Dilip Simeon's blog

NB:   Shameless criminality has been let loose in the Philippines from the apex of the state. That secret and not-so-secret criminal cohorts function with impunity from the heart of many state structures is an open scandal, but many ruling classes make some kind of effort to hide their criminal behaviour with masks of civility and law. At times this breaks down completely, as in India during state-enabled communal massacres and hate-speeches, when police look the other way and after them, when courts choose to delay cases or ignore crucial evidence.  Leaving aside totalitarian polities and ideocratic states (discussing which would detract from the intent of this note) never has the so-called free world - the world purporting to uphold democratic values and constitutions - seen such a blatant avowal of terror and lawlessness from the senior-most elected executive authority in the state. A man who orders outright murder, including of children & pregnant women (see below...

Philippine mayor Rodrigo Duterte, who has an unbeatable lead in unofficial tallies in the country’s presidential race, will push to rewrite the constitution and change to a parliamentary system of government, his spokesman has said. The New President Of The Philippines Is Donald Trump On Steroids Speaking to reporters on Tuesday morning a few hours after Duterte claimed victory, Peter Lavina said the plan “will require a wide national consensus beginning with asking congress to call for a constitutional convention.” He added: “There will be major rewriting of our constitution.” Duterte, 71, had  promised  during his campaign to change from a centralised system to a federal parliamentary form of government, a policy that has been popular in provinces far from the capital. As mayor for two decades in the southern city of Davao, Duterte has  complained that “Manila gets everything so regions are forced to beg”. Lavina said policies Duterte imposed in Davao coul...

Manila, the Philippines (CNN)  Lifeless bodies lying on the streets of the Philippines are a visceral sign of new President Rodrigo Duterte's war on drugs. So far more than 1,900 people have died. Of those more than 700 have been killed in police operations since Duterte took office in late June, according to police statistics. Many of the unsolved deaths are attributed to vigilantes. Duterte's tough talk on the country's drug and crime problems won him the election and, 60 days on from his inauguration, he remains extremely popular. "Double your efforts. Triple them, if need be. We will not stop until the last drug lord, the last financier, and the last pusher have surrendered or put behind bars -- or below the ground, if they so wish," he said in his July 25 State of the Nation speech A Senate inquiry  is underway into the police and the extrajudicial killings. Police Chief Ronald Dela Rosa told the committee there was no shoot to kill order, but pe...

The killing of a 17-year-old student in the  Philippines  has sparked nationwide protest and multiple government investigations, moves which many hope could signal a reassessment of the country’s war on drugs that has left an estimated 5,500 people dead. Kian Delos Santos was  dragged from his home  in Caloocan, on the outskirts of Manila, and allegedly murdered by police under the guise of a raid on drug pushers. His last words, pleading with officers hours before he was  found lying dead  on 16 August, were, “Please stop. Please stop. I have a test tomorrow,” according to a witness. An autopsy report showed he was shot twice in his head and once on the back. The killing has sparked mass protests and triggered several government agencies to launch investigations. Now even the architect of the violent crackdown, the president,  Rodrigo Duterte , has said that something was wrong with the police operation after viewing CCTV footage showing two me...

S ister Patricia Fox, who has been threatened with deportation for crossing the Philippine president, vows she won’t go quietly On Monday, Sister Patricia Fox is likely not to be at home. Normally, she spends the morning sitting in the walled front yard of the modest home in Quezon City, north-east of Manila, that she shares with six of her fellow nuns. Mornings, she says, are “lazy” time. She drinks tea, takes calls from friends and colleagues and prepares for an afternoon of voluntary work. But on Monday, if her legal appeals fail, officers of the Philippines Government are expected to arrive, take her away and forcibly deport her – or worse. Jails in the  Philippines  are tough places. The stick-thin 71-year-old nun doesn’t plan to let it happen. “I will go to ground,” she says. “I won’t tell you more, but I won’t be sitting around talking to journalists. They should not deport me when I have an appeal underway. And it won’t happen if I can help it.” Sister Fox...

N ow we know what “global Britain” means. Optimists have clung to Theresa May’s phrase in the hope that Brexit might avoid falling into insularity and isolation; that a hint of liberal England might survive Brexit. But with  May in Saudi Arabia ,  Philip Hammond trying to build empire 2.0 in India , and trade secretary  Liam Fox visiting Gulf tyrants and a Philippines president busy wiping out his own citizens , we can rid ourselves of such illusions. History repeats itself first as tragedy then as farce, said Marx. Certainly there is something ridiculous about May, Fox and foreign secretary  Boris Johnson scampering around the world as if the last 150 years hadn’t happened, dreaming of a military presence east of Suez while clearly desperate for a deal with any human-rights-abusing dictator that will meet them. But it is no less frightening for that. A ruling elite tortured by its inability to rule the world, which believes such a role is its birthright, can st...

The Philippines says it will charge the major news site Rappler, which has been critical of President Rodrigo Duterte, with tax evasion. Prosecutors said on Friday they also have grounds to indict founder Maria Ressa for violating tax laws after not declaring gains made in tax returns. Rappler has denied the charges, calling the case a "clear form of continuing intimidation and harassment". If found guilty Ms Ressa could be fined and jailed for up to 10 years. The government accuses Rappler and its chief executive of failing to pay tax on 2015 bond sales which resulted in 162.5 million pesos ($3 million; £2.3 million) in gains. Why Rappler is raising Philippine press freedom fears Duterte: The 'strongman' of the Philippines The state of Philippine media The English-language outlet's lawyer told journalists the case "has no legal leg to stand on" because Rappler did not evade any tax obligation. A justice department official told...

In 1938 President Roosevelt warned that “the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism.”  One of the answers to Trump, Putin, Orbán, Erdoğan, Salvini, Duterte, Le Pen, Farage and the politics they represent is to rescue democracy from transnational corporations. It is to defend the crucial political unit that is under assault by banks, monopolies and chainstores: community. It is to recognise that there is no greater hazard to peace between nations than a corporate model that crushes democratic choice. A wave of revulsion rolls around the world. Approval ratings for incumbent leaders are  everywhere collapsing . Symbols, slogans and sensation trump facts and nuanced argument. One in six Americans now believe that  military rule would be a good idea . From all this I draw the following, peculiar conclusion: no countr...

NB : A timely comment on a sinister speech. The NSA is telling us that civil society itself is a war zone. This is not surprising, as the militarisation of civil society is precisely the goal as well as modus operandi of totalitarian politics. This is nothing new. It was evident in the Nazi and Fascist movements in the 1920's and 1930's, of the Stalinist and Maoist regimes (and in Russia and China till this day). It was characteristic of Pol Pot's Kampuchea; of Islamist fundamentalist regimes, of governments led by Duterte, Trump and Bolsanaro. From one end of the spectrum to the other, all these examples of tyranny furthered their interests by making the whole social terrain a place for absolute enmity.  During the 1930's, the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt grounded his theory of politics and jurisprudence upon the idea that politics was defined by 'the friend/enemy distinction.' The Fuhrer's word was law, as he was the embodiment of the Nation; and anyone daring...

NB : The author of this piece is what might be called an enlightened conservative critic of American military interventionism abroad. Though I empathise with much of what he says, I can see where his argument resonates with (and exemplifies the problem with) a certain kind of left-wing stance on the unfolding American political crisis. What about the System? is what it says, much like a recent comment on the Trump impeachment made by Slavoj Zizek . It is necessary to engage with this posture and spell out its implications. (The global nature of the implosion of institutions based on the division of powers and answerability before the law exposes the nationalist pretensions of all the political patriots). Bacevich's article refers to the hypocrisy of the 'elite' - as if Trump, and Murdoch and the Republican Party aren't members of the global elite . (Its ironical how ruthless mafiosi portray themselves as victims and representatives of the underdog). It ignores the s...

By understanding the psychological buttons they’re pressing, we can stop demagogues from destroying our democracy   Is this democracy’s death spiral? Are we falling, in this and other countries, into a lethal cycle of fury and reaction, that blocks the reasoned conversation on which civic life depends? In every age there have been political hucksters, using aggression, lies and outrage to drown out reasoned argument. But not since the 1930s have so many succeeded. Trump, Johnson, Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro, Scott Morrison, Rodrigo Duterte, Nicolas Maduro, Viktor Orban and many others have discovered that the digital age offers rich pickings.  The anger and misunderstand-ing that social media generates, exacerbated by troll factories, bots and  covertly-funded political advertising ,  spills into real life . Today, politicians and commentators speak a language of violence that was unthinkable a few years ago. In the UK, Boris Johnson  mocks the memory...

A Nationalist International is under construction. From Viktor Orbán in the north to Jair Bolsonaro in the south, Rodrigo Duterte in the east to Donald Trump in the west, a coalition of nationalist strongmen are cracking down on civil rights, scapegoating minorities and facilitating widespread corruption for their family and friends. There is growing recognition that – to fight these forces of division – we must forge our own  Progressive International  movement. In the United States, Bernie Sanders has called to “unite people all over the world” to counter authoritarianism. In the United Kingdom, Jeremy Corbyn has promised to draw on “the best internationalist traditions of the labour movement”. If Benjamin Netanyahu’s attendance at Bolsonaro’s inauguration suggests strong ties between nationalist leaders, Corbyn’s attendance at Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s inauguration suggests growing solidarity between leftwing ones, as well. But while thinking global, the new in...

NB: Although this essay focuses on American politics, it has broader relevance. There are two major points I would make: it does not provide an adequate definition of liberalism , a word that originates in 'liberty'; and that it does not address the matter of the global domination of capital over economic and political life. There is a note by me on this on top of this post , but the matter requires much more attention than it has obtained. The question of political liberty and the freedom of the mind is something which cuts across the stale binary of 'left' vs 'right'; and socialism vs capitalism. Democracy cannot   be reduced to mean 'the rule of the majority' , but requires the separation of powers, and the presence of autonomous institutions of law. Without democratic liberty, the world will only see the perpetual oscillation between different forms of tyranny. DS Beyond the crisis of democracy: Does anyone still believe in liberalism? When Donald T...

Today corporate power is overlain by – and mutating into – oligarchic power Seven years ago the impressionist Rory Bremner complained that politicians had become so boring that few of them were worth mimicking: “They’re quite homogenous and dull these days … It’s as if character is seen as a liability.” Today his profession has the opposite problem: however extreme satire becomes, it struggles to keep pace with reality. The political sphere, so dull and grey a few years ago, is now populated by preposterous exhibitionists. This trend is not confined to the UK – everywhere the killer clowns are taking over. Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro, Scott Morrison, Rodrigo Duterte, Matteo Salvini, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Viktor Orbán and a host of other ludicrous strongmen – or weakmen, as they so often turn out to be – dominate nations that would once have laughed them off stage. The question is why? Why are the technocrats who held sway almost everywher...