Defeatism

Rather than worrying about China’s nuclear clout, senior security officials made it clear last week that seemingly widespread Filipino defeatism is their biggest national security nightmare.

For instance, Defense Secretary Gilbert Teodoro, speaking last week before cadets of the Philippine Military Academy, said, “We need to be ambitious in order to have the right motivation…to defeat defeatism.”

Similarly, Coast Guard spokesperson Jay Tarriela also scored last week the “defeatist mindset” of many Filipinos, stressing that the real question isn’t whether the Philippines can defeat China militarily but whether Filipinos are willing to surrender their rights and territory.

Undoubtedly, our security officials abhor defeatism in face of China’s hegemonic ambitions in Asia, that it’s an ominous political condition we ignore to our peril.

But what is defeatism? Defeatism, says the Cambridge Dictionary, is a “way of thinking or behaving that shows that you have no hope and expect to fail.”

In our present political circumstances, accepting or expecting failure happens to be the prevailing attitude of some identifiable political quarters — who some say coincidentally also profess blind political loyalty to the Duterte camp — making public calls for appeasement, that sometimes border on treason, with China.

In their calls, they vehemently insist that since policies antagonizing China inevitably end up in defeat, they actively discourage confronting or resisting mighty China’s encroachments in the West Philippine Sea (WPS).

Such grossly repugnant “defeatist” attitudes or platitudes are serious grounds enough for national security officials to go off the rails and mount serious information campaigns against it.

And, our present political leaders and security officials aren’t shy about identifying who the “defeatists” are. In fact, Tarriela claimed last week the “defeatist mindset” was instilled during the previous Duterte regime. That claim deserves looking into.

The Duterte regime’s pronounced pivot to China is, of course, inarguable. The previous regime, for one reason or another, openly thought it was politically and economically better to be in China’s good graces than not. Adherents of that rejected Duterte policy still believe it still holds water nowadays despite the abuses in the WPS.

Still, being buddies with China worked in the Duterte regime’s favor. In the regime’s subsequent reinvigorated friendly ties with China, the Asian behemoth held off commenting on the former strongman’s touchy brutal war on drugs.

China turned a blind eye to the drug war even as the United States and the European Union were strongly criticizing it at the time.

The Duterte regime, however, still had to sell its political position on China. But its massive propaganda operations, conducted by funding shady social media campaigns, was successful enough that it reinvigorated native Filipino defeatism.

The regime managed to somehow appeal to and exploit the latent defeatism in the Filipino’s psyche that it made defeatism a widely held attitude.

As an American policy expert autopsied at the end of the Duterte regime: “It is worth noting that defeatism is an entrenched and internalized Filipino value. Generally speaking, Filipinos are generous of spirit and hospitable to a fault. A function of this is the desire to not want to offend anyone. The default, therefore, is to be non-confrontational.

“Hence, caving into China’s assertive moves in the South China Sea and appeasing the rising power in exchange for support in the war on drugs and in infrastructure projects — while not necessarily morally correct — become logical.”

Such, therefore, are but some of the noteworthy entrenched aspects of contemporary Filipino defeatism that we need to labor against and correct.