Tribune: "Laurel attackers draw penalty" — executed already.

"The Tram Mystery: Loaded cars, revenue down. The chief reason for this decrease in revenue is that many passengers do not pay their fare." The conductors are as disinterested in collecting fares for the Japanese as the passengers are in paying them.

A few people ribbed me after I fell for the rumor that we'd get independence on Friday, August 13. Well, Georgie insists he saw the posters with his own eyes. The story going around is that the Executive Commission voted (unanimously or with 3 dissenters) to turn down independence a la Manchuria and Burma.

. . . .

Laurel reaches a new low with yet another essay: "Influence of Buddhism":

Standing on the hilly concentration camp in Capas, Tarlac, and one of the peaks of Bataan are monuments that were unveiled with appropriate ceremonies and dedicated to the memories of both the Japanese and Filipinos who perished in the hostilities in the Philippines. Christian nations have erected monuments in honor of their dead but never in honor of those of their enemies. Only non-Christian Japan does that.

So where is the monument to the American dead? Laurel has become so subservient to the Japanese that he's sunk to their level, becoming more and more dependent on them, fearful of being abandoned to face the wrath of his own people. In a panic he's dashing off essay after essay, posing as a brilliant historian and liberal genius that he is not. The Japanese would erect monument after monument if it would make us forget the 26,000 Filipino POWs who died in their foul prison camps, shut off from a nation desperate to aid them with food and medicine. As the deaths mounted daily into scores and then hundreds, they realized the horror of their great crime. Unable to stop the deaths and fearful for the consequences of their acts, the Japanese made a volte-face and suddenly became magnanimous, generous and benevolent, and never let us forget it. Then to crown it all they built there, at the scene of their inhuman perpetration, a monument which Laurel holds up in connivance with the Japanese as an olive branch, a token of Japanese sincerity, of a nation and people better than his own Christian people. But Laurel doesn't stop there:

There is a growing feeling that Christianity, as a civilizing and humanizing force has so suffered from corruption everywhere that its pristine purity is no longer to be seen anywhere; moreover, historical instances abound to suggest that Christianity has been employed as an instrument of political and economical exploitation of weak people on the pretext of its ministers that they were merely spreading the gospel.

What better example of religion as a political instrument can there be but the Japanese? They warred six times in fifty years, all for the Emperor, who, being sacred, has given Japan a "holy" mission. What matters the Japanese dead, the wounded, the maimed if they are allowed to live at all, and the living standards of the people? What irony! Laurel — the protector of the Japanese in the Philippines.

...ooOoo...