The colonial anti-boycott struggle

DIE HARD III
Herman Tiu Laurel
12/20/2010



"Coalition of the weak” and “lovely collection of rogues and cowards” are some of the pejoratives used for the countries that rejected this year’s Nobel Peace Prize award ceremony in Oslo, Norway. Weak, rogues, and cowards… huh? Seriously?

Among the 18 or so countries that joined the boycott, Vietnam, Venezuela, Cuba and Russia are countries that have stood up to the foremost imperialist in modern times. The United States of America, for everyone’s information, maintains 800 military bases in 130 countries and continues to trigger wars in smaller countries on all continents of the globe (except Australia).

Cuba, meanwhile, has withstood US economic blockade since 1960; Vietnam defeated the US in 1975; Venezuela has defied Uncle Sam to the benefit of Venezuelans and nationalized the oil industry which the US once controlled; while Russia has gone tit-for-tat with the US in arms control, missile defense, South Ossetian independence, and a lot more since Putin restored Russian sovereignty.

It would be more correct to describe the detractors of the Peace Prize boycott as a gaggle of weak minds for wittingly or unwittingly missing such obvious facts.

This gaggle among the local crop of naysayers should not surprise anyone anymore. The Philippine intelligentsia is still a colonial vestige that survives and thrives on the handouts of the imperial power. From the nurturing of their journalistic careers (with grants, scholarships, and visas), to the multi-national advertising money poured in for their media organizations, to funding for “human rights journalism” and recruitment to US academe, not to mention prestigious awards and prizes, this intelligentsia merely sucks from the great imperialist’s bosom.

Francisco Tatad, for instance, tells a story of this writer he saw decades ago in Washington DC. As he saw the latter tugging his luggage and making his way to State Department offices at the Watergate complex, the writer (now one of the most vitriolic in the Philippine Star on the Peace Prize issue) said, “Pera-pera lang ito,” revealing his role as a US hack.

The real surprise is that among the countries that boycotted the Nobel Peace Prize, Afghanistan and Colombia are both under US control. Were the leaders of these countries instructed to join or was it their way of nudging their American masters for more “aid” as it seems to be their habit?

The boycott from Ukraine is no longer surprising as it is under the new pro-Russia president Victor Yanukovych. Sudan, another country fighting off Western attempts to split it into two — the North whose President Bashir is persecuted by the International Criminal Court for “genocide,” a charge no African country believes, and the oil-rich South that has pro-US rebel forces — also joined the boycott. Iran, as we know, has defied the West’s nuclear apartheid for quite some time, so its boycott came as no surprise.

Other boycotting countries include Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Serbia (which has real issues against the West, such as the separation of Kosovo, later placed under the leadership of a Mafioso and organ smuggler), Pakistan (which has given the West the best runaround on its nuclear arsenal), Egypt , Morocco… and then the Philippines.

As I have said before, even if the Philippine boycott was for mistaken reasons, it was the “right” mistake, which may be a first step in wriggling a toe away from the US straight jacket. Hopefully it won’t go the direction of Gloria Arroyo who got one toe out in the Iraq pull-out but soon learned that the US will still give her free rein if only for corruption, subservience, and personal convenience — but never for political independence.

About the Nobel Peace Prize’s latest Trojan horse, Liu Xiaobo, few know that he rooted not only for the US attack on Iraq, but also praised the US-Nato-led Afghan War and campaigns for China to be fully westernized. For local intelligentsia such as the PEN writers who condemned China, westernization and colonial mind slavery are a ticket to more visas and Western literary awards or grants.

How can anyone with a right mind award a Peace Prize to a war monger, and worse, to one that seeks to erase Asian historical and cultural legacy? The mainstream of Philippine opposition to the Peace Prize boycott is conveniently weak, if not absent-minded. It likes to shoot from the hip while knowing very little about the Nobel laureate and hardly considers the recent turn for pro-war figures of the Peace Prize committee chairman, Thorbjoern Jagland, a Nato war hawk and concurrent chairman of the hawkish Council of Europe.

The Philippine anti-boycott voices reflect the prevailing colonial mentality of local intelligentsia. It explains why the Philippines is unable to break free from colonial exploitation and oppression, making the nation exceedingly poorer.

If the nation’s intelligentsia today were only half as proud and independent as those of Cuba, Vietnam, Venezuela, Iran, or China, our nation would long have stayed at the forefront of Asian intellectual leadership as the revolutionary intellectual Rizal and company showed. As things stand, a Philippines that exists only under the shadow of the US will never grow intellectually, cultural, politically, and economically.

(Tune in to Sulo ng Pilipino, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, 6 to 7 p.m. on 1098AM; watch Politics Today with HTL, Tuesday, 8 to 9 p.m., with replay at 11 p.m., on Global News Network, Destiny Cable channel 8; visit our blogs, http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com and http://hermantiulaurel.blogspot.com; P.S.-“10 minutes lights out vs power plunderers,” 7 to 7:10 p.m., Monday nights)