WHAT IS THE DEFINITION OF OUR NATION?

DEVELOPMENTAL INTERCOURSE

Prior to the 1500s, somewhere in the southeast Asia, north of Australia, and west of the Pacific Ocean, were people of many different tribes and petty kingdoms of clans of many families who have settled there.  Between the 1500s to the 1700s, the iberians of Western Europe in the name of the government of España also came to the aforementioned area.  These two peoples became involved in a developmental intercourse of events that resulted to the conception of Filipinas with a territorial definition represented by the Murillo Velarde Map of 1734.  This map became the international legal and moral foundation basis of our national territory today.  This embryonic stage was the critical stage where the health of our Determinants of National Attributes or DNA was developed.  Naturally, these centuries of events, led to our national umbilical cord to Madre España being cut upon our birth as a nation in 1898. 


CONCEPTION OF FILIPINO

For us to recover, let us derive that DNA developed in our embryonic stage by two of the ancestors of our national development:  Jose Rizal and Gen Artemio Ricarte. 

Gen Ricarte prepared a position paper which stated that chinese should be banned from business and banking.

A document was shown Jose Rizal to which he drew attention to the fact that he was incorrectly described as a chinese mestizo, saying that he was an "indio puro." Rizal further declared: “I do not agree. This is unjust! Here it says that I am a half-breed, and it isn’t true! I am a pure Filipino!” In a letter to his mother, Jose Rizal wrote: “I had a lawsuit with the Chinese and I vowed not to buy any more from them, so that sometimes I find myself very hard up. Now we have almost neither dishes nor tumblers.” Edgar Wickberg, who wrote "The Chinese in Philippine Life 1850-1898" said that in 1895, while in exile in Dapitan in Mindanao, in the southern Philippines, Jose Rizal was filled with righteous indignation at the “exploitation” of the natives by the Chinese traders, and appealed to the local residents to boycott the Chinese shops. He also opened a small sari-sari store to compete against the Chinese. Nick Joaquin, the late Philippine cultural icon, even praised Rizal’s actions: “And because Chinese financiers had a stranglehold on native agriculture, Rizal set up the Cooperative Association of Dapitan Farmers, a pioneer in economic nationalism.

OUR VALUE

As a new entity, we carried with us this national developmental code we inherited from those interacting separate entities which became our DNA. This was to be an inherent code with a set of self-regulating instinctive instructions on how we, in reference not to ourselves, but to our nation, function coherently to sustain our well-being from generation to generation.

"The Friars in the Philippines" by Coleman, and "GDP per capita in 1900 by country. Definition, graph, and map" by NationMaster.com 2010 reported:

We were among the most educated in all of Asia.  Our economy and standard of living were ahead of most of our Asian neighbors and even many European countries at that time.  In 1900, the estimated GDP per capita for the Philippines was $1033.oo.  We were the second richest nation in Asia, just a little behind Japan, having $1135.oo.  We were far ahead of China, having $652.oo or India having $625.oo.

NATIONAL DEFENSE, RESPONSE TO OUR NATIONAL VALUE

It was this status that conditioned us to respond to a defense situation at that time by rapidly developing an infant but potent defense system when dark forces were gathering heavily to invade us in an attempt to abort that birth.  It was our first encounter with a foreign aggressor force as a filipino nation.  We engaged this foreign aggressor force in 1898 without any help from any other nation.  They were foreigners and they were the emerging most powerful nation in the world at that time- the north americans of the United States. 

Part of our defense system was the activation of a defense force- Ejercito Republicana Filipina.  We lost in many battles but we also defeated them in a number of documented battles like Balangiga, Mabitac, Pulang Lupa, etc..  The U.S. aggressor forces were unable to catch, lock, nor control us for years.

Our Determinant of National Attributes then, which carried our national identity was a potent code against any foreign attempt to possess it.  How we identified ourselves with our nation was demonstrated in a letter by Ellis G. Davis, Company A, 20th Kansas about us in the 1900s: "They will never surrender until their whole race is exterminated. They are fighting for a good cause, and the Americans should be the last of all nations to transgress upon such rights.  Their independence is dearer to them than life,…".  As early as April 1899, north american of the United States General Shafter already recognized that potent national identity when he made a prognosis of the future conduct of the war: "It may be necessary to kill half the filipinos in order that the remaining half of the population may be advanced to a higher plane of life than their present semi-barbarous state affords."

But the most valuable characteristic we had as determined by our organic code in the 1900s that enabled us to be an excellent functioning nation was, our unprecedented and unsurpassed sacrifice of our individual selves and unity among the regions from the north to the south, the poor, rich, military, civilian, educated, and uneducated as one filipino people defending our nation against alien aggressors.

Our individual natural warrior character and our national unity rendered the enemy forces unable to break our defense system for almost 10 years.  The defense forces among us were only compelled to give-in to the demand of the U.S. to surrender to them after they the aggressors, resorted to massive kidnappings and extermination of the civilians among us.  The U.S. until now insisted to call it reconcentration because otherwise they would fall within the category of terrorists of which they themselves set the definition.

BEYOND TERRITORIAL DEFENSE

Even after the physical level of our defenses were dismantled, we still conducted defensive actions not only against the north americans of the United States occupational forces but this time, also against the chinese creeping invasion.  For years, we maneuvered to check these taking over of our economic and political bases mostly at the developmental level.  Around November of 1924, we tried to setup a legal channel of check points for identifying and assessing foreigners entering our country as part of our defense system of checking further foreign infiltration.

However, while our legal check points where still in the setting up stage, the mainland chinese government in complementary with the north americans of the United States, with their military might providing cover, quickly dismantled our check points.  An editorial appeared on June 5, 1926 in The Tribune. It made a comment regarding: the chinese making a plaything of our exclusion laws; their out maneouvering us from the start of our border checking operations, making a fool out of us.

We tried strategies based on our present condition to gain control of as much area of our nation as we could against the foreigners. The start of our series of manoeuvres thru legal operations with the Retail Trade Nationalization Law in 1954 however, was out-manoeuvred by the chinese. After we implemented this law, some 8700 of the 10,000 chinese who rushed to get hold of certificate of filipino citizenship papers after 1946, did so after 1954. We filipinos theoretically overrun previously chinese-controlled areas the strategic value of which were at most, negligible. Thus in paper, the number of chinese registered as engaged in the retail trade was reduced and the number of us filipinos engaged in the same business was increased. In reality however, there was no physical difference. The difference was only in paper.

CONTINUOUS DAMAGE OF NATIONHOOD

This is our national identity as determined by our organic Determinants of National Attributes.  This is the link we have with our nation for generations.  The take-over and control by alien invaders of our political, economic, and defense system, continuously frustrated us as a people in recovering the developmental basis of our heredity from our founding fathers.  As a result, we lost the libido to nurture and protect our own people.  By tampering with our national DNA and transmitting in our political, economic, defense, and educational systems, their synthesized code, our inherited national identity gradually slipped away from us.  Renato Constantino with an analysis by Bert Drona elaborated this tampering of our generators of actions in the site: http://thefilipinomind.blogspot.com/2006/03/making-of-americanized-filipino-minds.html.  Our defense system lost its ability to differentiate between national interest and foreign interest.  This is the developmental Heredity Injuring Variables.  After generations of continuous onslaught of our development: we lost our national identity and unable to differentiate between self and foreigners; we became willing victims of alien slavery; we became impotent at serving the interest of our own nation; we became dependent on our alien occupants for our source of existence; and we prostituted our own nation in exchange for individual fixes.  These are symptoms of an Alienation Impotency Dependency Syndrome.

RECOVERY

We are now aware that we did have a nation.  This nation is a concept as old in existence as that of the conception of our nation in the 1500s to the 1700s.  This is a conception which is of little difference from a biological entity of reproduction, conception, embryonic development and birth.  The quality of our nationhood stood the test in the economic and social development in the early 1900s.  But the ultimate test was in how we responded to the onslaught and attempted abortion of our birth at the post-natal stage of our development by the emerging most powerful nation in the world at that time.  This is also the nationhood that sustained well developed nations who also started from scanty material resources to the present superior development.  Among these nations are the Israelis, french, germans, vietnamese, south koreans, and the japanese.  We are now aware of how we lost our inheritance.  With the proper information, recovery of our inherited nation can now be set in the right direction and within the horizon. 


Jose Miguel Garcia
20160908