"Enemies of the State"

[r/brey]

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religion is the foundation of a successful society

AHAHAHHAHA

ngano man lagi ang pilipinas way ayo na halos tanan taw diri naa may religion, katoliko kasagaran.

unya tanawa ang, lets say, england. nagkadaghan man ang atheist did2, yet they're country is way up there, economically at least.

so, i think, religion has nothing at all to do with the success or failure of the state. it could just kill it, since it spawns fanatics who just chant all day to god instead of doing something productive with their lives. u see it all the time in TV. and thats sad.

[reklamador]

Ang imong gi pinpoint kay kato mana'ng mga deboto kunohay pero mga nag-una-una diay sila sa mga sala! nag-hatag lang to sila ug ka-uwaw! ang tinu-od nga kristyano kato tong mga hardworking ug dili pili-an ug trabaho kato gu'ng mga taw nga mohatag ug honor sa ilang trabaho no matter kung hugaw o dili, mga taw dili kahibaw mo-daot sa ilang isig-kataw, mga taw ng walay laing gihuna-huna kundi ang kaayuhan sa tanan, mao na ang tinuod nga kristyano!

[gareb]

reklamador & r/brey: Off topic na mo.

[reklamador]

oh! yrros!

[zadok]

kahibalo mo kung unsa jud ang enemy sa atong state? corruption!

ang contra sa atong nasud? kapobre!

[gareb]

[size=18px]Commentary : Missing the point [/size]
http://news.inq7.net/opinion/index.p...d=34059&col=75

DESPITE martial law in the Philippines and the defeat of the United States and its favored regime in Vietnam in 1975, is the Armed Forces of the Philippines still missing the point?

AFP intelligence does seem to be familiar with events in Vietnam, where the communist-led National Liberation Front (or the "Viet Cong" as the United States referred to them) won power in 1975. But a media briefing by a Philippine Navy intelligence officer last week didn't mention the country's own martial law experience at all-an experience that has its own lessons to offer.

The officer briefed the media on the controversial "Knowing the Enemy: Are We Missing the Point" briefing paper, parts of which the AFP released last week. The officer warned that something like the Tet offensive in Vietnam and an uprising similar to what happened in Russia in 1917 could happen in the Philippines.

While the Bolshevik triumph in Russia created the first socialist state in history, the Vietnamese experience is more relevant to the Philippine situation. The Communist Party-led New People's Army is waging a guerrilla war along the lines waged by the Viet Cong. But the Vietnamese experience is also relevant in another sense.

In the late 1960s, the US Central Intelligence Agency, together with the armed forces of the US-backed South Vietnamese regime, launched Operation Phoenix, a program for the systematic assassination of Viet Cong cadres and sympathizers. When the program officially ended in 1971, it had outrightly killed or tortured to death some 40,000 Vietnamese, mostly civilians and non-combatants. Those killed included village leaders, students, women-anyone suspected of collaborating with, or of being sympathetic to, the Viet Cong.

The March 1968 massacre of over 500 women, children and elderly men in the tiny village of My Lai was part of Operation Phoenix. In that incident, the US soldiers responsible claimed they had received "intelligence" that the only people who would be in My Lai on the day of the attack would be hard-core Viet Cong guerrillas.

Of added interest for Filipinos is the claim in some US publications that the killing, torture and forced disappearances of suspected NPA cadres and sympathizers in rural Philippines during the martial law period were part of a Philippine counterpart program. But what is of equal interest is that the ongoing killing of aboveground activists who are either leaders or members of legal organizations seems to echo Operation Phoenix. Although on a scale lower than the Vietnam War atrocities, the killings began in 2001 and their number has dramatically risen in the last few weeks.

They have become sufficiently numerous to revive memories of martial law. During that period, an average of three non-combatants a week were being killed by the Marcos military. As of March, however, seven people a week were being killed on average, all of them members or leaders of legal, including party-list, organizations, which the AFP claims to be communist fronts.

The irony is that in Vietnam during the US presence, as well as in the Philippines during the US-supported martial law regime, state terror in the form of assassinations, torture and forced disappearances didn't work.

The United States lost a war for the first time in its history, driven out of Vietnam, and the regime it supported fell.The Marcos regime collapsed despite the elaborate machinery of repression the military had created. Along the way, the repression managed to help transform the New People's Army from a rag-tag army of 70 in 1971 to a force the military estimated at 26,000 in 1986.

In both instances the point seemed clear: repression doesn't end rebellion; it encourages resistance. It does kill people, but invites legions to take their place. It's simple enough for even *****s to understand. The violence of repression gives people no other option except to use violence themselves.

Together with the signal lesson that repression breeds resistance rather than surrender is the lesson that allowing dissent and encouraging reform can be anti-theses to revolution. Dissent convinces people that a political and social system, no matter how seemingly reprehensible, is not without hope. On the other hand, reforms, even of the most cosmetic kind, imply that the same system can work.

The point seemed to have been well demonstrated and understood for the United States to reverse its 1960s-1970s policy of supporting right-wing dictatorships, including those in Latin America and Asia, where the most prominent were those of Marcos in the Philippines and Suharto in Indonesia.

Since the 1980s, the United States has exerted every effort to prove that it's on the side of democracy and liberty, rather than on the side of dictatorship and tyranny, and it has counseled its client states to behave accordingly. Even the Bush administration still declares support for democracy as official policy while laying waste that democratic precept called self-determination. But the behavior of its Philippine client, the Arroyo government, suggests a return to the tactics of old in addressing insurgencies.

What has raised alarm bells about the AFP's "Knowing the Enemy" briefing is precisely that implication. The briefing was prepared and is being disseminated in the context of the ongoing assassinations of legal, aboveground activists, whose organizations it identifies as CPP fronts.

Indeed, the killings and the identification of these organizations as CPP fronts suggest that the AFP, rather than focusing on defeating the NPA on the battlefield, is concentrating on the so-called "legal machinery" of the CPP. If the killing of activists and the demonization of sectoral and media organizations, and even of Church groups, indicate anything, it is the radical shift of government policy from its random intolerance of dissent in the past to intensified repression. If this is the case, both the Philippine government and its military arm could be, once again, missing the point.

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Luis V. Teodoro, is a professor of journalism at the University of the Philippines

[potterboy]

i have some points that ill be presenting here...

the enemies of the state will be known.

POT's wont be organized if the government hadnt started it all.

[cebutech]

[quote="potterboy"]

.....
wanna know who the enemies?
AFP and the Arroyo Regime- they are the true ENEMIES OF THE STATE.

...

quote]

interesting... must really be not far from the truth these days.

[potterboy]

what the current administration presents to the masses is total deception. as if they are not aware of what is happening or what has happened to our brothers and sisters who "involuntarily disappeared", purely of the cause.

[potterboy]

bumpy!