Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 23:01:00 04/18/2010
Filed Under: history, Treaties & International Organisations
WE Filipinos must review our mistakes and the problems they have brought about. For we still have not realized that our trusting ways have always been taken advantage of by opportunists. While our Asian neighbors have always traded with us without meddling in our internal affairs, Western countries have colonized us for their own selfish purposes.
For example, Spain converted us to Christianity which was used to rule us for 400 years while it exploited our natural resources. And then America came along to rule us for around 50 years, teaching us their system of democracy while they mined our mountains for gold and silver. What made us docile to their exploitative ways if not our trustful bent?
Consider now that the former US Ambassador Kristie Kenny was very warm and friendly and her replacement Harry Thomas is a forceful official. That makes us ask if the Obama administration is going to rule us once more with an iron glove for obvious geopolitical reasons. Indeed it is time we Filipinos realized that since 10 years ago our own leader, President Macapagal-Arroyo, allowed the Americans to have a say in our country’s affairs for her own political survival. The tradeoffs were always obvious even though her treachery to the Philippines was cleverly disguised.
The point is, if we have to protect our rights as human beings, we must differentiate right from wrong, good from evil. We must reject the deceptions foisted on us, including the technologies which merely serve to enslave us for obvious reasons. To put it another way, the West’s political aggressiveness has degraded our humanity so that even our leaders have succumbed to hypocritical and selfish ways.
It is time we realized that Google and Microsoft are being forced on us by the American hegemony so it can pry into our privacy, whether at home or in the workplace. For instance, only last December, a French publishing house in Paris won a copyright infringement case against Google for digitalizing the contents of books by French writers. And here in the Philippines, Microsoft also digitalized my manuscript “An Indication of the Truth” for a worldwide pay-per-view scheme on Yahoo—without my express permission.
Indeed, “highway robbery” in the old days has become “Internet robbery” these days. The fact is that Google and Microsoft amassed multibillion-dollar profits in 2009 at the expense of hardworking book writers.
When the French publisher won its case, Google was penalized and made to pay for the violation. This highlights the Philippine justice system’s failure in handling similar cases because its hands are still tied by America’s colonial chains, with the support of the corrupt Arroyo administration.
Indeed, unless we decide to right this wrong, we will remain an abused nation.
—ERNESTO KELLY MAGTOTO,
ernestomagtoto@gmail.com
http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/letterstotheeditor/view/20100418-265063/Filipinos-still-in-colonial-chains
