I got a lot of positive reviews and one very negative response via email and text from a good friend and faithful reader of mine about the column we wrote last Tuesday, which I based on the book “Imperial Cruise” written by James Bradley who wrote the national bestseller “Flags of our Fathers.” This negative text came from a very close friend who told me that I sounded like a leftist anti-American writer.
So I called him to reassure him that I didn’t read any books on Marxist or Leninist thought, but rather from an American author who only wanted to know the truth about America’s intentions in Asia to come out. After that call, even my friend admitted that during our high school days when we were taught Philippine history by our Filipino authors…we took the American propaganda, hook, line and sinker!
It is for this very reason why I wrote my comments about this book and I would like to exhort Department of Education (DepEd) Secretary Armin Luistro to make sure that this book should be taught in our high schools so that the DepEd can undo six decades of Filipinos like me who grew up not learning the whole truth about what the Americans did to Filipinos at the turn of the century. If a great multitude of Filipinos are pro-America today, it is due to plain ignorance of history which was never taught in our schools.
Today, those who are considered anti-American are those Filipinos who have embraced Communist ideology, but still have no idea of what the Americans did against Filipinos in the past. Unfortunately in this country… if you write anything against the American’s you get tagged as a leftist.
My friend complained that I shouldn’t be writing this anti-American sentiment at this time when we need America against China. But I believe that the US coming to our aid against China is just US propaganda. We know too well that Americans have greater interest in China than they have in the Philippines. This is why the Americans cannot categorically tell us in in front of our faces that they would defend us in case China invades us. Well the Chinese Navy has been badgering us in Scarborough Shoal, but the US Navy was never around.
So for those who are scared that China would invade the Philippines, I dare say that China ought to first invade their renegade Province of Taiwan or the Republic of China, which they could not even do. But my purpose in writing that piece is to awaken the Filipino people yes including the educated Filipinos to what really is the truth on how the Americans then looked at us Filipinos. To them we are an inferior race incapable of governing ourselves.
This is what William Howard Taft said about us Filipinos, The population of the islands is made up of a vast mass of ignorant, superstitious people, well-intentioned, lighthearted, temperate, somewhat cruel, domestic and fond of their families, and deeply rooted to the Catholic Church… they need the training of fifty or a hundred years before they shall even realize what Anglo-Saxon liberty is.” Are these prophetic words from Taft? Have we Filipinos changed and have learned how to govern ourselves?
During an ANC show by Karen Davila about the future of Philippine politics…it was agreed that the chances of Vice-President Jejomar Binay in winning the Presidential race in 2016 is still high because the C, D & E classes would vote for a corrupt leader because they know nothing better in electing the right people to the presidency.
As we pointed out in our previous column, Filipinos knew that Adolf Hitler and his cronies, like Heinrich Himmler of the Nazi SS believed in the Aryan Herrenvolk (the Aryan Master Race). Yet at the turn of the century, the Americans believed that they belonged to the Aryan race and it was their Christian duty to eliminate inferior races like the Native Americans and yes, Filipinos too had to be ethnically cleansed.
In Sept. 28, 1901 because of US soldiers maltreating Filipinos in the small town of Balangiga, Filipino cadres killed 51 American soldiers in front of the church. In reprisal, Gen. Jake Smith called for the US Navy’s warship New York and ordered Major Littleton Waller to massacre all Filipinos and took the Bells of Balangiga as their booty in Ft Wyoming.
It is high time we tell the US that we can learn to govern ourselves for as long as we change our political system. For instance we’ve been writing all along that the Comelec misused the PCOS machines to cheat in the last two elections in 2010 and 2013 and we have enough evidence to prove it. I’ll bet that even the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) knows this as a fact… and know that Pres. Benigno “P-Noy” Aquino’s Presidency is questionable because of the electronic cheating by PCOS. But then the CIA kept quiet. But they know that our democracy has been hacked. Yet they keep quiet!
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Email: vsbobita@mozcom.com or vsbobita@gmail.com.