Yellowtards have become a confused lot. The root cause of this confusion is their long-obsolete Laban (“fight”) rhetoric which remains the primary pillar of their ideology. To Yellowtards, everything is a “fight” against the Establishment. Even when they are in power, most recently under former President Benigno Simeon “BS” Aquino III, they still see themselves as “fighting” against some sort of dark opperessive force. For the average Yellowtard, this dark oppressive force comes in the form of the Martial Law spectre.
Because, to the Yellowtard brain, Martial Law = Military Rule, it follows (to them) that Martial Law as “evil” translates to Military = EVIL.
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We saw the fatal consequences of this thinking in 2015 when President BS Aquino’s ill regard for the Philippine military led to the massacre of 44 Special Action Force (SAF) police officers in the hands of terrorist elements of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. BS Aquino’s regard for the military, coloured by years of Yellowtard indoctrination growing up with his family and friends, was likely the reason why he left the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) out of the loop during the planning of that ill-fated mission and why, even as desperate cries for support from cornered SAF troops crackled back and forth as they came under fire, Aquino remained adamant in keeping them out of the loop.
In short, the AFP and everything it stands for is anathema to Yellowtard ideology. The military is the enemy in the Yellowtard Laban doctrine.
That sort of thinking among Yellowtards remains consistent today even as the role of the military in the defense of the nation against increasingly organised and increasingly well-funded Islamic terrorism transitions from being merely essential to being absolutely critical. Rather than get behind a national resolve to crush Islamic terrorism in Mindanao, Yellowtards are, instead, busy shrieking about the Martial Law bogeyman of yore.
It is getting to the point where the Yellowtards’ irrational hate of the military can be regarded as a serious national security issue.
The last thing our boys need as they go off to kill terrorists in Mindanao is a campaign to vilify their command. Taking a city back from the enemy street-by-street is counted as among the bloodiest sorts of battles a soldier could face in his career. And as the fighting drags on from days, into weeks, into months, troop morale becomes even more important. Indeed, history shows that the governments of countries at war invest a lot in ensuring the public is behind the war. A Yellowtard clique that undermines that effort at every step is counterproductive to that effort and, in the front lines, can be all but fatal.
The only real steps Yellowtards can take to free their minds from the shackles of an utterly obsolete ideology is to shed the cognitive baggage they apply when evaluating the situation we face and the measures the government is taking to respond to it. They can start with the biggest sack of shit of all — the irrational fear of Martial Law they drag into every “debate”.
[Photo courtesy Asia Times.]
benign0 is the Webmaster of GetRealPhilippines.com.
Oh come on Benign0. Stop branding everyone who disagrees with you a ‘yellowtard’. It does your cause no good whatsoever. Argue on the facts and let people judge for themselves without name-calling.
People are not afraid of what the AFP was. They’re afraid of what it is. It’s a well-known fact that the army is still made up of standard-issue Filipinos, and hasn’t changed much since an American audit gave it a score of 1/10 (metaphorically speaking) about 20 years ago. The main problems highlighted in that report were the ones any Filipino is familiar with: corruption and incompetence, especially among the officers. It’s also woefully under-equipped, partly because most tax income is stolen rather than spent on things that are important to the country.
So yes, while it might be technically desirable to flush out the terrorists once and for all, one has the question the ability of the Army to do so, and the actual intent of the government to do so. The terrorists have been extremely useful for many decades: without them, the execrable performance of the people in charge might start to attract some attention from would-be voters. Do the government REALLY want to drop that ace out of their sleeve and play fair? I really hope so, but I’ll believe it when I see it.
Agreement or disagreement with my views is not necessarily one of the defining criteria I apply in the use of the term “Yellowtard”.
Furthermore, I make no assertions about the quality of the Philippine military — only that the implementation or non-implementation of Martial Law is irrelevant considering there are bigger success factors (such as, as you pointed out, the quality of the military) involved in defeating Islamic terrorists that any incremental increase in police powers simply does not measure up to.
It is a scary scenario that one day this unfounded concern of the military will be rebound to this group and would find another colossal enemy, apart from the government of the day – the military and police authorities.
Undermining these institutions would not do well for the yellowtards. They could claim that they are NOT undermining these institutions, but only the government of the day, but the direct or indirect consequence of their utterances is definitely leading to that scenario.
If this group do not trust the military and police, then restoring peace and order under their governance would be highly improbable.
This group really need to redefine, in sensible and too obstructive ways, where they want to head to unless they become so irrelevant in the political landscape which at the moment it seems is the direction they are heading.
>> incremental increase in police powers
See, there’s the basic problem, although the “yellowtards” maybe aren’t good at articulating their concerns. In theory, the PFP have always had adequate power to round up troublemakers. They’ve just never been that interested in doing so. Outside of Manila, there is simply no police presence (a bunch of halfwitted drunks in the Tanod box don’t count). 95% of the country is completely without any enforcement of law and order, and even in Manila the police are more interested in setting up scams than looking after the public.
So what happens when you extend those “powers” to yet another bunch of people who have neither the training, the brains, nor the will to use them effectively? I suggest nothing very good. Before deploying the army on counterterrorism operations, it might have been worth giving them a crash course in how to do so, perhaps with training from people who have been there and done that. Otherwise, the only expected outcome is a lot of dead soldiers.
So it works both ways. Using that line of thinking, we can also argue that the police wouldn’t know how to improve their effectiveness proportionate to the amount of additional powers given them. By the same token, the idea that the amount of abuse will increase over the current level of abuse given more of such power would also be debatable — because we don’t even have a reliable enough baseline of quantity/quality of abuse under a non-Martial Law scenario on which to measure change in this quantity/quality under a Martial Law scenario.
All roads lead as originally asserted to the idea that Martial Law — whether in effect or not — is essentially a non-issue because, in relative terms, the weight of contributions of the deeper dysfunctions to do with the very nature of Philippine society itself on the problem utterly dwarf that of the incremental contribution of Martial Law.
War’s very object is victory, not prolonged indecision. In war there is no substitute for victory.
The Aquino Cojuangco political axis, cannot survive politically, without the government, as its perceived enemy. This is the reason they have the “laban” sign as their trademark…to me, they are “LOSERS”…
Their ideology is worn out; their fight is gone. They ruled and proven themselves, as more corrupt and incompetent. Their thievery, thru the DAP, PDAF, Typhoon Yolanda fund, etc…are enormous…
What they are doing now is to obstruct, what Pres. Duterte is doing to improve the country; and implement his programs…
benign0: thanks for the response, but I honestly don’t get what you’re saying. You appear to be suggesting that since the Philippines will fail under the weight of its many other problems regardless, it doesn’t really matter if we throw martial “law” into the mix. We’re going to go down anyway, so hey, let’s just throw everything we’ve got at it and go out with a bang.
Or have I completely misunderstood?
Incidentally, I’m putting “law” in quote marks there because the Philippines has never had any kind of functioning legal system, so the phrase “Martial Law” is completely meaningless. Martial Law is, in fact, only possible as an extension to an actual, working Civil legal system.
I fear and loathe the PH military because they are underequipped, undertrained and underled, not because they’ll be loose cannons.