"For Independence over Terror, Injustice, and Humiliation"
(Or: "Notes after Duterte's statement about 'a truly independent Philippines'
and its actually existing subservience to entrenched interests")
More than a century hence, the Philippines, despite its independence, remains under the clutches of interests. Both from the landed gentries and its foreign overlords, these interests hath controlled economically, politically, militarily, and culturally.
It may sound "negative" as such as it negates the country being an independent entity in the family of nations; but, by seeing the country continues to be plundered by American, Chinese, and various nationals, with its big corporations, financial institutions, and various entities controlled by the unequal treaties and agremeents, this country remains as a mere economic appendage of the operations of these foreign big capitalists.
What more of seeing landlords keeping control in their fiefs regardless of various agrarian reform programs, provisions, and decisions from the courts. The order, through the Duterte administration, continues to tolerate as such, citing the fact that the ones within the order are themselves both landlords and compradores, maintaining firm in their interests.
And now, with the rise of China as an imperialist power in a "socialist" garb, Duterte, whilst feigning to be an antiimperialist, has allowed this rising dragon to infringe on the cpountry's maritime territory and plunder the country's economic resources; whilst ironically, maintaining the country as a neocolonial client state under American rule, and serving its economic, military, and geopolitical interests.
With these, no wonder the Filipino's struggle for genuine national and social liberation continues to prevail. With the country celebrating its 121's anniversary of its independence, the Filipino people, drewing inspiration from its epic struggle to attain freedom, doesn't stop from its continuity. For these people, woken up by the realities that surrounded them, has concluded that it is indeniable that the regime whom assuming to be first "socialist" rather end as any other ruler that cares about the interests of the landed; so is also indeniable that the regime whom promised land for the landless, homes for the homeless, and justice for the victims of various oppressions including those in uniform turns out to be the one who kowtowed at the interest of the landlords, compradores, and bureaucrats.
Thus, it is indeniable that in the face of all-out terror of the Duterte regime, the clamor of the every Filipino to oust from his position, what more of dismantling this present order continues to mount.
And as in the past, it is the most urgent task in this saga of struggle to advance the Filipino's cause for National and Social Liberation.