarianism.
But the less developed world generally does not have enough government. Government by and large does not function; usually because of corruption. The result is chaos and every man for himself. The last thing the average person needs to worry about is government becoming too intrusive.
A good example: when Duterte came to power, there was quickly much more freedom of the press: the number of journalists getting killed went way down. Because until Duterte imposed order, journalists were regularly assassinated by organized crime for exposing corruption. I lived under Duterte, and never felt threatened or in danger from the government.
When the system is corrupt, the only way to fix it is by bypassing the system: breaking the “rules.” And this is commonly seen by North Americans as the man at the top acting like dictator, taking to himself dictatorial powers. Technically, this is correct; but it can be necessary in the circumstances; like a British government reading the riot act.
Duterte achieved results in Davao, as its mayor. The Filipino public wanted him to do the same for the country, and he did, for the length of his term. Because the Philippines has term limits, and because he was not a dictator, he then had to leave power.
Koreans, similarly, often have good things to say about Park Chung-Hee, their autocratic leader during the sixties and seventies. Unlike Duterte, Park really did seize dictatorial powers and bypass elections. Nevertheless, he replaced a deeply corrupt as well as autocratic regime and government that developed under Rhee Sing-Man, and was himself by contrast seemingly honest. He might have craved power, but not money. Under his rule, Korea was able to begin to develop rapidly.
I would like to put in a similar good word for the Saudi royal family, having lived under their rule. Other “republican” nations nearby, culturally similar, are fractious and violent: Syria, Egypt, Yemen, Iraq. Saudi Arabia has remained peaceful, orderly, and prosperous. Their populace did not rise up during the Arab Spring, showing their general contentment. Granted, they have the advantage of oil; but so did and does Iraq, or Libya, or Iran, or Venezuela. The government is theoretically autocratic, but seemingly honest and not intrusive in practice.
We need to understand the common need, in less developed countries, for a strong hand at the top. We should not automatically consider such leadership evil or dictatorial. The proper litmus is this: does thiat regime aggress against neighbouring countries? Does it oppress some minority within that country? Is it corrupt and draining the treasury?
This is the critical difference between a Saddam, an Idi Amin, or a Hitler, on the one hand, and a Duterte, a Frederick the Great or a Tito on the other.
We are accustomed to say we are in a culture war. But what are the two sides? It is not two warring cultures. One side seems in favour of culture, the other opposed.
Why would anyone be opposed to culture?
The answer is simple: those who seek power oppose culture; cultural norms are a restraint on power. See the Cultural Revolution in China, the French Reign of Terror, or the Cambodian Killing Fields.
So the real battle in the “culture war” is the bullies against the decent common folk. In political terms, say authoritarian government against liberty; but, culturally, it is broader than that. As broad as good against evil; the scribes and Pharisees against those Jesus identified as his own in the Beatitudes.
The bullies see the new technologies as the ideal opportunity for Big Brother—level control. They are pushing for constant oversight, censorship, and control as hard as they can. I have long believed, on the other hand, that the natural consequences of improved communications technology, and technology as a whole, favour over the longer term liberty against the bullies. It is harder for a small group of bullies to control and compel people who can communicate and organize among themselves. Indeed, I suspect that much of the current woke drive to authoritarianism is more a fear reaction to cats escaping bags.
What we currently call “woke” culture is the vanguard of the authoritarian bullying impulse. Consider the things it demands. One is now compelled to say that a man is a woman: the overlords demand the right to dictate reality itself. This is eerily parallel to O’Brien, in 1984, demanding Winston Smith admit that he sees three fingers when O’Brien holds up only two. What could be more complete control than a godlike control over reality itself? This is why bullies gaslight.
Language has long been under their control: “politically correct” is what Orwell called “newspeak.” It has gotten so far as the compulsory use of new pronouns. Or, in Canada, face a prison term.
The right to life has been negated by abortion, and now at warp speed in Canada by euthanasia.
Freedom of conscience, is increasingly denied. Expressing any of the major world religions’ teachings on homosexuality is now illegal. This is not because anyone cares much about homosexual sex or the supposed rights of homosexuals. It is an excuse to suppress religion. Religion, with its ethical restrictions, is the main constraint on bullies everywhere, and they always hate it. They will, at the same time, thoroughly infiltrate it, as did the Biblical Pharisees, for the same reason Saudi Arabia, China, and Afghanistan insist on always having seats on the UN Commission on Human Rights: to co-opt and subvert them. Let God actually appear, and they will try to kill him.
But mere subversion is not enough. They will also attack frontally. The Catholic Church will be condemned and suppressed, and churches will be burned down with no one held accountable, on the grounds that Catholicism is homophobic; at the same time that a huge proportion of the Catholic clergy are revealed to be active homosexuals, a “velvet mafia.”
The issue is not homosexuality. It is getting rid of morality.
Although the night seems dark, and no place left to turn, there are signs of impending dawn. I anticipated dawn for this spring, and I believe the morning star is here.
Styxenhammer notices an interesting recent shift: previously, when an aggressively woke movie got a low audience score on a site like Rotten Tomatoes, it got a high critics’ score. See the all-female remake of Ghostbusters. The scribes were closing ranks against the common people, who were condemned as misogynists, homophobes, racists, “white supremacists,” “Christian nationalists,” deplorables. However, the recent Queen Cleopatra series, which tries to gaslight the public to accept against all historical evidence that Cleopatra was black, is scoring almost as badly with both the critics and the viewers. Latest tally: 15% among critics, 3% with the audience.
This suggests the scribes and Pharisees, not all of whom are themselves bullies, some of whom are honest working stiffs who have been bullied into line, or suckered into line or have been going along to get along, like Joseph of Arimathea, are beginning to break ranks. The same thing happened with the nobility in the French Revolution, and it was a crucial moment.
In the meantime, the general public is also increasingly fed up with this stuff; there is much less of the cap-doffing syndrome and deference to authority than there was a couple of years ago. The woke movies and series are now consistently bombing at the box office: The Little Mermaid, Peter Pan and Wendy, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, the latest Star Wars bumpf. Literally, the public isn’t buying it any more.
Polls show that the main issue in the minds of Republicans in the US is now the battle against “wokeness.” Above the economy, above inflation, above government corruption (which is number two), above immigration, above national security.
Somebody has indeed woke; but not as advertised. As with most calculated lies, the term “woke” was always the opposite of the truth.
The bullies always have one great advantage: while they are single-mindedly bent on the acquisition and exercise of power, the average person just wants to either help their neighbour, or be left alone, and assumes the same good will of everyone else. So for some time, the bully can run wild and jackbooted without resistance—in fact, with the help and cooperation of those seeking peace at any price.
As a result, we have seen the rise of “woke” corporations. Their actions seem superficially mad; they are supposed to be making money for their shareholders, not pushing a political agenda. And, generally, the political agenda they push is against the interests and sentiments of their customers. In the case of media platforms, Facebook, YouTube and the like, their profitability depends on being the platform everyone needs to be on to engage in the public discourse. Yet they are banning users, increasingly driving the to other platforms or networks to suppress the public discourse. How can this make business sense?
It actually does. They have learned that if they fall afoul of the demands of the bullies, their business will suffer. There will be demands for boycotts, for divestment, for bans on advertising with them, for freezing their assets, silencing them on social media, and so forth. Disney learned this when they made the villain in The Lion King, Scar, appear to be gay.
If they appease the bullies, they avoid this.
As the demands of the bullies grow and grow.
On the other hand, they face little or no downside for this appeasement—because their other customers generally just want to buy a needed product, and do not care much whether a man dresses in women’s clothes, say, or has sex with another man, or whether it was a man or a woman who invented beer.
But the bullies have now overplayed their hand. This was inevitable; when you crave power above all, sooner or later you get drunk on it. They went too far with the pandemic lockdowns, vaccine mandates, suppression of news, defamations, false prosecutions, fake hate crimes, drag shows for children, pornographic children’s books in school libraries, and endless cries of “wolf.” The bullying has gotten too directly threatening for the passive and amoral general public. Now they rise up.
The Bud Light boycott looks like a watershed. The customers showed they now care enough about the woke bullying to do something about it. And they have discovered their power. At last, corporations must calculate on paying a price for appeasing bullies. The woke corporate complex may collapse quickly.
As for the woke political complex, Trump is currently running away with the Republican nomination: up 42 points over his nearest competitor, the highly credible Ron DeSantis. If that trend continues, he will enter the general election with a strong party united behind him.
Why the Trump surge? Because he has the right enemies. He is being legally persecuted, indicted and prosecuted. This establishes his bone fides as the hero of the common man against the corrupt elite. If the bad guys hate him so, he can be trusted.
The Democratic nomination is being contested by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who also has anti-establishment credibility as an anti-vaccination activist. And he is surging in the polls against a sitting president. The usual Democratic backroom chicanery will probably keep him from the nomination; but he will probably weaken Biden in the primaries, encourage others to come out against the establishment “narrative,” and possibly tempt the dark powers to overreach in order to stop him.
In Canada, we now have the rhetorically magnificent Pierre Poilievre. He has apparently decided to make the war on woke a central issue. No doubt he is reading polls, and sees the same surge in concern over wokeness as in the US. I recently saw a clip of Erin O’Toole, and remembered how luck we are to have Poilievre.
Things will never be as they ought to be, until the clouds part and Jesus comes trailing glory. But I have hopes that in two years, with Trump in power, a Republican majority in both houses of Congress, an originality majority on the Supreme Court, Poilievre presiding over a Conservative government in Canada, and the woke advertising blockade and the regime of censorship on social media broken, the cultural atmosphere will feel quite different.
My friend Xerxes, the left-leaning columnist, has recently made the Orwellian assertion that anyone who resists wearing a mask is an authoritarian.
No doubt he is sincere; Project Veritas recently released recordings of internal conversations at CNN, and they too sound absolutely sincere. This is the Devil’s work. The Devil, the Accuser, predisposes us, once we go off the moral rails, to begin to assert the very opposite of the truth. Xerxes, I can deduce, wants a nice authoritarian government, and he wants to blame someone else for it.
His logic is this:
1. people who resist masks do so because the experts keep changing their advice.
3. it is authoritarian to expect truth to be objective and unchanging.
To be clear on how wrong this is, Merriam-Webster gives its first definition of “authoritarianism" as “of, relating to, or favoring blind submission to authority.” Oxford defines "authoritarian" as “A person who favours obedience to authority as opposed to personal liberty; an authoritarian person.”
But that would not matter to Xerxes; in the same column, he objects to dictionary definitions as “authoritarian.”
Xerxes acknowledges that the experts have indeed kept changing their advice. Although it would be more accurate to say that different experts have expressed different opinions all along, and it is government that have been changing their advice.
But, he points out, that is how science operates.
“Initially, masks were considered useless. Immediately, experimenters began testing that hypothesis. They measured aerosol transmission indoors and outdoors. Medical recommendations changed to reflect those findings. That’s the scientific mindset.” For science, “any advice that doesn’t change will be suspect.”
So those who resist current government authority fail to understand science. They want “An absolute, unimpeachable, forever and ever, authority. Which is the opposite of the scientific approach.”
Here he gets the scientific enterprise backwards. Science is and has always been the quest for natural laws: that is, for maxims about nature that are always true: the Law of Gravity, the Law of Inertia, and so forth. It is true, by the nature of things, that any such established law of nature might be overturned tomorrow by a “black swan” event; natural laws do not have the certainty of the laws of reason. But that is not considered by science the goal; rather, it would represent a failure of the science.
It is also true that science progresses by disproving things, never by proving things. However, the likelihood that a given model or theory is true is measured in science by the fact that it has been tested over a long period and not been disproven. That is the scientific method. If you find theories and models being rapidly overturned or changed, this means science has, in this case, clearly been failing to approach truth. To see the change itself as evidence science is getting closer to truth is like seeing pollution as proof that a factory is working efficiently, or fever as evidence of good health.
As this suggests, more broadly, truth is stable and unchanging by its nature. It is not the truth that keeps changing; it is theories that keep changing if they fail to correspond with reality. Were this no so, there would be no grounds but whim on which to change our theories. To say that science now thinks relativity is more accurate, and Newtonian physics inadequate, is not to say that the cosmos changed between Newton and Einstein.
Nor is it some sort of infringement on personal liberty to seek the truth, or to act in conformity with it. It is nonsense to argue that acknowledging gravity is authoritarian because it denies us our freedom to fly at will.
But that is where the political left now is: that is the sort of thing they now assert. That is what we see now, for example, in “gender studies.”
It is not really my place to comment on Philippines politics. It is not my country. But well-meaning fellow Canadians have been sending me messages of concern about the dangers of living under such an oppressive totalitarian regime. I feel under some moral obligation to set the record straight. As in the case of Saudi Arabia, the Canadian press has things very wrong.
I guess we should not be surprised these days about the press getting things wrong, especially when writing about something far away.
To begin with, the odd image with which the linked story begins: of President Duterte “appearing constantly on the 24 hour news channel.” Makes it sound like 1984, or like Communist China used to be, with government the only source for news. We have TV, without any foreign channels, and do not see Duterte on the screen any more often than a Canadian television viewer might see Justin Trudeau. And in similar contexts: often also featuring someone criticizing him. If there is some government 24-hour news channel, nobody we know has discovered it. The Philippines actually has a pretty free-wheeling press.
It has also always been dangerous to be a journalist here; but murders of reporters have actually gone down under Duterte.
The fact that Duterte is at loggerheads with the Catholic Church is not newsworthy. Every Philippines administration at least since Marcos, with the exception of Corazon Aquino’s, has been at loggerheads with the Catholic Church. Traditionally the Church hierarchy holds the government’s feet to the fire. Governments rarely respond by showing anything like reverence. Duterte is more blunt than most about it; but this seems just part of his tough guy act. He is not even novel in that. He’s acting and talking just like Estrada did in his day.
One paragraph from the article:
“Duterte has launched a hate-filled anti-Catholic campaign that is a match for the most virulent forms of Islamophobia. A cathedral in the Philippines was bombed Jan. 27, killing 20 people. Several Catholic priests have been killed on his watch. Somehow he is getting away with it.”
I think Duterte would have a solid court case here to sue for libel. He is, like most Filipinos, not concerned with being PC. But this clearly implies that he was behind the cathedral bombing or the priest murders, doesn’t it? The cathedral was bombed by Islamist terrorists. Duterte is as much to blame as Macron is for the fire at Notre Dame, or Bush for 9/11. Takes one whale of a conspiracy theory to make that claim.
The clear suggestion that Filipinos might be afraid to speak their minds about Duterte is also wildly wrong. Naturally enough, he has many supporters, but even they tend not to be doctrinaire about it. Probably most people are openly critical of him about one thing or another in conversation.
There is actually far more freedom of speech, and far less fear of repercussions for expressing your opinion on any matter at all, in the Philippines than in Canada. Nobody in the Philippines has to watch what they say. Everybody in Canada, by contrast, has to guard their speech carefully. If Filipino-Canadians are indeed afraid of expressing their opinions about Duterte, that says more about an oppressive atmosphere in Canada, than back in the Philippines. They are aware that anything they say in Canada can be used against them at some future date. In Canada, quite possibly, it is not safe to express support for Duterte, just as it is not safe to express support for Donald Trump.
I do not like defending Duterte. I would never have voted for him. I oppose him just as I opposed Trudeau pere invoking the War Measures Act, for the same reasons. His government is acting lawlessly, with its extrajudicial killings. But for the average Filipino, the Duterte government is not a clear and present menace. It is like the situation when Mafia factions used to war in the streets of Chicago or New York. They were ruthless about killing each other, but killing civilians was forbidden between them. So too with Duterte’s vigilantes and the criminal gangs. So long as you yourself keep away from systematic criminal activity, you are not likely to be caught in any crossfire. The situation in Canada is quite different: well-meaning people acting morally and minding their own business can become victims at any moment. There is no real way to predict trouble or to defend yourself.
Duterte, it is true, is sometimes killing drug addicts as well as dealers. This seems very wrong to us in Canada, where the established idea is that we are to pity the addict and put all the blame on the dealers. But perhaps it is not self-evidently wrong. Are alcoholics not at all responsible for their alcoholism? Then how does AA work? In Canada we certainly hold cigarette smokers at least in large part responsible for their smoking. And we legally hold the customers entirely responsible in the case of prostitution, and the dealers innocent. Duterte is at least being consistent. His position is more logically defensible than ours.
Generally, what the Canadian press cannot seem to get is that the problem in the Philippines, as in the Middle East, is not too much or too oppressive government, but too little. The problem has been that the government was not in control. Local gangs, criminals, and corrupt officials could act with impunity. We are so far from that in Canada with our traditions of peace, order, and good government that we cannot apparently conceive of what that means. In my wife’s home town, people were fairly regularly murdered by neighbours or relatives, and nothing ever happened to the murderer. The killer just moved away—or perhaps not.
You can forgive so many Filipinos for feeling that it may take a tough guy to get things under control.
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