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This article was first published in Get Real Post, a collective blog of serious writers touching on all topics under the sun. Over the week, it has been generating interesting comments which prompt me now to post the article here, hoping it will fare as well. Should KAMAO readers wish to view the original post, please visit
http://getrealphilippines.com/blog/2013/01/truth-or-consequence/

Truth or Consequence

January 8, 2013

by Mauro Gia Samonte

Apropos the stream of comments generated by my article SYRIAN WAR: MARCOS IN RETROSPECT, I’m prompted to think back on Rashomon, that movie by Akira Kurosawa which won the Best Picture Award in the 1950 Berlin Film Festival onward to winning a similar honor in the Cannes Film Festival.

                                                  The Syrian Civil War:

MARCOS IN RETROSPECT

Given the turmoil obtaining in Syria at this hour, Marcos could be the kindest president the Philippines has ever had. What the Philippines was during those four days, February 22 to 25, in 1986 was what had Syria become first quarter of 2011. Decades-old regimes had begun falling across the Middle East either as a result of sheer civil unrest, as in Egypt where mass protests on the streets forced President Hosni Mubarak to resign, or where demos and rallies proved insufficient to force the perceived dictators to step down, a certain degree of armed action became necessary as in Libya where it needed a civil war to topple Muammar Gaddafi and get him killed. Certainly the gravest of all these downfalls was that of Sadam Hussein which required the costly Iraqi war, both in terms of destruction to infrastructure and human casualties, to bring about.

A CALL:  END TO THE WAR IN SYRIA

Update from my Facebook account

Addendum

Mauro Gia Samonte
TOO LATE THE DIARY

January 2 2013

Mauro Gia Samonte
TOO LATE THE DIARY

December 22 2012

As you will note the dateline, the Mayan deadline for the end of the world to begin taking place is past. Thank who. God? No. Thank superstition. The Mayan doomsday scare serves us one good revelation: that until such time as man attains complete understanding of his relationship with his fellow men and nature, he will continue to be enslaved by a metaphysical view of the world.

Edited Update from my Status at Facebook

Mauro Gia Samonte
TOO LATE THE DIARY

December 14, 2012

All of a sudden I thought of recording my day-to-day activities henceforth. Something I have never done in all my past 71 years.

Maoie (my eldest)  finally got the guts to tell me what I had been hinted about by Beth (wife) and Paulo (my second eldest) just lately. He and Keng are moving to another house, together with Thirdy, Tiffany (children of Maoie) and Gia (unica ija of unica ija Keng), of course. 

Update from my Status at Facebook.

Mauro Gia Samonte
TOO LATE THE DIARY

December 15 2012

A year ago today, Typhoon Sendong entered the country and proceeded to devastate Cagayan de Oro City and other neighboring communities in Mindanao.

NIGHT OF MAKING PURE PURSUIT OF PERFECTION

By Mauro Gia Samonte

WEDNESDAY was the day I made for finishing Alaalang Magbabalik, one of four films contemplated as entries in a movie festival to be held end of November. The Iglesia ni Cristo is in the process of popularizing its concept of INCinema,  among various activities being vigorously pursued by the church in anticipation of the grand centennial celebration of the INC in 2014. In an effort to lend a hand in the undertaking, the Ecclesiastical District of Rizal had thought of conducting the festival. The District had been divided into four groups, each group to do a movie as its entry in the festival. Because all those who would be participating in the activity, whether cast or production staff, would be amateurs, a professional filmmaker was needed to train them in the craft of filmmaking. The task was assigned to me by the INC District Staff.

PRELUDE TO WORKERS LIBERATION

By Mauro Gia Samonte

The struggle of 2,200 former Pantranco workers to recover back wages, retirement and separation pays has turned into a saga setting the stage for what truly is in store for Philippine workers. They won money claims amounting to P722.7 million, the biggest ever award won by workers in a labor case in the Philippines in so many years. The victory thus impacts upon the entire labor movement in the country.

Where the Pantranco workers’ case goes can be where the Philippine labor movement as a whole will.

                               

TWEETING THE REVOLUTION

By Mauro Gia Samonte

Part 3: KOMUN: Solution to Working Class Dilemma 

Our last post has given rise to this issue: The working class not buying capitalist goods is tantamount to committing suicide.

How, indeed, can workers live without buying capitalist goods?

Surely, workers not buying capitalist goods would send capitalism crashing, but by that act their own lifeblood would go crashing as well.

This is the dilemma today's revolutionary must overcome. 

The idea is not "not buying capitalist goods" but "not buying from capitalism".

TWEETING THE REVOLUTION

By Mauro Gia Samonte

Part 2: Capitalism Reduced To Basics

IT won’t help any to engage in highfalutin scholarly pedantry to get us an understanding of what capitalism is. 

Capitalism is a system whereby one produces and sells what the other consumes. Capitalism therefore thrives on the buying by consumers of the products of the producers, called capitalists. Without this relationship capitalism cannot exist.

TWEETING THE REVOLUTION

By Mauro Gia Samonte

 (Note: Blogger Friend Adam Ford of UK has this blurb in his Blog, Infantile Disorder: “The revolution will be tweeted.” I don’t know if applying the idea in practice has already been begun by anybody in the world, but what this article is all about is attempting to get it done beginning now.)

Part 1: Updating The Revolutionary Concept

Accept the need for revolution.

Capitalism  has gone to such an extent that the working class has been rendered no better than machines.

Workers are refueled from day to day just to sate capitalistic greed for profit.

Revolution is the necessary road to humanize a much-dehumanized working class.

SCARY END

THE CORONA CHRONOLOGY

By Mauro Gia Samonte

WHEN US Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Martin E. Dempsey arrived June 4,2012 for a one-day visit to the Philippines, hardly did the public suspect anything unusual or alarming. It looked like one of those occasions when a top foreign dignitary happens to have a stopover in the country and makes a courtesy call on the President. And even as, after meeting up with President Aquino, the US official proceeded to Camp Aguinaldo for another round of talks with his Philippine counterpart, AFP Chief of Staff Jessie Dellosa, still this appeared normal.

WALKING THE TIGHT WIRE

By Mauro Gia Samonte

THE ESCALATION of the Scaraborough Shoal standoff has thrown the Filipino people into a delicate balancing act. One little misstep and the country goes plummeting down either the sinister US design for dominance in the Asia Pacific or China’s intransigent assertiveness in the South China Sea.

YES, VIRGINIA, THERE IS A SUPREME COURT

            By Mauro Gia Samonte

(Author wrote this article in November 2011, after the Supreme Court issued the ruling partitioning the Hacienda Luisita among its tenants. In light of the impeachment of Supreme Court Chief Justice Renato C. Corona, Author takes it as a veritable duty to post this article once again.)

   

Tears of thanks from 80-year-oid Virginia Paligutan

for the Supreme Court ruling on the Hacienda Luisita

tenancy problem.

LESSONS FROM PROLETARIAN STRUGGLES

THE PITFALL of anyone arguing that communism is not attainable in our lifetime is the same as that of those who preach to the poor to accept their wretched existence on earth for anyway they will inherit the kingdom of heaven – metaphysics.

            At a time when Marx had just completed formalizing the idea of communism, it was understandable that one would think about it as attainable only beyond our lifetime. The Communist Manifesto had antedated the Paris Commune by more than two decades, hence at the time he wrote the manifesto no experience was at hand to prove that communism could be achieved in the immediate sense.

CORONA STAYS CHIEF JUSTICE

By Mauro Gia Samonte

By our earlier posts, have we misread the Senate proceedings?

Essentially, I don’t think we did.

We were picturing a Senate thrown between the devil and the deep blue sea by accepting very much flawed articles of impeachment against Chief Justice Renato C. Corona. This gave the defense a formidable shield against any possible adverse decision the impeachment court would render at the end of the trial. That was back in February when the defense filed a petition at the Supreme Court to stop the proceedings precisely on grounds of the infirmities in the impeachment complaints.

UPDATES ON

THE HOSTAGING OF THE SENATE

In February, when the Supreme Court issued the TRO against disclosing the alleged dollar accounts of  Supreme Court Chief Justice Renato Corona, I was prompted into writing about the  possible scenario of the Senator-Judges defying such TRO. (The article was titled The Hostaging of the Senate, among the posts in this Blog in February) I feared that in that event, there would be a head-on collision between the Judiciary and the Legislative – a constitutional crisis erupting into just the kind of situation that would satisfy someone’s design to institute a one-man rule in the country.

COMMUNISM IN THE HERE-AND-NOW

By Mauro Gia Samonte

FOREWORD

At the infancy of my involvement in proletarian politics, it had become common among activists to talk about communism as a social system to be brought about only through the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It was preached that this dictatorship, being ruled by the selfless working class, would bring about the abolition of private property, hence the abolition of classes. And when there would be no more classes, there would no longer be a need for the state as an instrument of class oppression. The state would then wither away, thus bringing about the establishment of communism, a social system of self-governing humanity moved by pure love, justice, peace and brotherhood in their interrelationship with one another and with nature.

AFTERTHOUGHT TO MAYDAY 2012

By Mauro Gia Samonte

I should write this now. I could not move on if I didn’t.

We are into the 125^th year from the time those workers were massacred in Illinois in 1886, still what we are shouting now are the very same shouts those workers did. A century and a quarter after, we have not progressed beyond just that, shout. May Day in, May Day out. Shout. Once in a while, we rejoice at dole outs here, concessions there, but have we ever paused and pondered that those we have the predilection to pass off proudly as prized premium gains precisely perform the primary purpose of programming perpetual plunder of the proletariat.