The Philippines a Century Hence: Concise Summary and Critical Analysis

“The Philippines a Century Hence” is an essay written by Philippine national hero Jose Rizal to forecast the future of the country within a hundred years. Rizal felt that it was time to remind Spain that the circumstances that ushered in the French Revolution could have a telling effect for her in the Philippines.
The Philippines a Century Hence Summary and Analysis
This essay, published in La Solidaridad starts by analyzing the various causes of the miseries suffered by the Filipino people:
Spain’s implementation of her military policies – because of such laws, the Philippine population decreased dramatically. Poverty became more rampant than ever, and farmlands were left to wither. The family as a unit of society was neglected, and overall, every aspect of the life of the Filipino was retarded.
Deterioration and disappearance of Filipino indigenous culture – when Spain came with the sword and the cross, it began the gradual destruction of the native Philippine culture. Because of this, the Filipinos started losing confidence in their past and their heritage, became doubtful of their present lifestyle, and eventually lost hope in the future and the preservation of their race.
Passivity and submissiveness to the Spanish colonizers – one of the most powerful forces that influenced a culture of silence among the natives were the Spanish friars. Because of the use of force, the Filipinos learned to submit themselves to the will of the foreigners.
The question then arises as to what had awakened the hearts and opened the minds of the Filipino people with regards to their plight. Eventually, the natives realized that such oppression in their society by foreign colonizers must no longer be tolerated.
One question Rizal raises in this essay is whether or not Spain can indeed prevent the progress of the Philippines:
Keeping the people uneducated and ignorant had failed. National consciousness had still awakened, and great Filipino minds still emerged from the rubble.
Keeping he people impoverished also came to no avail. On the contrary, living a life of eternal destitution had allowed the Filipinos to act on the desire for a change in their way of life. They began to explore other horizons through which they could move towards progress.
Exterminating the people as an alternative to hindering progress did not work either. The Filipino race was able to survive amidst wars and famine, and became even more numerous after such catastrophes. To wipe out the nation altogether would require the sacrifice of thousands of Spanish soldiers, and this is something Spain would not allow.

Spain, therefore, had no means to stop the progress of the country. What she needs to do is to change her colonial policies so that they are in keeping with the needs of the Philippine society and to the rising nationalism of the people.
What Rizal had envisioned in his essay came true. In 1898, the Americans wrestled with Spain to win the Philippines, and eventually took over the country. Theirs was a reign of democracy and liberty. Five decades after Rizal’s death, the Philippines gained her long-awaited independence. This was in fulfillment of what he had written in his essay: “History does not record in its annals any lasting domination by one people over another, of different races, of diverse usages and customs, of opposite and divergent ideas. One of the two had to yield and succumb.”


from http://socyberty.com/society/the-philippines-a-century-hence-concise-summary-and-critical-analysis/

LAE EXAM (UP LAW ENTRANCE EXAM)

Philippines a Century Hence

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freshman masculine wash

for mr. baldo's education. maybe some progress concerning gender bias, eh?

from a blogsite ( http://www.myhealthblog.org/2010/05/13/freshman-masculine-wash-because-men-need-to-feel-fresh-and-clean-too/)
We are building the website of a new customer and I found it amazing they had a new product in the market called: Freshman Masculine Wash. First thing that came to mind was Freshman College. Wrong. They mean Fresh MAN. Now what about that “Masculine Wash?”, I thought this was soap for MEN. Wrong again. This is soap for down there… you know like “feminine wash”, this time, it is MASCULINE WASH… you know for men’s private parts… oh, I get it.

Here’s their press release:

MEN NEED TO BE FRESH TOO!

Nowadays, men live a very active lifestyle. They engage themselves in a lot of sports activities as a way to de-stress from their very hectic career life. And naturally, men like to sweat a lot. But the question is, with all these sweaty activities, how do men refresh? Shower, Yes? But how can men get that ultimate fresh feeling? ‘Coz soaps alone won’t do the job.

Jovan is a regular cyclist. It’s his ultimate sports and he likes to bike around the metro during weekends and time-outs from work. “Cycling has been a part of my lifestyle, and I enjoy a little bit of running too. Almost all guy friends that I know enjoy cycling and running as an alternative workout in the gym.” Feeling all-sweaty has never been an alien feeling for a cyclist and a runner like Jovan. It’s part of the sports and he actually likes it. “Perspiring actually reminds you that you are shedding the pounds and fats that you want to lose so it’s okay. The more I perspire, the better.”

Now here comes the dilemma! Like Jovan, a lot of men are convinced that soaps alone can help you regain that fresh feeling, but we need to be informed that men too, need an intimate hygiene wash! Having that self-confidence and boost is important for men nowadays, and they tend to develop that feeling when they are “clean” and “fresh” all over. They feel “younger” and “more energetic” when they are “cool”. And having that “cool” feeling on men’s private parts has actually a scientific benefit!

According to research and doctors, having that 20% cooling feeling in men’s intimate areas can actually help them preserve the life span of their sperm and increase the number of counts required. Sperms are destroyed and definitely become low in counts when the intimate parts are much warmer than the body temperature.

So, giving men’s intimate parts some “cool”, “clean” and “refreshing” treat, is not just a feeling after all. It can also help men do wonders for their reproductive process! Now men don’t have to worry about soaps.
Freshman Masculine Wash has arrived!

It’s a masculine wash that thoroughly cleans unlike an ordinary soap! The product’s active ingredient, Tea Tree Oil, properly moisturizes the skin, neutrally balanced at ph7 making it gentle on the skin. It gives you that cool, fresh feeling that lasts all day!

It eliminates and protects the male genitals from germs that cause unwanted odor and itchiness! For minor scrapes and wounds, the masculine wash aids the immune system in the healing produces. Freshman Masculine Wash has also been dermatologically tested for proper intimate hygiene.

Freshman Masculine Wash is already available in the market for the suggested retail price of 79 pesos per bottle.

‘Cause men need to feel fresh, clean and cool too!

Cinema Paradiso

I consider this to one of the best films of all time.

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Pinoy Sunday

The Theory of World Domination, Reloaded EMOTIONAL WEATHER REPORT By Jessica Zafra

(The Philippine Star) Updated April 03, 2011 12:00 AM Comments (0)



Why am I bringing this up again? Because the real test of a theory is whether it can accommodate discoveries made after the theory was formulated.

Years ago, in a newspaper column, I put forth my Theory of World Domination. Essentially it says that Filipinos are taking over the world through reverse-colonization: millions of Filipino maids all over the world, raising kids of different nationalities to become Filipino. They are the primary carriers of Pinoy culture and society to the rest of the planet — a job that the Filipino arts are supposed to do but cannot, because there is neither public funding nor interest. So cultural promotion has been handed over to the yayas (nannies), who have done marvelously under the circumstances.

We have a unique logistical advantage: Filipino maids are already inside the houses of some of the most powerful and influential people in the world. These Pinays are our secret agents, just waiting to be activated. Unfortunately the second component of world domination theory — the conversion of our logistical advantage into political power — has not been initiated. Without organization, training, or even the assurance of legal assistance if they are maltreated by their employers, we cannot push on.

Our secret agents remain in such deep cover, they don’t even know they are agents. By sending Filipino maids and other workers out into the world undefended, as if they were merely cheap labor exports instead of our primary source of income, we are frittering away our most valuable resource.

At this rate we cannot proceed with our simple proposal to stage a global general strike of Filipino workers. Such a general strike would cripple the planet and wreak such havoc on the global economy that we could ask for anything we want.

“Swiss bankers, give us back all the money you’ve been keeping for the politicians who ripped us off. Fine, laugh at us, point out that the thieves themselves can’t get their mitts on the money they stole from us. You won’t be laughing at all when Yaya refuses to come out of her room, your kids are screaming and unwashed, your kitchen sink is clogged with coffee grounds, you can’t find a single clean shirt, and your house smelled like something died in it two days ago because Inday nuked tuyo in the microwave.”

That’s not going to happen as long as we take the money Yaya sends home but give her nothing in return. Sheesh, she can’t even get a smooth ride home from the airport when she comes to visit every three years bearing five balikbayan boxes of pasalubong for everyone. The money to build the roads went to some offshore account, a shoddy track was built with the three bags of cement they could afford after everyone had taken their cut, and after one summer shower the street turned into a crater.

The third component of the Theory has been a major factor in recent Philippine international successes in team sports outside of basketball. Millions of Filipinos have migrated abroad (the academic term is Diaspora), where they marry people of other ethnicities and give birth to mestizo (half-breed) offspring. These half-Filipino children are raised in countries where they can avail of superior nutrition, education, health care and other benefits.

They grow up playing team sports like football in Europe and South America, and rugby in former British colonies. They train and play at a higher standard than their counterparts in the Philippines. Since they hold Filipino citizenship through one of their parents, they are eligible to play for the Philippines. Bam, we suddenly win something.

One effect of the marriage of Filipinos to foreigners has been much remarked upon but never studied. We are referring to the Artista Syndrome. Very often, when a Filipino and a foreigner marry, the offspring have physical characteristics that neither parent possesses. To put it unscientifically, “Mukha silang artista.”

We cannot explain this phenomenon with some fairy godmother gene. Genetics is a lottery, but it seems that many Pinoys have figured out the winning combination. There is a scientific name for this phenomenon. It is called Transgressive Segregation.

According to our consulting geneticist, two parents with different phenotypes (observable characteristics) may produce progeny whose phenotypes are outside their range. For instance, the father could be 5’7” and the mother 4’11”, but the kids could be 6’1”. The parents might look... average, but the children are raving beauties. Surely we’re not content with that.



To recap, the mass migration of Filipinos has compensated for the lack of economic opportunity in the Philippines. It has done this so well that successive governments have managed not to create enough jobs for the Filipinos at home. Recently we have seen how migration has made up for the lack of grassroots sports development in the Philippines. And populated our TV and movie screens, advertisements and billboards.

The Theory of World Domination is valid. It is the application of the Theory that has been held back by complacency and a lack of ambition. It would be terrible if all the Theory amounted to was a lot of vapid pretty faces.

* * *

http://www.jessicarulestheuniverse.com Twisted by Jessica Zafra. Pumping irony since 1994.

A Heritage of Smallness Nick Joaquin

Society for the Filipino is a small rowboat: the barangay. Geography for the Filipino is a small locality: the barrio. History for the Filipino is a small vague saying: matanda pa kay mahoma; noong peacetime. Enterprise for the Filipino is a small stall: the sari-sari. Industry and production for the Filipino are the small immediate searchings of each day: isang kahig, isang tuka. And commerce for the Filipino is the smallest degree of retail: the tingi.

What most astonishes foreigners in the Philippines is that this is a country, perhaps the only one in the world, where people buy and sell one stick of cigarette, half a head of garlic, a dab of pomade, part of the contents of a can or bottle, one single egg, one single banana. To foreigners used to buying things by the carton or the dozen or pound and in the large economy sizes, the exquisite transactions of Philippine tingis cannot but seem Lilliputian. So much effort by so many for so little. Like all those children risking neck and limb in the traffic to sell one stick of cigarette at a time. Or those grown-up men hunting the sidewalks all day to sell a puppy or a lantern or a pair of socks. The amount of effort they spend seems out of all proportion to the returns. Such folk are, obviously, not enough. Laboriousness just can never be the equal of labor as skill, labor as audacity, labor as enterprise.

The Filipino who travels abroad gets to thinking that his is the hardest working country in the world. By six or seven in the morning we are already up on our way to work, shops and markets are open; the wheels of industry are already agrind. Abroad, especially in the West, if you go out at seven in the morning you’re in a dead-town. Everybody’s still in bed; everything’s still closed up. Activity doesn’t begin till nine or ten-- and ceases promptly at five p.m. By six, the business sections are dead towns again. The entire cities go to sleep on weekends. They have a shorter working day, a shorter working week. Yet they pile up more mileage than we who work all day and all week.

Is the disparity to our disparagement?

We work more but make less. Why? Because we act on such a pygmy scale. Abroad they would think you mad if you went in a store and tried to buy just one stick of cigarette. They don’t operate on the scale. The difference is greater than between having and not having; the difference is in the way of thinking. They are accustomed to thinking dynamically. We have the habit, whatever our individual resources, of thinking poor, of thinking petty.

Is that the explanation for our continuing failure to rise--that we buy small and sell small, that we think small and do small?

Are we not confusing timidity for humility and making a virtue of what may be the worst of our vices? Is not our timorous clinging to smallness the bondage we must break if we are ever to inherit the earth and be free, independent, progressive? The small must ever be prey to the big. Aldous Huxley said that some people are born victims, or "murderers." He came to the Philippines and thought us the "least original" of people. Is there not a relation between his two terms? Originality requires daring: the daring to destroy the obsolete, to annihilate the petty. It’s cold comfort to think we haven’t developed that kind of "murderer mentality."

But till we do we had best stop talking about "our heritage of greatness" for the national heritage is-- let’s face it-- a heritage of smallness.

However far we go back in our history it’s the small we find--the nipa hut, the barangay, the petty kingship, the slight tillage, the tingi trade. All our artifacts are miniatures and so is our folk literature, which is mostly proverbs, or dogmas in miniature. About the one big labor we can point to in our remote past are the rice terraces--and even that grandeur shrinks, on scrutiny, into numberless little separate plots into a series of layers added to previous ones, all this being the accumulation of ages of small routine efforts (like a colony of ant hills) rather than one grand labor following one grand design. We could bring in here the nursery diota about the little drops of water that make the mighty ocean, or the peso that’s not a peso if it lacks a centavo; but creative labor, alas, has sterner standards, a stricter hierarchy of values. Many little efforts, however perfect each in itself, still cannot equal one single epic creation. A galleryful of even the most charming statuettes is bound to look scant beside a Pieta or Moses by Michelangelo; and you could stack up the best short stories you can think of and still not have enough to outweigh a mountain like War and Peace.

The depressing fact in Philippine history is what seems to be our native aversion to the large venture, the big risk, the bold extensive enterprise. The pattern may have been set by the migration. We try to equate the odyssey of the migrating barangays with that of the Pilgrim, Father of America, but a glance of the map suffices to show the differences between the two ventures. One was a voyage across an ocean into an unknown world; the other was a going to and from among neighboring islands. One was a blind leap into space; the other seems, in comparison, a mere crossing of rivers. The nature of the one required organization, a sustained effort, special skills, special tools, the building of large ships. The nature of the other is revealed by its vehicle, the barangay, which is a small rowboat, not a seafaring vessel designed for long distances on the avenues of the ocean.

The migrations were thus self-limited, never moved far from their point of origin, and clung to the heart of a small known world; the islands clustered round the Malay Peninsula. The movement into the Philippines, for instance, was from points as next-door geographically as Borneo and Sumatra. Since the Philippines is at heart of this region, the movement was toward center, or, one may say, from near to still nearer, rather than to farther out. Just off the small brief circuit of these migrations was another world: the vast mysterious continent of Australia; but there was significantly no movement towards this terra incognita. It must have seemed too perilous, too unfriendly of climate, too big, too hard. So, Australia was conquered not by the fold next door, but by strangers from across two oceans and the other side of the world. They were more enterprising, they have been rewarded. But history has punished the laggard by setting up over them a White Australia with doors closed to the crowded Malay world.

The barangays that came to the Philippines were small both in scope and size. A barangay with a hundred households would already be enormous; some barangays had only 30 families, or less. These, however, could have been the seed of a great society if there had not been in that a fatal aversion to synthesis. The barangay settlements already displayed a Philippine characteristic: the tendency to petrify in isolation instead of consolidating, or to split smaller instead of growing. That within the small area of Manila Bay there should be three different kingdoms (Tondo, Manila and Pasay) may mean that the area wa originally settled by three different barangays that remained distinct, never came together, never fused; or it could mean that a single original settlement; as it grew split into three smaller pieces.

Philippine society, as though fearing bigness, ever tends to revert the condition of the barangay of the small enclosed society. We don’t grow like a seed, we split like an amoeba. The moment a town grows big it become two towns. The moment a province becomes populous it disintegrates into two or three smaller provinces. The excuse offered for divisions i always the alleged difficulty of administering so huge an entity. But Philippines provinces are microscopic compared to an American state like, say, Texas, where the local government isn’t heard complaining it can’t efficiently handle so vast an area. We, on the other hand, make a confession of character whenever we split up a town or province to avoid having of cope, admitting that, on that scale, we can’t be efficient; we are capable only of the small. The decentralization and barrio-autonomy movement expresses our craving to return to the one unit of society we feel adequate to: the barangay, with its 30 to a hundred families. Anything larger intimidates. We would deliberately limit ourselves to the small performance. This attitude, an immemorial one, explains why we’re finding it so hard to become a nation, and why our pagan forefathers could not even imagine the task. Not E pluribus, unum is the impulse in our culture but Out of many, fragments. Foreigners had to come and unite our land for us; the labor was far beyond our powers. Great was the King of Sugbu, but he couldn’t even control the tiny isle across his bay. Federation is still not even an idea for the tribes of the North; and the Moro sultanates behave like our political parties: they keep splitting off into particles.

Because we cannot unite for the large effort, even the small effort is increasingly beyond us. There is less to learn in our schools, but even this little is protested by our young as too hard. The falling line on the graph of effort is, alas, a recurring pattern in our history. Our artifacts but repeat a refrain of decline and fall, which wouldn’t be so sad if there had been a summit decline from, but the evidence is that we start small and end small without ever having scaled any peaks. Used only to the small effort, we are not, as a result, capable of the sustained effort and lose momentum fast. We have a term for it: ningas cogon.

Go to any exhibit of Philippine artifacts and the items that from our "cultural heritage" but confirm three theories about us, which should be stated again.

First: that the Filipino works best on small scale--tiny figurines, small pots, filigree work in gold or silver, decorative arabesques. The deduction here is that we feel adequate to the challenge of the small, but are cowed by the challenge of the big.

Second: that the Filipino chooses to work in soft easy materials--clay, molten metal, tree searching has failed to turn up anything really monumental in hardstone. Even carabao horn, an obvious material for native craftsmen, has not been used to any extent remotely comparable to the use of ivory in the ivory countries. The deduction here is that we feel equal to the materials that yield but evade the challenge of materials that resist.

Third: that having mastered a material, craft or product, we tend to rut in it and don’t move on to a next phase, a larger development, based on what we have learned. In fact, we instantly lay down even what mastery we already posses when confronted by a challenge from outside of something more masterly, instead of being provoked to develop by the threat of competition. Faced by the challenge of Chinese porcelain, the native art of pottery simply declined, though porcelain should have been the next phase for our pottery makers. There was apparently no effort to steal and master the arts of the Chinese. The excuse offered here that we did not have the materials for the techniques for the making of porcelain--unites in glum brotherhood yesterday’s pottery makers and today’s would be industrialists. The native pot got buried by Chinese porcelain as Philippine tobacco is still being buried by the blue seal.

Our cultural history, rather than a cumulative development, seems mostly a series of dead ends. One reason is a fear of moving on to a more complex phase; another reason is a fear of tools. Native pottery, for instance, somehow never got far enough to grasp the principle of the wheel. Neither did native agriculture ever reach the point of discovering the plow for itself, or even the idea of the draft animal, though the carabao was handy. Wheel and plow had to come from outside because we always stopped short of technology, This stoppage at a certain level is the recurring fate of our arts and crafts.

The santo everybody’s collecting now are charming as legacies, depressing as indices, for the art of the santero was a small art, in a not very demanding medium: wood. Having achieved perfection in it, the santero was faced by the challenge of proving he could achieve equal perfection on a larger scale and in more difficult materials: hardstone, marble, bronze. The challenge was not met. Like the pagan potter before him, the santero stuck to his tiny rut, repeating his little perfections over and over. The iron law of life is: Develop or decay. The art of the santero did not advance; so it declined. Instead of moving onto a harder material, it retreated to a material even easier than wool: Plaster--and plaster has wrought the death of relax art.

One could go on and on with this litany.

Philippine movies started 50 years ago and, during the ‘30s, reached a certain level of proficiency, where it stopped and has rutted ever since looking more and more primitive as the rest of the cinema world speeds by on the way to new frontiers. We have to be realistic, say local movie producers we’re in this business not to make art but money. But even from the business viewpoint, they’re not "realistic" at all. The true businessman ever seeks to increase his market and therefore ever tries to improve his product. Business dies when it resigns itself, as local movies have done, to a limited market.

After more than half a century of writing in English, Philippine Literature in that medium is still identified with the short story. That small literary form is apparently as much as we feel equal to. But by limiting ourselves less and less capable even of the small thing--as the fate of the pagan potter and the Christian santero should have warned us. It’ no longer as obvious today that the Filipino writer has mastered the short story form.

It’s two decades since the war but what were mere makeshift in postwar days have petrified into institutions like the jeepney, which we all know to be uncomfortable and inadequate, yet cannot get rid of, because the would mean to tackle the problem of modernizing our systems of transportation--a problem we think so huge we hide from it in the comforting smallness of the jeepney. A small solution to a huge problem--do we deceive ourselves into thinking that possible? The jeepney hints that we do, for the jeepney carrier is about as adequate as a spoon to empty a river with.

With the population welling, and land values rising, there should be in our cities, an upward thrust in architecture, but we continue to build small, in our timid two-story fashion. Oh, we have excuses. The land is soft: earthquakes are frequent. But Mexico City, for instance, is on far swampier land and Mexico City is not a two-story town. San Francisco and Tokyo are in worse earthquake belts, but San Francisco and Tokyo reach up for the skies. Isn’t our architecture another expression of our smallness spirit? To build big would pose problems too big for us. The water pressure, for example, would have to be improved--and it’s hard enough to get water on the ground floor flat and frail, our cities indicate our disinclination to make any but the smallest effort possible.

It wouldn’t be so bad if our aversion for bigness and our clinging to the small denoted a preference for quality over bulk; but the little things we take forever to do too often turn out to be worse than the mass-produced article. Our couturiers, for instance, grow even limper of wrist when, after waiting months and months for a pin ~a weaver to produce a yard or two of the fabric, they find they have to discard most of the stuff because it’s so sloppily done. Foreigners who think of pushing Philippine fabric in the world market give up in despair after experiencing our inability to deliver in quantity. Our proud apologia is that mass production would ruin the "quality" of our products. But Philippine crafts might be roused from the doldrums if forced to come up to mass-production standards.

It’s easy enough to quote the West against itself, to cite all those Western artists and writers who rail against the cult of bigness and mass production and the "b!tch goddess success"; but the arguments against technological progress, like the arguments against nationalism, are possible only to those who have already gone through that stage so successfully they can now afford to revile it. The rest of us can only crave to be big enough to be able to deplore bigness.

For the present all we seen to be able to do is ignore pagan evidence and blame our inability to sustain the big effort of our colonizers: they crushed our will and spirit, our initiative and originality. But colonialism is not uniquely our ordeal but rather a universal experience. Other nations went under the heel of the conqueror but have not spent the rest of their lives whining. What people were more trod under than the Jews? But each have been a thoroughly crushed nation get up and conquered new worlds instead. The Norman conquest of England was followed by a subjugation very similar to our experience, but what issued from that subjugation were the will to empire and the verve of a new language.

If it be true that we were enervated by the loss of our primordial freedom, culture and institutions, then the native tribes that were never under Spain and didn’t lose what we did should be showing a stronger will and spirit, more initiative and originality, a richer culture and greater progress, than the Christian Filipino. Do they? And this favorite apologia of ours gets further blasted when we consider a people who, alongside us, suffered a far greater trampling yet never lost their enterprising spirit. On the contrary, despite centuries of ghettos and programs and repressive measures and racial scorn, the Chinese in the Philippines clambered to the top of economic heap and are still right up there when it comes to the big deal. Shouldn’t they have long come to the conclusion (as we say we did) that there’s no point in hustling and laboring and amassing wealth only to see it wrested away and oneself punished for rising?

An honest reading of our history should rather force us to admit that it was the colonial years that pushed us toward the larger effort. There was actually an advance in freedom, for the unification of the land, the organization of towns and provinces, and the influx of new ideas, started our liberation from the rule of the petty, whether of clan, locality or custom. Are we not vexed at the hinterlander still bound by primordial terrors and taboos? Do we not say we have to set him "free" through education? Freedom, after all is more than a political condition; and the colonial lowlander--especially a person like, say, Rizal--was surely more of a freeman than the unconquered tribesman up in the hills. As wheel and plow set us free from a bondage to nature, so town and province liberated us from the bounds of the barangay.

The liberation can be seen just by comparing our pagan with our Christian statuary. What was static and stolid in the one becomes, in the other, dynamic motion and expression. It can be read in the rear of architecture. Now, at last, the Filipino attempts the massive--the stone bridge that unites, the irrigation dam that gives increase, the adobe church that identified. If we have a "heritage of greatness it’s in these labors and in three epic acts of the colonial period; first, the defense of the land during two centuries of siege; second, the Propaganda Movement; and the third, the Revolution.

The first, a heroic age that profoundly shaped us, began 1600 with the 50-year war with the Dutch and may be said to have drawn to a close with the British invasion of 1762. The War with the Dutch is the most under-rated event in our history, for it was the Great War in our history. It had to be pointed out that the Philippines, a small colony practically abandoned to itself, yet held at bay for half a century the mightiest naval power in the world at the time, though the Dutch sent armada after armada, year after year, to conquer the colony, or by cutting off the galleons that were its links with America, starve the colony to its knees. We rose so gloriously to the challenge the impetus of spirit sent us spilling down to Borneo and the Moluccas and Indo-China, and it seemed for a moment we might create an empire. But the tremendous effort did create an elite vital to our history: the Creole-Tagalog-Pampango principalia - and ruled it together during these centuries of siege, and which would which was the nation in embryo, which defended the land climax its military career with the war of resistance against the British in the 1660’s. By then, this elite already deeply felt itself a nation that the government it set up in Bacolor actually defined the captive government in Manila as illegitimate. From her flows the heritage that would flower in Malolos, for centuries of heroic effort had bred, in Tagalog and the Pampango, a habit of leadership, a lordliness of spirit. They had proved themselves capable of the great and sustained enterprise, destiny was theirs. An analyst of our history notes that the sun on our flag has eight rays, each of which stands for a Tagalog or Pampango province, and the the Tagalogs and Pampangos at Biak-na-Bato "assumed the representation of the entire country and, therefore, became in fact the Philippines.

From the field of battle this elite would, after the British war, shift to the field of politics, a significant move; and the Propaganda, which began as a Creole campaign against the Peninsulars, would turn into the nationalist movement of Rizal and Del Pilar. This second epic act in our history seemed a further annulment of the timidity. A man like Rizal was a deliberate rebel against the cult of the small; he was so various a magus because he was set on proving that the Filipino could tackle the big thing, the complex job. His novels have epic intentions; his poems sustain the long line and go against Garcia Villa’s more characteristically Philippine dictum that poetry is the small intense line.

With the Revolution, our culture is in dichotomy. This epic of 1896 is indeed a great effort--but by a small minority. The Tagalog and Pampango had taken it upon themselves to protest the grievances of the entire archipelago. Moreover, within the movement was a clash between the two strains in our culture--between the propensity for the small activity and the will to something more ambitious. Bonifacio’s Katipunan was large in number but small in scope; it was a rattling of bolos; and its post fiasco efforts are little more than amok raids in the manner the Filipino is said to excel in. (An observation about us in the last war was that we fight best not as an army, but in small informal guerrilla outfits; not in pitched battle, but in rapid hit-and-run raids.) On the other hand, there was, in Cavite, an army with officers, engineers, trenches, plans of battle and a complex organization - a Revolution unlike all the little uprisings or mere raids of the past because it had risen above tribe and saw itself as the national destiny. This was the highest we have reached in nationalistic effort. But here again, having reached a certain level of achievement, we stopped. The Revolution is, as we say today, "unfinished."

The trend since the turn of the century, and especially since the war, seems to be back to the tradition of timidity, the heritage of smallness. We seem to be making less and less effort, thinking ever smaller, doing even smaller. The air droops with a feeling of inadequacy. We can’t cope; we don’t respond; we are not rising to challenges. So tiny a land as ours shouldn’t be too hard to connect with transportation - but we get crushed on small jeepneys, get killed on small trains, get drowned in small boats. Larger and more populous cities abroad find it no problem to keep themselves clean - but the simple matter of garbage can create a "crisis" in the small city of Manila. One American remarked that, after seeing Manila’s chaos of traffic, he began to appreciate how his city of Los Angeles handles its far, far greater volume of traffic. Is building a road that won’t break down when it rains no longer within our powers? Is even the building of sidewalks too herculean of task for us?

One writer, as he surveyed the landscape of shortages---no rice, no water, no garbage collectors, no peace, no order---gloomily mumbled that disintegration seems to be creeping upon us and groped for Yeat’s terrifying lines:

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold:

Mere anarchy is loosed...

Have our capacities been so diminished by the small efforts we are becoming incapable even to the small things? Our present problems are surely not what might be called colossal or insurmountable--yet we stand helpless before them. As the population swells, those problems will expand and multiply. If they daunt us now, will they crush us then? The prospect is terrifying.

On the Feast of Freedom we may do well to ponder the Parable of the Servants and the Talents. The enterprising servants who increase talents entrusted to them were rewarded by their Lord; but the timid servant who made no effort to double the one talent given to him was deprived of that talent and cast into the outer darkness, where there was weeping and gnashing of teeth:

"For to him who has, more shall be given; but from him who has not, even the little he has shall be taken away."

Why are Filipinos so Poor?

Why are Filipinos so Poor?

In the ’50s and ’60s, the Philippines was the most envied country in Southeast Asia. What happened?

By F. Sionil Jose

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 criss-crossed with canals, the tallest structure was the Wat Arun, the Temple of the Sun, and it dominated the city’s skyline. Ricefields 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 with the hundreds of Ph.D.’s that 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 Tanada 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 communists won, they will rule as badly because they will be hostage to the same obstructions in our culture, the barkada, 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 shamed to admit they are Filipinos. I have, myself, been embarrassed to 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 archipelagic Southeast Asia, but our artists have now ranged the world, showing what we have done with Western art forms, enriched with our own ethnic traditions. Our professionals, not just our domestics, are all over, showing how accomplished a people we are!

Look at our history. We are 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 to 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.

F. Sionil Jose, whose works have been published in 24 languages, is also a bookseller, editor, publisher and founding president of the the PhilippinesÕ PEN Center. The foregoing is an excerpt from a speech delivered by Mr. Jose in Manila, Philippines.

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Rizal Sired Hitler
By: Ambeth R. Ocampo
Philippines Daily Inquirer
Lifestyle (C3)
Monday, June 19, 1995
EVERYWHERE I lecture on Rizal, one question never fail to arise in the open forum—"Is it true that Adolf Hitler is the son of Rizal?

This is absolutely absurd, but since some fairly educated people actually want to believe it, I write this column.The argument is that Rizal had a German connection, he studied in Heildelberg, and being the Pinoy Don Juan he probably sired a son (why not a Daughter?) who later turned out to Adolf Hitler. Hitler was born 1889, and Rizal left Germany in 1887. Unless Hitler was a delayed baby, that is highly improbable.

Although there is no resemblance between the two, it is argued that unlike the tall, blond and blue-eyed Germans, Hitler wanted to propagate into the "master race,’ Hitler himself was small of stature had dark hair and dark eyes. I would counter this argument by explaining that, contrary to popular belief, Hitler was Austrian not a German.

But then Rizal visited in Austria in May 1887 and according to Rizal’s traveling companion, Max Viola, he did spend a night with an unknown Austrian woman. Viola remembers that they were billeted in the Hotel Metropole, Vienna and Rizal "…encountered the figure of a temptress in the form of Viennese woman, of the family of the Camelliasor Margarite of extraordinary beauty and irresistible attraction, who seemingly had been expressly invited to offer for a moment the cup of mundane pleasure to the apostle of the Philippine freedom who until the had enjoyed among his intimates the fame worthy of his glorious namesake, St. Joseph. With the exception of this case I knew of no other slip of Rizal during more than six months of our living together."

Amazing, what yarns can be pulled off a one-night stand with a Viennese prostitute.

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