An honest picture of the Philippines includes Western abuses
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-impe...