A dogma called 'national language.'

SABBATICAL NOTES. 7 JULY 2014. MONDAY. N1.
A dogma called 'national language.'

IN THE ACT OF nation building and state crafting in some of the contemporary nation states, one thing has been put forward unjustly as a 'foundational' element: the element of 'national language.'

This is the dogma.

And in the case of the Philippines, this the country's dogma, done the overt and covert way, the overt by way of unjust legislations that began in 1935, and the covert by way of the ideological state apparatuses of the country.

It is a political dogma.

It is a cultural dogma.

It is a linguistic dogma.

It is an educational dogma.

Dogma, the dictionary says, is "a principle or set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true." [New Oxford American Dictionary].

It was first an opinion, and then that opinion is laid down by an authority as 'the truth', 'the incontrovertible truth.'

That was what happened in the imposition of Tagalog as the 'basis' of the national language, that basis to be erased later on by the 1987 Constitution that is all the time being misread by the likes of that San Juan academic who misinterprets what he reads and threatens those who he calls as 'regionalists' with shooting them in the head pointplant.

It is dogma, this.

And in this age of modernist thought, we still believe in a dogma like this, and we never see the other truth that there is that national language that is better than the literal schizophrenic 'national language.'

This is the language of justice, cultural democracy, and emancipatory education.

FELIPENAS/

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