When I woke up yesterday morning and opened up the TV set, I saw Karen Davila on her talkshow "Headstart" over ANC interviewing Mr. Vivencio Jose who wrote the book or biography of Gen. Antonio Luna, which was based on the hit movie "Heneral Luna." In another ANC report, it said that "Heneral Luna" has now grossed P141 million and I do not recall of any Tagalog movie that has grossed this much in recent memory. That Karen Davila brought Mr. Jose into her show is testimony of the popularity of this movie amongst Filipinos today.
Isn't it time to ask ourselves, how come the movie "Heneral Luna" is a major top grossing hit for Filipinos? What does this phenomenon tell us? That a great majority of Filipinos are hungry to learn more about their own history they did not learn in school. As the old saying goes, "History is written by the victors." This is what I wrote yesterday that as we were growing up in the 1950's the history books that were taught in our high school were written by two authors, Teodoro Agoncillo and Gregorio Zaide and both succumb to the prevailing thought of their time that the Americans had "benevolent" desires in the Philippines rather than colonial desires.
Last Monday, September 28 was the 114th anniversary of an attack by Filipino villagers in the small town of Balangiga, Samar where they killed 51 American soldiers. This was dubbed by the American Press as the "Balangiga Massacre" and by October 23, the US Navy Warship "New York" arrived in Samar with a US Marine contingent led by Marine Major Littleton Waller under the command of General Jake Smith. Gen. Smith told Major Waller, "I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better you will please me. I want all persons killed who are capable of bearing arms in actual hostilities against the United States."
This story is written in a book "The Imperial Cruise" written by the American author James Bradley, who wrote the national bestselling book "Flags of our Fathers" which was the story of how American soldiers placed the American flag on Mt. Suribachi in Iwo Jima, Japan where his father was one of the soldiers who raised that flag.
After writing this bestselling book, James Bradley wanted to know more about why America is in the Pacific and thus his research ended with this book "Imperial Cruise" which gives details of how America got the Philippines from Spain and how they fought and killed hundreds of thousands of Filipinos. Now that wasn't a benevolent way to colonize the Philippines.
At the time of the Balangiga massacre, the population of Samar was around 250,000 people and Gen. Smith ordered all the people living in the island of Samar 10-days to abandon their homes and enter in US concentration camps or be shot on sight. That is the people of the entire province of Samar brought into concentration camps on Philippine soil.
Now I ask you, how many Filipino students or our youth know about this piece of history? Do we need to make another movie on the Balangiga massacre before the Filipino youth would know about this historical incidents that happened 114 years ago? Incidentally the Bells of Balangiga has never been returned. The US military kept one bell in the 9th Infantry Regiment at Camp Red Cloud in South Korea and the other at the 11th Infantry Regiment in F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
Why hasn't the US military returned those church bells? It is because these were used as a signal to attack the American soldiers in front of the church. But while this is more than a hundred years behind us and today America is our closes ally, I still believe that America should make an effort to return those bells to their rightful place. This is another failure of Pres. PNoy Aquino who prides himself to be close to US Pres. Barrack Obama.
Mind you, reading this pages of hidden history doesn't make me an anti-American. After all, thanks to American press, these violent orgies happening in the Philippines were reported in the American press notably by the New York Times on January 15, 1901 and on January 31, 1902 there was a US Senate investigation on what was happening in the Philippines.
But how many Filipinos today realize that Filipinos were the first people who were "water boarded" by the Americans? Just a few months ago, the US Military admitted to waterboarding their prisoners in Gitmo.
But during the US Senate investigation 114 years ago, an American soldier testified to the embarrassment of US Pres. Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt that some 160 Filipinos were water boarded of which 134 died when they were tortured. Pres. Roosevelt was forced to try 44 US officers and soldiers but those so-called convictions were reduced to "reprimands." All in all, the Philippine American war resulted in the slaughter of more than 300,000 thousand Filipinos in the 41-month war that America calls "Philippine Insurrection". In my book it was the Philippine-American War.
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For email responses to this article, write to vsbobita@mozcom.com or vsbobita@gmail.com. His columns can be accessed through www.philstar.com.