Falsifying the de facto argument about 'Filipino' as the national language

SABBATICAL NOTES. 20 JUNE 2014. MONDAY. N1.
Falsifying the de facto argument about 'Filipino' as the national language, and hence, must be mandated, and worse, imposed. 

FOR ALMOST NINE decades now, this Tagalog/Pilipino/Filipino language (for Tagalog) or dialect (for P/Filipino) has been rammed into the throat of every Tomas, Diko, and Harry in the Philippines. 

The brainwashing that we have to have this 'language' taught among our youth begins in the early years of every unthinking person in the Philippines and lasts until college, or a total of at least 12 years of education, or even more for those who entered the pre-school and/or went through Grade 7 (for some sectarian schools).

Even as our young who are not from the Tagalog areas are taught this Tagalog-based P/Filipino, they are not at all--NOT AT ALL--given the chance to know their own mother language.

Which leads to the Tagalogization of the mindset of the Ilonggo educatee, the Tagalogization of the Tausog, the Tagalogization of the Boholano, the Tagalogization of the Kapampangan. The list goes on and on, and on and on.

Now comes the 'de facto' argument which states that Tagalog/Pilipino/Filipino has been in effect the language of the everyone in the Philippines and has been declared as such by the 1987 Cory Constitution and as such, there is no reason why we have to reject it.

We have, of course, other legal instruments, such as the 1974 Constitution for that older version of the rendering as de facto this abracadabra of a law, and in the older times, the enactment by the Commonwealth Regime of the imposition of Tagalog as the 'basis' of the national language.

In the deception is that calculated forgetting of the word 'basis'.

The 1987 Constitution is bolder, but even that boldness contains a seed of its own contradiction.

It declared in a de facto way that 'Filipino' is the national language, and it declares as well that it is 'evolving'. Ah, the sleight of hand.

There is the legal hemeneut, Emilio Betti, whose works on textual interpretation leads us to question this hocus-pocus technique of the powerful.

There is something unethical and substantially illegal in these maneuverings, and we need to untangle the deception by looking into the intentions of those involved in this triumphalism that characterizes nation building and state crafting.

No, you cannot legislate an unjust law, even if this law is part of the Constitution.

For one thing, the declaration that Filipino as the national language when that language does not exist, is a fictive provision as it has no basis in reality.

What these people have is the existence of Tagalog and not Filipino, and that is where we can locate the lie.

A law based on a lie is an unjust law.

FELIPENAS/