THE former chairman and executive director of the National Historical Commission of the Philippines, which is the agency President Benigno Aquino 3 rd assigned to lead or organize the celebrations of today’s 113th Anniversary of the Proclamation of Philippine Independence, once wrote that “Filipinos are by nature and tradition a liberty-loving people. The pages of their history are replete with revolts, uprisings, mutinies, insurrections, and rebellions to free themselves from injustices, abuses, vexations, discriminations and oppressions of conquerors, whether Spanish, Japanese or Americans. To borrow Sir Winston Churchill’s phrase, Filipinos have shed much ‘blood, sweat and tears’ in their fight for human freedom and national dignity.” True. But more and more Filipinos are, we hope, realizing that many of us seem, comically, to be still at war with Spain and the United States for having colonized us. We should move on and learn to love ourselves and our former colonizers for having been a part of our history. Without them we would not be what we are today. But we should not take this as a permanent license to blame our continuing feudal-mindedness, the poverty of about half of our households and the near-poverty of another 20 percent. We should learn to like the great things about ourselves too. No nationhood without Spain—and Rizal If we do that we will happily concede that it is thanks to Spain that we are now the Republic of the Philippines of between 1,150 and 1,200-plus islands. Without Spain and the Roman Catholic Church, we would not have a Jose Rizal who—burn this in your mind—was the first Filipino to see the Philippine archipelago as a nation and conceived the idea of a single Filipino people. No other Filipino before Rizal thought of Filipino nationhood and the solidarity of all Filipinos (including the Muslim Filipinos and the Subanons of Dapitan and our other ethnic minorities) as a single people. Thanks to the Spaniards, who named our archipelago after the Christian King Felipe, the boundaries of our country got defined to what it is now. Had our leaders during Quezon’s time been more politically adept and as wise as Jose Rizal, they should have put North Borneo—Sabah—on the Philippine map. But they did not, despite Sabah, being Philippine—simply because it belongs to the Sultan of Sulu who leased it to the British North Borneo company and because of that Malaysia continues to pay rent to the heirs of the Sulu Sultan. Thanks to Spain we have some European culture in us and the Catholic religion. But one of the articles that the National Historical Commission has for media to publish in connection with Independence Day 2011 says this: “Religion is probably the most popular vestige of colonialism that was left by the Spaniards and Americans From animism, the Filipinos were drawn to the Christian doctrine. Islam, a dominant religion in Mindanao was not founded by a Filipino but by an Arab named Mohammad. Our anitos were replaced by statues with Greek features. Today, various sects are sprouting like mushrooms to teach Western theology.” The paragraph is a mere statement of fact. But the context seems to be the author’s regret that we Filipinos do not have our own religion, in the same regrettable way that we don’t have the power to fight off globalization and a culture that is largely American. But is it right to lament that we don’t have the power of the United States or of China, or the beauty of Japanese culture (which the Japanese got largely from Tang dynasty China)? Is it right to lament that we do not have a gone golden age of the non-Westernized Filipinos? No we don’t, and those who invent such a golden age are mentally dishonest, lacking in true scholarship. What we should lament is that we lost that culture that produced that paragon of nobility, patriotism, scholarship, intellectual power and mental honesty, Jose Rizal. What we Filipinos did was abandon the great example that Rizal gave to us. That is what we should bitterly lament and flagellate ourselves for. Blessings of our so-called Americanization On our so-called Americanization, we should also be more positive. Thanks to our exposure to the USA, we are being rescued from the horrible effects of our feudal politics and commerce by the remittances from our 11 million Overseas Filipino Workers. Thanks to our links to Washington, we will not be gobbled up by our giant Asian superpower neighbor, the People’s Republic of China. And we will be able to assert our sovereignty over our territories and maritime spaces in the West Philippine Sea (the South China Sea). On this the 113th anniversary of the proclamation of our independence from Spain and the United States, we must thank God for being Filipinos. And we must pray for the wisdom to learn to move on, to make our country less beset by massive poverty and feudalistic corruption, and to realize that we should stop fighting the shadow of imperialist Spain and imperialist United States and instead make the most of our once being their colony. Source:- http://www.manilatimes.net/opinion/still-fighting-spanish-and-american-imperialism/
