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Why many Filipinos are like Jason Bourne
AS I WRECK THIS CHAIR By William M. Esposo
The Philippine Star 2009-05-24
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Actor Matt Damon’s portrayal of the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) programmed assassin Jason Bourne was such a box office success that it became a movie trilogy — The Bourne identity, The Bourne supremacy and The Bourne ultimatum.
Jason Bourne, the movie character, was a patriot who wanted to serve his country and save American lives. His patriotic zeal was taken advantage of by the CIA when they indoctrinated him to be a programmed assassin.
The CIA erased Jason Bourne’s recollection of his real identity and transformed him into a killing machine of sorts.
What his programmers did not anticipate was that Bourne’s humanity would override his destructive programming. He sensed that he was not doing a noble mission. Bourne started to ask questions and seek the truth about his past. He wanted to liberate and rescue his soul.
Many Filipinos are familiar with the character of Jason Bourne after having watched at least one of the three Bourne movies. However, many Filipinos might not have realized that they too are suffering from the problem of Jason Bourne.
Like Jason Bourne, many Filipinos do not know their real history. Jason Bourne succeeded though in sorting out his problem. Bourne had finally caught up with what made him a programmed assassin of the CIA while many Filipinos continue to remain clueless about how we were programmed to collectively fail by former and current masters.
Jason Bourne may have been a fictional character but his struggle is a realistic portrayal of human suffering resulting from not knowing one’s history. The people who created Jason Bourne did not want him to know who made him a programmed assassin. They just want him to continue killing for them.
Like Jason Bourne, the colonizers and the neo-colonizers that brought us Filipinos to our current sorry state do not want us to know who they are and what they did to us. You can’t solve a problem that you’re not even aware of.
Like Jason Bourne, it serves the interests of those who brought us to this pass — to keep us in the dark and thus continue to exploit us.
After Jason Bourne became a rogue programmed assassin and started to ask dangerous questions, his CIA programmers activated other programmed assassins to hunt and eliminate him.
Like Jason Bourne and his fellow programmed assassins, Filipinos have been calibrated to fight one another in keeping with the old doctrine for imperial control — divide and rule.
Jason Bourne was indoctrinated to murder anyone tagged by his programmers as an “enemy of the state” and this included his fellow Americans who just happened to be ‘inconvenient’ to the CIA. Bourne was programmed not to discern why he is going to kill a designated target.
Like Jason Bourne, many Filipinos have been programmed to despise and reject fellow Filipinos identified as “enemies of the state” by the colonizers and the current neo-colonizers – the Filipino oligarchs. Over the last 200 years, the tag “enemy of the state” has been programmed into the Filipino psyche as “rebolusyonaryo,” “Katipunero,” “Communist,” “militant,” “destabilizer” and “anachronistic nationalist.”
Few Filipinos wonder how come it is legal here to promote foreign interests and illegal to protect Filipino interests. Few Filipinos wonder why it is considered bad over here to be a nationalist when other countries admire and honor their nationalists.
Many Filipinos will automatically dismiss what the so-called “enemies of the state” are fighting for without even analyzing if these are causes that they too should be fighting for. If the so-called ‘militants’ are protesting the ceding of our precious mining resources to foreigners, many Filipinos fail to realize that this is their resources and unthinkingly become apathetic to the issue.
We fail to consider that just because we do not believe in Communism — it does not mean that Filipinos who are associated with it have no valid ideas to contribute to improve our lives.
If you care to study the analyses of the Leftist groups of the Philippine socio-economic-political problems, you will find that these are correct assessments.
It is a fact that the root causes of our problems are imperialism (as exemplified by the US Parity Rights, the US-sponsored Marcos martial law, the US interest to push the MILF-BJE deal and China’s taking over of Philippine natural resources) and feudalism (political warlords and dynasties rule many provinces and districts). It is a fact that we suffer from a big Wealth Gap where too few have too much and too many have too little.
Where we differ with the Left is their offered solution. After Russia and China have veered away from it and became capitalists, Communism is now an even harder sell. If we did not buy it four decades ago, we are certainly not going to buy it now.
However, when the Leftists are advocating nationalism, patriotism, preservation of Philippine natural resources, asserting Philippine sovereignty and the like — do we reject these simply because the advocates are Leftists? Because the devil quotes scripture, do we then also reject the Gospel of Jesus Christ?
In this regard, Jason Bourne is a hero because he had a soul that questioned if his program was just and moral. He changed from a programmed assassin to the man who was able to expose a devious CIA murder program.
In the third Bourne movie, David Webb (Bourne’s real name) reminded the other programmed assassin (who was about to shoot him) to search his soul. The other programmed assassin did not even know why he was tasked to kill Jason Bourne.
It is high time that we Filipinos start searching our Filipino souls and find out why we are in this seemingly perpetual hell. We should know what brought us to hell and who were the persons responsible for all the exploitation, predation and prostitution of our people?
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