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... ...Universal Declaration of Human Rights, December 10, 1948 -- "A Cause for Celebration" ... 'Demands of Dignity' 'Demands of Dignity' <DEVELOPING THE DISCOURSE ON OUR DECEMBER 1Oth DECLARATION>
On-Line Edition of the Book by Ed Aurelio C. Reyes Chapter 5-- Response to the American Non-Response |
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CONTENTS OF THIS BOOK: Response
to the Spanish Response Response to the American Non-Response Two Myths Among Filipinos About Americans America’s Long Double-Bladed History Clueless About Global Resentment App 5-A: Open Letter to the American
People App 5-B: Dear Whites, I Am No Racist! App 5-C: Mark Twain's 'The War Prayer' Demands of Dignity EXCERPTS: -o0o- "The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, signed Dec. 10, 1948, has been a cause of celebration, and the Treaty of Paris, signed Dec. 10, 1898, has been a cause for indignation... on the part of ALL HUMANS." -o0o- "The HUMANITY of ALL is ONE! Assaults on the Rights of a human anywhere are assaults on the rights of all humans everywhere." -o0o- "The current Human Evolutionary Imperative is attaining Synergy in Conscious Oneness." -o0o- "We demand apologies not to uphold our national dignity, but to give the offenders the opportunity to uphold theirs." -o0o- "Demands for Human Dignity come from within Human Dignity itself." -o0o- "We seek redress, closure and healing... Since the governments involved and the international organizations that depend on the consent of governments cannot be expected to support these calls or accord them any serious attention, we are calling upon the citizens of these and other nations, on the citizenry of the world." -o0o- "One of the factors underpinning the habit of trying to hide or mangle the truth is the illusion that facts hidden well enough as secrets can stay as such forever. Another is the illusion that you can harm your fellow-humans without harming yourself." -o0o- "Inevitably, eventually and ultimately, all wrongs cry out to be fully acknowledged, regretted, and set aright. Your peace of mind now and in the future demands it. Your very dignity demands it." -o0o- "Smile for Synergy! Seek One Humanity!"
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LINKS TO THE MAIN PARTS OF THE Demands of Dignity BOOK:
GENERAL FEEDBACK SPECIFIC FEEDBACK FEEDBACK BOX
Chapter Five ---------------------- Response to the American Non-Response FOUR
SCORE and thirty years ago, the United States of America brought forth
on the Asian continent the destruction of its first republic, and
committed genocide against a new nation to deny it its hard-earned
liberty, indeed a most abominable violation of the proposition that all
men are created equal. When
those who have, for one reason or another, committed to memory U.S.
President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address come
across these lines, they would surely notice and subject to severe
beating my “error in the number of years” in this obviously intended
parody. It is quite easy to
concede this, for that would be the only “error” to be found in
these lines. Actually,
when I first wrote these lines back in December 1985,1
it was then exactly 87 years after the events referred to, and I could
use Lincoln’s exact opening words to produce a perfectly truthful
paragraph. This
paragraph is so heavily loaded that one would perhaps be willing to
excuse seeming errors in the number of years.
I would prefer that readers’ attention be focused on the
content After all, really serious allegations these are.
But valid enough to prove beyond all doubt. As
a history researcher and popularizer, a campaigner for a keen sense of
history (as distinguished from blind memorization focused on its
details), I have developed the habit of noting the date of a significant
event only to relate it to another date, and thus yield as bigger truths
their chronology and also the time span between them. Examples of these abound in this present work.
Take chronology, for example. Wouldn’t everyone raise a howl if
the British had tried to sell the 13 colonies to another European power after
July 1776 and some other nation, perhaps a more powerful one,
came forward to buy them? (After
all, the British Crown signed the earlier Treaty of Paris
with the United States only seven years later, in 1783, formally ending
the Revolutionary War that the erstwhile colonies won seven years
earlier. Seven years is a long time, and the transaction may have been
negotiated without having to involve the Americans at all, just by
dismissing the latter as “incapable of self-government”!)2 Much
more important than the dates and the time spans, I am most ready to
assert that line by line, or phrase by phrase, everything in the first
paragraph of that parody is founded on the Truth. As I owe proof, so do
I offer them, and give them adequately throughout this work. Before anyone has reason to be curious as to my motives in writing all these, let me give the assurance that I harbor only the noblest of intentions here: to seek full disclosure of the truth; redress and closure of a grave injustice perpetrated on millions, nay dozens of millions, or people; emancipation from prolonged conditions of ignorant bliss; and genuine human oneness and evolution. Yes, these are intentions at least as noble as asserting the proposition that all men are created equal. All humans are not only created equal but are also created as one, that is, in oneness, and should evolve enough maturity to remember this and, in full consciousness, to freely decide to act accordingly. Elaborating on a ParodyIt
may not be the usual way, much less the best way, to describe a century
and a decade. Actually, by the time we came out with our 1998
Philippine Declaration of Felicitation and Protest, in December
that year, it was the Golden Anniversary of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights and no less than the Centennial of
the Treaty of Paris.
Now, a decade later, we are following up to develop a much
wider-scale and much deeper discourse on our 1998 Declaration,
hopefully from altered, more mature, perspectives.
At the bottom line, this author seeks the readers’ indulgence
while invoking the “literary license” on the parody. Did
the Philippines in fact have a native nationwide state at the time the
United States started a war of invasion early in February 1899 to
enforce the purchase of the Philippines from Spain?
Yes. And it was not even just the first one that had been
established; it was our third. Jose
Rizal came home to the Philippines with a blueprint, a fully democratic
constitution for an archipelago-wide grassroots-based La Liga Filipina
(Filipino League) that was to be built up openly as a mere
reform-oriented entity expected to be viewed by the Spaniards as
harmless and therefore allowable. The colonizers arrested Rizal with
many other Liga leaders and exiled him indefinitely in Dapitan in
northern Zamboanga, thus nipping in the bud his association and its
vague perspective for building “dual power” in the localities.3 The
first republic was established on August 24, 1896 three months and a
half after the Asamblea Magna (“Great Assembly,” actually the
first state assembly) held in a place called “Bitukang Manok” in
Pasig town early in May, attended by leaders of the four-year old
revolutionary organization (Katipunan) from various regions of the
archipelago.4
That state, called “Haring Bayang Katagalugan” (Sovereign State of
River-dwellers) had a president, Andres Bonifacio, who had a Cabinet.5
and an army. This
government was defeated in a coup d’etat staged by a faction of the
Katipunan in one provincial chapter led by General Emilio Aguinaldo, and
was much later revived by forces loyal to the original founder and to
the Katipunan ideals.6
Before
surrendering to the Spaniards in exchange for some concessions offered
in a so-called “political settlement” that completely abandoned the
revolutionary cause, Aguinaldo first established a government, also with
a Cabinet and a Constitution, at the Biyak na Bato caves in the province
of Bulacan.7
That was the second one. Before Aguinaldo and his group went on
voluntary exile in Hong Kong in December 1897, bringing the money from
the Spaniards, he called upon the Filipino revolutionaries to lay down
their arms and stop the struggle.8
With
Aguinaldo gone, however, they simply defied his order and continued the
revolutionary fight with the same fervor and under the same original
people’s war guerrilla strategy (“ilihan” warfare9)
laid down by the Katipunan and the Katagalugan government. They engaged
and gradually weakened and overran the Spanish forces all over Luzon and
the Visayas, and even confiscated wide landholdings of the colonizers
(which the US later saw fit to restore to the Spaniards).
With
this development, the Americans saw sense in contacting Aguinaldo in
Hong Kong, and aided him in coming back to “resume” the struggle
that had never really stopped. Back
in Cavite, he first set up a dictatorship that proclaimed
“independence” from Spain under the protection of the US, and was
later advised by Apolinario Mabini to prepare for a constituent assembly
(Malolos Congress, which opened in mid-September 1898) and that body
hammered out a constitution for a full republic that was finally
inaugurated in Malolos, Bulacan on January 23, 1899. This was actually
the third republic, which was later recognized in the world as the
“first republic in Asia.” (The
Katagalugan republic was revived during the Filipino-American War by
Gen. Miguel
Malvar, and later by Macario Sakay.) Yes,
indeed, “the United States of America brought forth on the Asian
continent the destruction of its first republic…”
That
the US also committed genocide among the people is adequately discussed
in Chapter Two, specifically in Appendix 2-B (“War to Enforce a
Sale”), on page 75. Were
the Filipinos a new nation? Yes.
For thousands of years, the local communities were internally
practicing the socio-economics of synergy, called “bayanihan,”10
and were living among themselves in peace and harmony. But they we were
not yet a nation with centralized politics and formally integrated
economies of scale. That was still evolving in mutually-agreed voluntary
clustering of petty kingdoms in evolving larger and larger
constituencies. The
Spanish colonizers claimed the archipelago as one big real estate
property for the Spanish crown, and through a system of vassals and
tribute collectors, the move for real division (among the territories of
the growing number of these remotely-controlled vassals) and more
division was started, even as the colonizers adopted the “divide and
rule” strategy for subjugation. Uprisings
were carried out throughout the archipelago but separately, and they all
lost, except the united Moros and the indigenous tribes in the
Cordillera and Mindanao who were never conquered.
Unity was only attained by the four-year gathering work of the
Katipunan (Tagalog word for gathering) in preparation for the
Revolution, and the outbreak of that unified countrywide effort with its
own government established on August 24, 1896, signaled no less than the
birth of the Filipino nation.11
And
this nation had to wage wars against two colonizer powers, defeating the
first in almost exactly two years but being crushed by the second. With
the sense of nationhood eclipsed by effective American education that
promoted self-alienation and “swooning over everything American,”
Filipinos still have to renew the lost sense of collective pride and
patriotism to regain our full nationhood. A distinct movement has
recently been launched to attain this by the year 2021, exactly half a
millennium after Spaniards discovered our land and people for lucrative
colonization.12
That
the Filipinos had driven almost the whole of Spanish control into just
their walled capital city by the time the American Navy came into the
picture cannot be denied, it was in fact even categorically acknowledged
by Dewey and the other American officers themselves.
This undeniable Filipino victory was, however, snatched from the
Filipinos' hands through the pre-scripting of the Mock Battle of Manila
that effected an almost bloodless turnover from the outgoing Caucasian
colonizer to the incoming Caucasian colonizer, keeping out the
real victors, the Filipino revolutionary forces. This author
cannot imagine the present-day American people feeling proud about such
an American "accomplishment"! A sense of shame would be more
like it. And
what liberty could the millions of widows and orphans of the American
genocide in the Philippines possibly be allowed to enjoy?
For a time, they could not even display their own flag, whose
three colors red, white and blue had ironically been officially chosen
by the Aguinaldo government to salute the colors of the US stars and
stripes. Even their hearts
were gagged from expressing their pains and woes, under threat of
sedition and libel charges! Now,
this writer cannot expect anyone sane to claim seriously that all these
acts of the US government and armed forces were faithfully “dedicated
to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
Far from indicating even just any hint of fidelity to such an
ideal, or of even knowing about it, this has been indelibly etched in
human history as “a most abominable violation of precisely that
proposition.
And rightly so. Myths Among Filipinos About AmericansGenerations of the widows and orphans of the Filipino-American War, as
processed through American-imposed public education and university
systems, became the consistent majorities of the miseducated Filipinos
who have placed the Americans on the pedestal, thinking very highly of
them, along with American products, language, systems, technologies,
lifestyles, efficiency, aesthetics, material prosperity, etc.
For
such people who still compose the majority of our nation, all the woes
suffered by our people are purely rooted in native corruption and
tyranny. For them the
Americans, particularly the "real" (read: white) Americans,
have simply been incapable of doing anything wrong, or of even just
intending to do anything wrong to poor countries like the Philippines. Whenever
confronted with undeniable indicators of defect in the American ways,
the bottom line recourse has been to declare our own ways and conditions
in the Philippines as "hell by comparison." This
is the myth held in the hearts and minds of the majority who are
bedazzled by the picture of "fun, modernity and prosperity"
that they have picked up from American books and magazines, movies,
television shows and computer programs. This
myth is of course erroneous. But no less mistaken has been its
diametrical opposite. The
more simplistic thinking among Filipinos have had the tendency to
pendulum-swing from one extreme view to another, and within the growing
minority of Filipinos who have seen through the artificiality, and even
intended deception of at least some of the aspects of American
projections, have gotten over their unfounded adulation over everything
American, but have swung to the other extreme of suspecting, or
dismissing outright as deceptive, anything American.
The
tendency in either case is to refuse to consider that contrasting, even
opposing, sides of a single reality can actually be both true.
To
illustrate on the very topics at the heart of this book, namely, the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights and the Treaty of Paris: About
the UDHR, people who know about the role played by the
United States in its inception and in the long process of crafting it
all the way to UN General Assembly approval in 1948,13
are either overjoyed about it as an obvious milestone in the evolution
of human consciousness (that has even branched out to the articulation
of various specific human rights and the setting up of systems of
invoking for universal observance), or they are, on the other hand,
highly suspicious, even cynical, of some loaded bias for the side of the
American ideological grouping within the then nascent UN organization. The
latter groups would be vulnerable to find themselves in the pitfall of
forgoing whatever value they can have from invoking the UDHR,
its consequent documents and the UN human rights mechanisms already in
place, just because of what they perceive as limitations deliberately
placed to favor the US and its allies. About
the TP, many people who have gotten themselves
well-informed about the route of deceit and callous cruelty that the new
imperialist power strung up all along the path of its premeditated
acquisition of the Philippines lose sight of the fact that this was not
a unanimously supported policy on the part of the American people. The Treaty
and the war of aggression that was waged to force it literally down the
throats of the Filipinos was widely opposed every step of the way by
large segments of the American body politic, who had both self-centered
and altruistic motives for the active pursuit of their chosen positions
on the relevant issues.14
The
dedicated activists of the Anti-Imperialist League,15
the sharp pen of Samuel Clements ("Mark Twain")16;
the shining example of Sgt. David Fagan and his fellow-blacks in the US
invasion forces who defected to the defensive side of the colored
natives17;
and even the conscience-stricken American soldiers who could not
sadistically enjoy obeying the orders for massive genocide, torture and
arson and gave stomach-turning narrations18
-- they all have to be fully acknowledged and honored to have a balanced
and therefore fair and accurate story. If stubbornly maintained, the extreme, one-sided view in each of the myths, and the overreactions to these, block the path of objectivity and mature redress, closure and healing that all parties actually need to make possible for any player in this bloody drama to move on along the path of inner peace and real human evolution.19 America's
Long Double-Bladed History
The turning point was said to have come with the closing of the internal frontier.20 The American ideals enshrined in such basic documents as the American Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution and the Gettysburg Address had had to take secondary priority to the interests of American Big Business that desired much bigger markets. It was allegedly then when the revolutionary former colony turned to the ways of colonization the 13 states had liberated themselves against. It
actually happened much earlier. The First Americans, mislabeled as
"American Indians," due to the geographical ignorance of one
Christopher Columbus,21
were forced out of the land they had freely lived and cared for dozens
of centuries. The
firearms of the white settlers from Europe were superior to the archery
of the "copper-skinned" natives. On this basis, the European
settlers interpreted themselves to be superior in many more ways to the
natives, and that it was perfectly all right to grab their land and put
them now into "reservation areas" where their demoralized
bodies have been kept alive but shorn of their freely-blowing and
nature-loving culture, incessantly tempted by the gambling dens of Las
Vegas, and very far removed from the noble ways of Chief Seattle!22 Might is right! Much
later, the imperialists (the monopoly capitalists with world-wide
empires that they have built up over the last century and a half23)
have preferred to exploit more the inhabitants of the poorer countries
while keeping their own people generally satisfied and proud. Part of
such pride was kept rooted in the ideals of freedom, equality and
democracy that have remained more in American rhetoric but have actually
been shelved, even buried, in practice in the face of the practical
needs of American financial capital and the war industry.24 Government
policy has invariably sided with the latter. Successions of
administrations in Washington D.C. have had to resort to grand
deceptions to keep up the presence demanded by those Americans who have
remained faithful to the original American revolutionary ideals that
their government has actually discarded. Chapters Two and Three of this
book are veritably dripping with official U.S. lies aimed at fooling
mainly the American people. These
powerful politician and business policymakers have succeeded to fool
some of the American people all of the time and also succeeded to fool
all of the American people some of the time, but did not get to fool all
the people all the time. But you cannot fault them for lack of trying.
And
even if they failed in the absolute sense, they succeeded in the
relative timeframe. For example, the invasion of Iraq was pushed through
against world opinion and substantial American public opinion. It was
revealed that the CIA had actually known that the weapons of mass
destruction story was just a figment of the imagination at the White
House and that the Agency allowed then State Secretary Colin Powell to
maintain that lie as he made his vital presentation before the UN
Security Council by not telling him the truth.25
It got Powell and many other Americans furious when the secret was found
out much later, but, come to think of it, the whole scheme worked!
America got the Iraqi oil! And
the little "white lie" has since been largely ignored. Holding
a bright lamp at the entrance to the U.S. from the direction of Europe,
the Statue of Liberty stands to symbolize an openness to embrace in
people who are in need. She carries an inscription resonating the
American self-image as the land of freedom and opportunity: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe
free, The wretched refuse of your teeming
shore. Send these, the homeless,
tempest-tossed to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden
door.”26 The
inscription implies that the "huddled masses" from many other
lands just simply have to knock to get in and partake of the land's
well-advertised freedom and prosperity.
Kept strong in the heart of the American people, the spirit of
goodwill can somehow materialize to affect official policy again at some
future date. Why future? Because it is not currently reflected in the
law and practice of the federal government of the United States. Consider
this: Recently, what used to be called the Immigration and
Naturalization Service has been reorganized. It is now U.S. Immigration
and Customs Enforcement. What used to be a bureau for immigration to the
US is now the law enforcement agency designed to keep people out. Aside
from the generous spirit being violated by the government that the
American people have consistently claimed to control by "exemplary
democracy" (actually,
the people have not even been able to compel it to be truthful to them),
there is something missing in the generosity framework itself. It is
noble for the well-off of the world to wish to share part of their
lifestyle of fun, pleasure and convenience with the "huddled
masses" from poor countries who would knock at their door, assuming
these would be let in. American advertising has always adequately
projected the contrasts in the standards of living in terms of just
that--a study in stark contrasts. What
is left out in the projection, or even in the admission, is the relation
of causality between the contrasting realities, i.e., the
U.S. economy is prosperous not just in contrast to the
rest of the world but more as a result of what it has been
getting from the rest of the world! The
fact the affluent in the U.S. and the other highly developed economies
account for only about 20 percent of the world's population while
consuming about 80 percent of the world's resources (leaving about 80
percent of the humans on this planet to make do with about 20 percent of
the resources) has been monitored by international bodies as a gross
imbalance that is still worsening to this very day. And
the world is not about ready to ascribe it all to pure American luck,
population growth discrepancies, comparative educational attainments and
different indices of willingness to work.
The consistent net outflow of resources from the poorer to the
richer countries has given the world clues as to the presence of serious
flaws in the dominant neo-liberal economic and financial systems being
run and maintained by giant transnational banks and operated with the
collaboration of entire governments. Even
with its periodic financial crises due to forced artificial growths and
speculative and inflationary practices, the American portrait of
relative prosperity remains and shall remain while the flow of money and
of its inflationary derivatives within and across national boundaries
still rules the economies of the "globalized world." The free-trade Commandments of the Golden Calf will continue to rule, until money becomes too artificial, too far removed from Nature-based real production for real human needs, to remain useful at all. That time is sure to come but it is not to be expected very soon. Still, the American people do have to start rethinking for themselves their values and systems...and human ethics. Clueless
About Global Resentment
The
people of the United States obviously look at their country from a
perspective very different from the viewpoint of the rest of the world.
Apparently, the state governments are doing a fine job of taking care of
their respective constituents while the federal government "takes
care" of the rest of the world -- as extended battlefields and
extended markets, as slave countries made up of lesser humans, as
clients in global transactions where Washington holds all the powerful
cards. Considering
the number of countries where American military, trade and financial
operations have turned large sections of the respective populations into
widows, orphans, physically debilitated, evacuees, refugees, beggars,
and so on, it is not at all surprising anymore that the American
star-spangled banner is not exactly the most well-loved flag on earth.
And the federal government has had no need for any affection,
either, not unlike a bully who always gets its way by a clever
combination of deception and brute force. Wasn't it former President
Theodore Roosevelt who said that the U.S., being the "policeman of
the world" had to speak softly while carrying a big stick?27 But
there is that heart of America, the people themselves, whose political
savvy has been focused on state politics and whose knowledge about world
affairs has long been clouded with selective perception as molded by a
fanatically patriotic paradigm criticized l01 years ago by the
anti-imperialist Samuel Clemens ("Mark Twain"). The famous
author of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn wrote in 1907: “Citizenship?
We have none! In place of it we teach patriotism which Samuel Johnson
said a hundred and forty or a hundred and fifty years ago was the last
refuge of the scoundrel — and I believe that he was right. I remember
when I was a boy and I heard repeated time and time again the phrase,
‘My country, right or wrong, my country!’ How absolutely absurd is
such an idea. How absolutely absurd to teach this idea to the youth of
the country.”28 Such selective perception, plus their real focus on own local concerns, may very well have led to a measure of real ignorance on the part of a large section of the American body politic about U.S. deeds the world over. These deeds are invariably described as necessary for the defense of freedom and democracy for all and for the preservation of the American lifestyle, the last one mentioned having been used as an excuse not to join the other big and small pollution-spewing countries in signing the Tokyo Protocol.29 Why
does this writer have to bring in the element of ignorance? Firstly, it
is the only logical explanation available short of malicious collective
complicity, an interpretation I am not prepared intellectually or
emotionally to make. Secondly, when Americans were hurt, physically and
emotionally, by the September 11 bombing of the World Trade Center back
in 2001, they appeared and sounded really sincerely clueless
as to why America could be a target of such a heinous act.30
"Why us? Why target
us?" they cried with real tears. This writer contributed lines to the post-9/11 poem, Nostraverus: Our Truth, created by our synergism-oriented organization, and among these lines were these that pertained to this deep shock. We were praying "God bless America!" when we wrote this quatrain, the fifth one of ten in that poem:31 God,
please bless these people, so proud to be mighty and free! Heal
their wounds and pains; lovingly dry their bitt’rest of tears. Cure
them of hatred and confusion, and help them to deeply see. Why
anger of many ‘round the world for stripe’d flag is so fierce? Mark
Twain has had an answer to this for more than a century by now. In his
piece on the American Flag, the great novelist "confessed": “I
was not properly reared, and had the illusion that a flag was a thing
which must be sacredly guarded against shameful uses and unclean
contacts, lest it suffer pollution; and so when it was sent out to the
Philippines to float over a wanton war and a robbing expedition I
supposed it was polluted, and in an ignorant moment I said so. But I
stand corrected. I concede and acknowledge that it was only the
government that sent it on such an errand that was polluted. Let us
compromise on that. I am glad to have it that way. For our flag could
not well stand pollution, never having been used to it, but it is
different with the administration.”32 The
"Old Glory," another name for the U.S. stars and stripes, was
sent to preside over the gory war in the Philippines at the turn of the
century, and was sent by alternating Democratic and Republican
administrations to be soaked in the heroic blood of many other peoples
worldwide in the hundred years that followed the war of aggression in
the Philippines. We were just the first. While
we appreciate the opposition a large section of the American people
mounted against the ratification of the Treaty of Paris in
1899 and against the war waged to subjugate us to accept it, we also
take note of the legitimate but narrow reason why some of them did so.
Americans were concerned about American lives.
But there were two historic massacres that the American people
met with a magnitude of revulsion beyond concern for their own
relatives. These are the My
Lai Massacre in Vietnam in 1968, and the much earlier Massacre at
Wounded Knee Creek in 1890.33
Massacres here in the Philippines polluted the U.S. flag in a
period between these two. It
should not be deemed too much for Filipinos to ask now that Americans
and other peoples of the world take a long hard look at the forgotten
Samar and Batangas massacres during the Philippine-American War that
lasted much longer and took much more casualties in the number of
civilians sent to their deaths at a very early age of ten. "Kill
everyone capable of bearing arms," Gen. Jake Smith ordered for
Samar, "ten years old" and above. It should neither be deemed too much for us to insist now that
the Americans seriously consider returning to the Philippines the
Balangiga Bells that the US military stole. It is actually in the best interest of the American people, first and foremost, to know and acknowledge these atrocities. The U.S. government can be compelled by the people to go all out in making a clean breast of this. And the American media can really help the people in doing this. Unlike the revelation of The Pentagon Papers34 during the Vietnam War, detailed accounts on the Filipino-American War obviously have no more tactical value for America's perceived enemies. A
New Hope
This
writer's brother, Shyam Tony Reyes, who has lived in the United States
for more than three decades now, very recently wrote a song that
celebrates a new miracle, a new hope upon a call for America to
"listen to your heart." The
lines bear singing together, as soon as we learn the tune:35 Listen
to your heart, America! Listen
to your heart, sweet America! Choose
the path of love and healing We
can see the Love clearly in the children of the world Who
reach out from their hearts to help those in need. Look
around, look around you; they’re here to set us free Let
their hearts lead us to the new world we love to see... That
makes it easier to be the Light; That
makes it easier to be the Light; Making it easier
to think things right; The
lyrics resonate with the very spirit of this book, particularly Chapters
Two and Five and a good part of Chapter Three. The present Chapter is
titled as a response to a non-response, because our 1998
Declaration really got no response from the US Embassy in Manila
after that document was handcarried. And we were not at all surprised.
After all, the document was delivered to the U.S. government!36
This
time, our sentiments are more properly addressed to the American people,
to their very hearts. And if only they could use more their hearts to
discern more sensitively between the truths and the untruths from the
pronouncements of the U.S. federal government, if they could only more
strongly express their hearts' sentiments that can really resonate with
the sentiments of the Rest of Humanity, hope for a new miracle in
America, a miracle that is America, well within and
not above the context of a worldwide community, shall have found
the strongest basis for resolute fulfillment. It will definitely unfold
a story much more touching and amazing than anything Hollywood's
creativity can ever spin out. It
is fortuitous that these last chapters of this humble volume are being
written now that the people of the United States have just shown
themselves and everybody else that they really desire change and that
they are capable of making significant steps to carry that desire toward
fruition. They have thus created a number of historic firsts during the
presidential elections. On
the day of the U.S. elections, this writer teamed up with Donald
Goertzen, the American co-initiator of the organization called SYCONE-Humanity,
and sent out to all addressees in our e-groups and e-mail directories
these ponderings: What
we all just had with Barack Obama's victory in the US elections: a new
historic sequel to Haley’s Roots; a new episode to Lincoln’s Gettysburg
piece, a new challenge for the ideals of Sgt. Fagan of a century ago; a
new opportunity for the fulfillment of Luther King’s dream for
togetherness of children of many skin colors, and for the
Jackson-McCartney Harmony on harmony; a new hope for a
multiracial nation who has just chosen a chief leader from a race other
than white, who can now face the “white man’s burden” from a
perspective quite different from Kipling’s;
a significant stride towards Bishop Tutu’s real humanity
possible only in togetherness. We
encourage the new US leadership to commit itself to the well-being not
only of the American people but also of the Whole Planet and of all
people. Obama's
racial origin was not the reason he was given a landslide victory, but
it was very significant that he won in spite of it. This is to be
rightly considered more the American people's victory than his own and
of his political party, the Democrats. A victory for maturity! His
triumph symbolizes the historic break from an unbroken line of 43
all-white previous presidents, and proved for the first time in U.S.
history that non-whites, let alone blacks, are no longer to be treated
as second-class citizens in his multi-racial country.
Early policy speeches, both as candidate and as president-elect
have projected him as a credible champion for change in foreign policy
and people-empowering governance, although the challenges he now faces
are formidable. The
urgent challenge is to turn the US economy on the road to quick
recovery; the bigger and more important challenge is to change the
American ways that have contributed greatly to the ultimate causes of
the financial debacles and an entire Gordian Knot of world crises in the
environment, in food and energy, in peace and harmony, in everything. The
Republican personalities that the American electorate stood up together
recently to reject were not different from many of their Republican and
Democrat counterparts in the White House all the way back from the time
of William MacKinley when the United States first embarked on becoming a
world power, at the expense of the world. The
American people have stood up together to prove they can elect a Barack
Obama. What remains to be seen is whether they are willing to help him
keep to the path of change and succeed along that path, for the sake of
America and the rest of Humanity. That would most probably require them
to undergo much attitudinal change especially in validating for all the
world to see that they really are dedicated to the proposition that all
humans are created equal. Why
is this author writing a response to the American non-response
to our
1998
Declaration?
Because with copies of that document, and this book itself,
reaching many American hearts and minds that are now undergoing positive
change, and with a new American federal government giving Filipinos and
other peoples of the world early signs of eagerness for real change, we
might just be able to get a real positive response this time around.
Such response will go a long way in getting redress, closure and
healing that we have been seeking for all. We
seek apologies for real, historical, offenses, not so we can regain our
dignity. We seek them so
that those who owe them, also historically, can cleanse themselves of
such sin of omission and regain their own dignity. Honor is never to be
seen in the refusal to articulate sincere regrets. Honor shines in
honest humility, and we are confident that even the U.S. federal
government can be pushed by the American people to learn this, to start
a new US track record in world history. back to top suggested next
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ANNOUNCEMENTS: Demands of Dignity THE HARDCOPY EDITION, in about 180 regular sized bookpaper pages with full-color paperback cover FREE ACCESS FOR ALL to the ON-LINE EDITION until February. 4, 2009, 110th Anni- versary of the Fil-Am War.
APPENDICES: App 5-A: Open Letter to the American
People App 5-B: Dear Whites, I Am No Racist! App 5-C: Mark Twain's 'The War Prayer'
'FOOTNOTES': 1“Emil Gamat” (a penname of Ed Aurelio C. Reyes during martial law) “Please Let Our Country Be! (An Open Letter to the American People),” 1986: Hectic and Historic (Manila: Dispatch Publica- tions, 1987), pp. 1-5. 2This would be tantamount to amending the pertinent passage in the American Declaration of Independence to read: “…all men, who are deemed capable of self-gov- ernment, are created equal,” even if such amendment be blessed with any sense. 3People empowerment through self-organization and participation even just in aspects of governance… 4The late former Sen. Jose W. Diokno once asserted, “Without (the Great Assembly at) Bitukang Manok, there could not have been (the ‘First Cry’ at) Pugadlawin, (the ‘Proclamation of Indepen- dence’ at) Kawit, or (the inauguration of the Philip- pine Republic at) Malolos.” Source: “Kapulungan sa Bitukang Manok,” Tambuli ng Dakilang Lahi (magazine), August 2006, pp. 17-18. 5La Ilustracion Española correspondent G. Reparaz reported, in the February 8, 1897 issue of the publication, the following Cabinet members in Bonifacio’s government: Teodoro Plata, secretary of war; Emilio Jacinto, secretary of state; Aguedo del Rosario, secretary of the interior; Briccio Pantas, secretary of justice; and Enrico Pacheco, secretary of the economy. Source: Ed Aurelio C. Reyes, Bonifacio: Siya Ba Ay Kilala Ko? (Bonifacio: Do I Really Know Him?), English Version, (Manila: Kamalaysayan, 2004, p. 47, quoting a contributed article by historian Dr. Milagros Guerrero. 6At one time, close to the heels of the execution of Andres Bonifacio, the “Haring Bayang Katagalugan” republic was revived by Gen. Miguel Malvar. After Malvar had surrendered to the US forces, it was revived by Macario Sakay. Generally the revolutionary people remained faithful to the Katipunan ideals and strategy, which led them to archipelago-wide victory against Spanish rule in less than two years. That this victory was snatched from their hands by the new colonizer who had pretended to be their ally, is another story. 7Biyak na Bato Constitution and Republic, see Teodoro Agoncilio, History of the Filipino People (8th Ed.), pp.182-184, 200. 8On December 30, 1897, French Consul in Manila G. de Bérard reported to his principals in Paris a report which quoted Aguinaldo as having declared in a formal proclamation: “I declare, out of the jurisdiction of the constituted government of the revolution, without right to be called insurgents or revolutionaries, nor entitlement to any of the privileges concluded with the Spanish government, those who would disobey my orders to lay down their arms and obstruct the realization of the program of pacification. xxx Those who would not obey my orders and oppose the efforts of pacification, by continuing to hold on to their ranks within the revolutionary government shall be no longer under our supervision and shall be declared thieves and bandits.” Source: French Consular Dispatches on the Philippine Revolution, compilation of reports by Consul G. de Bérard, as translated into English by Ma. Luisa T. Camagay (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1997), p. 48. 9Dr. Zeus Salazar of the University of the Philippines explains the Ilihan warfare in the Bagong Kasaysayan periodical’s special pamphlet on the subject: Written in Tagalog and Filipino and as freely translated into English for inclusion here, Salazar’s explanation follows: “During the Revolution, Bonifacio employed the ilihán as base areas for the struggle of the people (i.e., the communities of the Anak ng Bayan that form the Inang Bayan through the Revolution), in order to attack the pueblos (old municipalities or new communities formed the reduccion). The areas involved in the ilihán are often steep difficult-to-climb mountains (not mere hills) from where to start raids on surrounding pueblos. Many such ilihán were clustered in various mountain ranges in various areas across the archipelago. This was the “reál” warfare of the (Katipunan).” 10Commonly symbolized by people carrying a nipa hut together in teamwork, “bayanihan” is the application of the spiritual and scientific principle of synergism (“one plus one equals three”) on socio-economic activities like farming and shoreline net fishing, to magnify total strengths and lighten the workload of the people. Volunteerism as a common ethical norm is still alive among Filipinos, although cash economy and mechanization have downplayed the need for the earlier applications of the principle. 11In the last week of August 1896, the decentralized operations of the centrally coordinated revolutionary armed struggle against Spanish rule started. It was the first ever unified enterprise of the communities throughout the archipelago, with the Katipunan-led communities mainly in Luzon and the Visayas finally joining among themselves in a unified revolutionary movement and joining up with the Moros in Mindanao in a unified anti-Spanish war. This historic development and the establishment of the first-ever native government with nationwide coverage on August 24, 1896, was no less than the Birth of the Nation. 12By 2021, the Philippines shall have had half a century of interaction with the Spanish colonialists. Kamalaysayan (Solidarity on Sense of History) and its fraternal organizations will be launching a consciousness campaign of full decolonization in terms of what our people would continue to seek and continue to allow to dominate our lives. 13First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of then US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, played a key role in leading all those who were actively involved in crafting and finalizing the drafts of what was later approved by the UN General Assembly in 1948 as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 14Behind
the active pursuit of their chosen positions on the issues relevant to
the ratification of the Treaty of Paris and the waging of
war to enforce it, Americans had the self-serving but legitimate motive
of protectionism, and also had the predisposition to keep faithful to
the ideals enshrined by their Founding Fathers in their basic documents. 15Read
the comprehensive book on the Anti-Imperialist League written by Daniel
Boone Schirmer under the title, Republic or Empire: American
Resistance to the Philippine War (Cambridge: Schenkman
Publishing Co., 1972) 298 pp. 16See JimZwick.net; and http://twainweb,net/reviews /zwick.html. 17David Fagan was a black American who defected to the Filipino side during the Filipino-American War. He was a six-foot US soldier who earned the rank of captain in the resistance forces. 18See “Accounts in Letters from Soldiers,” Appendix 2-B, p. 78. 19The habit of all-sidedness, of seeking to grasp the totality of any situation by finding out and taking into full considerations all the various and similar viewpoints and aspects in a configuration is part of human evolution. 20See H. Zinn’s account on the closing of the internal frontier, on p. 32. 21Christopher Columbus thought his expedition had reached the Indies after crossing the Atlantic Ocean. According to science popularizer Carl Sagan, Columbus had been an itinerant peddler of old maps and an assiduous reader of books by and about ancient geographers, including Eratostheness who had described the “enterprise of the Indies” as passing from Iberia to India. However, for such a project to succeed, i.e., for the ships and crews to survive the long voyage, the Earth had to be smaller than the measurements of Eratostheness. Columbus therefore cheated on his calculations, as examiners in the faculty of the University of Salamanca correctly pointed out. He used the smallest possible circumference of the Earth and the greatest eastward extension of Asia he could find in all the books available to him. And then he exaggerated even those, Sagan tells us. (Carl Sagan, Cosmos (New York: Random House Inc., 1985. Underscoring supplied.). 22Chief Seattle was the chief of the Suquamish tribe of First Americans. At the time this speech was made in 1854, it was commonly believed by whites and by many “Indians” that Native Americans would inevitably become extinct. Considering their numbers and conditions by now, the projected extinction is apparently well on its way to fulfillment. There are a number of versions but they are all parallel in content, with two versions available for viewing in http://www.kyphilom.com/www/ seattle.html. . 23Imperialists, was a term popularized by the Anti-Imperialist League of the United States to describe the expansionist policy of the country under the leadership of Republican President William MacKinley. 24In shelving and burying these ideals for the pragmatic needs of American big business and military interests, one of the earliest steps had to be revisionism, inserting qualifying amendments to the basic declarations, like what Sen. Alfred Beveridge did when he publicly declared on January 9, 1900 that “The Declaration is applicable only to people of self-government.” 25For details on the CIA “trick” played on Sec. Powell at the UN Security Council in 2003, about Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), please open http://www.salon.com/opinion/blum enthal/2007/09/06/bush_wmd/ 26Source of text of the inscription at the Statue of Liberty: http://www.zyra.org.uk/ liberty1.htm 27US Pres. Theodore Roosevelt said in a speech in Chicago in April 1903: “‘Speak softly and carry and big stick; you will go far.’ If the American nation will speak softly, and yet build and keep at a pitch of the highest training a thoroughly efficient navy, the Monroe Doctrine will go far.” Wikipedia describes the “Big Stick Ideology,” or “Big Stick Policy,” as a form of hegemony and was the slogan describing U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt’s corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. The term originated from the phrase “Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far,” a West African proverb. The term is used to describe the foreign policy of the U.S. at the time; Roosevelt claimed the U.S. had the right to oppose European actions in the Western Hemisphere. The U.S., he said, also had the right to intervene economically and militarily in the domestic affairs of its neighbors if they proved incapable of maintaining peace and sovereignty on their own. The U.S. has used big stick diplomacy several times, particularly during Roosevelt’s presidency. 28Mark Twain, “True Citizenship at the Children’s Theater,” 1907. 29President George W. Bush refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol, saying the US government is not willing to compromise the lifestyles of the American people. But even with that explanation, groups of private American citizens have refused to be used as the excuse. Some of them expressed this at the Global Warming conference convened by the United Nations in Bali, Indonesia in December 2007; stress balls sporting the planet earth look were given out, marked with the words “The Other US is with You!” 30Much earlier, another heinous crime resulting in American deaths took place in mysterious and still unsolved circumstances that also gave the White House the excuse to call for war: the sinking of USS Maine at the Havana port in Cuba. Wikipedia informs us that a total of four investigations into the causes of the explosion and sinking of USS Maine were conducted, with the investigators coming to different conclusions. The Spanish and American versions would carry on with divergences. Less than a decade ago, in 1999, an investigation commissioned by National Geographic Magazine and carried out by Advanced Marine Enterprises concluded that “it appears more probable than was previously concluded that a mine caused the inward bent bottom structure and the detonation of the magazines.” However there is still much contention over what caused the explosion. Spanish and loyalist Cuban opinions included a theory that the United States government may have intentionally caused the detonation as a pretext to go to war with Spain (see http://en.wiki pedia.org/wiki/Spanish-American_ War). Similarly, right after the "9/11" plane-bombing raids on New York and Washington, the American public and much of the rest of the world were made to feel they knew for sure that Afghan rebel figure Osama Bin Laden and the Al Qaeda group were the culprits. As in the case of the sinking of USS Maine in the port of Havana, nothing has yet been proven up to now as to who really masterminded and executed the "9/11" opera- tions. In both cases, uncer- tainty never tempered the war hysteria against the demonized suspects tried only by publi- city. Rage against the sus- pects, and all who seemed to sympathize with them, was viewed as patriotism. 31See http://saniblakas.faithweb. com/nostraverus.htm (uploaded in September 2001) 32Twain, “The American Flag,” 1901. 33The Massacre at Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota, on December 29, 1890 ended with 300 men, women and children of the Lakota Sioux and 25 government troopers dead. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Wounded_Knee_massacre) The My Lai Massacre in Vietnam in March 16, 1968 accounted for 347 to 504 unarmed citizens dead (mostly civilians), many bearing signs of having been tortured and raped and some bodies mutilated. Of the 26 US soldiers initially charged with criminal offences for their actions at My Lai, only William Calley was convicted and he served only four and one-half months of his two-year sentence. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_ Lai_massacre). On the other hand, the Batangas massacres left 100,000 dead, and the Samar “howling wilderness” massacres left at least as many casualties. These massacres of Filipinos really deserve to be known and remembered well by Americans and Filipinos alike, at least to a similar extent as those in Wounded Knee Creek and in Vietnam. 34The "Pentagon Papers Case": On June 13,1971, the New York Times run its first story on the Pentagon Papers, under the headline “Vietnam Archive: Pentagon Study Traces 3 Decades of Growing U.S. Involvement.” The fol- lowing day, Attorney General John Mitchell warned the Times via phone and telegram against further publication; and on Tuesday June 15, the government sought and won a restraining order against the Times – an injunction subse- quently extended to the Washington Post when that paper picked up the cause. The epic legal battle that ensued culminated on June 30, 1971 in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision to lift the prior restraints – arguably the most important Supreme Court case ever on freedom of the press. 35The 1998 Declaration was delivered on December 10, 1998, exact Centennial of the Treaty of Paris, to US federal government through the US Embassy in Manila. This time around, the text of that document, along with certain vital experts from this book will be sent to scores of e-group and email addresses the world over. 36SYCONE-Humanity
is a world wide synergism-oriented network aimed at doing what its name
describes: “Seek One Humanity,” where the coined word also means
“Synergy in Conscious Oneness.”
It encourages and develops multinationality discourses and
friendships for the active advocacy of human development and harmony. It
is based in the International Academy of Management and Economics (IAME)
in Makati City, the Philippines. |
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