IF THE administration of President Ferdinand ‘Bongbong’ Marcos Jr. believes that furthering our security alliance with US Imperialism and the former imperial power of Japan is a “demonstration” of our ‘independent foreign policy’ and more importantly, a recognition of our “sovereignty” by other countries and would thus gain as further “respect,” such presumption is naively wrong.
For one, an ‘alliance’ to be truly credible among the contracting parties must be based made by those in ‘equal footing’ of which the simplest denominator would be their relative economic strength and the degree of sincere appreciation and respect they accord one another.
In our case, the proposed “alliance triad” between the Philippines, Japan, and the United States—that by all indications our government seemed very much eager to grab—is an absurdity; it is a relationship that is an embarrassment to our actual historical experience with the United States and Japan.
Or are Filipinos, as a people, really a race of ignoramuses that they haven’t learned anything at all from our bitter historical experience? Our biggest drawback is that eager to be ‘friends to everyone and enemy to none,’ we have national leaders who are ready to forget the barbarity and exploitation that the United States and Japan have inflicted on us in an effort to turn us into their respective colonial possession.
We have been so miseducated all these years thus learning nothing, and our leaders imbibed with short memory that we are no longer bitter when the US turned much of Luzon and Samar into a “howling wilderness” barely 123 years ago and our country devastated, and our women as forced prostitutes by Japan just 82 years ago.
In other words, if the government believes, truly, that by being recognized as a military “partner” and “ally” of the US and Japan would give us the respectability and prestige that we want as an independent nation, such a premise is wrong, very wrong, on several levels. Nay, such eagerness is even despicable considering the cruelty and deprivations we suffered under their hands.
Indeed, under the proposed military triad with Japan and America, we are sure to be the laughingstock in the world worthy of derision and disrespect.
For it is a true spectacle for a country, enslaved and brutalized by their former oppressors, to be seen as very eager to enter into a military partnership with them on the deluded belief that it would be a ‘partnership of equals.’
If that is bad enough, the really worse part is that this proposed alliance is targeted against a country, China, that has done nothing bad against us and whose only “fault,” in the eyes of the West, is to stubbornly follow its own path of development independently and to always insist on others to respect its own independence.
And yes, the worst part of this whole deal is that, just like Ukraine today, Filipinos would be made to shed their blood, their homes and their future destroyed for generations to come, the country saddled with debt it cannot possibly pay thus sinking it to the level of Yemen or Iraq today and all for a “cause” (war with China) that they don’t care about and know nothing about.
If despite our warning, the government of PBBM persists on entering into a military alliance with both Japan and the United States, it should not expect to gain further respect from the rest of the world community. For who can respect a relationship between masters and slave?
What this government should prepare for is the day our country gets devastated.
But as no sane Filipino would want this to happen, the government should prepare for a REVOLUTION.