Father of our country(Conclusion)

MANILA, Philippines - Emilio Aguinaldo is the father of our country, a hero on the same level as Jose Rizal and Andres Bonifacio.

Rizal and Bonifacio never knew our flag or our national anthem; it was Aguinaldo who gave them to us. Aguinaldo executed the first nationalist revolution in Asia, welded us into a nation, and set up the first democratic republic in Asia. Sun Yat Sen did the same in China 13 years later, in 1911.

Aguinaldo challenged Spain and the USA, fought them one after the other. He beat Spain on his second attempt, the first in Asia to break the shackles of western colonialism.

Then he forced the USA to suffer 6 times the casualties, and 7 times longer to defeat us than it took them to defeat Spain.

For four glorious years from 1898 to 1902, the First Philippine Republic (the first in Asia) existed under a president who was barely 29 years of age, a giant of a man.

Such was the strength of Filipino Nationalism that President Emilio Aguinaldo forged during the greatest period of our history. This is why Americans deprived him of his proper place in our history, even spreading the canard that he was responsible for the death of Bonifacio and Antonio Luna... a canard revived by Quezon when Aguinaldo opposed him in the elections of 1935.

Aguinaldo did not bother to learn English, he urged Filipinos to stop fighting America’s war with Japan, and denounced the book written by the CIA, entitled, “A Second Look at America” which attempted to make a little brown brother out of the Father of our Country.

As a young boy I met Aguinaldo on my grandpa’s birthday. My Lolo Senator Daniel Maramba, Grand Old Man of Pangasinan, was Quezon’s political ally but was also the Vice-President of the Veterans of the Revolution, of which Aguinaldo was the President.

On my Lolo’s birthday Quezon and Aguinaldo were reconciled after years of political enmity.

Aguinaldo spoke to me in Spanish, his eyes dulled more by anguish than by anger, “Love your country, it is the only one you have.”

Late in the 1950s at the height of the American campaign against Recto’s Nationalist Crusade, I went to see Gen. Aguinaldo for the last time in his Kawit residence, bringing my two sons with me. He was almost deaf and almost blind. “I am Larry Henares, the eldest grandson of your friend Daniel Maramba. I remember you told me to love our country.”

The old man’s eyes filled with tears, as I cried, “I do, I swear I do!”

The tragedy of Emilio Aguinaldo is that he lived to a ripe old age at a time when heroes died young, when martyrdom was the final badge of greatness.

He lived to be 94 years old. He outlived Recto and died in 1963.

Men are mortal, but Man is immortal. We live and die, but our race and all humanity lives on, because of all creatures, we have a racial memory, a remarkable ability to pass on our experience, our knowledge, our wisdom to generations yet unborn.

If there is any one who deserves to be remembered by the Filipino people, it is President Emilio Aguinaldo, who like George Washington is the Father of his Country. To him we owe our flag, our anthem, the first Asian nationalist revolution, the first Asian democratic republic. At Malolos, his generation synthesized a culture, a society, a nation we now call our own.