I present to you my condensed history of the Philippines. It is based on four years of intense study utilizing books, films, documents, popular media, personal interviews and a visit to those unique islands. It concerns the past four hundred years in the main. The study of world history is necessarily the study of macro-economics. The degree to which this is considered and admitted to in a text is an indication of the veracity of the information. Is it an accurate unbiased history? There are many historical documents. The most reliable of these documents are kept secret. True history can be also be found in the soliloquy of a drunkard and in the correspondence of unknown ordinary people.
Part of the information presented here is from recently released documents of the Central Intelligence Agency and from the words of eye witnesses. I am grateful to all authors who utilize this type of information. Read the information your government provides you. Then read the information that has been hidden. Also, read the words of a witness. Ponder the economic impact of the events you are researching. Consider the economic climate of the time you are studying. When you are finished, take time to digest all the information.
Familiar patterns will emerge from this practice. Many of these patterns are repetitive. I see these as historical archetypes, to coin a phrase. They become visible when they are not obfuscated by unimportant details. Unfortunately, these details are usually given undue prominence in most history texts. History is an ancient dance. We must disregard the costumes of the dancers in order to be aware of the continuity of the dance. When you read something that you strongly disagree with, it is productive to consult a variety of other sources. Try to discover the truth.
One: Discovery
There is a similarity between the Vikings and the conquistadores. In ancient Scandinavia it was customary for the eldest son to inherit the family farm. Agriculture is difficult on the North latitude fifty-five. If a man had more than one son, the younger son had a bleak future. These young men found a remedy in the occupation of Viking.
In ancient times, Malay people came to the archipelago of the Philippines. They came on large boats that they called balanghais. This is the root of the Tagalog word barangay, that today denotes a barrio or neighbourhood. These boats were landed and carried out of reach of the sea. Villages were built around these boats. The balanghais were then used for ceremonies. Various subcultures developed over time.
Now we will look at Europe and advance the clock to the sixteenth century. On the Iberian peninsula, many young men were also destined to have a bleak future. Their fate was similar to the aforementioned Vikings. One particular province, Extremadura was the birthplace of most of the conquistadores. Pizarro, Cortez, Balboa and others. To this day, Extremadura is a dry and desolate area. The inhabitants were poor because of their feudal system and the mob of unemployed young men was increasing. In reality, a conquistador was an unemployed Catholic young man. These adventurers were eventually financed and armed by the monarchy. They were then given ships and with the blessing of the Church they became Iberian Vikings.
Why? One reason was to rid Spain of the most dangerous element in its society at the time. If they were left unemployed, someone might invent communism. For the price of some ships and swords, the unemployment problem could be solved. If the boys were successful, they would return with gold.
The Portuguese were the experts in navigation and they possessed the most accurate maps. You can read The Lusiads by Camoens for more information on that topic. Magellan the Navigator was denied an increase in salary by the Portuguese Crown. So he offered his services to the Spanish Crown. Using their combined talents, Magellan and the international mariners anchored his ship in the Philippines one fateful day.
Thousands of years of isolation ended when he claimed those islands for Spain. To solemnize the event, he planted a flag and a cross on the beach. Magellan encouraged the different tribes to fight each other in a Machiavellian campaign to gain control of all and balance the existing powers in his favour. During a skirmish on the island of Mactan, the Navigator was fatally stabbed by Lapu-Lapu, a Filipino warrior. This contact with Magellan infected the Filipinos with Catholicism. He even gave a fragment of the "true" cross to the Queen of Cebu. That holy relic has been preserved down to this day.
Meanwhile, the native populations of the New World were being annihilated by the conquistadores and the royal coffers began to fill with looted gold and silver. A sea trade route was established connecting Manila, Barcelona, Tampico and Vera Cruz. Spaniards came to live in the Philippines and their bureaucracy increased exponentially. Many religious officials also came. The Portuguese and the Spanish argued bitterly over their plunder. The Pope eventually decreed that land West of a certain longitude belonged to Spain and that land East of this line belonged to Portugal. Thus, Brazilians speak Portuguese today because of an old man with a pointed hat.
Two: Occupation
The most accessible parts of the islands were administered by Franciscans, Trappists and Jesuits. These pious men became so powerful that it necessitated a new word to be coined. Frailocracy (government of friars). This situation angered the secular government officials. Vast tracts of land were owned by all the religious orders. They firmly controlled all of the arable land. Although they did not dare to go up into the mountains. The Filipino people were starved, beaten, tortured and raped by men of the Catholic Church and children were not spared.
The feudal system was now operational on new fertile land and it lasted for three hundred years. For more than fifteen generations Spanish and Malay blood was mixed. A new creature appeared. The mestizo. The Spaniards considered them to be less than human and the mestizos adopted Spanish names. The mestizos treated the full blood Filipino people with intensified cruelty as soon as in a position of petty power to do so.
Filipino people were forbidden to work for the government or to vote. They were even forbidden to tuck their shirts into their trousers. The native Filipino shirt, the barong tagalog, is worn today as a reminder of that ban. During the era of Spanish rule, class division began to appear. People were either landlords or tenants. Ladies sacrificed their pride in order to have a child that looked white. And the poisonous seeds of self-loathing were kneaded into the psyche of the nation.
High above the drama happening on the plains, the mountain dwellers drank palm wine, ate pork and played music on nose flutes. The impact of the foreigners was inversely proportional to their altitude above sea-level. I mentioned earlier that economics is an integral part of history. I remind you now that physical geography must also be reckoned.
Three: The Americans
In the latter part of the nineteenth century there was a rebel movement in the Philippines. It had two fronts. A physical front and an intellectual front. The intellectual revolt was conducted by Dr. José Rizal. Dr. Rizal deserves an entire essay in the least. His accomplishments are formidable by any standard, ancient or modern. He dedicated his life to his people and sacrificed it on the alter of his ideals. His desire was to raise the souls and minds of Filipinos up to a level where foreign oppression would be impossible.
His two novels, Noli Mi Tangere and El Filibusterismo were his crowning literary achievements. These two books were also instrumental in his fate. José absorbed all of the knowledge that his foreign oppressors could give him. He then attempted to apply that knowledge for the betterment of the lives of his fellow Filipino people.
There are similarities between José Rizal and a young Cherokee statesman, John Ross. John and two other gifted Cherokees were educated in the New England universities of their oppressors. They became political leaders and built the Cherokee Nation. Their political system was based upon the best of what they had learned. They established diplomatic relations with several European nations and published two newspapers. Theirs was the only sovereign nation located within the confines of continental America. It was eventually lost, but that is another story.
This is an example of a historical archetype that I mentioned earlier. In this particular recurring theme a conquered person is educated by his oppressors. He or she then attempts to practice what has been learned. The goal is to improve the lives of ones own people. These educated “savages” are perceived as a threat by the conquerors. They are bribed, slandered, exiled or assassinated depending on the individual’s personal mettle. John Ross the Cherokee saw and then lost his dream. Rizal the Filipino never saw his.
Ross went directly to nation building upon graduation from his studies. Rizal was a deep thinker and approached his task with a greater wisdom and longer patience. He knew the Filipino people were not psychologically equipped for a sudden transition to autonomy after three hundred years of oppression. Rizal wrote the two novels I have listed in order to prepare his people for that eventual freedom. The ills of his society were exposed in the books by design.
The stories displayed the best and the worst of the Filipino people, their culture, their spirit and their collective soul. After their publishing, the Filipino rebel faction identified Rizal as their source of inspiration. When Rizal returned to the Philippines from his studies in Europe, he was exiled to Mindanao. Only then did he then learn of the imminent revolt.
Rizal wrote a manifesto which opposed an armed revolt. To further his stance, he volunteered to serve as a doctor in Cuba where Spain was fighting yet another revolution. His offer was accepted and the Spanish authorities asked him to first come to Manila. Before he arrived, Rizal was visited by a representative of the local rebellion. Rizal would not give his support to the armed conflict because he wanted the Philippines to be a province of Spain with equal rights for the Filipino people.
He was late for his ship to Cuba and was put on another ship anchored in the harbour and was told to wait for a third ship which would take him to Barcelona and then on to Cuba. When Rizal arrived at Barcelona he was arrested and taken back to Manila. He was accused of sedition. After his unfair trial he was frog-marched to Bagumbayan Field in Luneta Park on the waterfront of Manila and executed.
He was quoted as saying just before the firing squad pulled their triggers and after declining a blind-fold, "It is far better to die on your feet than to live on your knees."
In America, twenty years had passed since the Civil War. That war was presented to the public as a war to free the slaves and to strengthen the union. In reality the North had the factories, industries and infrastructure. The South had the raw materials. This situation was inconvenient for the North. After the Civil War many former slaves left their dismal life in the warm rural South to begin dismal lives of freedom in the cold Northern cities. The factories produced a surplus of quality merchandise and workers were laid off once everyone had one of everything. Attempts were made to reduce the surplus but the situation worsened. There was massive unemployment. People were discontented.
When rich people complained to the President, he consulted his anal-retentive advisory staff. They told him that more people were needed to buy the merchandise. America must expand her markets. They explained to him that an increase of the market would decrease the supply of goods. This would increase the demand for those goods and that would multiply the profits. Another benefit was the reduction of unemployment. When people are busy they do not make trouble. The President was encouraged to consider the advantages of a war with Spain.
Spain had rebellions in most of her colonies so it was a perfect time to attack her. Spain had lost control of Venezuela, Argentina, Ecuador, Columbia, Bolivia, Chile, and Peru. She was at war with Cuba and now a rebellion was imminent in the Philippines. With the Philippines as a base of operations, America could also establish trade with China which was an immense future market. The President was strongly advised to make war on Spain. The public was told that America was fighting Spain in order to free the poor Cubans. The plan was to defeat Spain and install a puppet government. It was a ploy that had worked for Caesar over a thousand years before.
Trade agreements with the new Cuban government would be created to legally ensure America's permanent economic advantage. Propaganda about freedom and democracy would further polish the American image on the world stage. All along the Philippines were the main objective as a strategic base of operations near the future market of China. The archipelago also had the largest Christian workforce in Asia.
In Manila, Spanish forces were on the verge of surrender to the rebel forces at this crucial time. They gave some money to the rebels and promised to reform their harsh policies. The rebel leader went to Singapore with the money. Some people say he went there to buy weapons which is likely. Meanwhile, Spain lost her war in Cuba.
US Admiral Dewy was the commander of an American warship anchored in Hong Kong. He was ordered to sail to Manila. Two American government secret agents went to Singapore and escorted the aforementioned Filipino rebel leader back to Manila. When they arrived in Manila, these agents had a clandestine meeting with the Spanish commander. This table of men proceeded to plan a mock battle.
After a brief exchange of choreographed bullets, the Spanish commander capitulated on cue. In many history books this event is presented as a real battle. The commander was told to convince the rebel leader, who was not present at the meeting to cease hostilities. The rebels were on the brink of hard won legitimate independence from Spain. They were understandably frustrated to see yet another foreign invader. What happened next is not common knowledge in America nor the Philippines.
There was a struggle between those rebels and the American occupation forces. The Philippine-American War. American and Filipino history books usually say it lasted two years. The truth can be found in American military records and State Department documents. These two sources and the testimonies of American soldiers, many of whom were from Oregon, all agree that the war lasted nearly nine years. More than sixty thousand American troops went to the Philippines. Villages were burned, livestock was slaughtered, crops were destroyed and millions of people above the age of ten were killed.
This campaign was conducted on Luzon, Panay and many other islands. US Military advisors debated what percentage of the population must be exterminated before the survivors could be tamed? One American soldier described the war as more of a “rabbit hunt.” The corpses were so plentiful they were used for macabre defensive walls.
Many former black slaves were in the American Army at that time. When they were ordered to murder innocent brown people which the white troops referred to as “niggers”, many of them deserted. To their unsung credit on this side of the Pacific, many chose to fight on the side of the rebels. The carnage finally ceased in 1910. A definite million Filipinos were dead. The total number has been estimated at three million. The truth of this shameful episode is not included in secondary school history books in the countries of either combatant.
I once spoke of these events to a young Filipina woman in Vancouver who was so upset that she refused to ever speak to me again during the entire time we were neighbours in the same small apartment building nor was she willing to view the sources of my information which were recently released CIA documents that had aged beyond the required period before being declassified. As the next chapter will show, this delay tactic of meting out truth after several generations works like a charm and is still continued today just as it has been for thousands of years.
Four: Free Education
The Spanish Governor General was replaced by an American. The policy of America was to secure their new piece of real estate and to establish a military presence in the area. The rebels were chased into the mountains. An Air Force base, a Naval base and several other military bases were constructed. Near the city of Baguio, a recreational facility for American troops was built. Another city, Olongapo was developed on land controlled by yet another American base.
From the beginning, American politicians used propaganda to legitimize their escapades. It was decided that the Filipinos were not yet ready for freedom as Rizal had already observed. Thus they were put under the stewardship of America. A trade agreement was quickly written. That agreement would not have been signed by any person with a choice to exercise. I read a copy of it while researching this essay. The agreement in essence made clear that America had all the benefits of the trade and that the Philippines had to bear all the restrictions. The trade agreements that I have read the text of from recent times seem to be similar and I thus categorize them also as historical archetypes.
Volunteers flocked to the Philippines to be teachers in an education program sponsored by the American government. Generously, a free education (a re-education) was offered in the English language to all surviving Filipino children. This magnanimous gesture was announced in every major newspaper. The whole world admired America, the brother of democracy. The volunteer teachers educated the Filipino children who had survived the war. A large part of the curriculum was a very sterilized recent local history.
The recent war was explained as a brief struggle with communist rebels in which a relatively few lives were tragically but necessarily and lost. The traditional ancient Filipino culture was modified and modernized into a caricature of a happy rural family with a Mom, a Dad, a boy, a girl, a water buffalo and a rice paddy. The main goal of the educators was to prepare those young Filipinos to be cheap, obedient rural labourers for American owned plantations. The psychological job was well conceived, well researched, very thorough and immensely effective. When I was in the Philippines in 1993, I asked a variety of random people about that portion of Philippine history. They all repeated the sanitized version back to me as if reciting the catechism.
Some Filipino families had been wealthy before the Americans arrived. Those who had learned ruthlessness during the Spanish occupation. Those rich men became the first ethnically Filipino political leaders of the Philippines. Thus the corrupt were now leading the conquered. American sugar growers asked their government to abandon the Philippines because the influx of Philippine sugar had seriously damaged their profits. Subsequent trade agreements alleviated that complaint.
The life of the Filipino people worsened. The rebels formed proto-communist groups. Luis Taruc organized thousands of people in central Luzon. They protested against the big sugar mills and had some successes. This angered the Americans and the few Filipino tycoons. America endeavoured to spread the English language and to advertise its own products.
Gen. Douglas MacArthur, whose father had also been a Philippines Administrator was sent to administer the Philippines. He quickly made friends with several of the rich local men. Meanwhile, Japan attempted to build the Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere because they needed petroleum, raw materials and cheap labourers in order to ape the West and modernize their country. America did not want them to succeed. America boycotted and embargoed Japan. She turned her back on a Korean Emperor who desired nothing more than to also become just like his American big brother. All the sorts of things that we tell our children not to do when they play with each other seem to have formed the policies of those days.
Japan responded by putting on its armour. In the Philippines, MacArthur was warned within moments of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. He did nothing to secure the US Air Force planes on the tarmac under his watch and history does not adequately explain why. His Air Force at Clark Field was attacked next and all the airplanes were destroyed.
The Japanese troops landed and advanced rapidly across the Philippines. The American and Filipino troops retreated to Bataan, a tiny peninsula North of Manila where they were slaughtered in the jungle. America did not send them any reinforcements nor supplies. MacArthur and his family took refuge on the islet of Corregidor in the mouth of Manila Bay. A cave was converted into his military headquarters. It was immediately besieged. Eventually, MacArthur was ordered to evacuate with his family and they went to Australia by boat. A Filipino politician gave him a large sum of cash before he left. In Australia he received a hero's welcome.
A few years before he left the Philippines, MacArthur went to America on a work assignment accompanied by a pretty Filipina woman. He bought her an apartment and a poodle. He divided his time between her and his mother. He kept her hidden from his mother and married a white woman. The abandoned Filipina woman became a hairdresser in a small town in the American desert. Later, MacArthur was the victim of attempted blackmail by a political rival who knew about this former lover. Douglas paid for the blackmailer’s silence with the money he had been given by the Filipino politician in Corregidor.
MacArthur directed his soldiers to fight in New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and eventually Leyte in the Philippines. During this time, the Filipino rebel forces were the only protection that the civilian Filipinos had against the Japanese Occupation Forces. The Japanese soldiers stabbed infants, amputated hands and beheaded old women. The rebel forces now took the formal name of Hukbalahap. It means "the people's army to fight against the Japanese invaders."
When MacArthur returned to the Philippines as he had promised upon leaving, he waded ashore and posed for a photograph to put in the history books. The Filipino man next to him in that photograph was the same man again who had given him the money when he left for Australia. They waded ashore two or three times in order to obtain the perfect photograph.
During the Japanese Occupation, the Filipino people were forced to speak the Japanese language and to bow to any Japanese officer. More indignity after already suffering for three hundred years. The Hukbalahap gallantly joined the returned American troops and cooperated with them to defeat the Japanese. As soon as the fighting had ceased, again the Americans killed or imprisoned many of the rebels. The rebels were labelled communists and went into hiding once again. The Filipino peasantry did not care about labels, such as "communist", or Hukbalahap. For these warriors had protected them against the invaders from Spain, America and Japan. During all of that time up on the rice terraces, the mountain people made bamboo baskets and chewed on betel nuts.
Another historical archetype now becomes obvious. The fate of the Hukbalahap was similar to the fate of some original Chinese communists. They were killed by Chiang Kai Shek after they had helped him achieve one of his military goals. You can read about it in a book by Andre Malraux called Man's Fate.
Both of those examples are similar to the fate of the Cherokees in Texas. They fought two other hostile native tribes in order to aid the Texans who were fighting Mexico to gain their independence. That band of Cherokees were already holders of a proper legal title to their Texas lands from the Mexican government. The Texas rebellion made it necessary for them to assist in order to ensure the securing of a new such document from the new republic which seemed inevitably on the horizon. They were of course, betrayed by the Republic of Texas which they had fought for.
Five: The Elvis Years
After the World War II, America rewarded the rich Filipino men who had collaborated with Yamashita to form a Japanese puppet government while many Filipino patriots were jailed. Free rigged elections were conducted and new one-sided trade agreements were signed. Finally, a Filipino man was President of the Republic of the Philippines albeit several generations later than the Americans had originally promised.
Modern Philippine history is a manipulated event. By the time Ferdinand Marcos was president, his republic was manipulated by the World Bank, the IMF and the Central Intelligence Agency. Billions of dollars were loaned to a horribly corrupted government. One example of modern foreign aid was the M99 Rice Program. Sadly, I will label this scam as yet another historical archetype.
A fund was set up with foreign money and was distributed to brand new rural banks by the Philippine National Bank. Farmers were inundated with propaganda and leaflets which said that a new kind of “miracle rice” could yield ninety-nine bags from the same amount of land that traditionally yielded only fifty bags.
The farmers who chose to participate in this windfall had to accept loans and had surrender all their native heirloom seed rice to be destroyed. In return they got foreign modified M99 seed rice, foreign chemical fertilizer and foreign insecticide. The farmers had to make regular payments against these loans. They also had to give 30% of their harvests to their landlords. Their wives had to clean the big houses of their landlords.
That first harvest of M99 rice, however, produced only thirty-nine bags. The farmers had to borrow money from local criminals at even more exorbitant interest rates. So they planted again. The second yield was better so the landlords increased their rents. There are three harvests per year in this part of the world. As a result, the soil was exhausted after the third harvest and required massive amounts of chemical fertilizer ever after. Fertilizer and pesticide to be purchased from foreign manufacturers.
The fishes, frogs and snails disappeared from the rice fields due to the chemicals. Agriculture was now dependent on foreign merchandise and loans. Any profit was taken by the landlords and the environment was badly damaged. An ancient natural variety of rice, perfectly adapted to the region was purposely destroyed. The farmers were now in a far worse predicament than before. The soil in the Philippines is rich yet half of the arable land is planted with sugarcane, pineapple, bananas and coconuts. Mostly owned by foreigners and grown for export. I read somewhere that if a Filipino man plants a row of vegetables on a barren hill, he is probably a rebel.
Six: Beyond Marcos
There are many examples of foreign intervention in the history of the Philippines. I will elaborate on the fascinating story of the overthrow of Ferdinand Marcos nor enumerate the damage done by him and his wife in this short essay.
Cory Aquino resurrected a dead constitution but did not accomplish many other pressingly necessary tasks. Her family are the multi-generational owners of a huge sugar plantation. She understandably did not make the needed land reforms.
President Ramos had a vision. He called it Philippines 2000. In his plan there would be reliable electrical service, more telephones and more roads. The rebels would be pacified and the Muslims in Mindanao would be pacified. The National Police Force would be purged like a septic boil. The names of the corrupt policemen were shown on television. The newspapers put the total number at six thousand. Ramos terminated the employment of some of the worst of those named offenders. Upsets like this are common fare for Americans as new crews set up new networks of newly bribed or compromised minions and chuck a few scraps to the dogs of public outrage.
There is a psychology at work in the Philippines that I call the crab syndrome. If you put a crab in a basket, it will usually escape. However, if you put two or more crabs in a basket, they usually drag each other back inside and thus none escape. [Very small tidal pool crabs are an exception, indeed I have seen them cooperate by piggy-backing when my Filipina wife brought some to our room in a butter tub after a trip to the beach in Vancouver.] Since this essay was first composed, the Philippines have had presidents Ramos, Estrada, Macapagal-Arroyo, Ninoy Aquino and Duterte.
In the summer of 2003, young military officers protested when they discovered that their government had sold military weapons to the Muslim separatists of Mindanao. The very same separatists that they were combating. Their righteous protest was labelled as a "coup" and those officers were arrested. That drama was also a sadly familiar theme to me as a North American. Crabs in a basket. I am inspired and frustrated that José Rizal understood the problems of his country more than one hundred years ago and valiantly attempted to share that knowledge in his writing to no apparent avail. Such is the lot of those who peer into the abyss.
A quote from his epigrams: "Keep advancing. Learn, learn and think. Life is very serious. It goes only for those who have intelligence and heart. To live among men, a man must strive. We can serve our country by speaking the naked bitter truth."
José was an ophthalmic surgeon, a poet, a dramatist, an essayist, a novelist, an historian, an architect, a painter, a sculptor, an educator, a linguist, a musician, a naturalist, an ethnologist, a surveyor, an engineer, a farmer, a businessman, an economist, a geographer, a cartographer, a bibliophile, a philologist, a grammarian, a folklorist, a philosopher, a translator, an inventor, a magician, a humorist, a satirist, a polemicist, a sportsman, a traveller, a chess master, a Mason, a prophet and a martyr.
He was thirty-five years old when he was killed. To supplement his powerful intellect, Rizal had a strong spirit. Because the quality of life for most Filipino people has not improved, the wisdom of Rizal is still needed. His spirit is on the wind. The Filipino people are highly talented and they have retained their humanity despite a long past of horrors. After I visited the Archipelago, I came to describe the Philippines as a wounded heart that oozes love. As I write, tribal people in the high mountains there are watching yet the dramas below.
fin