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The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars but in ourselves that
we are underlings.”
Once again, our government has lived up to these
oft-quoted lines uttered by Cassius in Shakespeare’s play Julius
Caesar. This one cliché has defined our collective fate.
In springing a US serviceman, convicted of rape,
from a local jail, and that the President herself justified what has
been called “the midnight express,” GMA officials have run true
to what former UP President O.D. Corpuz wrote back in the sixties
that “rooted deep in the Filipino mind [is] a predisposition, in
the resolution of political issues, to appreciate and understand the
American point of view.”
Hence, 60 years after formal independence, the
country is still under US hegemony maintained by Filipino surrogates
in a neocolonial regime. Why so? As Antonio Gramsci said: “Every
relationship of ‘hegemony’ is necessarily a pedagogic
relationship.” Consider the long period of “pacification” that
included, to use a crass word, colonial “brainwashing” in our
educational and political system.
From the beginning, officials in the executive
departments have chosen to interpret the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA)
in favor of the Americans. Two senators also rationalized compliance
with the VFA (despite its being not ratified by their US
counterparts) along what the executive officials have unctuously
maintained. One said in effect, what can we do? Do we have the
clout? He added.
Why the VFA in the first place? The Senate had
already voted against the renewal of the US bases treaty in 1991—a
shining moment in our history, and not long after the Ramos
government came up with the bright idea of a VFA to accommodate the
desire of the Americans to continue having a strategic hold in this
part of the world.
Despite strong opposition from a wide spectrum
of nationalists, the Senate ratified the agreement thinking of it as
a treaty. There was no reciprocal action from the US Senate. Now the
country is reaping what those opposed to the VFA have been warning
all along. Will we ever learn?
Since the turn of the century, when
Aguinaldo’s army was shunted aside by US troops from positions
outside still Spanish-held Intramuros, the country has suffered
humiliation after humiliation from the new invaders. Not that there
was no resistance. Filipino patriots gave their lives in battles
fought gallantly, or spoke eloquently in world forums to assert our
independence from centuries of colonial rule.
Only the nationalist movement has persisted
(despite red-baiting) in the campaign to regain our humanity and
self-respect as a nation. But the benighted ones have managed to get
into office and control our economic and political life on the basis
of an unequal partnership with an imperialist power.
The late Senator Claro M. Recto, in the wake of
the country giving parity and bases rights to the US after the war,
spoke out against this odious relationship with the US in a UP
commencement address called “The Roots of our Mendicant Foreign
Policy.” Recto’s call for a “second propaganda movement” has
resonated in the minds of young activists who have accordingly armed
their nationalist vision with radical ideas for social and political
change.
Their steadfast opposition to neocolonial/neoliberal
schemes under the rubric of globalization and the war on terror
(e.g. Balikatan exercises) has made them the targets of
extrajudicial killings in modes reminiscent of the Vietnam War (e.g.
CIA-backed Phoenix program of killing national liberation
supporters) and brutal suppression of Latin-American insurgencies.
Interestingly some methods used were first applied in the
Philippines against Huk guerrillas and supporters after the war, or
even as early as the Filipino-American war and the pacification
campaign.
Our salvation from the fate of perpetual
underlings or subalterns lies in the hands of a people who are not
beholden to or intimidated by the US but who persevere in the
struggle for national sovereignty and democracy.
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