The Major Predicate
The forest – the big picture – is not easy to see.
2019 marks the 7th year of the Gardener’s Tales. The garden, of course, is always there – green and pretty. And the gang of gardeners has increased in number. But the tales – ah, the tales – have not always been easy to publish, nor even just to print. There was a feeling among many that doing so would not be good for one’s health. But later than sooner one gets tired even of that feeling. That has happened now.
The Gardener was first among firsts to blurt out the prophetic statement that a new regime had been inaugurated in his country some three years ago – one not committed to democracy, freedom, and independence – that sort but, rather, to siding with the international challenger to the international power which had, for many decades, always dominated our land, our mines and our minds.
In clearer terms, this international power is America and the international challenger is China.
Poor Pinas remains their battlefield. But ignorance is bliss. Most Pilipinos don’t realize that this is so – too busy looking at the trees, hardly given the chance to clearly see the forest as such. The forest – the big picture – is not easy to see.
It was not easy to see that China has a border doctrine they take quite seriously indeed. And anyone who does not respect her borders becomes their foe – no exception, not even their erstwhile great allies Russia and Vietnam, ruled by communist parties alike. Their border conflict with China led not to word squabbles but to serious shooting wars.
Unfortunately for China, it lives and prospers in the age of the American Empire, not so-called by the United States, which prides itself in being the original modern democratic republic, supposedly the opposite of old-fashioned empire-builders, but really not quite.
China, of course, is too old, has seen too many centuries and millennia not to be able to see through the American reality. It would have been fine, in its view, if that Empire had its “border” in California, Hawaii or even Guam. But for a century now it has occupied the Philippines and has de facto moved its “borders” to what China calls the “South China Sea” ( or, as lately referred to by the Philippines, the “West Philippine Sea”).
To make matters worse, America has its own sacrosanct “border” doctrine, originally called “the Monroe Doctrine” ( actually written by John Quincy Adams, son of a President who himself became a president as well).
In essence this doctrine stipulates that America must hold what it already has, defend and keep what it has acquired – “to have and to hold.” First applied to Central and South America the application of the doctrine was extended to the Great Pacific and now, more than a hundred years later, it has clothed Pinas, its erstwhile old-style colony, with the mantle of “independence” while simultaneously strengthening the occupation forces that the Philippines agreed to call, on America’s suggestion, (permanently) “Visiting Forces” – to the chagrin of China, which seems to have had the habit of regarding this disguised American “state” as an old Chinese “province” – or something of this sort.
The next tale will narrate the gardeners’ view of the implications of this major political predicate that can be accurately described as the Sino-American War, a continuing low-intensity conflict that has all the makings of sudden high intensity manifestation – to the great harm of Pinas and all of us. FINIS.