Why the Philippines is Standing Still - F. Sionil Jose

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“There is no literate population in the world that is poor; there is no illiterate population that is anything but poor.” – John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006)



“The true Filipino is a decolonized Filipino.” – Prof. Renato Constantino (1919-1999)

Many of us Filipinos -who had lived for 2 generations or so -have repeatedly heard and read the claim that after WW2 we Filipinos and/or our homeland were second only to Japan. I believed so; though I think we were actually referring to the more urban areas at the time, in particular Manila, where most national government offices, public services, light industries, higher education, banking and commerce were located; while most of the countryside and islands, were mainly devoted to agriculture, if not idle lands, many of which were/are privately owned by absentee hacienderos. 

Sionil Jose talks about why we were left behind by our erstwhile more backward and poorer Asian  neighbors. He mentions that our damaged culture. He speaks of elitism, which we can say is essentially that of an aristocratic-socioeconomic elite, of the foreign and/or mestizo elite, who also comprise the so-called educated elite, who looked up to their foreign masters (the Spaniards then, the Americans later) and looked down on the native Filipino masses/common tao. 

We still have these mestizo elite, throw the Spanish-Chinese, American or other foreign hybrid. To these elites, we can throw in the nouveau riche, many "who got it made" through thievery from  odious debts and government revenues, beginning with the Marcos Dictatorship and its successive regimes, all seeing the government coffers as their source of personal wealth formation. 


The OCW-OFW remittances have been extremely useful to the ruling regimes and their support systems (the military, technocrats,cronies etc.). These remittances serve at least dual purposes: to provide a bigger government pot to steal from and simultaneously create a social safety-relief valve to a potentially explosive situation if the educated, politically unconnected masses were kept within the homeland without decent livelihood/employment. The regimes dupe and sweeten OCWs/OFWs by calling them "heroes."



Sionil Jose puts our supposed avoidance of manual labor as part of the Spanish heritage. To this I can only add that he must be referring to the members/descendants of this elite and those who are wannabe-elites. He demonstrates his elitist self when he charges that we Filipinos are lazy. I have lived long enough to appreciate and learn that we native Filipinos are not lazy, whether one is educated or not. Of course, just like with any nationality or race, there are lazy individuals. I find Sionil Jose deficient in understanding, if not quite ignorant, of what poverty is all about.



Sionil Jose refers specifically to the slum people as lazy and he makes me wonder:

• Does he understand the fact that many of these people may have existed in generational poverty [I am not referring to situational poverty which is a shorter time and is caused by circumstance (i.e. death, illness, etc.).] 
• Does he understand the fact that many of these people, while growing up, are much more likely than non-poor children to suffer developmental delay and damage, to drop out of school, and for the poor girls to give birth during their teen years? 
• Does he understand the fact that poverty is caused by interrelated factors: parental employment  status and earnings, family structure and parental education? 
• Does he understand the fact that an individual brings with him the hidden rules of the class (i.e. impoverished) in which he was raised -patterns of thought, social interaction, cognitive strategies, etc. which may/may not help him leave his state of poverty?

Sure we know that one can get out of poverty through education and relationships. We know some reasons to leave poverty: it is too painful to stay, a vision or goal, a key relationship or a special talent or skill. We have seen these all happen by individual effort but it would be much better and the opportunities wider if the government -whose main job is to provide human progress to its citizens- performs its main job.



Sionil Jose blames our inward-looking nationalism with regards to industrialization then, now mostly gone thanks to IMF/WB imposed removal of tariff and exchange control, with consequent devaluation and uncontrolled profit repatriation by foreign companies, the cheap buy-out of our domestic companies, now worsened by the WTO rules and agreements signed by our technocrats without the knowledge and understanding of the populace. I wonder what he was referring to. 



Until the Marcos Dictatorship, our industries were mostly classified as light-manufacturing, chemical, food, textile, assembly and a few others. I have worked for several years in a chemical company owned by a native Filipino family and it was a technologically progressive, professional and treats its employees better than its competitors. Sure, it used the BOI-classified  "preferred industries" to gain some tax incentives. Thus it ventured to new chemical manufacturing to satisfy local and export markets. What's wrong with looking out for our own when a serious study of how the developed nations became such was precisely to their decades long, inward-looking nationalism for a start and competing/looking out only when strong enough. and even to the present, such advance nations still do inward-looking practices, i.e.  protectionism in certain industries and sectors of agricultural production while they demand absolute free-trade from the poorer countries like ours.



Sionil Jose may be correct if referring to say,our sugar industry which was essentially owned and operated by the aristocratic-oligarchs who were conspicuously living it up with inefficiency since they were guaranteed for a long time to export under the American quota system with a higher than world market price (thanks to Cuba turning communist) while exploiting their workers and sacadas under slavish conditions. While I was in SMC-Corporate Planning I wrote a sugar industry analysis which indicated how badly this industry was - like milking a cow to death or using a machine to obsolescence.



Any nationalist program for industrialization should be to produce necessities first, to satisfy the domestic market first, to make use of best available technology, if possible to make use of domestic substitutes as raw materials, etc.. Of course the reversal to the traditional, narrow nationalism exploited by the aristocratic elite (or any new elite) shall not be allowed under a truly nationalist leadership.. An actively nationalist government control and participation, if necessary, shall be applied. Obviously such a program can materialize only when the prerequisite, significant portion of native Filipinos have developed into true Filipino nationalists, into decolonized Filipinos, as Renato Constantino wrote about it. 



This active and courageous nationalism is a sine-qua-non for the leaders and citizenry, given that the forces behind globalization will exert forms of pressure. i.e. media, economic isolation and even military blockade/force, to equate nationalism with "communism" as they have done so in the past, to have it their way. As to Claro M. Recto and Lorenzo Tanada, they may have been against agrarian reform in their earlier years, but both realized in their later years that land reform is an imperative to nationalist industrial development of the homeland, i.e. Prof. Constantino wrote of "The Making of a Filipino" about the ilustrado Recto. For Tanada, his change is greatly indicated by being a founder of BAYAN, a nationalistic coalition movement that calls for agrarian reform among others. 



Sionil Jose said we did not implement land reform and mentioned land reform in Japan and Taiwan. He did not define who "we" is.  

• Did he forget or not know that in Japan it was the Americans, specifically Gen. Douglas MacArthur who imposed land reform (the same Douglas MacArthur we Filipinos with naïve sentimentality remember and look up to like a demigod)? 
• Did he forget or not know why the Americans never implemented land reform in our homeland while they were still the colonizers? 
• As for Taiwan, then General/President Chiang-Kai-Shek, a nationalistic strongman/dictator, was driven and aided by America to implemented land reform and pursued heavy industrialization.

I add that the two countries at the time profited from the Cold War, i.e. Communism versus Capitalism. America wanted to showcase both Japan and Taiwan versus Communist China.  Furthermore, the active roles of their respective, although dictatorial, governments to educate the populace for nationalism was instrumental in consolidating them (nationalism was already in existence in Japan at the turn of the 20th century; nationalism was pursued by the Chiang's Kuomintang Party on their displacing the local Taiwanese).



I do not read fiction and so have not read any of Sionil Jose's famous fictional stories, though I have read one of his social commentaries. I find him always criticizing the Spaniards but not the Americans as former colonizers. I get a feeling he has friends in the States and have noted that he has been receiving accolades and awards from American literary societies  for his writings. He does not bite the hands that feed him.  So I have some understanding where he is coming from. 



Re education for change, education for Filipino nationalism is imperative. Not just plain education for a career or profession, to help repair our damaged culture; a nationwide nationalist education is possible but may be improbable without going through a period of a bloody nationalist revolution, which many of us, who profit from (or want to be part of) the status quo, are fighting against its happening now with our colonized minds and JUSMAG/American-trained military.


Below is F. Sionil Jose's article.


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F. Sionil Jose: why the Philippines is Standing Still

INQUIRER.net

Posted date: July 15, 2008

In one of the luncheons he hosted recently for clients of the Rizal Commercial Banking Corp., Ambassador Alfonso T. Yuchengco asked the National Artist for Literature Francisco Sionil Jose to share some of his observations of the current scene. This is the paper Mr. Jose read on that occasion: What did South Korea look like after the Korean War in 1953? Battered, poor, but look at Korea now. In the Fifties, the traffic in Taipei was composed of bicycles and Army trucks, the streets flanked by tile-roofed low buildings. Jakarta was a giant village and Kuala Lumpur a small village surrounded by jungle and rubber plantations. Bangkok was crisscrossed with canals, the tallest structure was the Wat Arun, the Temple of the Sun, and it dominated the city's skyline. Rice fields all the way from Don Muang Airport - then a huddle of galvanized iron-roofed bodegas, to the Victory monument. Visit these cities today and weep - for they are more beautiful, cleaner and prosperous than Manila. In the Fifties and Sixties we were the most envied country in Southeast Asia. Remember further that when Indonesia got its independence in 1949, it had only 114 university graduates compared to the hundreds of Ph.D.'s which were already in our universities. Why then were we left behind? The economic explanation is simple. We did not produce cheaper and better products. The basic question really is: why we did not modernize fast enough and thereby doomed our people to poverty. This is the harsh truth about us today. Just consider these: some 15 years ago a survey showed that half of all grade school pupils dropped out after grade 5 because they had no money to continue schooling. Thousands of young adults today are therefore unable to find jobs. Our natural resources have been ravaged and they are not renewable. Our tremendous population increase eats up all of our economic gains. There is hunger in this country now; our poorest eat only once a day. But this physical poverty is really not as serious as the greater poverty that afflicts us and this is the poverty of the spirit. Why then are we poor? More than ten years ago, James Fallows, editor of the Atlantic Monthly came to the Philippines and wrote about our “damaged culture” which, he asserted, impeded our development. Many disagreed with him but I do find a great deal of truth in his analysis. This is not to say that I blame our social and moral malaise on colonialism alone. But we did inherit from Spain a social system and an elite that, on purpose, exploited the masses. Then, too, in the Iberian peninsula, to work with one's hands is frowned upon and we inherited that vice as well. Colonialism by foreigners may no longer be what it was, but we are now a colony of our own elite. We are poor because we are poor - this is not a tautology. The culture of poverty is self-perpetuating. We are poor because our people are lazy. I pass by a slum area every morning - dozens of adults do nothing but idle, gossip and drink. We do not save. Look at the Japanese and how they save in spite of the fact that the interest given them by their banks is so little. They work very hard too. We are great show-offs. Look at our women, how overdressed, over-coiffed they are, and Imelda epitomizes that extravagance. Look at our men, their manicured nails, their personal jewelry, their diamond rings. Yabang - that is what we are, and all that money expended on status symbols, on yabang. How much better if it were channeled into production! We are poor because our nationalism is inward looking. Under its guise we protect inefficient industries and monopolies. We did not pursue agrarian reform like Japan and Taiwan. It is not so much the development of the rural sector, making it productive and a good market as well. Agrarian reform releases the energies of the landlords who, before the reform, merely waited for the harvest. They become entrepreneurs, the harbingers of change. Our nationalist icons like Claro M. Recto and Lorenzo Tañada opposed agrarian reform, the single most important factor that would have altered the rural areas and lifted the peasant from poverty. Both of them were merely anti-American. And finally, we are poor because we have lost our ethical moorings. We condone cronyism and corruption and we don't ostracize or punish the crooks in our midst. Both cronyism and corruption are wasteful but we allow their practice because our loyalty is to family or friend, not to the larger good. We can tackle our poverty in two very distinct ways. The first choice: a nationalist revolution, a continuation of the revolution in 1896. But even before we can use violence to change inequities in our society, we must first have a profound change in our way of thinking, in our culture. My regret about EDSA is that change would have been possible then with a minimum of bloodshed. In fact, a revolution may not be bloody at all if something like EDSA would present itself again, or a dictator unlike Marcos. The second is through education, perhaps a longer and more complex process. The only problem is that it may take so long and by the time conditions have changed, we may be back where we were, caught up with this tremendous population explosion which the Catholic Church exacerbates in its conformity with doctrinal purity. We are faced with a growing compulsion to violence, but even if the communist won, they will rule as badly because they will be hostage to the same obstructions in our culture, the barkada and the vaulting egos that sundered the revolution in 1896, the Huk revolt in 1949-53. To repeat, neither education nor revolution can succeed if we do not internalize new attitudes, new ways of thinking. Let us go back to basics and remember those American slogans: A Ford in every garage. A chicken in every pot. Money is like fertilizer: to do any good it must be spread around. Some Filipinos, taunted wherever they are, are ashamed to admit they are Filipinos. I have, myself, been embarrassed explain for instance why Imelda, her children and the Marcos cronies are back, and in positions of power? Are there redeeming features in our country that we can be proud of? Of course, lots of them. When people say for instance that our corruption will never be banished, just remember that Arsenio Lacson as mayor of Manila and Ramon Magsaysay as President brought a clean government. We do not have the classical arts that brought Hinduism and Buddhism to continental and archipelago Southeast Asia, but our artists have now ranged the world, showing what we have done with Western art forms, enriched without own ethnic traditions. Our professionals, not just our domestics, are all over, showing how an accomplished people we are! Look at our history. We were the first in Asia to rise against Western colonialism, the first to establish a republic. Recall the Battle of Tirad Pass and glory in the heroism of Gregorio Del Pilar and the 48 Filipinos who died but stopped the Texas Rangers from capturing the President of that First Republic. Its equivalent in ancient history is the Battle of Thermopylae where the Spartans and their king Leonidas died to a man, defending the pass against the invading Persians. Rizal - what nation on earth has produced a man like him? At 35, he was a novelist, a poet, an anthropologist, a sculptor, a medical doctor, a teacher and martyr. We are now 80 million and in another two decades we will pass the 100 million mark. Eighty million - that is a mass market in any language, a mass market that should absorb our increased production in goods and services - a mass market which any entrepreneur can hope exploit, like the proverbial oil for the lamps of China. Japan was only 70 million when it had confidence enough and the wherewithal to challenge the United States and almost won. It is the same confidence that enabled Japan to flourish from the rubble of defeat in World War II. I am not looking for a foreign power for us to challenge. But we have a real and insidious enemy that we must vanquish, and this enemy is worse than the intransigence of any foreign power. We are our own enemy. And we must have the courage, the will, to change ourselves. “May the Lord watch between you and me when we are absent one from the other.” – Genesis Source: http://globalnation.inquirer.net/mindfeeds/mindfeeds/view/20080715-148544/F._Sionil_Jose:_why_the_Philippines_is_Standing_Still

Memory and Collaboration: 1896 Revolution - by F. Sionil Jose (UPDATED)

WHAT WE FILIPINOS SHOULD KNOW: (Note: Bold and/or underlined words are HTML links. Click on them to see the linked postings/articles. Forwarding the postings to relatives and friends, especially in the homeland, is greatly appreciated. To write or read a comment, please scroll down to the bottom of the post and click on "Comments.")
“Nations, whose NATIONALISM is destroyed, are subject to ruin.” - Muammar al_Qaddafi

“There is no literate population in the world that is poor; there is no illiterate population that is anything but poor.” – John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006)

“As to the source of leadership, we Filipinos still look up and limit ourselves to the same socioeconomic-political elite, the same prominent dynasties, many of whom were of the collaborationist and mendicant variety. There is potentially good leadership, maybe still unknown, who will rise up, OUTSIDE the selfish, morally bankrupt and oftentimes subservient elite. When we have done away with our massive ignorance, we Filipinos can surely find and actively ensure that only individuals -with courage and strong nationalism- earn respect; thus who will successfully propel the people to fight, and finally win the revolt for the common good” - Gadfly
Hi All,

We are poor and in ever-worsening predicament because the majority of native Filipinos are functionally illiterate and most are ignorant.

Majority of native Filipinos are apathetic about socio-economic problems because they are not informed; and lack of information (ignorance) reinforces apathy.

People can be aroused to action with a well-formulated presentation of the problems that evoke their sympathy. Thus we Filipinos need first to eliminate our illiteracy and ignorance, to educate ourselves so as to gain knowledge and understanding of the fundamental causes and remedies for social problems, including the economics, politics, and ethics of the problems and solutions. Then when we educate others, we must at the same time invoke their antipathy to the problems and arouse their sympathy with the remedies.

When the impoverished majority, that is the "masa," are roused with sympathy and armed with knowledge of the remedy, the greedy in government, business and military who benefits from ignorance will either be swayed themselves to join the righteous battle, or be overwhelmed by the greater force of the righteous revolution.

It is and will not be an easy task. There are internal and external forces constantly at work to keep the majority ignorant. The internal forces (native government bureaucrats and technocrats or modern "ilustrados" with economic and political powers) and external forces (resident aliens, foreign businessmen and transnational companies (TNCs). They all remind us of the Spaniards who kept us natives (indio) uneducated, or the white Americans who kept the Negroes/Blacks illiterate for slavery.

Rampant corruption in public offices, top to bottom is a symptom of disease: the disease of absent Filipino nationalism in combination with the disease of immature Christianity/religion shown by self-confessed Christians/Catholics.

Without being repetitive here, I just want to say that all these have been discussed in previous posts. It may be tiring and seemingly hopeless, but we need to keep alive, to continue the discussion of fundamental issues that cause our predicament, especially to those who can not escape/emigrate, the uneducated, the impoverished. And hopefully, we can reach and help them gain an appreciation and understanding of "what's going on" and "why" the need to fight for the common good.

Because without the impoverished majority knowing, they can not unite and act for radical changes that are long overdue. We may not see the realization now or during our lifetime. But we have to try and do so, for the next generations. For another, there's no place like home, our country of birth. That's how I feel and think.

Below is an essay about us Filipinos and our revolutionary heritage by our famous novelist and social critic F. Sionil Jose.  I liked his "what ifs" re Japan colonizing as for long. I think we would be more economically successful like them and the Koreans. I also agree with his assertion that we did not need communism as an ideology, Filipino nationalism is enough but we lost it under American tutelage and consequent Americanization of our mind and heart. Same with his comment regarding Our Filipino Religiosity.

See also what I just found a few minutes ago: http://barangayrp.wordpress.com/2008/09/07/imelda-marcos%E2%80%99s-presence-too-much-for-f-sionil-jose/

{ I encourage all to visit Sionil Jose's Solidaridad Bookshop, which is at the junction of Padre Faura  and Mabini Streets in Ermita. His bookshop offers mostly hard-to-find books and Filipiniana reading materials. I did not know him but frequently dropped in to browse and buy books during the late 1960s to 1970s. I visited his bookstore thrice last October 2011 and ended up purchasing almost 30 Filipiniana books. I did enjoy browsing so many of the publications I missed in the last 34 years.}

-Bert, 11/05/2012

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Our Revolution of 1896 is significant to me personally, not just as a Filipino but as a novelist. From it, I have deduced the influence of our revolutionary tradition on our nativistic movements; that revolution also made it easier for me to define collaboration as a moral issue. In this regard, I bring to mind Artemio Ricarte, a general of the Revolution who spent three years of exile in Japan and returned to the Philippines, only to die in the fastness of ifugao in the Cordilleras.

In our celebration of the centennial of this Revolution, it is perhaps necessary to remind ourselves that beyond the festival tinsel, we should ask why we should remember at all, and what.
All to often, we have ignored, through either blindness or self-lobotomy, what transpired fifty years ago when we were occupied by the Japanese and many Filipinos, out of convenience, collaborated with them. Or, for that matter, what happened at EDSA a mere decade ago when a despicable dictator and his family were forced to flee.

If the past means something to us, it is because it reminds us of the good old days - their comfort, the wonderful times enshrined in memory. this is pure and simple nostalgia which does not have any more meaning than would a gargantuan feast, or some orgiastic experience that will forever haunt us with its magic. But beyond this, what then?
To remember the antique grandeur of Intramuros or the sybaritic Ermita and Malate of the thirties in an upper class luxury, particularly for those who lived in such districts when these were at the height of their glory.

Why these enclaves of power and privilege?

When we ask this question, we then come to the core of what ails our country, and why revolution was -and is- the answer to this most basic of our internal contradictions. we then realize it was not so much the foreign interloper that brought perdition to our society, but that most insidious of exploiters -internal colonialism and the agrarian discontent it spawned.

A hundred years from now, those who will perhaps remember the grandeur of Forbes Park, the snobbery of Makati, will they consider these districts as the supreme monuments to internal colonialism too?

My first awareness of the Revolution of 1896 came when I was very young, perhaps six or seven years old. Memory being rusted by the years, I'm incapable of totally recalling how my grandfather brought his whole clan to the plains of eastern Pangasinan, to a village called Cabugawan -from the town of Cabugaw in Ilocos Sur from whence they came. My grandfather died when I was very young; the stories I heard from him, from my mother and aunts and uncles were hazy bits, that, later on, I put together as in an Andalusian mosaic.

He was perhaps in his sixties, his white hair cropped short. It was his feet which I could not forget, for like other farmers in our village, he had never worn shoes. it is not possible to work the muddy fields with shoes or slippers. Ginger - that was what the peasant feet were called because the toes were splayed, like ginger, and the soles were thick and cracked.

I called my grandfather, as did the others in our family, Ba-ac, an Ilokano term of endearment for anything that is aged like cane wine, or the big, leaf tobacco which the women hand-rolled into cigars or pressed into cubes of chewing tobacco.

Grandfather was a soldier of the Revolution; in our house was a rusting length of iron with a pointed end. I was told he used it during the revolution, not as much as a weapon but as a rod to prod the earth for buried treasure left by the Spaniards, much like the way Yamashita's treaure is hunted today. Grandfather had no gun -I was told that he and so many of the revolutionaries were armed only with bolos.

Grandfather spoke a few Spanish phrases, among them "sin verguenza" which he applied to the Spaniards and, later on, to the ilustrado mestizos who dispossessed him of the land he had carved out of the wilderness.

In later years when I was writing Po-on, one of my novels about the Revolution and the Ilokano hegira, I recreated Grandfather as the embittered old man who fulminated against the Spaniards.

Ethnocentric Tagalog writers are perhaps right when they say that the Revolution was essentially a Tagalog response to Spanish tyranny. But then, grandfather was not Tagalog, and so were the host of other revolutionaries - Antonio Luna, Bishop Aglipay, both of whom reconnoitered the north for a possible escape route when the defeat of the Malolos republic by the Americans was imminent. And in the Ilokos, many Ilokanos continued fighting the Americans even when most of Luzon was already conquered by them.

And finally, there is General Artemio Ricarte,.originally from Batac, Ilokos Norte, lie most well- placed Ilokanos, he went to Manila, where he imbibed early enough the ideals of the revolution. As one of the founders of the Katipunan, Ricarte figured in the early battles with the Spaniards in Cavite where he taught school. then the Americans came.

After the collapse of the organized resistance to the new colonizers, he refused the pledge of allegiance to the United States. Consequently, he was exiled to Guam together with Mabini and the rest of whom the Americans regarded as recalcitrant.

Unfazed by his exile in Guam, he returned to the Philippines. here he continued opposing the United States for which reason he was again exiled this time in HongKong. He returned to the Philippines in secret and continued his activities  was captured and imprisoned in solitary for six years, after which he still refused to pledge allegiance to the United States. Exiled for a third time, he finally went to Shanghai and from there, to Japan where he took odd jobs and lived in penury. Fortunately, he had a friend, Goto Simpei, who became mayor of Tokyo and later on, foreign affairs minister.

To Ricarte, he gave the job of teaching Spanish to Japanese emigrants to South America. Ricarte's wife joined him in Yokohama where she started a Philippine restaurant and sold Ricarte's book on the Revolution to Filipino visitors., most of whom them sailors or passengers in ocean liners. With the Japanese Imperial Army, he returned to the Philippines via Aparri in 1942 wearing the uniform of a Japanese shogun complete with a Japanese sword. He must have been extremely disappointed that the Japanese did not appoint him to a high position. Not only was he already too old, the Japanese used the same old elite to rule as their puppets and initiate social, structural changes.
A few years ago, on a Japan Foundation grant, I stayed in Japan for six months to research on a novel about this doughty Ilokano. I interviewed the few living Japanese who knew him, one of them an aging civilian who had been in the Japanese Army and Ricarte on his last days. His former aide and student, Colonel Ohta, wrote a book about him, Even the Devil Will Weep, which recounts Ricarte's tribulations. he bore them all, in Japan as well as in the Cordilleras, with stoicism and pride.

Ricarte wrote a lot in exile; visitors as well as relatives attest to this. Certainly, a man as well-informed as he must have followed with interest the imperial advance of Japan into China and earlier, into Korea. Surely, he must have known of Japan's hegemonic ambition in Asia, as well as the non-democratic nature of Japanese society, its censorship, its emperor worship.

We may assume he not only approved of these, but that he also appreciated them. Would he then have wanted the Japanese to rule the Philippines as they eventually did? 

These are grave questions which must be answered, for the truth of the matter is that Ricarte was an active Japanese collaborator, out of sincere admiration for them and perhaps for no other reason.

His relatives say that by 1935, he had already ceased being anti-American, that he recognized what the Americans had positively achieved -their promise to give independence after the Commonwealth.

If he approved of the American regime afterwards, why did he not come home when he was offered a very good position in the government by President Quezon, Paredes and other Filipino leaders who had visited him in Yokohama? Was it enough that he sent his wife to attend the 1935 Commonwealth celebration? But if he did collaborate with the Japanese, a distinction must be made -he committed no treason to the United States. he had not sworn allegiance to that country the way so many Filipino leaders had.

He did help many Filipinos escape death by appealing to the Japanese, and at times went beyond the authority given him for which he incurred their ire.

Wanting to show his independence, he tried to form his own militia -a quixotic act because it would not have flourished without Japanese arms and approval. The Japanese used him instead in their pacification drive and sent him on speaking terms all over the country.

General Ricarte had an ultra-nationalistic agenda; he would change not just the name of the Philippines but many Spanish names; for instance, the days of the week. Beyond this trivia was his deep hatred of the ilustrados whom he considered traitors to the Revolution.
When he returned incognito to the Philippines from Hongkong, he met Aguinaldo and other comrades and urged them in cleansing the country of such traitors. Aguinaldo counseled patience.

Why did he retreat with the Japanese Army to the Cordilleras towards the end of the Occupation? Was he in fear of his life as a collaborator? Why did he not stay behind where the possibility of his surviving the war would have been better?

I shall describe this act not so much as a gesture of his final collaboration with the Japanese. he was in his seventies -the past was all behind him. I think he was being true to himself. That was his undoing.

It is fairly well established that if the United States had not taken over the Philippines at the turn of the century, Japan would have been quite ready to do so. Maybe in the long run, if it were Japan that had colonized the Philippines, it would have ended for the better. 

Being cruel, they would have maltreated us but at the same time, established exploitative industries and thereby transferred to the Filipinos a stern kind of work ethic. In all probability too, we would not have gotten the terrific hangover from the American colonial experience,given the benign nature of American colonialism and the openness with which the Americans dealt with us.

But to go back to the 1896 Revolution, its influence on the nativistic movements like the Colorums and the Watawat Ng Lahi was very strong. In my conversations in the early fifties with the late Pedro Calosa, founder of the Colorums of Tayug, he maintained that it was the heroes of the revolution, most of all Jose Rizal, who inspired them. Mabini, Bonifacio -all of them who fought for the country's freedom were enshrined in the colorum pantheon because they were men who fought for Filipino freedom. The Colorums also believed these men were "gods;" that "God created land, water and air for all men, that it was wrong for one man or one family to own so much while the rest of humankind had nothing."
It was such a belief that led them to rise in revolt in 1931 -they tore their cedulas then took over the municipal building of Tayug in Pangasinan, suffering as they were from the harshness of the landlords in the area.

It was the same with the "Watawat Ng Lahi" in Laguna led by the late Valentin de los Santos with whom I had also conversed in the mid-Fifties. In 1965, like the Colorums  they massed on Taft Avenue where they were massacred by army troops which did not know how to deal with them. Like the Colorums, they had believed in their invincibility, their quasi-Latin chants (from which their name Colorum came from, their sacred amulets that would protect them from bullets - the same belief that had so imbued many of the 1896 peasant soldiers, for which the Americans considered them fanatics.

Although the succeeding rebel movements, the Huks and the New Peoples' Army (NPA) were agrarian-motivated, the influence of the 1896 revolution was no longer evident in both movements. The Maoist communist party behind the NPA's did not draw either sustenance or inspiration from the Filipino revolutionary tradition. It could have easily discarded its Maoist mambo jumbo and relied wholly on the teachings of Mabini, Rizal and others who had fueled the propaganda Movement. 

As I said then, and I repeat today, there was enough in our revolutionary tradition to color the Revolution, not red but nationalist. But the leaders of the NPA were doctrinaire communists - they failed to show their own reading of what they considered the "objective reality," and they missed their place in history by boycotting the 1986 elections and absenting themselves from the EDSA uprising that same year.

This lesson should not be lost on us now, or on future generations that may yet bring invigorating change to the country by destroying or emasculating the oligarchy and restoring what our politicians call "people power."

Ricarte's collaboration with the Japanese in instructive too, in the sense that it gives "collaboration" many nuances and grey areas. Collaboration is far more complex than it appears although its stigma is really simple -collaborators are individuals who aid the enemy in the conquest of their country and in the murder of their countrymen. It is in this sense that, indeed, collaboration in its simplest form is treason.
But the variations need looking into.

Is the collaboration borne out of sincerity or is it coerced by fear?
The Sakdals and the Makapilis -peasant organizations- cooperated with the Japanese out of the simple belief that Japan was going to help liberate the Philippines from imperialism.

How about those opportunistic individuals who collaborated with the enemy for profit? And worse, how about those who, aside from conniving with the enemy, themselves killed their own countrymen?
Ricarte collaborated with the Japanese -this is the simplest and most basic fact about him. Did he also commit treason like the other Filipinos who did collaborate with the Japanese and brought harm or death to their countrymen?

We have heard all their arguments - that without them, it would have been worse, that they have helped their countrymen survive the war (and Marcos), that as bureaucrats they had no choice and were only following orders. Herein lies the ambiguities of history, of our attitudes to the collaborators. 

Herein too is the root of our moral malaise which we must somehow resolve if we are going to give our politics a truly moral basis.This moral malaise, it seems to me, lies deep in our past, in our having forgotten what the Revolution of 1896 really meant although we continue to lisp its significance. 

The revolution was a rejection not just of tyranny but of colonialism; and somehow,those who helped the colonialists -foreign as well as native- have never really been brought to justice; not just those who collaborated with the Spaniards but with the Americans, the Japanese and in more recent times, with Marcos.

There are those who rationalize our moral malaise as an inevitable continuum from the Spanish regime when corruption was rife. Ditto with a church whose liturgies and penances were available for a price.

Yet long before World War II, when candidates for political office impoverished themselves; they had to spend their own money for their campaign, for feeding the electorate.

Foreigners have marveled at the Filipino capacity for forgiveness. I would call it lack of memory. They see in our country the monuments that the Japanese built to commemorate their war dead. In Mabalacat, Pampanga, for instance, is a monument to their kamikaze pilots.

This would never happen, they say emphatically, in Britain, in France, in the countries occupied by the Germans.To this very day, those in the French Vichy government who were exposed for collaboration with the Nazis are on trial, and several of them have been executed in the past.

Only in the Philippines could such collaborators who actively helped Marcos in his plunder of the country, parade themselves on TV screens, write columns in the newspapers. Only in the Philippines can someone like Imelda Marcos return to power and have her children idolized. Bongbong Marcos went to UP sometime back -the UP of all schools- and he was mobbed by students seeking his autograph.

The Revolution of 1896 was riven with many contradictions, clashing interests. Poor Mabini -in my novel Po-on, I had attributed his paralysis to syphilis as was the information I got from the late Teodoro Agoncillo and Cesar Majul. I met Cesar in the Fifties when he had just returned from Cornell where he did his Ph. D dissertation on Mabini. When I told him I was from Rosales, Pangasinan, he told me that Mabini had stayed in my hometown before he fled to nearby Cuyapo, Nueva Ecija, where he was eventually captured. I knew then that Po-on would be anchored on Mabini's stay in Rosales, his ideas and ideals.

The rich ilustrados had a plan to milk the Malolos government, and Mabini stood in the way, for which reason he was gossiped about -it was said that his paralytic condition was due to syphilis. Years later, in the Eighties, Ambeth Ocampo explained his bones were exhumed and the specialists found out he had suffered not from syphilis, but from polio. I had done his memory irreparable harm for which I am deeply sorry.

Because of the contradictions in 1896, I surmised that if the Americans did not come, we would have had a civil war in twenty years. Carmen Guerrero Nakpil who is more sanguine said: "Not twenty years but a couple of years."

My novel Po-on which ends with the battle of Tirad Pass, required that I do a lot of reading, not just on the revolution but on the social life of the period. I had to go to Tirad Pass, too. from Candon, Ilokos Sur, we turned right towards the town of Salcedo at the foot of the Cordilleras. On a clear day, Tirad, which means "pointed" in Ilokano, is visible. below is the pass. it was November and the rains had lifted. It would have have been difficult for my wife and me to reach Mt. Tirad during the rainy season because the Buaya River which we had to cross several times would have been bloated. But in November, the river could be forded on foot. We hired a jeepney in Salcedo but left it in the last village as it could no longer make the ascent, and we had to climb on foot.

A few words about Tirad Pass -during the Spanish Times, it was the short cut from the Ilokos for those migrating to Cagayan Valley. It was widened so that horses and water buffaloes, but not bull-carts  could cross. Those who took the circuitous route went down to Pangasinan, across the Caraballo Range through the Sta.Fe trail now called the Dalton Pass after an American general who was killed there by a Japanese sniper in 1945.

The Revolution was our moment of truth; in that shining episode we defined ourselves and confirmed, not just our heroic and revolutionary tradition but also our continuous struggle for freedom. Our revolution laid down the foundation of a nation. For so many centuries  like our neighbors, we were so many tribes in many islands often fighting one another. as the fictional Mabini states in Po-on, "we will build a nation not of tagalogs alone, but also of Visayans  Ilokanos, our Muslim brothers in the South." Mabini did not say this exactly in this phrasing, but having read so much of his writing, I am sure this was what he would have said.

In the conclusion of his major work, The Roots of the Filipino Nation, O.D.Corpuz opines that "extra constitutional processes" -either a coup d'etat or a revolution -will do away with our decrepit political system.  

I hope that such would indeed, happen, although I am quite sure that I will not see a revolution triumph in my lifetime, that perhaps as Rizal had expounded, education will be slow but better alternative, I nonetheless feel it in my bones, in my deepest being, that our internal contradictions will yet to be resolved.

However bleak my views, in the pith of my feelings is everlasting hope. If I were such a hardened pessimist, I would not not be writing at all, for what is the use?

I have always maintained that tradition has its often unperceived shackles; we are not fatally bound by them the way some people of the world are so crippled  believing as they do that "they are born unequal, they live unequal and they die unequal." When I visited a neighboring country in the Fifties, I was invited to a merienda by a minor member of that country's royalty. I was shocked when the maids brought the food, crawling on the floor. We may ponder to the gods, but we do not grovel before them.

A few decades ago, thousands fled from the poverty of Spain to work in Europe. When these Spaniards returned, not only did they bring home new skills -their eyes were wide opened and helped bring about new attitudes that have transformed Spain today.

It is my hope that when our thousands upon thousands of overseas workers come back, they will also be the harbingers of change.

Since we have long been nurtured in democratic institutions, we shall be able to banish the curse of our society -a corrupt and expensive political system. We have seen this development slowly through the years- first with Magsaysay going to the barrios, and our lower classes finding their voice. We now see in our midst the new crop of nontraditional politicians concerned more with performance than patronage. As our people mature politically, we shall be able to abolish Congress as it stands today, limit the number of lawmakers to the provincial governors who will then meet only four months a year. God knows we have so many laws that are never implemented.

It is not true that the government has neglected the Muslims; through the years, billions have been poured into their region, but much of it disappeared in the seemingly bottomless pit of Muslim corruption, exacerbated by the Moro social elite (datu system). as Misuari is now finding out, it is this endemic corruption -worse than that among the Christians -that will derail whatever development plans he has. Again, heroism as shown by the Moros against the Spaniards, the Americans and the Armed Forces must be channeled into this struggle -more Koranic than they themselves realize.

The justice system is obviously corrupt, from the lowest courts to the highest. Overhaul it completely? Who in the highest echelons of power will have the guts to do this? Not when everyone seems involved. In fact, if the peace and order situation continues to deteriorate, the people would not be wrong to assume that the old-boy ties among the police and the Army leaders are what dissuade them from acting swiftly and with courage. In the closest of most high-ranking officers are skeletons; they must protect each other from exposure.

And what about the succeeding generation of military officials? Only time will tell if they will break away from from tradition of pakikisama.

Indeed, it is time for those in our police and Armed Forces who truly believe in reform or revolution, or both, to join hands with those of similar thinking in the fractured Left. It is, perhaps, this amalgam of "new" men committed to the building of a new nation in whom much of our hope for the future will repose. Who will be the men and women in both the Armed Forces and the Left who will come forward to do this? The line forms in the middle.

As for the persistent agrarian problem, the solutions propounded in the Fifties may no longer be valid -for one, there is not enough land now to distribute to the tillers. But there are still ways by which agricultural production can be improved so we would be self-sufficient in food, and with this modernization, the twin objective of equity should also be pursued. Consolidation, more irrigation systems, rural credit and cooperatives, the banning of additional golf courses  and most of all, the introduction of agrarian reform in the sugar and coconut lands -these are imperatives. In fact, urban land reform should also be pursued relentlessly.

Eventually too, I hope that our churches will be empty as they are in Europe, not because we have become atheistic but because we have realized that our progress depends on our own efforts and not on divine will.

Our salvation lies in resuscitating our revolutionary tradition, in acting out the indelible lessons of our history -most of all, its selfish heroism. Indeed, we are heroic people. While researching for my novel, Po-on, I came across photographs of our soldiers in the revolutionary army -in the trenches where they were felled by American guns. They were barefoot because they were peasants. So is it today; the enlisted men in the Armed Forces of the Philippines, the cadres of the New People's Army and of the Moro National Liberation front -they are peasants fighting the ancient war against one another, and perhaps, against the Filipino oligarchy as well.

Po-on ends with the battle of tirad Pass on the morning of December 2, 1900, on the roof of the Ilokos, the Cordilleras. here, the young general, Gregorio del Pilar, defended that pass so that General Emilio Aguinaldo could flee the pursuing Americans, Del Pilar had sixty men to face a well-equipped, superior Texas Rangers; of the sixty, only seven survived and Del Pilar himself fell in this heroic stand -no different from the battle of Thermopylae where the Spartans died to a man defending the pass against the invading Persians.

In these moments of despair, of grieving over the rubble of our dreams of a beautiful Pilipinas, I think, too, of Rizal returning to his beloved homeland although he knew death awaited him there.

And most of all, I remember my grandfather -barefoot, defying the Spaniards and the Americans with nothing more than a blade.

Source: We Filipinos: Our Moral Malaise, Our Heroic Heritage - F.Sionil Jose, 1999

Ignorance, Apathy, Social Justice/Morality, and the Nationalist Revolution (Updated)

"Those who profess to favor freedom
and yet deprecate agitation
are men who want crops without plowing up the ground;
they want rain without thunder and
lightning.
They want the ocean without the
awful roar of its waters.
This struggle may be a moral one
or it may be a physical one
or it may be both moral and physical
but it must be a struggle.
Power concedes nothing without a
demand
It never did, and never will."- - Frederick Douglass, Abolitionist, Author, Slave (1817-1895)
[from Fr. Pedro V. Salgado, O.P.,The Philippine Economy: History and Analysis, 1985]


WHAT WE FILIPINOS SHOULD KNOW: (Note: Bold and/or underlined words are HTML links. Click on them to see the linked postings/articles. Forwarding the postings to relatives and friends, especially in the homeland, is greatly appreciated. To write or read a comment, please go to the bottom of the post and click on "Comments.").

We are poor and in ever-worsening predicament because the majority of native Filipinos are functionally illiterate and most are ignorant.

Majority of native Filipinos are apathetic about socio-economic problems because they are not informed; and lack of information (ignorance) reinforces apathy.

People can be aroused to action with a well-formulated presentation of the problems that evoke their sympathy. Thus we Filipinos need first to eliminate our illiteracy and ignorance, to educate ourselves so as to gain knowledge of the fundamental causes and remedies for social problems, including the economics, politics, and ethics of the problems and solutions. Then when we educate others, we must at the same time invoke their antipathy to the problems and arouse their sympathy with the remedies.

When the impoverished majority, that is the "masa," are roused with sympathy and armed with knowledge of the remedy, the greedy in government, business and military who benefits from ignorance will either be swayed themselves to join the righteous battle, or be overwhelmed by the greater force of the righteous revolution.

It is and will not be an easy task. There are internal and external forces constantly at work to keep the majority ignorant. The internal forces (native Filipinos with economic and political powers) and external forces (foreign businessmen and TNCs). They all remind us of the Spaniards who kept us (indios) uneducated, or the white Americans who kept the Negroes/Blacks illiterate for slavery.

In a previous post, I wrote about the subtle changes that neocolonialism/neoimperialism imposes on our private and state universities (our foreign loans are predicated on following its conditions):

".....As to the present goals of the educational system: during the Dictatorship, Marcos followed the dictates and plans of the International Monetary Fund/World Bank/Asian Development Bank (IMF/WB/ADB) as to the direction of our Public School System (PSS) and educational system as a whole; that is, to provide cheap and trained labor to multinational/transnational companies."

This was confirmed to me by a Spanish friend whom I visited last December in Madrid; he mentioned about Marcos inviting and speaking to them about such a direction for Philippine schools (my friend was a former priest and principal at a Catholic school).

Stressing only technical vocations, though practical since they put food on the table, will only lead to the "dumbing" of the new generations of Filipino minds, to keep the majority ignorant; unable to comprehend the root causes of their predicament (note that nowadays, the American mind has closed and its youth is getting dumb) which in turn will lead to perpetuation of the injustices in the socio-economic and political status-quo.

Thus, the primary imperative is to educate the "masa," in terms of understanding "what's going on;" thereafter we can change what has been keeping us down; preferably peacefully; if not, by radical means, i.e. a revolution that is neither communist nor anticommunist, but a nationalist revolution.

Below article is a brief by our famous writer F. Sionil Jose on the "who, why, what" of a real revolution, necessarily nationalistic, for the common good.

(see also: http://thefilipinomind.blogspot.com/2006/01/education-deterioration-of-public.html

http://thefilipinomind.blogspot.com/2005/06/ang-sistema-ng-edukasyon-sa-pilipinas.html

http://thefilipinomind.blogspot.com/2005/08/meaning-of-illiteracy-paul-harrison-is.html

http://thefilipinomind.blogspot.com/2005/12/third-worlddefinitions-and.html,

http://thefilipinomind.blogspot.com/2005/12/education-and-social-change-rev.html,

http://thefilipinomind.blogspot.com/2005/11/education-for-independent-thought.html,

http://thefilipinomind.blogspot.com/2005/12/dumbing-down-audience-by-ralph-nader.html )

“Nations, whose NATIONALISM is destroyed, are subject to ruin.” - Colonel Muhammar Qaddafi, 1942-, Libyan Political and Military Leader

“The true Filipino is a decolonized Filipino.” – Renato Constantino

"Upang maitindig natin ang bantayog ng ating lipunan, kailangang radikal nating baguhin hindi lamang ang ating mga institusyon kundi maging ang ating pag-iisip at pamumuhay. Kailangan ang rebolusyon, hindi lamang sa panlabas, kundi lalo na sa panloob!" --Apolinario Mabini, La Revolucion Filipina (1898)

***************************************
Revolution and the University of the Philippines
by F. Sionil Jose

What is an old man like myself doing here, talking about revolution? Hindsight is the lowest form of wisdom. I can tell you what it was like when your campus was nothing but cogon waste, when all those trees that line your streets were just saplings.

I can tell you, also, why we were left behind by all our neighbors when in the fifties and the sixties we were the richest, most progressive country in the region, when Seoul, Tokyo, were ravaged by war and Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta were mere kampongs, when Bangkok was a sleepy town criss-crossed by canals.

I never was in China till 1979, but I know in the forties that country was always threatened by famine. It had a population then of only half a billion. Now, with more than a billion people, famine is no longer a threat, although hunger still lurks in some of its distant regions.

Hunger has always been with some of us, too, but not as much as it is now when so many poor Filipinos eat only once a day. Altanghap, I wonder how many of you know what that word means.

So then, why are we poor? Why do our women flee to foreign cities to work as housemaids, as prostitutes?

We are poor because we have lost our ethical moorings, this in spite of those massive religious rallies of EI Shaddai, those neo-gothic churches of the Iglesia ni Kristo sprouting all over the country, in spite of the nearly 400 years of Catholic evangelization.

How can we build an ethical society? We must remember that so-called values are neutral--that so much depends on how people use them. James Fallows' thesis on our "damaged culture" which many of us understand is neither permanent nor inherent.

Ramon Magsaysay infused public life in the fifties with discipline and morality, Arsenio Lacson as mayor of Manila cleaned up City Hall. Even today, shining examples of honesty among our public officials exist, but they are few and far between and they are not institutionalized.

And it is precisely here where the university comes in with its courses in the humanities. Of all the arts, only literature teaches us ethics. Literature presents us with problems, complex equations that deal with the human spirit and how often the choice between right and wrong is made. In this process, we are compelled to use our conscience, to validate the choice we make, and render the meaning, the pith of our existence.

The university then is the real cathedral of a nation, and its humanities particularly its literature department, the altar. But how many of our teachers know this crucial function of literature, how many teachers themselves possess this sense of worth, and mission?

To know ourselves, to make good and proper use of our consciences, we must know our own history. So few of us do, in fact, we nurture no sense of the past. If our teachers know our history, if they soak it in their bones, then it follows that they also impart this very same marrow to their students.

If this is so, how come that when Bongbong Marcos visited UP Diliman some time ago, he was mobbed by students who wanted his autograph? How come that in La Salle, business students cited Marcos as the best President this country ever had?

Not too long ago, I spoke before freshmen at the Ateneo and was told that since so many practice bribery, it must be right, or how could anyone get things done if palms are not greased? In this university are professors who served Marcos. Have they ever been asked what their role was?

We are poor because we are not moral. Can this immorality as evidenced by widespread corruption be quantified? Yes, about 23 billion pesos a year is lost according to NGO estimates.

We are poor because we have no sense of history, and therefore, no sense of nation. The nationalism that was preached to my generation by Claro M. Recto and Lorenzo Tañada was phony; how they could have convinced so many intellectuals is in itself the failure of those intellectuals to analyze that inward, socially meaningless nationalism.

Recto and Tañada opposed agrarian reform, the single most important political act that could have lifted this country then from poverty and released the peasantry from its centuries-old bondage.

We are poor because our elites from way back had no sense of nation--they collaborated with whoever ruled--the Spaniards, the Japanese, the Americans and in recent times, Marcos. Our elites imbibed the values of the colonizer.

And worst of all, these wealthy Filipinos did not modernize this country--they sent abroad their wealth distilled from the blood and sweat of our poor. The rich Chinese to China, to Taiwan, to Hong Kong, the rich mestizos to Europe, and the rich Indios like Marcos to Switzerland and the United States--moneys that could have developed this nation.

How do we end this shameless domestic colonialism? The ballot failed; the bullet then? How else but through the cleansing power of revolution. Make no mistake about it--revolution means the transfer of power from the decadent upper classes to the lower classes. Revolution is class war whose objective is justice and freedom.

Who will form the vanguard of change? Who else but the very people who will benefit from it. Listen, when I was researching for my novel POON at the New York Public Library, I came across photographs of our soldiers of the 1896 revolution felled in their trenches by American guns. I looked closely and found that most of them were barefoot. They were peasants.

The peasant is the truest nationalist. He works the land with his hands, he knows instinctively what the term Motherland means. He loves this earth, even worships it. The Ilocano farmer calls it Apo Daga.

But never romanticize the poor. Once, a group of Ph.D.s lamented the futility of their efforts in organizing and motivating them. When the elections came that year, the poor sold their votes, or voted for Erap.

Understand why they are often lazy, contemptible, fawning, cheating and stealing. Imagine yourself not having a centavo in your pocket now, and you don't know if you will eat tonight. There is nothing honorable about poverty--it is totally dehumanizing and degrading. But once the very poor are roused from their stupor, they become the bravest, the most steadfast. Remember those Watawat ng Lahi followers felled by Constabulary guns on Taft Avenue in 1965? They believed that with their faith they were invincible.

It is with such faith and righteousness that our peasants rebelled in living memory, the Colorums in 1931, the Sakdals in 1935, and the Huks in 1949-53.The Moro rebellion, the New People's Army--the cadres of both are from our very poor, just like it was in 1896. And now, here is the most tragic contradiction in our country.

Our Armed Forces--its officers corps--many come from the lower classes, too; they got to their exalted positions through public examinations and entry to the Philippine Military Academy. Our Armed Forces enlisted men--most of them come from the very poor. When the poor kill the poor, who profits?

The Ideology of the Revolution
Revolution starts in the mind and heart. It alters attitudes to enable us to think beyond ourselves, family and ethnicity to encompass the whole nation. If the communists win and I don't think they ever will, they will rule just as badly because they are Filipinos unable to go beyond barnacled habits of mind, hostage as they always are to friends and family and to towering egos. The same egos aborted the revolution in 1896, the EDSA revolution in 1986, and now, we see the same egos wrecking havoc on the Communist Party. We see these egos eroding our already rotten political system.

The core belief that should guide us in redeeming our unhappy country is in our history, in our peasantry. It is not in textbooks, in foreign intellectual idols, in Marx. And what is this ideology which Bonifacio believed in? Which those barefoot soldiers killed by the Americans believed in? Pedro Calosa, the peasant leader who led the Colorum uprising in Tayug, Pangasinan in 1931 said it is this: "God resides in every man. God created earth, water and air for all men. It is against God's laws for one family or one group to own them."

God and country; translate this belief into your own words and there you have it in its simplest terms the creed with which the unfulfilled revolution of 1896 was based, and which should be the same creed that should forge unity among us.

Who will lead the revolution?
Certainly, not the masa, but one from the masa who understands them, who will not betray them, the way our leaders betrayed the masa. Estrada is the most shameful example of that leadership that betrayed.The leaders of the revolution could be in this university, who have the education, but who are not shackled by alien concepts, or the attitudes of superiority that destroy leadership. Such leaders, like Ho Chi Minh, must lead by sterling example, with integrity, courage, compassion and willingness to sacrifice, who know that when the revolution is won, it is time to change from conspirators to even better administrators, remembering that they have become conservative, that they must now work even harder to produce better and cheaper products.

And this massive work of modernization can be achieved in one generation. The Koreans, Taiwanese and the Japanese did it. It is not the Confucian ethic that enabled them to do this, they understood simply the logic of government which is service and that of commerce which is profit.

By what right do I have to urge revolution upon our people who will suffer it? What right do I have to urge the young to sacrifice, the poor to get even poorer, if they embrace the revolutionary creed? I have no such right, nor will I call it such. I call it duty, duty, duty. Duty for all of us rooted in our soil, who believe that our destiny is freedom.

Not everyone can bear arms, or have the physical strength to stand up, to shout loudly about the injustices that prevail around us. Those who cannot do these, who cannot be part of this radical movement, must not help those who enslave us. Do not give them legitimacy as so many gave legitimacy to Marcos. Recognize, identify our enemies and oppose them with all your means. This will then test integrity, commitment.

Nobody need tell us the exorbitant cost of revolution, the lives that will be lost, senselessly even as when Pol Pot massacred thousands of his own countrymen in Cambodia. We who lived through the Japanese Occupation know what hunger, fear, and flight mean.

Joseph Conrad, Albert Camus and Jose Rizal--writers I admire deeply, all warned against revolution because it breeds tyrants, because it does not always bring change. But look around us, at the thousands of Filipinos who are debased and hungry, who are denied justice. Be shamed if you don't act.

And as Salud Algabre, the Sakdal general said in 1935-- "No rebellion fails. Each is a step in the right direction." Revolution need not even have to be bloody. How many lives were lost at EDSA I? Not even 20. So Cory goes around telling the world that she had restored democracy in the Philippines.

Sure enough, we now have free elections, free speech, free assembly but these are the empty shells of democratic institutions because the real essence of democracy does not exist here. And that real essence is in the stomach--as when the taxi driver in Tokyo eats the same sashimi as the Japanese emperor, or the bus driver in Washington who can eat the same steak as President Bush in the White House. Contrast these with that jobless Cavite laborer whose two children died because he fed them with garbage.

No, Cory Aquino's EDSA revolution could not even have our garbage properly collected. Worse, nineteen farmer demonstrators were killed near Malacanan because she refused to see them. True to her oligarchic class, she declared a revolutionary government without doing anything revolutionary; instead, she turned EDSA I into a restoration of the old oligarchy. So today, we are reaping the results of her negligence, ignorance and folly.

Yet, even capitalism can be very helpful. South Korea is a very good example of how capital was formed by corruption, and how a single-minded general lifted that nation from the ashes of the Korean War, into the thriving modem economy which Korea is today.

Remember the slogans of American capitalism--a chicken in every pot, a Ford in every garage. Money is like fertilizer--to do any good it must be spread around. Those robber barons at the turn of the 19th century were rapacious, they exploited their workers, but they built industries, railroads, banks, the sinews of American capitalism.

And the most important thing--they kept their money home to develop America. Unlike our rich Chinese, our rich mestizos and the likes of Marcos who sent their money abroad to keep us poor. They are the enemy.

It has been said again and again that we are, indeed, a young nation compared with other Asian countries whose august civilizations date back to two thousand years or more. Indeed, so are the Filipinos who shaped this nation--those who led the revolution against Spain--they were all young, like you are, in their twenties or early thirties. Rizal was 34 when he was martyred.

How then do we keep young without having to grow old only to see the fire in our minds and hearts die? How does the nation's leading university maintain its vitality, its youth against the ravages of consumerism, of globalism?

How else but to keep the mind ever healthy, ever alive by empowering it with those ideas that nurture change and revolution itself, by ingesting the technological age so that we can use technology for realizing our ideals. How else but to embrace the ideas that make us doubt technology, society, even revolution itself, but never, never about who we are, what we should do and hope to be.

We cannot be beholden to any other nation. Jose Maria Sison doomed his revolution when he turned to China for assistance; he ignored the "objective reality"--the latent anti-Chinese feeling among Filipinos, in fact among all Southeast Asians who fear a Chinese hegemony. We must mould our own destiny, infusing it with the strength of a sovereign people. The Americans, the English, French, Russians, Cubans, Chinese, Vietnamese--all achieved their unique revolutions. We must have our very own, defined only by us.

How to build it, direct it, use it for the betterment of our lives, the flowering of liberty--I see all these as the major function of the university which, after all, shapes our leaders. I pray that UP will graduate the best doctors, the best engineers, the best teachers, the best bureaucrats. The revolution needs them all. But most of all, let this university of the people produce the ultimate modernizer, the heroic nationalist revolutionary--we need him most of all.



Source: http://www.up.edu.ph/fsioniljose_lecture.htm









“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe." . – Frederick Douglass, American Abolitionist, Lecturer, Author and Slave, 1817-1895)





Neocolonialism - The dominance of strong nations over weak nations, not by direct political control (as in traditional colonialism), but by economic and cultural influence.





"The selfish spirit of commerce knows no country, and feels no passion or principle but that of gain" - Thomas Jefferson, 1809





posted by Bert M. Drona @ 11:28 PM 9 comments links to this post

9 Comments:
At 12:56 AM, Anonymous said...
I agree that the masses should be educated. Churches and schools are agencies that can help but the leaders of these organizations are also ignorant. Listen to their sermons - they do not teach people to look at facts, to think and how to make dicisions in terms of the general good of the community and the country.- DrPaz
At 1:01 AM, Bert M. Drona said...
Thanks for your response. Yes, when one steps back and think, educating the masses is crucial. Else, no fundamental changes can happen. The "masa" will be simple pawns and duped as in the past,present,in the near future. You also are mainly correct in inferring that the is ignorant. The church is essentially part of the establishment; as a former seminarian and catholic, I am to put it very mildly, disappointed with it.
At 1:04 AM, Anonymous said...
Hi Bert!We are poor because this People's Power government believed in the lie propounded by the free trade economist that all poor nations will be eliminated if only all economies practice free trade. This is a blatant lie propounded by professional economist who is more interested in propaganda rather than truth.When NAFTA was implemented in Mexico, the average growth rate of Mexico fell from 5.9 per cent to 3.9 per cent, and yet free trade economist refuse to recognize these facts and keep on insisting that poverty will be eliminated in the planet if free trade is practised everywhere -- inspite of all the evidence to the contrary.Because our People's Power government economic planners believed in this obvious lies of the free trade economist, the People's Power government has failed to take off our country inspite of their promise that they will do better than President Marcos if allowed to run the country. Because of the institution of free trade in the country, our average growth rate has fell to one half that was achieved by Marcos and all his predecessors.Inspite of these facts, the Liberal Party in its official website has called for the continuation of free trade in the country and made free trade as the principal economic platform of that party.Free trade was the principal economic policy of the American colonial administration. When the United States acquired Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines, the Americans instituted a policy of free trade on all its newly acquired economies. Because free trade was keeping the Philippines as an agricultural economy, nationalist like Manuel L. Quezon and Sergio Osmena demanded independence from the United States. It was the election of Manuel L. Quezon as President of our Commonwealth that finally put an end to the policy of free trade imposed by the Americans on the Philippine economy.One of the principal reasons why the Nationalista Party was able to easily obtain the passage of the Tydings-Mcduffie Law which granted independence to the Philippines was because the American labor backed the independence move of the Philippine government. The American labor unions is opposed to any free trade in the United States between its colonies or any other independent nation.When the commonwealth administration of Pres. Quezon put an end to the colonial policy of free trade of the Americans, we saw the emergence of Philippine industrialization. However, because of the devastation in the Philippines caused by World War II, the Americans again imposed free trade as a condition for the American assistance in the reconstruction of the Philippines. This free trade was embodied in the Bell Treaty.This Bell Treaty again did not improve the Philippine economy but only fanned the hatred of Philippine political leaders against the Americans. The Bell Treaty was denounced by leading luminaries in both the Liberal and Nationalista Parties.Inspite of all these facts, the Liberal Party and the People's Power government believed all the lies that was propounded by the free trade economists. Neither did the lessons of Philippine history nor the warnings of economists who saw through the lies of the free trade economists could convince the economists of the People's Power government that free trade will stultify the economic development of our country. They kept insisting on believing the lies of the free trade economists that free trade is the solution of the poverty of the planet -- inspite of all the evidence to the contrary.Very truly yours,RAMON A. DEL GALLEGO
At 1:24 AM, Bert M. Drona said...
Ramon,I agree with you. Absolute free trade, which the WTO/economic globalization is all about, is disastrous for our poor country. Free trade is great only for the rich nations. WTO rules are made by the rich nations to be followed by the poor nations; and in reality, not necessarily by the former.Free trade/WTO is one of the fundamental aspects in our political economy that needs to be dismantled. The mixed economy that we had before martial law was workable and could be improved on. But essential too is a change in our way of thinking and behaving, a need for a "cultural revolution;" especially towards nationalism within our homeland, our territorial boundaries. It is only when we have attained national unity can we be able to stand on our own and be able to deal other nations with confidence and strength; and be treated fairly and with respect. Without nationalism, we will be where we are now and going nowhere up but continually spiralling down, i.e. increasing impoverishment for the expanding majority (declining native middle class). That is why the ruling elite, i.e. the native and local politicians/technocrats/businessmen/military and their foreign partners and TNCs want to keep the "masa" ignorant. Knowledge is power. To maintain slaves and slavery, our majority have to be kept ignorant of what's really going on.
At 6:49 AM, Anonymous said...
"The mixed economy that we had before martial law was workable and could be improved on. But essential too is a change in our way of thinking and behaving, a need for a "cultural revolution;" especially towards nationalism within our homeland, our territorial boundaries."This is precisely the reason why I am encouraging you to keep on writing your ideas. Nobody will help the Philippines except Filipinos. We cannot rely on the Americans, the Japanese or any other foriegners to help us. We Filipinos have to learn to help ourselves because no foreigner will do that for us. We will obtain happiness or misery because we Filipinos have collectively chosen happiness or misery as our goal.In the ultimate analysis, only Filipinos are to be blamed for anything that is happening in our country because we have allowed it in the first place.- Ramon
At 6:57 AM, Anonymous said...
Because I failed to see in your blog little bio on Luis Taruc, I am forwarding what I wrote on the day I learned about his death.A REQUIEM TO SUPREMO KA LUIS TARUCThe peasant farmer depends on the fruit of his labor to the land he toils to support a family. But even when fertile fields become fertile grounds for discontent, there is incongruity between the basic needs he yearns and the impossible demands from the landlord. Pity the poor abused sharecroppers for they shall inherit bloody agrarian revolution.One man understood the plight of hapless farmers. He witnessed the abuses of absent landlords and incensed on the inept and often biased government army soldiers who were supposed to protect them. He saw the birth and demise of the Sakdalista movement and its peasant origin. He also witnessed the litany of abuses temporarily halted during the Japanese occupation but not the occupiers’ brutal treatment to the citizens deserted by MacArthur. That man’s vision started an effective answer to oppressive regimes of what we now know and what it spawned other violent groups by their acronyms, HUKBALAHAP, primarly against ther Japanese, HUK (urban and rural guerillas during Roxas, Quirino and Magsaysay) and HMB Hukbong Magpalaya ng Bayan of the Garcia and early Marcos administration. Now NPA is getting its share in the struggle.Like Andres Bonifacio of the 1896 revolution, this man can also speak the language of the masses. He even adopted the title Supremo. If I remember correctly, while the first supremo has the equivalent of second grade elementary education, this other supremo attended two years at the University of the Philippines. Call him Bonifacio re-incarnate!