Gangsterism and the issue of the Tagalog/Pilipino/Filipino language
THERE IS THE NEED to recognize today that the uncritical advocates of the Tagalog/Pilipino/Filipino language (or dialect for Filipino?) are at it again: their gangster tactics involving intimidation, name-calling, and boisterousness are gaining sound bites, true, and while they are at it, they keep on enjoying their advantage over the other language advocates.
The other language advocates are the 'othered' peoples of the land, and many of them are Tagalog and Tagalog-speaking people, English-speaking people, and non-Tagalog-speaking peoples of the other and othered Philippine ethnolinguistic nations.
These gangsters can no longer deny the fact that their 79-going-on-80 years of linguistic reign since Quezon imposed his will upon an unwilling people--a will that hypervalued and placed in the citadel of mind-formation and epistemic development his mother's language and effectively disrespected the community and local languages of educatees--can no longer sustain that reign's hold over the already awakened non-Tagalog communities.
Gangsterism is "the use of tactics associated with gangsters, as intimidation or violence, in order to achieve something." That is what they are precisely doing, these language gansters in the name of their own imagined nation. This nation speaks only one language, their own, a language they are imposing upon everyone, making each one Tagalogized, and thus, depriving the other nations their right to mediate their own understanding of the nation in their own language.
Some of the gangsters have even called for the "isolation" of their enemies, the word referencing the bartolina, Bicutan, Bilibid, or Guantanamo.
The funny logic of these gangsters is that if you do not advocate for the Tagalog/Pilipino/Filipino, you are not a nationalist, as if those who fought for their own respective ethnolinguistic nations did not think beyond their own in the way these narrow-minded advocates of the schizophrenic 'national' language are thinking now.
Their empty logic is easy to understand: advocacy for Tagalog/Pilipino/
Ah, Hitler killed six million Jews in the name of the German nation.
Ah, the soldiers and minions and pit-bulls of Nazism put up gas chambers to 'isolate' and liquidate those who did not believe in the Nazi sense of nationalism and patriotism.
Today, we are celebrating the 79th-going-on-80th year of linguistic fascism in the Philippines.
May these language fascists enjoy their decades of structural violence.
FELIPENAS/
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