Independence Will Always Be True While Filipinos Care

BIMBO CABIDOG

People still ask: is their country truly independent? Some say no and cite reasons, or ask further leading questions. One of these questions is, “can we indeed be already independent if the vast masses of our people remain poor?”

Others say yes and prove it by political postulates, like the country has its own democratic institutions – congress and the judiciary, and the people exercise the right to vote and choose officials they like to govern.

In case somebody has forgotten, we are celebrating today the 121^st anniversary of Philippine Independence. This means that government has officially decreed June 12, 1898 as the day the nation freed itself from colonial rule.

June 12, more than a century ago, was the day Filipino revolutionaries hoisted the country’s flag at the balcony of the Aguinaldo mansion in Kawit, Cavite and declared independence from Spain.

Of course, they were still in the midst of armed struggle to overthrow Spanish rule and complete victory was not at hand. But this was the winding moment of national conversion and the tribes and regions standing under a flag as one people.

The historical fact is important to clarify some erroneous misconception. The figure 121 is not the number of years the country has become independent. It is the number of years since Filipinos first asserted independence from foreign rule, officially and formally.

So, if we are now indeed independent or not doesn’t matter. We are not celebrating the period of time the country has become independent. We are marking the time the Filipino people resolutely asserted nationhood in revolutionary struggle.

Independence is not a mere label or political status. It is a collective stand and assertion of the people at a certain stage of their historical social development. It was the announcement to the whole world by our freedom fighters that henceforth they hold their right to self-determination inviolable and thus entertain no more colonial dictates.

In 1898, as provincial uprisings surged everywhere in the islands, the Filipino people have risen to a course that was irreversible. They have given birth to a nation by a collective will that no foreign power could anymore crush. Nationhood and identity were etched in blood by unity and struggle.

Yes, the American imperialists would later come to subjugate us. But the aggressors were deluding themselves to think they could do so. The Filipino nation was already beyond killing, even if the well-trained and better armed US forces decimated hundreds of thousands of resisting natives.

The Aguinaldo-led government succumbed in defeat to the imperialists. Noted for vacillation and betrayal, it foolishly conceded to yield inch by strategic inch of foothold to the foreign interventionists who faked alliance, but actually wanted to annex the islands to their sphere of global expansion.

As revolutionary courage gave way to treasonous cowardice, the newly built republic ended under the bootheels of the imperialist aggressor, and for the next fifty years, the country heeded foreign tutelage and dictates. It forfeited a future of its own.

Subtract the 46 years under US colonial rule, when even the mere mention of the word independence by Filipinos would be prohibited as a crime of sedition. Subtract also the post-war years of a fledgling republic, when continuing political and economic interference by the Americans easily annulled their supposed granting of independence in 1946. How many years can we yet count as really independent?

When we assess the national experience in the years of purported self-determination and government of our own, has independence ever been a reality? There are cases and instances to prove it hasn’t – the continuing Filipino diaspora, economic dependence, debt slavery, and diminution of sovereignty by consent to the hegemonic intrusions of powers like China which is devouring the West Philippine Sea, and the United States which still bases military forces and assets here.

But what do Filipinos today really care? As long as there are folks calling themselves Filipino who still stand and assert for country, the trueness of independence will never be erased by any circumstance. Fear when the masses no longer care.