Skip to main content
Work with the NEU
An honest picture of the Philippines includes Western abuses
TOM SYKES argues that by leaving out the devastating impact of invasion, colonialism and neoliberal subjugation in the modern day, writers and journalists have been getting the Philippines wrong for 200 years
SAME OLD SAME OLD: A 1900-1902 editorial cartoon in Judge Magazine by Emil Flohri commenting on the US conquest of the Philippines [Cartoon: Wikipedia]

IN 1845, Marx and Engels made their now-famous observation that “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, ie the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.”

Transmitted through education, culture, the media and other institutions of knowledge, these dominant ideas not only govern how Western elites perceive their own societies but also non-Western ones.

Writing more than a century after Marx and Engels — but differing in their methodology Edward Said and Alain Grosrichard argued that capitalist-imperialist objectives in the Middle East have over time informed numerous distortions, misrepresentations and stereotypes found across a wide spectrum of media from British Victorian travelogues of Egypt to French Enlightenment essays on “Oriental despotism” to late 20th-century US journalism on the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands.

The 95th Anniversary Appeal
Support the Morning Star
You have reached the free limit.
Subscribe to continue reading.
Similar stories
Press cuttings of the Angry Brigade, 1973
History / 18 October 2025
18 October 2025

With the recent release of Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie One Battle After Another, STEPHEN ARNELL gives the storied history of the British real-life left-wing urban guerillas

MAJOR PROTESTS: (left) Young people call out endemic corruption as massive protests and rioting
Features / 29 September 2025
29 September 2025

Huge protests against corruption and preventable deaths during flooding have rocked the government — the masses are not likely to be able to take direct control in their own interests yet, writes KENNY COYLE, but it’s a promising show of people power

Prime Minister Keir Starmer speaks to soldiers at the RAF base in Akrotiri, Cyprus, during his three-day trip to the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Cyprus, December 10, 2024
Features / 3 July 2025
3 July 2025

From nuclear bomb storage in the 1950s to surveillance flights over Gaza today, the Cyprus base has enabled seven decades of machinations so heinous that Starmer once blurted out ‘we can’t tell the world’ what goes on there, writes NUVPREET KALRA

fanon
Opinion / 24 June 2025
24 June 2025

On the centenary of the birth of the anti-colonial thinker and activist Frantz Fanon, JENNY FARRELL assesses his enduring influence