12/30/2011
The raggedy “little girl”
doll was all-too-willing a tool in the subversion of our country’s slow
but fledgling popular democratic governance. For her almost canine
devotion to her masters, she was rewarded with her share of the plunder
by the US and the local oligarchy for nine years. But, as that raggedy
doll became worn out and torn on all sides, she was amply thrown away,
replaced with a “little boy puppet.” This dummy, with a wooden smile
carved into a wooden face (perplexing everyone besides himself), has a
wide eyed gape like the cowboy marionette of the 1950s puppet show,
Howdy Doody, coupled with the jerky motions and hobbling gait of Jim
Henson’s Muppets.
The past year, this little boy’s puppeteers
made him over as a “hanging judge” to end 2010 with a bang. For the New
Year, they are dressing him up as the “little drummer boy” and “little
tin soldier” rolled into one, hobbling off to a new adventure of patriot
games — even when the future of our people, our children, and
grandchildren is not something to be toyed with.
Two of my recent
columns raised the alert for the heightened geopolitical tensions being
drummed up in the Eurasian front, centered on Syria and Iran, and in the
Asia-Pacific front, on the South China Sea issue. “A creeping World War
III” and “Useful idiot’s autocratic mission” are a wake-up call to the
real and present danger of having a literally insane leadership in
Malacañang — installed in the 2010 “Hocus-PCOS” elections, where
technical shenanigans had been established and where the key to
uncovering the electoral manipulation lies in the second software
sneaked in. Yes, my friends, they do go to that extent to control our
elections, with US software company, Dominion Voting Systems, at the
core of that discredited AES of Smartmatic.
War does not just
happen. It is painstakingly planned on a long-term basis. And it is
seldom done so for reasons other than money. Since wars are utterly
expensive in resources and lives, these are never initiated without a
clear payback in mind. We see that in every conflict initiated
throughout the millennia. In the latest one in Libya, the lion’s share
of that country’s oil revenues now go to North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (Nato) countries, leaving mere drops for the Libyans
themselves.
The assaults on Syria are aimed at Iran’s oil, which,
in turn, leads to the ultimate goal — aborting China’s rise as a world
power. The personal assaults on Vladimir Putin by the plethora of
“opposition” groups funded by Western NGOs (like George Soros’ Open
Society, the National Endowment for Democracy, and Freedom House) is
meant to weaken Russian politics for the ultimate assault on its
sovereignty and the weakening of the Russia-China alliance.
Meanwhile,
in Asia, the Australia, New Zealand, United States Security (ANZUS)
partners are aiming for the China Sea issue as the casus belli against
China — this, despite perfectly sound arrangements having been forged by
that emerging superpower with Asean to resolve their shared maritime
territorial and resource issues through peaceful dialog and joint
exploitation.
Thus, with an irrational element needing to be
introduced, the likely “hero” would be a little boy blue with all his
insecurities covered up by his love of guns, the company of his
kabarkada cronies, all while exhibiting an incompetence that has caused
the most dismal Asean growth rate the past year and presiding over
troubles at home that are wreaking havoc on the nation’s institutions.
Here,
the perfect chance to escape all these woes is by playing soldier and
patriot, egged on by a Big Brother, who promises this little “useful
idiot” a steady supply of disposed guns, warships, and planes for his
war games. No surprise there really — for this little dummy now struts
before his generals, declaring a shift of focus, from internal security
to the defense of the realm. And as the little boy now has his toys to
brandish, all it takes is to provoke an overreaction from the “enemy.”
That
situation was very eruditely described in the Asia Sentinel, a
prestigious Web magazine that features well-known Asian writers. In a
Dec. 20 article there (“US Playing a Dangerous Asia-Pacific Game?”),
Gavin Greenwood says: “On Dec. 14, Philippine President Benigno Aquino
formally commissioned his country’s latest and most capable warship, a
46-year-old former US Coast Guard cutter. Renamed the Gregorio del
Pilar after a young revolutionary general killed fighting American
troops in 1899, the navy’s new flagship… along with many other small
warships, form what military strategists like to call ‘the tip of the
spear’… The significance of this ageing vessel’s deployment, however, is
not its manifest inability to defend itself — let alone the Philippines
— from almost any other warship afloat in the region but that such an
attack could invoke the country’s 60-year-old mutual defense treaty with
the US… The role of the Gregorio del Pilar may be seen as simply to
remain at sea long enough to get in the way of a potential enemy —
invariably seen as China — and introduce a layer of uncertainty over the
consequences of any direct action against the Philippines or its state
assets…
“By providing the Philippines with even the most limited
means to confront an opponent at sea, backed by Clinton’s explicit
signaling her government’s resolve to stand by its treaty obligation,
Washington may have handed over the potential detonator for an armed
confrontation with China to the crew of an elderly ship that had once
borne the name of the first US Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton.
Hamilton’s caution that ‘when the sword is once drawn, the passions of
men observe no bounds of moderation’…”
Such a sword — in the hands
of a little tin soldier boy imbued with a growing sense of insecurity
over his domestic failures and the conflicts he has spawned, who is
moreover nervous and fretful of the consequences of his rapidly
disintegrating governance — can certainly come in handy, with Big
Brother eagerly awaiting the consequences.
(Tune in to Sulo ng
Pilipino/Radyo OpinYon, Monday to Friday, 5 to 6 p.m. on 1098AM; Talk
News TV with HTL, Saturday, 8:15 to 9 p.m., with replay at 11 p.m., on
GNN, Destiny Cable Channel 8; visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com
for our articles plus TV and radio archives) ....
MORE
Source: The Daily Tribune
URL:
http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20111230com4.html
