HERE’S an interesting entry from vocabulary.com on the phrase “defeatist attitude”: Having a defeatist attitude means that you give up before you’ve even started, like the runner who is so convinced he’s going to lose the race that he doesn’t even bother to go to the starting line.
When a Chinese boat rammed a Filipino fishing boat in Recto Bank, a territory within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone (EEZ) but which is being claimed by China as its own, defeatists stumbled upon one another in making light of the incident. The line long laid out by President Duterte and which is now the mantra of the other defeatists is that a small country like ours should not criticize a military giant like China. Even actor Robin Padilla, who is fond of posturing as a macho man, recently weighed in the same way.
To be fair, the President didn’t directly say we should not be critical of China because we would never win against it in war. He only downplayed the ramming as a maritime incident that does not deserve state intervention. But defeatists just could not resist telling critics that speaking up against China is useless because we could not win against it in war.
It’s as if condemning China for the incident, which is justified considering how Chinese ships used water cannons against Vietnamese fishing vessels in the Paracels (meaning that China does attack ships in asserting its claim to a big chunk of the South China Sea), can already be equated to a declaration of war.
But back to the attitude in question. In waging war or even asserting one’s claim and advancing one’s rights, a defeatist attitude is one’s worst enemy. Defeatists allowed Ferdinand Marcos to rule for decades by refusing to fight his regime. They were the people who would shut up activists and tell them that holding rallies or even waging war against the dictatorship would be futile considering the power Marcos wielded.
Defeatism is motivated by fear and worse, cowardice. I once read a book on Vietnam’s war for independence against the mighty United States and ended up admiring the Vietnamese for their courage and bravery and, most of all, the will to win. Who would have thought that a puny power could defeat a military juggernaut? But the Americans did lose the Vietnamese war.
Had Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese possessed a defeatist attitude, they could never have found ways to defeat the US. China attempted to battle with the Vietnamese, whose border it shares, but it stopped after encountering fierce resistance. Did the Vietnamese cower in the midst of China’s enormous military advantage? They didn’t. They willingly defended their land.
A defeatist attitude is what China wants our leaders to possess in its effort to assert its claim to the South China Sea. The other attitude it wants to foster on our leaders is economic overdependence. China almost succeeded in Malaysia, until Mahathir decided to make a political comeback to reassert his country’s independent ways.
Mahathir is no defeatist. When can we have leaders like him?