A keen observer of history, Mr. Duterte is in the same mold as the authentic nationalist of the past like Senator Claro M. Recto, industrialist Salvador Araneta, Harvard-trained lawyer-economist Alejandro Lichauco, economist Dr. Emmanuel Yap and noted historian-writer Renato Constantino, to cite a few, who incessantly quarreled with some misguided Americans for good reasons.


For instance, Araneta strongly denounced some US officials for blocking the industrialization policy of the country after uncovering the existence of the Dodds Report (of 1946).


He explained the failure of the country to industrialize, thus: 

<div class="article-comment">

"The indifferent economic development of the country ... was due to America's policy toward Japan and the Philippines. This policy was the result of the Dodds Report, which President Truman accepted and which had as its objective to make Japan the industrial workshop of Asia and the Philippines a mere supplier of raw materials."

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Araneta bitterly continued: 

<div class="article-comment">

"We do not argue against the wisdom of providing Japan with the means to rehabilitate herself and allowed to become an industrial country once again, although this was contrary to the prior recommendation of a post-war planning committee headed by US Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr., a recommendation which was in line with the prevailing sentiment at the end of the war. But, certainly, we can argue against a policy that would make Japan the exclusive industrialized country in the Far East, for such a policy was most detrimental to the Philippines. Indeed, the United States could not justify a policy that provided all kinds of stumbling blocks to the industrialization of her ally (Philippines) in the war against Japan. As a result of this policy, industrialization in the Philippines suffered severe setbacks.

</div>


The Dodds Report, according to Constantino, in a series of conversations with this writer some years back, explained the continuing obsession of US foreign policy to keep the Philippines a free and open market for US products, because a liberal import policy, another name for free trade, ensures that this country will never be able to industrialize and take the same nationalistic developmental strategy that enabled once poorer neighbors Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, Malaysia and Thailand to transform into the newly industrialized countries.


The late nationalist CM Recto described the geopolitical plan embodied in the Dodds Report as "America's anti-industrialization policy for the Philippines".



Conclusive proof of what Recto described as America's "anti-industrialization policy for the Philippines" came when President Ferdinand E. Marcos formally launched an industrialization program in the late 1970s based on 11 heavy industries, led by the steel, petrochemical and engineering industries. The announcement of that plan swiftly followed a protest by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the pro-American technocrats in the Marcos Cabinet, led by no less than Prime Minister Cesar Virata.


The anti-industrialization policy has been implemented all these years through IMF conditionalities, and it isn't hard to understand that for the past 60 years this country has been under the continuous economic supervision of the IMF. There is no country in the world that can claim to be under IMF's supervision for even a fraction of that time. And it isn't coincidence either that this country is the only one in the region that isn't making any headway toward industrialization.


When the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and Singapore originally founded the ASEAN in 1967, not one of them was a newly industrialized country (NIC). Today only the Philippines remained outside of the NIC-hood status. The four other cofounders of the ASEAN are now acknowledged NICs.


Lichauco said:

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"The sovereign nationhood was pure fiction, because the colonial power, which supposedly returned to us the independence which it had wrested from Andres Bonifacio's revolution, never really left and never really allowed us to exist and act as a free and sovereign people." 

</div>

In a conversation with this writer before his death in 2015, Lichauco said: 

<div class="article-comment">

"The Philippines is a neocolonial state which, by definition, means a state that is sovereign and independent in theory but which, in fact, is the colony of another, or of others. As a people, we are the classic victim of what Webster's New World Dictionary calls neocolonialism and which it defines as the exploitation of a supposedly independent nation as by imposing a puppet government."

</div>

For his part, Yap, one of those who crafted and pushed the approval of the House Joint Resolution 2, or the Magna Carta of Social Justice and Economic Freedom, in the Sixth Congress, said in a conversation with this writer a few years ago: 

<div class="article-comment">

"If we had a total economic crisis in our hands, it is because we are a country stuck in the preindustrial stage of history." 

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Although unimplemented, the Magna Carta still remains a valid law today.



Isn't President Duterte's recall of how American soldiers massacred hundreds of Moros in March 1906 in Bud Dajo, Sulu, a way of reminding misguided Americans, who continue to meddle in purely domestic affairs, are more answerable to issues of human-rights violations and a trail of economic degradation?



Sources: 

<ol class="article-sources">
<li>
Duterte, a genuine nationalist by Cecilio T. Arillo, October 10, 2016, <a href="https://goo.gl/LSYhfP" class="news_link" target="_blank" title="Source">Manila Standard</a>
</li>
</ol>



(This article is adapted from the source listed above. We are unable to grant permission for any kind of reproduction other than social media shares.)

The genuine nationalist Duterte and the American meddling in purely domestic affairs