The Linguicide Society of the Philippines.

SABBATICAL NOTES. 19 AUG 2014. TUESDAY. N3.
The Linguicide Society of the Philippines.

A FORMER STUDENT OF MINE in a specialized college for the priesthood--name withheld for security reasons--has called my attention to the fact that these language terrorists (1) accusing that the advocates of multiplicity in the country are under the employ of the US Central Intelligence Agency and (2) calling these advocates to be shot in the head pointblank are in fact members of a band of losers called The Linguicide Society of the Philippines.

This apt phrase is not mine, but Professor Bart Gacrama's.

I was amazed at the kind of creativity he has that I wondered if he has turned away from critical philosophy and after years of not having seen each other after presumably losing his philosophical innocence in my class, has instead succumbed to the seductions of a kind of capitalism that is mindless, and it is mindless because it has no sense of the moral.

Of course, I asked him that. And bluntly so.

He bluntly told me, his tone a reprimand: 'Philosophy is a jealous lover, sir!'

He still called me 'sir', and I am sensing he has forgiven me for accusing him of becoming a traitor to The Cause because he has turned capitalist, or has started to serve the ends of capitalistic universities like those we know in the heart of Kamaynilaan. Some of these schools have become the breeding ground of this Linguicide Society of the Philippines.

The use of 'linguicide' to account that group is unequivocal.

It simply means that systematic erasure of other languages of a diverse country like the Philippines through wrong public policies on language, language education, culture, and general and professional education per se.

Many of the members of the Linguicide Society of the Philippines are sporting the title 'associate professor' and truly, they have come to profess anything but justice and fairness for the othered languages.

What we have are their tyrannical ways of pursuing their narrow sense of nation, state, and nationalism--all at the expense of our country's multiplicity, all at the expense of cultural democracy, all the expense of linguistic justice, all at the expense of emancipatory education.

So, here we are.

Ladies and gentleman, The Linguicide Society of the Philippines!