‘Basketball players have to prove they’re worth the adulation we grant them, otherwise their careers are short ones; politicians? It’s family property, remember? So voters are only carrying out their ministerial duties.’
TOMORROW, we mark another year of Philippine “independence,” with that word in quotation because I personally no longer know what it means. On the one hand, no foreign pennant flies above the Philippine flag on flagpoles, or alone for that matter, but it is also a fact of geopolitics that we have almost really never existed as an archipelago of inhabitants without a world power somehow exerting influence, if not control, over our affairs.
First we had the Spaniards, from 1565 (the arrival of Miguel Lopez de Legazpi in Cebu) to 1898, August 13 to be exact, the date the Spaniards surrendered to end the Spanish-American war in the Philippines.
We even had the British for 20 months, from 30 October 1762 to 29 March 1764, which was the result of Spain siding with France in the so-called Seven Years’ War with Britain.
That war actually ended in 1763 but because this was long before texts and selfies it took some time for London, Paris and Madrid to know that Manila had been occupied, so it also took some time for instructions to reach the warring forces in Manila to disengage. The British disengagement was easy because they never really occupied territory beyond Manila and Cavite (this was long before Cavite had been hit by COVID), and the British took with them a Spanish galleon worth (at that time) $3 million with cargo worth $1.5 million, or thereabouts. Imagine if we had remained a British colony, then it would matter to us that HRH Queen Elizabeth is now a widow, and that estranged Prince Harry has a daughter named Lilibeth Diana.
When the British left, the Spaniards recovered Manila and Cavite; Diego Silang died because he never received the aid that the British promised to give him if he revolted against Spain but then a young Caviteño named Emilio Aguinaldo more than a hundred years later did just that and was somewhat more successful. His raising of the Philippine flag 123 years ago on the balcony of his house in Kawit (I wonder if it was spelled Cawit or Cauit then?) is what we mark tomorrow, which also happens to be the second to the last time that President Duterte will be presiding over an Independence Day celebration — not that he has really been actively doing so since his first year in office.
Maybe PRRD knows something that we only suspect.
You see, after the Spaniards came the Americans, who granted retirement allowances to some of the leaders of our anti-Spain movement, co-opted others, and just eliminated the really rebellious ones. They were more thorough than the Spaniards in taking over the country, wisely focusing on educating the people who soon were speaking English with our unique accent (A as in Epol?) and adopting a system of government patterned after the American one sans the adherence to democratic principles (including party discipline and party loyalty) that made the US version work over the years before Donald Trump. When the Stars and Stripes were lowered at the Luneta on July 4, 1946, many argue that it did not really mark real independence because the US Ambassador to the Philippines still acted in many ways like the Governor-General of old, albeit no longer a resident of Malacañang.
Of course, I will be remiss if I did not add that just as there was a brief British hiatus during the long Spanish occupation, there was also a brief Japanese hiatus during the half century of American occupation that ended when World War 2 ended and we were back in the arms of good old Uncle Sam.
Maybe the closure of the US bases in the Philippines, with Subic Bay being decommissioned in 1992, finally truly ended the US “occupation” of the Philippines. And maybe it can be argued that the years after that were the years when we were really on our own.
Until the 2000s (18 years later) and we awaken to the new realities of a world power in our midst and not an ocean away, and one whose economic and military might was growing by the day.
That’s why today many talk about the Philippines being in the circle of influence of Beijing as it flexes its political, economic and even military muscles; nothing new really except for the fact that Filipinos still remain psychologically Western-oriented and wary of China as a world power.
So first it was Spain; for a while Britain; then America and for a while Japan. Will China be our greatest influence for the next 10, 20, maybe 50 years?
Makes me wonder what Emilio Aguinaldo would be saying had he been alive today. After he sailed to Hong Kong with 400,000 pesos in his pocket that the Spaniards gave him in 1897, he actually returned to the Philippines just as the Spanish-American war was about to break out after American envoys had sought him out, promising him independence if he aided the US side in its war against Spain. We know what happened to that promise — it turned out to be a joke and you could imagine some US leader saying “look, that promise was made in the heat of the campaign and if you fell for it then you’re stupid.” (Sounds familiar?)
Could he be telling today’s leaders to never ever trust a foreign power?
Then again, do Filipino leaders really have a choice?
