The Philippine Opposition’s sad colonial mentality

It is sad, the way the Philippine Opposition led by the Liberal Party (referred to by many as the “Yellowtards”) has adopted a strategy of running to the West for validation and then using that validation to influence Filipinos. It demonstrates that they are a pale shadow of the political force they are desperately pitching themselves as. Indeed, the irony that escapes them is that they are no longer pitching themselves to the Filipino and are, instead, sucking up to the foreign media as a roundabout way to prop up their relevance to Filipinos (perversely circular, as can be seen).

The Yellowtards, as such, insult Filipinos’ intelligence in the underhanded manner with which they try to get into their heads using the political and cultural clout and collateral of traditional imperialist societies. Rather than face and engage the Filipino public directly, they exploit their cultural baggage by making perverse use of Western media, Western “experts”, and even Western celebrities to endorse their political views and echo their opposition to current President Rodrigo Duterte.

In short, the Philippine Opposition continue to propagate a historical scourge of Philippine culture — colonial mentality. Instead of encouraging Filipinos to rely more on themselves to solve their internal problems (i.e. learn to be truly independent), the Yellowtards continue to turn their own country into a Welcome mat for foreign influence and intervention. They are no better than that ad agency that advised popular milk brand Bear Brand to populate their print ads with caucasian faces backdropped by Nordic settings back in the 1970s. To be fair, this old promotional trick continues to work even today, perhaps because, Philippine society’s most powerful influencers — their own corporate media and the cliques of social media hangers-on that orbit it — continue to use their vast resources to keep it deeply-ingrained in the public psyche.

In this sense, the Philippine Opposition led by the Yellowtards have become the real traitors to Filipinos’ aspirations of becoming a true independent, self-sufficient, and modern society. The Yellowtards, to begin with, already hold a detestable tradition of being the first to abandon institutional democratic processes in favour of street parliamentarianism (which they pitch as “people power revolutions”) whenever things don’t go their way. They now lead the way in discrediting their country’s own judicial system in favour of a lame-duck “criminal court” halfway around the world that is constituted around European Union liberal ideals that are, themselves, currently being put to question by Western European voters themselves. And this is all on top of the banal colonial character they exhibit in the chi-chi exclusive “conventions” they organise amongst like-minded Jesuit-educated amigas to navel-gaze about the favourite stuff of their sissy nightmares, the much-feared modern-day bogeyman they have named “Fake News”.

All this has done nothing to bring them closer to the ordinary Filipino voter a true Opposition worth its salt is meant to reach out to. Rather, they continue to add more to thicken what had already become a formidable wall that separates the “village kids” that skateboard on smoothly-paved village streets from the “brown boys” who once sold them gagamba, tex, and trumpo from the other side of what was once a very porous chicken wire fence.

Make no mistake. The Philippine Opposition are on a tililing rampage because they had lost Imperial Manila to a Mindanaoan president. So what do they do? They now try to establish a beachhead in Imperial Western Europe and Imperial North America in a crass desperate effort to remain relevant. In the process, they insult Jose Rizal himself and other Filipino “heroes” who, as we were taught in school, paid high prices to liberate Filipinos from all that.

benign0

benign0 is the Webmaster of GetRealPhilippines.com.