WHO IS FILIPINO? (5)
20. THE NEW FILIPINO: OFFSPRING OF A TWISTED HISTORY
Since 4 July 1946, the Filipinos were made to believe that they constituted an independent and sovereign people. Today, any passably intelligent Filipino knows the true quality and value of that “independence.” And US WASP neocolonialism has become the more evident force in the archipelago.
But the majority of the Filipinos of the present time have been completely misled as to their own national history and culture to a point that they themselves can not understand their country’s history and traditions, neither can they define their national identity.
To speak of a “New Filipino” is to speak of a different –contradictory if not denaturalized– Filipino. That new Filipino today is the caricaturesque PINÓY.
A great Filipino writer calls him and his kind “a generation without fathers.” If Nick Joaquín had not added the phrase about “a generation without sons,” we could have easily concluded that the generation, or generations of Americanized Filipinos referred to by Nick Joaquín, are indeed “without fathers” because their fathers are unknown to themselves.
In another essay, one about “La Naval de Manila,” the same author, who is perhaps the only author of some depth in his writings, also labeled the same generations of Americanized Filipinos as “amnesiacs” because they “forgot their own history and great traditions.”
Along the same vein of thought, the late Jesuit historian, Horacio V. de la Costa, wrote in 1965 –from an interesting book he titled “The Background of Nationalism and Other Essays”– (page 23), the following:
The present unsatisfactory state of historical studies among us is
one of the reasons why we cannot define our national culture as
clearly and accurately as we should wish. Our knowledge of our
past can only be described as spotty. About certain periods and
aspects of it we know a great deal; about other periods and aspects,
hardly anything.
We only cite these two writers who are also the known historians that the Philippines has ever produced with its English language system of education. Fortunately, both these historians know Spanish aside from English and Tagalog. That is why they can see better, as historians, what is the Filipino; and what really is his true history and culture.
And what they see is not flattering to their contemporaries who are blinded by over-Americanization and subsequent denaturalization as Filipinos. From experience, we can easily conclude that the majority of those who were educated in English, without any Spanish at the sides, have ended up having their minds closed to what is Filipino. They were taught to hate what is Spanish along with Spain and the Spanish language. Why the Hispanophobia?
As we go along analyzing the New Pilipino, or Pinóy, we will be able to establish WHO his father really is.
21. DISFIGURING OF THE FILIPINO IDENTITY AND THE DESTRUCTIONOF THE FILIPINO’S NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY AND RIGHTS.
This admitted ignorance and lack of knowledge –sufficient knowledge– on his own History on the part of the New Filipino goes hand in hand with a built-in Hispanophobia: a hatred, a fear, that is an error which in turn has begotten a set of ugly prejudices that has deformed the Filipino character of our days unto denaturalization.
The “spiritual” father of the New Filipino is William McKinley, (1843-1901), the 24th president of the United States of America who approved the annexation of the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico as US territories (i.e. colonies) shortly before he died.
It was President McKinley who laid down the cultural, economic, political, and even religious policy which the Filipinos had to follow, whether they liked it or not. And that McKinleyan policy was summarized by himself when he declared that:
…there was nothing left for us to do but take all of the Philippines
and educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize
them... (Vide: The Philippines Yesterday and Today, NY 1966 by
Delia and Ferdinand Kuhn)
When this was uttered, the McKinleyan policy clearly sounded hollow for, indeed, hollow was the justification to annex the Philippines when it had already declared its independence from Spain and had started the first democratic form of government ever seen in the whole of Asia.
The Salvadoran historian, Dr. Rodolfo Barón Castro, in his “Historia Preliminar,” wrote that “this famous political statement of McKinley has been discussed by many authors, among them: Jaime Menéndez, author of “Vísperas de la Catástrofe,” Madrid, 1934; Julian W. Pratt, author of “Expansionist of 1898,” Baltimore, 1936, and, more recently; Delia and Ferdinand Kuhn, in their cited work; and; Claude Julian, author of “L’Empire Americain,” Paris, 1968. All these authors have reacted with either irony or surprise before such a hollow justification to colonize the Philippines… a justification which pharisaical trappings could not conceal its real, hardcore imperialism and economi oppression of the Filipino poor.
The thinking Filipinos of the early 1900’s immediately saw through the McKinleyan policy which evil was to be carried over them wickedly and their unwitting descendants who, because of that policy, were designed to become “the New Filipinos.”
The first thing that the original Filipinos saw in that political declaration was its sectarian and anti-Catholic character. Did President McKinley not know that the predominantly Catholic Filipinos were already Christians since 1521? But to William McKinley, himself a non-Catholic, those Filipinos who practiced Catholicism, as they had inherited it from their Spanish missionaries and friars, could not be Christians. Wittingly or unwittingly, William McKinley made the Filipinos understand that only the Protestants like him were Christians. And that sectarian idea still prevails in many government quarters, particularly in the Department of Education under one Onofre Corpus.
22. THE ‘NEW’ FILIPINO AS AN AMNISIAC OR WHAT THEY SHOULD REMEMBER AND KNOW.
Present-day Filipinos might as well know that before the Americans came to “Christianize” them in 1900, there was only one Christian religion observed all over the Philippines, “de Aparri hasta Joló,” to quote Manuel Bernabé’s famous Hymn to the Sacred Heart of Jesus (No más amor que tuyo). If Filipino’s find themselves disunited today in religion, they owe that disunity to the American invaders who came at the turn of the last century.
Moreover, if the Moslem Filipinos are now able to stand up and threaten the entire Philippines with a separatist movement, the Filipino of today also owes that “gift” to the Americans who created what they themselves called “the Moro Province.” According to Vicente Ilustre, the Isagani of Rizal, “the American invaders wanted to keep Mindanao for themselves. They had offered to give the Filipinos their political independence if their leaders were in conformity with the idea of only having as their national territory what comprised Luzón and Visayas. Mindanao was to be an American territory.”
In spite of the “WASP Religious legacy” which the New Filipinos received from their US “liberators,” the Roman Catholic Church in the Philippines remains as “the most numerous church in the islands.” The first aim of Spanish colonization of the Philippines, which is to Christianize in Cathlicism the native islanders, was achieved with great success.
But neither President McKinley, nor the Americans of that time who had finished a war with Spain, were in the mood for the preservation of what was Spanish or Hispanic in the Philippines, even if that also meant the very survival of the Filipinos as a nation. We know, of course, that the American Hispanophobia of the 1900’s is no longer prevalent among many normal present-day Americans.
While the Americans of today have already gotten over, (almost), their Hispanophobia, the New Filipinos have not. This is so, judging by the constant persecution being officially staged by the “brown McKinleyans” we have in certain Government Departments and Commissions who up to now appear to be still drowned in useless Hispanophobia.
The other phase of that McKinleyan political declaration dealt with education. But what the WASPs termed as “education” is being translated into deliberate mis-education for the Filipinos. The Americans purposely de-emphasized Spanish in the education of the rising Filipino generations. Without Spanish, what was, and is, originally Filipino was criminally destroyed.
Even the learned David P. Barrows, the American Director of Education, wrote, in effect, in his “Annual School Report,” 1906, page 94, that:
At the time of the American occupation (of the Philippines), there
was a general feeling among Filipinos that the knowledge of the
Spanish language had been deliberately, and wrongly, withheld
from them by the sovereign country (The USA).
If we must go to a blaming stance, the WASP American colonizers are really to be blamed for deemphasizing Spanish in the Philippines. The imposition of English was part of their imperialist agenda for the Filipinos. The imposition of English was needed to make the Filipinos accept their political and economic policies in their own country. And the Spanish language, then used by the nationalist Filipinos of that time as their supreme vehicle for freedom was squarely blocking WASP American imperialism.
To erode the Filipino’s conviction for Spanish as his official and national language –in much the same way that Spanish remains as such in almost all of the Latin American countries– the US colonial government, wittingly or unwittingly, planted in the Filipino mind that they needed a native national language. Being the common vernacular of Manila, the capital city of the Philippines, Tagalog was chosen as the national language. The aim was to remove the Filipino focus on Spanish and transfer the same into Tagalog. This aim was implemented in the primary public education in English of all Filipino children and adolescents.
To also nullify the objections that were naturally coming from the non-Tagalog majority of Filipinos who did not readily accept Tagalog as the replacement for their respective native languages, the stand for Tagalog was modified and disguised. It was called “the basis” of the Filipino national language but with a self destructive adoption of a pre-Hispanic based “abakada” that would hinder the expected advance of tagalog as a tool language for education and official government transactions as evidenced up to this writing.
But then, the divisive strategy between Spanish and Tagalog, took several generations to succeed, since the “national language program” was aimed at dividing the Filipino nationalists front, between Spanish and Tagalog, so that English and Americanization could, in the meantime, advance unperturbed.
It is a fact well proven that in spite of all the colonialist strategies applied against Filipino nationalism in Spanish, the English language only achieved some popular use in the Philippines during the so-called Liberation Era, that is to say, after the war with the Japanese. And Tagalog, subsequently renamed “Pilipino,” was condemned to always play second fiddle to English. At least “Pilipino”, lacking as it is in appropriate vocabulary and reference books in all the branches human knowledge, could never be the threat to the suzerainty of English. The treat to the raise of English was coming from Spanish since it had a three century ascendancy over English in as far as the Filipino context of things were concerned.
The McKinleyan strategy against Spanish, and to an extent even against Tagalog, has inevitably resulted in the language and identity confusion among a good number of present-day Filipinos since it raised issues on what really is his national language and what is really his individual and collective identity.
And it is precisely this deliberate confusion, doggenly imposed upon the Filipino’s educational system up to now, that has turned the Filipino of today into the despicable, corrupt, indifferent and bastard New Filipino that he is of our days. Despicable indeed because the New Filipino plunders, mercilessly kills his fellow Filipinos, has moreover made deceit his norm and amorality his religion. That is the New Filipino. The lesser ones, those with lesser knowledge and a myopic outlook, as well as a poor attitude, became the “Pilipinos” or the exploited “Pinoys”. These are, in fine, the perfect products of the WASP imposed Americanized educational system that has been haphazardly functioning in all these Philippine Islands for nearly a century of confusion and destability.
Aside from the aforementioned defects and errors of the New Filipino, those that could pass as “the good guys of their breed” are pitifully misguided and confused by the ignorance, aided by the prohibited drugs, that has engulfed them through the processes of mis-education making them incapable of honest self-government and even a normal family life..
The sorry state of things in the Philippines from 1986 up to the present time can never be surely pointed out as the “Magnus Opus” of the New Filipino and his “great American culture” that includes prohibited drugs. . Let the facts speak for themselves.
And wittingly or unwittingly, this result seems to justify the Duterte war against probited drugs and government corruption.
23. THE FILIPINO OF YORE’S EXAMPLE: THE ONLY HOPE.
Even if there is a New Filipino –who calls himself, irresponsibly, a PILIPINO or a PINOY– we have no alternative but to wish for an “Old” Filipino leadership. Could that be President Rodrigo Duterte y Roa?
But circumstances presently obtaining, the so-called “New Filipino” is an alien, and a vile, English/Taglish-speaking alien at that. The real Filipino is the not so overly-Americanized native who also has an idea of the origins of the Filipino State and his true national history.. He may have defects, but in the long run, he may prove himself less evil, less callous and less ruthless as the now corrupt, arrogant and shameless “New Filipino”.
The real Filipino will never barter nor sell the Patrimony of his people. He will not withhold the teaching of Spanish to the new generations of Filipinos. He will even encourage its proper teaching and its literary development. In this regard, the New Filipino, or “Pinóy” has proven himself , wittingly or unwittingly, a true scoundrel up to now. And we hope that change will modify him unto the real ideals of the original Filipino.
(end)
20. THE NEW FILIPINO: OFFSPRING OF A TWISTED HISTORY
Since 4 July 1946, the Filipinos were made to believe that they constituted an independent and sovereign people. Today, any passably intelligent Filipino knows the true quality and value of that “independence.” And US WASP neocolonialism has become the more evident force in the archipelago.
But the majority of the Filipinos of the present time have been completely misled as to their own national history and culture to a point that they themselves can not understand their country’s history and traditions, neither can they define their national identity.
To speak of a “New Filipino” is to speak of a different –contradictory if not denaturalized– Filipino. That new Filipino today is the caricaturesque PINÓY.
A great Filipino writer calls him and his kind “a generation without fathers.” If Nick Joaquín had not added the phrase about “a generation without sons,” we could have easily concluded that the generation, or generations of Americanized Filipinos referred to by Nick Joaquín, are indeed “without fathers” because their fathers are unknown to themselves.
In another essay, one about “La Naval de Manila,” the same author, who is perhaps the only author of some depth in his writings, also labeled the same generations of Americanized Filipinos as “amnesiacs” because they “forgot their own history and great traditions.”
Along the same vein of thought, the late Jesuit historian, Horacio V. de la Costa, wrote in 1965 –from an interesting book he titled “The Background of Nationalism and Other Essays”– (page 23), the following:
The present unsatisfactory state of historical studies among us is
one of the reasons why we cannot define our national culture as
clearly and accurately as we should wish. Our knowledge of our
past can only be described as spotty. About certain periods and
aspects of it we know a great deal; about other periods and aspects,
hardly anything.
We only cite these two writers who are also the known historians that the Philippines has ever produced with its English language system of education. Fortunately, both these historians know Spanish aside from English and Tagalog. That is why they can see better, as historians, what is the Filipino; and what really is his true history and culture.
And what they see is not flattering to their contemporaries who are blinded by over-Americanization and subsequent denaturalization as Filipinos. From experience, we can easily conclude that the majority of those who were educated in English, without any Spanish at the sides, have ended up having their minds closed to what is Filipino. They were taught to hate what is Spanish along with Spain and the Spanish language. Why the Hispanophobia?
As we go along analyzing the New Pilipino, or Pinóy, we will be able to establish WHO his father really is.
21. DISFIGURING OF THE FILIPINO IDENTITY AND THE DESTRUCTIONOF THE FILIPINO’S NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY AND RIGHTS.
This admitted ignorance and lack of knowledge –sufficient knowledge– on his own History on the part of the New Filipino goes hand in hand with a built-in Hispanophobia: a hatred, a fear, that is an error which in turn has begotten a set of ugly prejudices that has deformed the Filipino character of our days unto denaturalization.
The “spiritual” father of the New Filipino is William McKinley, (1843-1901), the 24th president of the United States of America who approved the annexation of the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico as US territories (i.e. colonies) shortly before he died.
It was President McKinley who laid down the cultural, economic, political, and even religious policy which the Filipinos had to follow, whether they liked it or not. And that McKinleyan policy was summarized by himself when he declared that:
…there was nothing left for us to do but take all of the Philippines
and educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize
them... (Vide: The Philippines Yesterday and Today, NY 1966 by
Delia and Ferdinand Kuhn)
When this was uttered, the McKinleyan policy clearly sounded hollow for, indeed, hollow was the justification to annex the Philippines when it had already declared its independence from Spain and had started the first democratic form of government ever seen in the whole of Asia.
The Salvadoran historian, Dr. Rodolfo Barón Castro, in his “Historia Preliminar,” wrote that “this famous political statement of McKinley has been discussed by many authors, among them: Jaime Menéndez, author of “Vísperas de la Catástrofe,” Madrid, 1934; Julian W. Pratt, author of “Expansionist of 1898,” Baltimore, 1936, and, more recently; Delia and Ferdinand Kuhn, in their cited work; and; Claude Julian, author of “L’Empire Americain,” Paris, 1968. All these authors have reacted with either irony or surprise before such a hollow justification to colonize the Philippines… a justification which pharisaical trappings could not conceal its real, hardcore imperialism and economi oppression of the Filipino poor.
The thinking Filipinos of the early 1900’s immediately saw through the McKinleyan policy which evil was to be carried over them wickedly and their unwitting descendants who, because of that policy, were designed to become “the New Filipinos.”
The first thing that the original Filipinos saw in that political declaration was its sectarian and anti-Catholic character. Did President McKinley not know that the predominantly Catholic Filipinos were already Christians since 1521? But to William McKinley, himself a non-Catholic, those Filipinos who practiced Catholicism, as they had inherited it from their Spanish missionaries and friars, could not be Christians. Wittingly or unwittingly, William McKinley made the Filipinos understand that only the Protestants like him were Christians. And that sectarian idea still prevails in many government quarters, particularly in the Department of Education under one Onofre Corpus.
22. THE ‘NEW’ FILIPINO AS AN AMNISIAC OR WHAT THEY SHOULD REMEMBER AND KNOW.
Present-day Filipinos might as well know that before the Americans came to “Christianize” them in 1900, there was only one Christian religion observed all over the Philippines, “de Aparri hasta Joló,” to quote Manuel Bernabé’s famous Hymn to the Sacred Heart of Jesus (No más amor que tuyo). If Filipino’s find themselves disunited today in religion, they owe that disunity to the American invaders who came at the turn of the last century.
Moreover, if the Moslem Filipinos are now able to stand up and threaten the entire Philippines with a separatist movement, the Filipino of today also owes that “gift” to the Americans who created what they themselves called “the Moro Province.” According to Vicente Ilustre, the Isagani of Rizal, “the American invaders wanted to keep Mindanao for themselves. They had offered to give the Filipinos their political independence if their leaders were in conformity with the idea of only having as their national territory what comprised Luzón and Visayas. Mindanao was to be an American territory.”
In spite of the “WASP Religious legacy” which the New Filipinos received from their US “liberators,” the Roman Catholic Church in the Philippines remains as “the most numerous church in the islands.” The first aim of Spanish colonization of the Philippines, which is to Christianize in Cathlicism the native islanders, was achieved with great success.
But neither President McKinley, nor the Americans of that time who had finished a war with Spain, were in the mood for the preservation of what was Spanish or Hispanic in the Philippines, even if that also meant the very survival of the Filipinos as a nation. We know, of course, that the American Hispanophobia of the 1900’s is no longer prevalent among many normal present-day Americans.
While the Americans of today have already gotten over, (almost), their Hispanophobia, the New Filipinos have not. This is so, judging by the constant persecution being officially staged by the “brown McKinleyans” we have in certain Government Departments and Commissions who up to now appear to be still drowned in useless Hispanophobia.
The other phase of that McKinleyan political declaration dealt with education. But what the WASPs termed as “education” is being translated into deliberate mis-education for the Filipinos. The Americans purposely de-emphasized Spanish in the education of the rising Filipino generations. Without Spanish, what was, and is, originally Filipino was criminally destroyed.
Even the learned David P. Barrows, the American Director of Education, wrote, in effect, in his “Annual School Report,” 1906, page 94, that:
At the time of the American occupation (of the Philippines), there
was a general feeling among Filipinos that the knowledge of the
Spanish language had been deliberately, and wrongly, withheld
from them by the sovereign country (The USA).
If we must go to a blaming stance, the WASP American colonizers are really to be blamed for deemphasizing Spanish in the Philippines. The imposition of English was part of their imperialist agenda for the Filipinos. The imposition of English was needed to make the Filipinos accept their political and economic policies in their own country. And the Spanish language, then used by the nationalist Filipinos of that time as their supreme vehicle for freedom was squarely blocking WASP American imperialism.
To erode the Filipino’s conviction for Spanish as his official and national language –in much the same way that Spanish remains as such in almost all of the Latin American countries– the US colonial government, wittingly or unwittingly, planted in the Filipino mind that they needed a native national language. Being the common vernacular of Manila, the capital city of the Philippines, Tagalog was chosen as the national language. The aim was to remove the Filipino focus on Spanish and transfer the same into Tagalog. This aim was implemented in the primary public education in English of all Filipino children and adolescents.
To also nullify the objections that were naturally coming from the non-Tagalog majority of Filipinos who did not readily accept Tagalog as the replacement for their respective native languages, the stand for Tagalog was modified and disguised. It was called “the basis” of the Filipino national language but with a self destructive adoption of a pre-Hispanic based “abakada” that would hinder the expected advance of tagalog as a tool language for education and official government transactions as evidenced up to this writing.
But then, the divisive strategy between Spanish and Tagalog, took several generations to succeed, since the “national language program” was aimed at dividing the Filipino nationalists front, between Spanish and Tagalog, so that English and Americanization could, in the meantime, advance unperturbed.
It is a fact well proven that in spite of all the colonialist strategies applied against Filipino nationalism in Spanish, the English language only achieved some popular use in the Philippines during the so-called Liberation Era, that is to say, after the war with the Japanese. And Tagalog, subsequently renamed “Pilipino,” was condemned to always play second fiddle to English. At least “Pilipino”, lacking as it is in appropriate vocabulary and reference books in all the branches human knowledge, could never be the threat to the suzerainty of English. The treat to the raise of English was coming from Spanish since it had a three century ascendancy over English in as far as the Filipino context of things were concerned.
The McKinleyan strategy against Spanish, and to an extent even against Tagalog, has inevitably resulted in the language and identity confusion among a good number of present-day Filipinos since it raised issues on what really is his national language and what is really his individual and collective identity.
And it is precisely this deliberate confusion, doggenly imposed upon the Filipino’s educational system up to now, that has turned the Filipino of today into the despicable, corrupt, indifferent and bastard New Filipino that he is of our days. Despicable indeed because the New Filipino plunders, mercilessly kills his fellow Filipinos, has moreover made deceit his norm and amorality his religion. That is the New Filipino. The lesser ones, those with lesser knowledge and a myopic outlook, as well as a poor attitude, became the “Pilipinos” or the exploited “Pinoys”. These are, in fine, the perfect products of the WASP imposed Americanized educational system that has been haphazardly functioning in all these Philippine Islands for nearly a century of confusion and destability.
Aside from the aforementioned defects and errors of the New Filipino, those that could pass as “the good guys of their breed” are pitifully misguided and confused by the ignorance, aided by the prohibited drugs, that has engulfed them through the processes of mis-education making them incapable of honest self-government and even a normal family life..
The sorry state of things in the Philippines from 1986 up to the present time can never be surely pointed out as the “Magnus Opus” of the New Filipino and his “great American culture” that includes prohibited drugs. . Let the facts speak for themselves.
And wittingly or unwittingly, this result seems to justify the Duterte war against probited drugs and government corruption.
23. THE FILIPINO OF YORE’S EXAMPLE: THE ONLY HOPE.
Even if there is a New Filipino –who calls himself, irresponsibly, a PILIPINO or a PINOY– we have no alternative but to wish for an “Old” Filipino leadership. Could that be President Rodrigo Duterte y Roa?
But circumstances presently obtaining, the so-called “New Filipino” is an alien, and a vile, English/Taglish-speaking alien at that. The real Filipino is the not so overly-Americanized native who also has an idea of the origins of the Filipino State and his true national history.. He may have defects, but in the long run, he may prove himself less evil, less callous and less ruthless as the now corrupt, arrogant and shameless “New Filipino”.
The real Filipino will never barter nor sell the Patrimony of his people. He will not withhold the teaching of Spanish to the new generations of Filipinos. He will even encourage its proper teaching and its literary development. In this regard, the New Filipino, or “Pinóy” has proven himself , wittingly or unwittingly, a true scoundrel up to now. And we hope that change will modify him unto the real ideals of the original Filipino.
(end)
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