The subtleties of fascism and ethnic cleansing. Or, how to homogenize various peoples via the imposition of a national language.
LIKE ALL ADVOCATES of multiplicity in the Philippines, I have always argued that the imposition of a bogus national language in its most schizophrenic form is a kind of deception marketed as a good thing for the soul of the country.
Or, for the spirit of a people now acting and thinking and behaving and dreaming and 'languaging' as one and only one.
Here, we have been hoodwinked wholesale with an idea that with the fake national language, everything would follow suit, and that progress would come about at last to all men, women, and children of this god-forsaken country.
And by the power of the state's ideological apparatuses that, in today's terms would be equivalent to the CHED, DEPED, and TESDA, and all the agencies that promote a homogenized culture including the KWF, the project to turn every person in this country into parrots is now almost done and over with.
With Ilokanos, Kapampangans, Bikolanos, Pangasinan, Visayans, and everyone else having learned the skills in self-hatred called cultural and linguistic denigration, it is not farfetched that everyone will soon be speaking a language that is not even a language but a dialect of an existing one.
Challenge an honest linguist and show her that rule of mutual intelligibility and you realize that we have fooled all along.
For decades.
For generations.
To make the deception palatable to everyone, the powerful link this up with the nation.
These people--some of them writers, academics, and national artists--forget that the non-Tagalog peoples had demonstrated their sense of the nation in their own language and culture long before the Katipunan did.
The last time I checked, the Ilokanos, for instance, wrote and signed their membership in the Katipunan in the Ilokano language contrary to the claim of Tagalogistas who cannot offer us something new to prove that Tagalog is different from P/Filipino.
The 'isang bansa-isang diwa-isang wika' mantra of the Marcosian New Society has not been forgotten. The powerful KWF people follow the same fascistic mantra that every fascist regime in Europe followed to the letter.
These fascistic regimes inaugurated what is now called linguicide, the systematic killing of the languages of a country not approved and considered and regarded as 'national'. This act of killing the other languages is to make it certain that the approved national languages gets all the nurturing so that in the end, like France, everyone would be speaking French.
All these are rituals of nation building of the wrong kind, and it is wrong because it is not premised on multiplicity, on diversity, on the 'manyness' of peoples that constitute this country.
The turning of this fact of multiplicity into just 'one'--into 'one' people speaking a single language--is an act of ethnic cleansing.
The formula is simple: no other non-Tagalog speaking peoples shall ever be allowed to exist in this homogenized country.
One activist has aptly expressed this ethnic cleansing this way: 'To homogenize a country by imposing a national language and identity at the expense of the existing indigenous languages and cultures is nothing more than organized ETHNIC CLEANSING. Congratulations Philippines for doing this without much bloodshed, but ethnic cleansing is still ethnic cleansing...' [Mike Pangilinan, https://www.facebook.com/
Now, summon the Aryan race, the pure race, of the Philippines.
And call in the cattle train for all those other peoples of this country. The gas chambers are waiting.
Auschwitz and Dachau have been built, and the gas has been ignited.
WPH/
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