Rockstar PR and cynicism

Rockstar PR and cynicism

(Herman Tiu Laurel / DieHard III / The Daily Tribune / 01-19-2015 MON)

 

At our Sunday runners’ group breakfast at the Salcedo Market, a number of us had this to say about the Pope Francis media coverage: “Dozens of TV and radio ads punctuated each segment of the pope’s sermon; the telcos and privatized public utilities were hogging the limelight with the pope.”  Another recounted his conversations with taxi drivers, one of whom reportedly said, “After the pope, corrupt, corrupt again,” referring to life in the Philippines.  For my part, I wondered how much this rockstar tour with 50,000 police security et al. is costing us taxpayers.

 

It’s been months of PR hype and weeks of monomaniacal coverage for the pope, from his pre-arrival to his one-week stay, courtesy of the oligarchy-controlled Philippine media.  Naturally, a “bandwagon effect” follows.  This came after a “possessed” month of preparations and procession of the Black Nazarene as masses tried to rub towels on the icon to bless their increasingly sordid lives, where the only ascension to the heavens involves the price of basic utilities.  Is it a coincidence that the MRT/LRT and tsunami of water rate hikes came at a time that these two high points of Catholic in the Philippines came in full swing, supposedly to drown out public protests?

 

For the Philippine Catholic hierarchy, the visit of the pope was a much needed shot in the arm after its debacles the past year, i.e. its defeat in the fight against the Reproductive Health (RH) Law.  One would think: How could they have lost if God was on their infallible side?  But the actual winners of that RH fight were not the pro-RH advocates either; it was the subsidiaries of the Carlyle group producing birth control devices.  Of course, the total losers are the Filipino taxpayers who will have to shell out taxpayers’ money to fund the contraceptive devices and drugs, allocations from which politicians will get their share via a new system of “pork barrel.”

 

The proportion of Catholics among Filipinos, which used to be 85 percent, is now reported to go as low as 65 percent, even as the general proportion of Christian Filipinos (including adherents of sects like the Iglesia ni Cristo) may still be at 85 percent to 90 percent.  Of course, “baptized Catholics” constitute 80 percent to 85 percent of the population since baptism remains to be a perfunctory practice among many Filipino families.  There are, however, many deviations from mainstream Catholicism.  A friend of mine, for instance, refers to himself as a “Born Again Catholic,” which he explains is more “evangelical” and “democratic” than catholic, which is still perplexing.

 

For sure, the mass religious gatherings have taken a minimal toll this year, with two dead at the Black Nazarene procession (a heart attack right on the Black Nazarene carriage and another crushed by either the carriage or under the feet of mesmerized devotees) and one death in Tacloban as hasty preparations there for the pope’s sermon caused part of the scaffoldings for the papal stage’s sound system came crashing down.  But no matter the abbreviated Leyte trip due to threat of the approaching typhoon, last year’s “Yolanda” victims were just too good an international scene not to be taken advantage of.

 

Pope Francis created a global stir when asked of his reaction to the Charlie Hebdo incident.  He said freedom of expression “has its limits,” likening the insult to faith to “a curse word against my mother,” upon which the offender “can expect a punch.”  Whoa!  Whatever happened to “turning the other cheek”?  Was this then the justification for the Philippine Catholic Church’s cry for blood in calling for the jailing of Carlos Celdran (who damned the “Damasos” but not the Catholic faith)?

 

Actually, there is intense dissension in the Church today caused by Francis’ forcing of “reform” for the survival of Catholicism, which is in steep decline in Europe as well as in North and South America; and this is in contradiction to the conservative principles of “the Last Pope.”

 

But then I remember this from the 1970s rock opera “Jesus Christ, Superstar,” where the titular character exclaimed, “Why waste your breath moaning at the crowd?  Nothing can be done to stop the shouting!  If every tongue were stilled, the noise would still continue!  The rocks and stones themselves would start to sing!”

 

(Listen to Sulô ng Pilipino, 1098 AM, dwAD, Tuesday to Friday, 5 p.m. to 6 p.m.; watch GNN Talk News TV with HTL on Destiny Cable Channel 8, SkyCable Channel 213, and www.gnntv-asia.com, Saturday, 8 p.m. and replay Sunday, 8 a.m.; search Talk News TV and date of showing on YouTube; visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com; and text reactions to 0917-8658664)

--

Donation box

Ce sont des hypocrites

Ce sont des hypocrites

(Herman Tiu Laurel / DieHard III / The Daily Tribune / 01-14-2015 WED)

 

The response of many anti-war, anti-imperialist, human rights, and peace activists expressing themselves on alternative media to the “Je suis Charlie” slogan has been “Je ne suis pas Charlie” (We are not Charlie), a clear denunciation of the hypocrisy of those rallyists, writers, pundits, and global political leaders who uphold the wrong principle by calling for the wrong response (vengeance) and maintaining the wrong message (discrimination) in light of the Charlie Hedbo incident and the cry of the oppressed peoples.

 

A surviving member of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists’ group, Dutch-born Bernard Holtrop, said this of the many personalities who joined the Je suis Charlie Paris unity march: “We vomit on all these people who suddenly say they are our friends.”  Indeed, with personalities like Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, who thinks nothing of bombing to death Palestinian children and women; or the US State Department’s Victoria Nuland, who triggered the Ukrainian coup that has now killed 5,000 ethnic Russian civilians in East Ukraine; or French leaders who’ve caused 50,000 deaths in Libya and destroyed that nation, I, too, vomit.

 

MailOnLine reports that Bernard Holtrop found the new fame of Charlie Hedbo “laughable.”  Alternative media have published many articles of genuine freedom advocates: Justin Raimondo’s “March of the Hypocrites” (http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article40681.htm); Chris Hedge’s “Message from the Dispossessed” (http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article40677.htm); and Dr. David Halpin’s “Je suis Ali Abbas: The Forgotten Victims of State Terrorism” (http://www.globalresearch.ca/je-suis-ali-abbas-the-forgotten-victims-of-state-terrorism/5424384).

 

It should not escape the serious analysts of such terror events that there are sufficient newspaper accounts of how the four “terrorists” involved in the Charlie Hedbo and Kosher store attacks have histories with Islamist rebel-terrorist groups operating in Syria, Yemen, and other countries where such movements are supported by Western funding, training, and arms supply, and under close surveillance by the Western authorities.  Read “Charlie Hebdo Killers Armed and Trained in Syria--Terrorism Made in France?” from the Activist Post, and you’ll get the sense that the events were somehow allowed to happen by elements in the security apparatus.

 

GlobalResearch’s report, “Ankara Mayor Gökçek: ‘Mossad is Behind the Paris Attacks’,” alleges that the deadly attacks in Paris “are the result of France expressing support for Palestine, and that Israeli intelligence is behind the attacks,” as the semi-official Anadolu news agency reported.  We must recall that just prior to the Paris attacks, several European states had already signified support for Palestine’s membership in the UN.  This incident now puts France in a difficult position vis-à-vis its population already brainwashed by mainstream media’s anti-Muslim take of the Charlie Hebdo and Kosher store attacks.

 

The main argument of the “Je suis Charlie” multimillion marchers is that they are marching for Western civilization values of “freedom of speech” and the “use of the pen against bullets.”  But the 500 year-old history of Western nations using the cannon to invade Third World nations (that continue today with drones), maiming and killing thousands upon thousands in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan et al. should show these historically-dumbed down Western peoples that the rest of the world may not see them in the same light that they do.

 

The West is now getting its comeuppance of sorts from centuries of imperialist policies.  So long as Western populations fail to reflect upon these truths and their ruling classes’ continuing oppressive, murderous, imperial adventures on the rest of the world, the carnage will continue as more zeroes will be added to the number of the dead.

 

It is the duty of global media, and especially alternative media, to educate Western populations with the true story of global terrorism and the West’s provocateur role, in the face of the blowback of Islamist “shock and awe” inevitably rising in frequency and severity.

 

Unless Western peoples learn the whole truth and force their ruling powers to cease the oppression and murders by their armed and covert forces in the Third World (most victims of which are Islamic), their protests against terrorism and bigotry will amount to nothing but sheer hypocrisy--Ce sont des hypocrites--as there will be no peace anywhere in the world and in these Western peoples’ homelands.

 

(Listen to Sulô ng Pilipino, 1098 AM, dwAD, Tuesday to Friday, 5 p.m. to 6 p.m.; watch GNN Talk News TV with HTL on Destiny Cable Channel 8, SkyCable Channel 213, and www.gnntv-asia.com, Saturday, 8 p.m. and replay Sunday, 8 a.m.; search Talk News TV and date of showing on YouTube; visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com; and text reactions to 0917-8658664)

--

Donation box

Modernizing faith

Modernizing faith

(Herman Tiu Laurel / DieHard III / The Daily Tribune / 01-12-2015 MON)

 

Last December, at a round table discussion on Philippine-China issues for a visiting professor from Yonsei University held at the Ricardo Leung Center for Chinese Studies at the Ateneo de Manila, one comment arose: “The number of mainland Chinese Catholics is growing.”  My reaction: “Do we want to see China become an economic backwater like Catholic-dominated Latin American countries or like the Philippines in Asia?”

 

That said, the basic conditions of human existence and ethical and moral behavior is indeed a gnawing need of all peoples.  Even the atheistic communist leadership of China understands this.

 

In 1980, supreme leader Deng Xiaoping enunciated the “socialist spiritual civilization” (reemphasized by Jiang Zemin in the 1990s), an ideological drive to reflect the improving material conditions of society in social transformation, raising political consciousness and morality to mitigate “nihilism, commercialism, hedonism and consumerism… in the course of modernization.”

 

It is estimated that mainland China has 100 million Christians today and projections about its growth are hyped by Western media, even though it can decline as well with further economic advances as in most parts of the world.

 

A mainland Chinese cousin, whom I and another Chinese-Filipino cousin had the pleasure of entertaining, recently visited the Philippines.  When the subject of religion came up, this cousin of ours declared himself a Christian (without distinguishing between Catholic and non-Catholic).  This, he said, is because Christianity promises an afterlife if he behaves.  My other cousin interjected: Isn’t Christianity (lumped with Catholicism) called “tsia kaw” (Hokkien for “eating religion”) because Christian missionaries offered food for conversion at a time when “old China” was plagued with famine?

 

According to Albert Einstein, “If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.”

 

I am, at 64 years of age this year, at the pre-departure as seniors would like to joke; but I felt more terror about the problem of death in my youth.  As an acolyte serving mass, I remember squeezing out tears to show piety.  But in light of my rational mind, I have come to terms with what Einstein once said: “The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion.  It should transcend personal God and avoid dogma and theology.  Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things natural and spiritual as a meaningful unity.”

 

The distance from faith in the Black Nazarene and Jesuit anthropologist Teilhard de Chardin’s effort to reconcile his Catholic faith with scientific experience (an irreconcilable contradiction that led him to be near excommunication) was what started me toward seeking spiritual truth in scientific insight.  There I discovered that we can find solace and our basis for a moral structure and spiritual optimism.

 

Max Planck, the father of quantum physics, held that “All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together.  We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind.  This mind is the matrix of all matter.”

 

But that mind isn’t in the form of a brain that humans conceive but a “cosmic brain” that is formed by the stuff that makes up the universe, including each and every human being and living thing.

 

As such, three modern scientific insights led me to my “religion” today: Quantum mechanics and its “spooky actions” such as quantum entanglement; “biocentrism” where the universe is an unfolding consciousness and our human consciousness participating in creating it; and the theory of the “morphogenetic universe” where all living things and human individuals are in a “field” (visualize iron filings forming fields around a bar magnet) and our decisions and actions are retained in the “field” as specie lessons for all time.  From these scientific insights I conclude that elements that constitute “me” are indestructible and my moral acts have permanent consequences in the “field.”

 

But the all-important question to 99.9 percent of human beings is “What happens after death?”  Do I go on living as “I,” in heaven or hell; do I exist no longer as “I” with eternal life around dozens of virgins?  My answer: “Did you exist when you were conceived in the womb and before the world molded your personhood?”

 

As there was no “person” then, why should there be an afterlife?  Nonetheless, the force that gave life is still there and that is what or who we really are, waiting to be reborn.  That’s Buddhism’s view and ideal (which Einstein says is closest to that cosmic religion)--to be and act as one before one became an “ego.”

 

(Listen to Sulô ng Pilipino, 1098 AM, dwAD, Tuesday to Friday, 5 p.m. to 6 p.m.; watch GNN Talk News TV with HTL on Destiny Cable Channel 8, SkyCable Channel 213, and www.gnntv-asia.com, Saturday, 8 p.m. and replay Sunday, 8 a.m.; search Talk News TV and date of showing on YouTube; visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com; and text reactions to 0917-8658664)

--

Donation box