20090731
Life of Saint Ignatius of Loyola
From engaging in a worldly warfare, he became engaged in the most basic of our levels-- a spiritual warfare. He founded the Society of Jesus.
20090720
Open Message of Congratulation to MGEN JUANCHO SABBAN, AFP
Congratulations to you, MGen Sabban, Sir!
I am happy for you, who deserves the new position because of your dedication to the development of the art and profession of combat thru our reality.
I am happy for the Filipino Marines among us, who because of high standard of discipline and dedication to the combat profession and to serve the Filipino people, deserve a commandant with an equally high standard of discipline, and distinct marine leadership who, amidst storm could steer the unit to arrive at its frontier destination with the well-being of his men sustained at a high level.
I am happy for us, the Filipino people, who has now a captain of one of the most reliable defense unit of the nation, whose system of combat has always been founded on the preservation of our Filipino nation and it’s interest above the defense unit and self and above any other nation.
Lest we forget, let us review http://jmgpatria.blogspot.com/2009/06/american-invasion-continues_7055.html, http://jmgpatria.blogspot.com/2009/06/chinese-invasion-continues.html and http://jmgpatria.blogspot.com/2009/06/developmental-basis.html. That is why I am happy for us Filipinos, who have long been driven out of our inherited nation and taken over by the American and Chinese invaders. With our nation always held dear to your heart, we feel expectant as we are also hopeful that you will as always, be with us your brother Filipinos in our very long struggle to finally come to and recover our own home-- Filipinas!
José Miguel García
20090704
GeoCities: Artemio Ricarte
Based on this writing, it must have been written by Jose Ranes during the time of Gen Ricarte.
Wiki: Antonio Luna
The loss of Luna, was a great loss to our resistance against the American invasion.
20090703
CITIZEN'S PEACE WATCH: REPORT OF THE FACT-FINDING MISSION TO ZAMBOANGA CITY AND SULU, Feb. 2008
Filipinos, it is time to wake up!
Israel transformed from a stateless people scattered around the world for 2000 years and reclaimed their land only in the 1940s, to a nation with one of the most powerful defense force in the world.
Vietnam, a third world country, but drove away from their soil, what has been regarded as the most powerful military in the world- US Armed Forces.
Many Asean nations just several years back were behind us in military equipment and firepower are now way ahead of us.
What do they have that we do not? Let us wake up!
Israel transformed from a stateless people scattered around the world for 2000 years and reclaimed their land only in the 1940s, to a nation with one of the most powerful defense force in the world.
Vietnam, a third world country, but drove away from their soil, what has been regarded as the most powerful military in the world- US Armed Forces.
Many Asean nations just several years back were behind us in military equipment and firepower are now way ahead of us.
What do they have that we do not? Let us wake up!
THE NEW YORKER: ANALS OF AMERICAN HISTORY: THE WATER CURE
This is the spirit of the statement, "...to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them,..." of American President McKinley.
20090702
Duration of Philippine-American War: 1899-1913
By Jim Zwick (February 4, 1999). Copyright © 1999 Jim Zwick. All rights reserved.
The centennials of the Philippine Revolution and the Philippine-American War have led to a long-needed reexamination of Philippine and U.S. history. Only in March of 1998 did the U.S. Library of Congress finally abandon its antiquated "Philippine Insurrection" subject category in favor of two new ones: "Philippine Revolution, 1896-1898" and "Philippine-American War, 1899-1902." But as the Philippine Daily Inquirer's editorial of Feb. 4 pointed out, the Revolution continued beyond 1898, and the war lasted much longer than three years.
I first came upon these problems while researching Mark Twain's writings on the war. He wrote the satirical story "The War Prayer" in 1905, and in March of 1906 he wrote a scathing indictment of the U.S. troops who massacred 900 Muslim Filipinos -- men, women and children -- at Bud Dajo. The Filipinos were trapped in the volcanic crater and fired upon for four days from the heights above until all were reported killed (one young girl survived). Twain continued to comment on the war and U.S. imperialism until at least 1908, but the events of those years that inspired his writings were not covered in any history of the war I could find.
Although the war was never declared in the first place, U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt declared it over on July 4, 1902. The date was not only symbolic but politically expedient. Less than a week before the U.S. senate had concluded embarrassing hearings that delved into U.S. Army atrocities during the war. The hearings included testimony by soldiers about use of the "water cure" torture and Gen. Jacob Smith's order to "kill and burn" and turn Samar into a "howling wilderness." Roosevelt was faced with growing domestic opposition to the already unpopular war. If it was over, the revelations of atrocities would no longer be politically relevant.
But the war continued, and further denials of its existence were necessary. On November 26, 1902, the Philippine Commission passed a "Brigandage Act" that defined any further resistance to U.S. rule as "banditry." As Orlino Ochosa has discussed in his book, "Bandoleros": Outlawed Guerrillas of the Philippine-American War, 1903-1907, the last holdouts among the Filipino officers on the northern front were hanged as bandits in 1907. Their deaths provided the U.S. with the opportunity to establish the Philippine Assembly that year. Its creation had been delayed until "pacification" was complete in the northern islands. But that wasn't the end, either.
The war had a second front that is rarely recognized in U.S. or Filipino scholarship. Warfare with the Muslim Filipinos was avoided in 1899 through the Bates Agreement which promised them autonomy in exchange for recognition of nominal U.S. rule. Once the warfare in the north began to subside, the U.S. abrogated that agreement in 1903 and commenced military operations aimed at exerting full U.S. control over the southern islands. Two of the worst massacres of the war took place in the south in 1906 and 1913 (about 500 Muslim Filipinos were reported killed at Bud Bagsak in June 1913), and Moro Province remained under U.S. military government until the end of December 1913.
It is true that the U.S. established stable colonial control of the northern islands while the war in the south was taking place. But to accept that the Philippine-American War ended any earlier than December 1913 would seem to require complete dismissal of the U.S. military's divide and conquer strategy that took advantage of still existing divisions within the Philippine population.
During the centennial we should also examine the later years of the war. It had a devastating impact on a truly national scale in the Philippines, and it was not only America's "first Vietnam" but the longest war in U.S. history.
Jim Zwick is the author of Militarism and Repression in the Philippines (1982), the editor of Mark Twain's Weapons of Satire: Anti-Imperialist Writings on the Philippine-American War (1992), and has published articles about the Anti-Imperialist League and Mark Twain's anti-imperialist writings in Amerasia Journal, The Atlantic Monthly, Over Here: Reviews in American Studies (UK), the Mark Twain Journal, Filipinas Magazine, and elsewhere. From 1989 to 1994 he also edited the FFP Bulletin published by Friends of the Filipino People.
20090701
Selves and Others: U.S. Genocide in the Philippines
U.S. Genocide in the Philippines
A Case of Guilt, Shame, or Amnesia?
Tuesday 22 March 2005, by E. San Juan, Jr.
Very few people know what the Filipino-American War of 1899-1902 was all about, even though historian Bernard Fall called it America’s "First Vietnam." Amid the war in Iraq following the invasion of Afghanistan, can we still learn from history?
Except during the sixties when the Filipino-American War of 1899-1902 was referred to as “the first Vietnam,” the death of 1.4 million Filipinos has been usually accounted for as either collateral damage or victims of insurrection against the imperial authority of the United States. The first Filipino scholar to make a thorough documentation of the carnage is the late Luzviminda Francisco in her contribution to The Philippines: The End of An Illusion (London, 1973).
This fact is not even mentioned in the tiny paragraph or so in most U.S. history textbooks. Stanley Karnow’s In Our Image (1989), the acclaimed history of this intervention, quotes the figure of 200,000 Filipinos killed in outright fighting. Among historians, only Howard Zinn and Gabriel Kolko have dwelt on the “genocidal” character of the catastrophe. Kolko, in his magisterial Main Currents in Modern American History (1976), reflects on the context of the mass murder: “Violence reached a crescendo against the Indian after the Civil War and found a yet bloodier manifestation during the protracted conquest of the Philippines from 1898 until well into the next decade, when anywhere from 200,000 to 600,000 Filipinos were killed in an orgy of racist slaughter that evoked much congratulation and approval....” Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980) cites 300,000 Filipinos killed in Batangas alone, while William Pomeroy’s American Neo-Colonialism (1970) cites 600,000 Filipinos dead in Luzon alone by 1902. The actual figure of 1.4 million covers the period from 1899 to 1905 when resistance by the Filipino revolutionary forces mutated from outright combat in battle to guerilla skirmishes; it doesn’t include the thousands of Moros (Filipino Muslims) killed in the first two decades of U.S. colonial domination.
The first Philippine Republic led by Emilio Aguinaldo, which had already waged a successful war against the Spanish colonizers, mounted a determined nationwide opposition against U.S. invading forces. It continued for two more decades after Aguinaldo’s capture in 1901. Several provinces resisted to the point where the U.S. had to employ scorched-earth tactics, and hamletting or “reconcentration” to quarantine the populace from the guerillas, resulting in widespread torture, disease, and mass starvation. In The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective (2003), Prof. Gavan McCormack argues that the outright counterguerilla operations launched by the U.S. against the Filipinos, an integral part of its violent pacification program, constitutes genocide. He refers to Jean Paul Sartre’s contention that as in Vietnam, “the only anti-guerilla strategy which will be effective is the destruction of the people, in other words, the civilians, women and children.” That is what happened in the Philippines in the first half of the bloody twentieth century.
As defined by the UN 1948 “ Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” genocide means acts “committed with intention to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” It is clear that the U.S. colonial conquest of the Philippines deliberately sought to destroy the national sovereignty of the Filipinos. The intent of the U.S. perpetrators included the dissolution of the ethnic identity of the Filipinos manifest in the rhetoric, policies, and disciplinary regimes enunciated and executed by legislators, politicians, military personnel, and other apparatuses. The original proponents of the UN document on genocide conceived of genocide as including acts or policies aimed at “preventing the preservation or development” of “racial, national, linguistic, religious, or political groups.” That would include “all forms of propaganda tending by their systematic and hateful character to provoke genocide, or tending to make it appear as a necessary, legitimate, or excusable act.” What the UN had in mind, namely, genocide as cultural or social death of targeted groups, was purged from the final document due to the political interests of the nation-states that then dominated the world body.
What was deleted in the original draft of the UN document are practices considered genocidal in their collective effect. Some of them were carried out in the Philippines by the United States from 1899 up to 1946 when the country was finally granted formal independence. As with the American Indians, U.S. colonization involved, among others, the “destruction of the specific character of a persecuted group by forced transfer of children, forced exile, prohibition of the use of the national language, destruction of books, documents, monuments, and objects of historical, artistic or religious value.” The goal of all colonialism is the cultural and social death of the conquered natives, in effect, genocide.
In a recent article, “Genocide and America” (New York Review of Books, March 14, 2002), Samantha Power observes that US officials “had genuine difficulty distinguishing the deliberate massacre of civilians from the casualties incurred in conventional conflict.” It is precisely the blurring of this distinction in colonial wars through racializing discourses and practices that proves how genocide cannot be fully grasped without analyzing the way the victimizer (the colonizing state power) categorizes the victims (target populations) in totalizing and naturalizing modes unique perhaps to the civilizational drives of modernity. Within the modern period, in particular, the messianic impulse to genocide springs from the imperative of capital accumulation-the imperative to reduce humans to commodified labor-power, to saleable goods/services. U.S. “primitive accumulation” began with the early colonies in New England and Virginia, and culminated in the 19th century with the conquest and annexation of Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guam, Hawaii, and the Philippines.With the historical background of the U.S. campaigns against the American Indians in particular, and the treatment of African slaves and Chicanos in general, there is a need for future scholars and researchers to concretize this idea of genocide (as byproduct of imperial expansion) by exemplary illustrations from the U.S. colonial adventure in the Philippines.
E. San Juan, Jr. was recently Fulbright Professor of American Studies at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, and visiting professor of literature and cultural studies at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan, Republic of China.
See online : http://www.selvesandothers.org/arti...
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