Foes try movies

“He said it is being used as a medium ‘to espouse one-sided information bordering on black propaganda aimed at gullible foreign audiences who know little or have zero-knowledge about the Philippines’.

The detractors of President Rody Duterte, with their shrinking protest options, have gone into filmmaking as part of their demonization drive.

For release next week in the United States, mainly through the free channel Public Broadcasting Service, is a documentary titled “On the President’s Order” that supposedly provides a window to the administration’s flagship war on drugs.

The script of the documentary predictably will take off from the yellow narrative that included the claimed 27,000 extrajudicial killings since the start of Rody’s presidency.

A preview stated that the documentary “takes a fiercely critical look at the Philippine government’s deadly drug crackdown” and called it a “testament of our dark age of cruelty and dehumanization.”

An expensive propaganda is what it actually is, since it seeks to inflame Filipinos living abroad against Rody and thus erode his major support base.

The campaign to vilify Rody in the global stage is being strongly resisted by overseas Filipino workers who back the President’s unrelenting drive against criminals and drug traffickers.

Another target is the vociferous rights groups who crave for anything that is against Rody. For an extended period, supposed human rights defenders such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have run out of ammunition against Rody, since all the attacks they launched proved ineffective and only served to further prop up public support for him.

President Duterte’s spokesman Sal Panelo saw the American film as “riding on the coattails of the President’s international popularity and success.”

Further, he said it is being used as a medium “to espouse one-sided information bordering on black propaganda aimed at gullible foreign audiences who know little or have zero-knowledge about the Philippines and its government.”

The Palace official described the documentary as “deliberately overdramatized” for the purpose of creating a better cinematic experience for its audience “apart from putting the Philippines in a bad light.”

Rightly, Panelo noted that even in the title, the presentation already reeked with malice.

The release of the documentary is apparently timed to counter the recent investigations that again implicated detained Sen. Leila de Lima and other yellow top guns in the New Bilibid Prison scandal in which every imaginable abomination happens inside the maximum security penitentiary.

It is turning out, based on the witnesses in the inquiry, that money-making schemes inside the penitentiary prospered during the term of De Lima as Department of Justice secretary.

The riveting probe is expected to bolster the criminal allegations against De Lima that his supporters hope to counter through the release of this piece of fiction in US television.

The documentary will be no different to another recent failed bid by movie application Netflix to malign the President through satire, which was released on the eve of the midterm elections.

The show called “Patriot Act,” hosted by American comedian Hasan Minhaj, implied that President Duterte is an “autocrat” who “every so often goes on a killing spree.”

It also used the overblown figures provided by coup plotter Antonio Trillanes IV on the alleged deaths in the war on drugs.

Also, his critics tried to create game applications for mobile phone and tablets in which he blows up “zombies” who certainly look like drug dependents. The apps were removed, however.

With a lot of money in their pockets, Rody’s foes have endless creativity in their destabilization campaign, but all of such efforts consistently fail.

Expensive as they are, the yellow pursuits fizzle out since majority of Filipinos know what Rody is really up to.