The US must rethink its outlook of Filipinos

Since I’m having my kidney transplant surgery at this time, this is an advanced column that I prepared while I’m out of this world for this medical procedure. I already knew in advance that yesterday, the United States held its historic US Presidential elections. But at this point, I won’t have anyway of knowing who really won this Presidential race… so we can only hope that whoever wins the US Presidency would help improve our current ties between the US government and the government of Pres. Rodrigo “Digong” Duterte whose “Pivot to China” sort of short circuited US Pres. Barack Obama’s “Asian Pivot.”

Like what we already wrote about Pres. Duterte’s sudden turnaround against the US… it is the first time since the US gave the Philippines independence on July 4, 1946 that a Philippine President had the guts to thumb his nose against the mighty USA. All Philippine Presidents since Pres. Manuel L. Quezon became Commonwealth President and all the Philippine Presidents all the way to Pres. Benigno “PNoy” Aquino III, they were all dubbed as American lackeys or puppets and only Pres. Duterte ever dared to say anything against America.

Of course, the Americans are sore at Pres. Duterte for trying to impress to the Filipino people that we should pursue an independent foreign policy as embodied in the 1987 Philippine Constitution. So why should the “Kano” be sore when a Philippine President tries to do this? Haven’t the Yanks truly given us our independence or was this nothing but a farce?

Perhaps the problem lies upon the fact that the official mindset in Washington, D. C. has never changed despite giving us our Independence on the fourth of July 1946? Allow me to refresh you on what the Yanks think about us Filipinos as written by American bestseller author James Bradley who wrote “The Imperial Cruise: A secret history of Empire and War.” So I don’t get misunderstood, allow me to quote from page 22 of the book “Imperial Cruise” so you would understand how Americans think about Filipinos.

“Howard Taft referred to the Filipinos as “those wards of ours ten thousand miles away from here.” Declaring that America had a desire to do the best for these people. (The term wards was laden with meaning; former Judge Taft and his audience knew that the United States Supreme Court had defined American Indians as “Wards” of the Federal government,) The problem – which he did not mention – was that the Filipino “wards” didn’t agree with the American sense of what was “Best” for them.

In 1898, Filipino freedom fighters had expected that America would come to their aid in their patriotic revolution against their Spanish colonial masters. Instead, the Americans short-circuited the revolution and took the country for themselves. Related American military actions left two hundred fifty thousand Filipinos dead. Over the next seven years, many Filipinos came to associate Americans with torture, concentration camps, rape and murder of civilians, and destruction of their villages. But in San Francisco’s Palace Hotel, Taft assured his audience that the real problem was the Filipinos themselves.

“The problem in the Philippines is the problem of making the people whom we are to govern in those islands for their benefit believe that we are sincere when we tell them that we are there for their benefit, and make them patient while we are instructing them in self-government. You cannot make them patient unless you convince them of your good intentions. I am confronted with the repeated question, Shall we grant them independence at once or are we right to show them that they cannot be made fit for independence at once? They are not yet ready for independence and if they talk of independence at the present time it is mere wind.”

Mind you, in July 1905, William Howard Taft was Secretary of War and was later assigned as the first Governor General for the Philippines. He spoke these words 41 years before the Philippines were granted independence by the US. But right after the debacle of World War II when Manila was considered the worst devastated city of that war (Cebu City was not even in the list despite the fact that the city was 90% destroyed) America suddenly gave us our independence. Yet as history teaches us… we really did not have true independence from America… as there was an umbilical cord that was never cut off… it was called the US military bases in the Philippines.

So whoever gets to be the next US President has to learn to show us Filipinos that they know how to respect President Duterte even as he pursues an “Independent foreign policy”. They can show respect by returning the Bells of Balangiga as a sign of goodwill. These are dark moments in RP-US history that even our own Filipino historians kept from our people and I dare say that the American mindset about us Filipinos should change.

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