Members of Bagong Alyansang Makabayan marked the Independence Day celebration with a protest to amplify the call for the urgent dismantling of US bases, missile systems, and the rejection of the Pax Silica which would lead to the establishment of a weapons hub in the so-called Luzon Economic Corridor.
There’s no genuine independence as long as US bases and troops are allowed in the country, and the US military continues to use our land and water territories as training and staging grounds for its acts of aggression and intervention against other countries.
Bayan condemns the Marcos Jr government for its treasonous foreign policy and its subservience in equating the US geopolitical agenda with our national interest. In the past four years, Marcos colluded with the US in building additional US military bases, allowing more countries to deploy their armed forces and use our communities as their war playground and base for testing missiles and other weapons of mass destruction.
The Independence Day theme of “Kalayaan, Kinabukasan, Kasaysayan” rings hollow as the government continues to sell out our patrimony to foreign plunderers, while ignoring and even distorting the lessons of history by whitewashing the crimes of imperialist powers and peddling the defeatist narrative that the only way to secure our borders and modernize our defenses is to rely on our former colonizers.
The Philippine experience since the 1946 “grant” of independence is that successive puppet governments beholden to the US and the local oligarchy of big comprador bourgeoisie and landlords, have made sure that the state machinery, the domestic economy, and cultural and political institutions would serve their vested interests. It reinforced the country’s semi-feudal and semi-colonial status which further entrenched poverty, landlessness, inequality, and an economy that could barely meet our basic needs. US imperialism backed the Marcos fascist dictatorship and imposed its brutal counterinsurgency model which, to this day, unleashes terror in communities aimed at suppressing the people’s resistance against imperialist domination, war, and plunder.
Independence Day is a reminder that the path forward to genuine independence is to fight for sovereignty instead of kowtowing to foreign powers, especially those who claim to be our allies but whose real sinister agenda is to preserve their hegemony in this part of the world, and turn our country and people as mere cannon fodder in instigating conflicts with rival superpowers.
We reiterate the call for an independent foreign policy, and we ask all freedom-loving Filipinos to learn from history, honor our heroes, and save the country’s future by expelling all foreign bases and troops from our country. Let us carry forward the struggle for genuine independence and democracy.