Can one be pro-Filipino without being pro-Chinese?
Credit to Author: Mauro Gia Samonte| Date: Sat, 14 Dec 2019 17:03:35 +0000
The question was first prompted in me by an incident I gathered from a book by the late former vice president Salvador Laurel, A Child’s Footnote to History. The author cites the brief conversation President Jose P. Laurel had with the leader of the American troops sent by General Douglas MacArthur to arrest him in his hotel suite in Nara City, Japan in 1945:
“At one point, Colonel Turner asked my Papa, ‘What made you serve under the Japanese?’ I jotted down Papa’s reply.
“‘Colonel, you are from Harvard and I am from Yale. We can cheer against each other in a ball game and argue passionately on almost any subject under the sun. But, on fundamental principles, we must agree. One such fundamental principle is that you should not expect me to love Americans better than Filipinos in the same way that I should not expect you to love the Filipinos better than the Americans…’”
Clearly, however, the statement of the wartime president was spoken on the plane of principle, where patriotism is limited by the ideal confines of the relationship between man and his nation: loving one’s country over and above any else. In the pragmatic realities of the relations among nations, love of country is necessarily measured by how one navigates through the gamut of interlinking issues in those relations, with the one single primordial motive of, as Dr. Jose P. Laurel would put it time and again, “tiding the country over to better times.” In fact, this is where President Laurel had attained heroism to the fullest measure, bearing the nation on his shoulders on the sheer doctrine of national survival — to the extent of being accused a “collaborator.”
In brief, if collaboration with the Japanese occupational forces was necessary to carry the Filipino nation through the war, then that collaboration becomes a heroic patriotic act.
Given now the situation obtaining in the South China Sea, that Laurel episode is called to our minds one more time. It would seem that the best way out for the Philippines in extricating itself out of the conflict is to maintain a neutral stance: not pro-United States, not pro-China, but precisely as Laurel put it quite lucidly during the war, pro-Filipino.
I would admit that not too long ago, I think I was myself was clinging to that notion when during a discussion in “Ang Maestro atbp. — The Unfinished Revolution” over Radyo Pililipinas, I was proposing that the Philippines disengage itself from the US-China confrontation. I honestly believed until then that maintaining that disengagement was the safe way open for the country out of the conflict.
But anybody with the nation’s interest at heart is inevitably ushered into the dawning, as expressed in one forum at the Ateneo University thus: When two elephants fight, the grass is trampled upon. When they don’t fight, the elephants eat the grass. A question was then asked: What’s there for the Philippines to do? Came the answer: “Be a tree. So you don’t get trampled on or [be] eaten.”
There was some fallacy somewhere in the conclusion. In the first place, the Philippines is no grass. Why can’t it be the third elephant then? So, it can do its own trampling on and eating the grass.
In due time, it dawned on me. In the worsening tension between the US and China in the South China Sea, it would be foolhardy for the Philippines not to take a stand. When the behemoths go crashing through the fence the country is sitting on, it will be the first to get crushed.
President Rodrigo Duterte took the wise step when right at the start of his term, he executed a radical turnaround from long-held tradition by the Philippines of heavy leaning on the US to close alliance with China this time. In fact, with Russia, too, with whom he proclaimed the analogy to the elephants in the Ateneo forum: “The three of us against the world.”
At long last, a Third World country, gets the ball to proclaim itself the third elephant.
But enough of figure of speech.
The tension in the South China Sea has crystallized to Filipinos that China is the one to stand by if it is to ultimately jumpstart in its own determined push to progress. Time and again, I have cited in this column the volume of developmental assistance China has rendered to the Philippines since Duterte took power. It would be redundant to cite them here for the umpteenth time.
The only reason I thought of bringing up this matter again is that there is seemingly a campaign to approach the question of Filipino nationalism as an issue independent in itself.
No, it is not. Filipinism does exist in a vacuum. It relates to all developments in geopolitics, particularly to the conflict between China and the United States both over the South China Sea and over world trade. In both arenas, China is winning and the United States is losing.
China’s unabated build up of forward military bases in the South China Sea region evidently aimed at neutralizing US’ own military presence in the area attests to this US loss.
Similarly, President Donald Trump’s willingness now to sign a deal with China for ending his high tariff on Chinese imports indicates US admission of defeat in Trump’s trade war.
Purveyors of “Filipino nationalism,” clearly with great encouragement from US rah-rah boys, tend to divert Filipinos from these pragmatic features of Philippine existence. The China-US conflict is a reality that Filipinos will have to live by day after day. Who between the two protagonists to take up: China or the United States?
For Filipinos to stand by the US is to take up a losing cause. It is in this respect that the question is raised: Can one be a pro-Filipino without being pro-Chinese?