Last Sunday there was a resurgence of Dr. Jose Rizal memorabilia to commemorate his 150-years which put our national hero back into the nation’s consciousness and understandably all were praises for the man who fought our Spanish colonizers not by guns, but by his writings. For taking on the Spaniards, Dr. Jose Rizal was put to death and in the end, he did not only become a hero to the Philippines, but a genuine Asian hero who defended our God given right to free ourselves from foreign domination.
While Dr. Jose Rizal became our national hero, his death however did not free our nation from foreign domination or oppression, instead, it ushered another era of colonization of the Philippines when the Americans took over this motley archipelago from the Spaniards and in order to legitimize their hold over our country, they signed the Treaty of Paris on Dec.10, 1898 thus putting to an end to the Spanish-American War and they paid Spain P20 million dollars for the Philippines. Thus ended the 400-year old rule in this country. The Treaty of Paris also surrendered Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guam to the United States.
It was not until after the Second World War when the Philippines was finally given its independence and sovereignty on July 4, 1946. But then, it created more problems for the country as we embarked on our journey to self-determination. While we had a very stable basic law that was the 1935 Constitution, all that was thrown out by then Pres. Ferdinand E. Marcos who declared Martial Law in Sept. 21, 1972 in order to perpetuate himself in power. From a foreign oppressor we now had a domestic oppressor!
Those so-called 14 years of darkness that we call the Conjugal Marcos Dictatorship ended with the tumultuous ouster of Pres. Marcos and his cronies out of Malacañang and into exile in the Hawaii Islands. Those were proud times to be a Filipino where a mere grief stricken housewife named Cory Aquino, widow of the late Sen. Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, Jr. took the reins of power after the Marcos Dictatorship. As I’ve written several times already, Sen. Ninoy Aquino was the Jose Rizal of our generation. I met him only once right before Martial Law was declared when he came to Cebu. But he had to die for our country in order to regain our lost freedom.
In his prepared homecoming speech, which he never got to read because his assassins shot him already, Sen. Ninoy quoted Archibald Macleish, the famous Pulitzer Prize for Poetry winner who once quipped “How shall freedom be defended? By arms when it is attacked by arms; by truth where it is attacked by lies; by democratic faith when it is attacked by authoritarian dogma. Always, and in the final act, by determination and faith.” Call it a coincidence that this is the stand that I took when I went against the Reproductive Health (RH) Bill, especially when those supporting it attack us with lies.
Today our nation has become so weak, China has only shown us belligerence and because of this I have written articles telling the Philippine government to prepare for any eventuality. While I did get a lot of email supporting my views, however there was someone who accused me of being a warmonger. I replied to that person that preparing a defense for our nation isn’t being a warmonger because all nations have that basic right to defend itself from internal or foreign aggressors. One of my suggestions that have been totally ignored in the last 10-years was the return of the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) back into our school curriculum.
Least you haven’t realized this nation has been too reactionary for its own good. Worse of all, public opinion listens to the noisy left-leaning organizations, which is why we lost the US Military bases in this country because our 24 Senators reacted to their cry against US Imperialism. Strangely, these same noisy left-leaning groups are now behind supporting the RH Bill even with the full knowledge that this is one of the demands of the US government. The same thing happened to the ROTC, which was removed by Congress because of a hazing incident that was magnified by the leftists.
History has taught us that the US was ill-prepared to defend the Philippines when the Japanese simultaneously attacked Pearl Harbor and Sangley Point in Cavite. But thank God Filipinos in those days had taken the compulsory ROTC whose graduates formed the backbone of the Filipino guerrillas that made life difficult for our Japanese occupiers.
Without the basic training of ROTC, I doubt if the guerrillas could have been as effective as they were. Just in case you don’t know, aside from the Japanese, the biggest problem our guerrillas faced during the war where the Filipino collaborators, who helped the Japanese, find Filipino guerrillas and even executed these people themselves! So again I urge the Aquino government to bring back the ROTC so we can defend our nation ourselves.
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Email: vsbobita@mozcom.com