What I found very sad in the controversy over the website Rappler is that there really has been little outrage over its vile deed, which is indisputably as follows:

Its profit-hungry owners, influence-seeking foreigners, and its fame-lusting editor-in-chief were so willing to violate the Constitution’s provision that is intended to shield media from foreigners and ensure its freedom to help develop our people’s consciousness as a nation.

Rigoberto D. Tiglao

Yet, here are people who have been spreading the fallacy that there should not even be any such restrictions.

For instance, it is so insulting to the framers of the Constitution that Fidel Ramos’ former socioeconomic planning chief, Cielito Habito, in his newspaper column even dismissed the Constitution’s provision banning foreign money in media as “fear of foreigners.” That simply is the English translation of the “xenophobia,” a pejorative term that has come to mean irrational fear and hatred of other races.

Habito, sadly, like other Rappler supporters, has been so ignorant of the most important nature of the Press.

Imagined community

The Press – and I use the term to refer to newspapers, as well as to their digital versions and internet-only news sites – isn’t just a tool for disseminating information. It also does not just serve as a check to the powerful and the rich, even if it often has been.

The most important thing about newspapers is that they are, as the acclaimed late scholar Benedict Anderson had explained, an embodiment of that “imagined community” we call the nation. Even in our case, the first stirrings of a nation were through a newspaper, the La Solidaridad, founded in 1889, even if it was published in Spain and in Spanish.

This should be clear from the obvious fact that a newspaper doesn’t report everything interesting in the world, but only what happens in its particular nation, or what would interest its citizens. An American would identify, or be “in communion with” The New York Times (or Washington Post) wherever he lives in the world. Even if he is in the Philippines he could never be in communion with The Manila Times, nor with the other three major broadsheets.

To very easily understand this: An Ateneo student would identify with The Guidon and a UP scholar with The Collegian. Even if called only “newsletters,” these publications in effect are the embodiment of their schools and their ideals. (Wouldn’t it be horrific if an Ateneo student financed The Collegian, at the height of their UAAP games?)

The most developed countries in the world, in fact, emerged at the turn of the century with a newspaper, or a few newspapers, developing and solidifying its citizens’ consciousness as a nation: The New York Times (1851), Chicago Tribune (1847), The Guardian (London, 1851); the then USSR’s Pravda (1912); and of course, China’s Renmin Ribao (People’s Daily, 1948).

Not coincidental

The Allied Powers that won World War II knew the importance of newspapers in building a nation that they allowed the countries they destroyed to publish their newspapers soon after the war: Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung (1945, the first newspaper allowed by the occupying US military) and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (1949), as well as Japan’s Yomiuri Shimbun and Asahi Shimbun.

It isn’t coincidental that the countries whose citizens are the most nationalistic have newspapers with the biggest circulations in the world: Yomiuri Shimbun and Asahi Shimbun, with readers of 9 million and 7 million, respectively. Their newspapers are able to reach most of their citizens, for them to “commune” with the nation daily, often at the breakfast table.

All countries in the world restrict or ban foreign money in their newspapers. The 20 percent foreign participation in media allowed in some countries such as the US, has been allowed only in order for these huge firms to tap the stock market, in which investors are so spread out that it is impossible for them to have any influence, let alone control, over the publication.

This is in contrast to the American North Base Media and Omidyar Network’s P50 million funds in Rappler, which, concealed by the artifice called depositary receipts, represent nearly half of the outfit’s capitalization.

The world’s richest media mogul, Rupert Murdoch, gave up his Australian citizenship and became an American so he could be allowed to buy the biggest media conglomerate there, which owns Twentieth Century Fox and The Wall Street Journal.

Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew saw the media as so important to nation-building and his island-state’s growth that he didn’t just ban foreign ownership of media, or let Singaporean businesses operate newspapers. He, instead, set up the Singapore Press Holdings, controlled by his party, which to this day owns all of the newspapers and broadcast media in that country.

Habito, in his column so slavish to foreign capital, claimed that the internet has torn down the nation’s borders that “there’s no longer any point to the nationality restriction on our mass media.”

Ignorant

This guy is so ignorant. The top newspapers on the internet are all still nation-bound, the majority such as cnn.com, nytimes.com and theguardian.com are simply cyber versions of their print editions, even if they have additional features, such as breaking-news reportage. The sites in the Philippines that have the biggest viewers are the internet versions of our TV networks and newspapers.

Huffingtonpost.com, the most successful website-only news outfit, is still mainly a publication devoted to the US. Its attempts to have versions for a few nations have not been successful – since citizens of those countries can’t relate or commune with a version of a US newsite.

Even your Facebook page is nation-bound as its algorithms will post on your timeline those made by Filipinos or in the Philippines, since your internet service provider will be reported as Philippine-based.

The Securities and Exchange Commission was simply defending the Constitution – and its aim of developing national consciousness – by ruling that even an internet-only news outfit falls within the definition of media.

I leave it to you, dear reader, to decide whether our Press, especially the three biggest broadsheets and the two largest TV networks, have helped build our nation and develop our national consciousness.

Or whether they have merely been tools used by the oligarchy, especially the Yellow Cult — which would explain partly why nationalism in this country has all but vanished.

Email: tiglao.manilatimes@gmail.com
Facebook: Rigoberto Tiglao
Twitter: @bobitiglao

This story was originally published by The Manila Times, Philippines

This week, the only time when we think of things beyond, even as rituals of Christianity dominate our days, perhaps is a good time to critique, as modern man has to, what centuries or even just decades ago, we could not question at all religion.

Rigoberto D. Tiglao

Indeed, there hasn’t been found yet a tribe or society built on the values of selfishness and cruelty. Of course, no such society will ever be found since the members of such a tribe or society would have over the centuries killed each other to extinction. In the long run, as archaeologists have argued quite rigorously, the selfish member of a tribe gets to be exposed as such and either exterminated or banished.

As sociologists using game theory have pointed out, the best game plan is to be sometimes selfish, sometimes selfless—which is after all how most rational people live their lives. Even the most selfish individual in his twilight years gets to be good.

Is it just a coincidence that nearly all religions that flourished in humanity’s history were not just state religions, but religions of empires — Christianity that of the Roman Empire since Emperor (“Saint”) Constantine, and its successor the European states; Islam that of the empires of the caliphates and sultanates up to the modern era’s Ottoman Empire. No wonder Zen Buddhism — whose teachings rulers can’t use to subjugate peoples — never got to be a widespread religion.

Is it coincidental that that kings and their nobles claimed and ruled as God’s representatives on earth which allowed them to live off the blood and sweat of the toiling tenants? Did Spain get to rule over us for three centuries through force of arms and its higher level of culture, or through religion that convinced the people that they were children of God, whom the friars and the Spanish conquistadores represented, and therefore must obey?

Book explains why charity and love for humanity aren’t necessarily because of Divine revelations.

Religions seem powerless to solve this problem, and may even have worsened it. Religions, which most tribes use as one of their distinguishing feature as against other tribes, have been used as justification for the cruelest wars in history.

How many times have we heard in YouTube videos that spine-tingling cry “Allahu Akbar!” while humans are beheaded, or even torched. But wasn’t it Christians and their Crusades in the Middle Ages who invented the notion of a Holy War, in order to expel the Muslims and recapture where Yeshua their founder walked the earth?

It is only religion, and nothing else, that can prod a young man to kill scores of infidels with the bomb that also blows him to smithereens, since he believes that there will be an afterlife for a mujahideen like him where he will enjoy 72 virgins.

The most basic appeal of religion is that it brainwashes one into believing that he is immortal, that he will be merely moving to a different kind of existence when he dies; for Filipinos perhaps, just like migrating to the US or Canada.

That’s certainly an attractive notion for one of the exploited class who has lived a life of misery and pain. Death will mean his moving to a better world.

That’s also great news if you’re with the exploiting class, that your huge donation to build your local church would get you the visa to enter that territory Christians call Heaven.

Recurring belief
It’s a recurring notion in most of the world religions: Muslims call it Jannah, the Hindus Swarga Loka, Romans the Elysian Fields, and the Vikings Valhalla, with its giant beer-drinking hall. But it is no longer a universal belief: ask a Japanese, Chinese, Korean, or a Scandinavian and he’ll reply a bit embarrassingly, “We hardly think of that.”

Still, the notion of a heavenly afterlife is so powerful that modern man is unable to shed it off, even if it goes against his rationality. There has been in fact a resurgence of the fantasy, with the plethora of best-selling books on “heaven” that have made millions of dollars for their clever authors in the US.

This is despite the fact there is nothing in the “heaven” they depict that hasn’t been in Christian depictions of it in art and fiction for centuries. A book written about a mujahideen’s encounter with 72 virgins in the afterlife, I bet, would probably be an instant hit. (The doctor who attended to best-selling “Proof of Heaven” author Dr. Eben Alexander when he claimed that he had died, reported in Esquire that he was in a medically induced coma, and was hallucinating.)

New scientific discoveries understood really only by professional physicists through abstract equations have been hijacked by creative writers to propound a theory that when one dies, he lives “alternate lives” – a la quantum physics’ “multiverses”– as a recent movie, The Discovery, dramatized.

What religion robs us of with its fiction that we are immortal is life itself, the enjoyment of the here and now.

Is it so terrible that in this vast cosmos, this unique creature, because of random events in immense stretches of time we cannot comprehend, has been given the opportunity, even if only for a limited time, to become aware of himself and of the universe, to enjoy life, love, family, friendship and achievements?

Why is that void in the future so fearsome when we really came from a void we don’t even remember?

“Be here now” is the mantra not just of mystics through the centuries, like Ramana Maharishi, Osho, and now Eckhart Tolle, but of a scientist like Sigmund Freud, who wrote:
“A flower that blossoms only for a single night does not seem to us on that account less lovely.”

Email: tiglao.manilatimes@gmail.com
Facebook: Rigoberto Tiglao
Twitter: @bobitiglao

This story was originally published by The Manila Times, Philippines