I. Accelerated Time Frames 

THAT SPECIFIC MASTERWORK of yours spoke in terms of centuries – three centuries of Spanish domination in retrospect, and a full century projecting alternative perspectives. Reading your work again  affords the present-day Filipino the sense of history that can enrich with invaluable wisdom an otherwise myopic view of eclectic details overemphasized in the hectic mode of the day-to-day, even more hour-to-hour, news.

History subjects have been rendered generally unattractive to students by approaches that impose the memorization of so many names and dates while failing to trace the more essential strands of development all the way to their present-day consequences.⁶ The result is just the same myopia of daily news reading, stretched over much longer period of time, and in effect reducing historians to the level of simple compilers of newspaper clippings.

Consciously seeking to avoid doing such disservice to history as a valuable academic discipline, the present-day Filipino can travel a full century back to the time your essay was being published in La, Solidaridad, grasp the logical and empirical premises of your projections, and then seek to compare these projections with how developments actually unfolded in the hundred years that followed your prognosis.

The immensity of the century as a time frame rightly humbles the viewer and his possible preoccupations with such incidental and accidental details as exact dates and specific personalities.

Another thing noteworthy about your hundred-years time frame is that historical developments have had the tendency to accelerate. Aided by hindsight counting three centuries, you proceeded to project alternative perspectives for this country, which “may come to pass within something like a hundred years.” However, as things actually turned out, virtually all the specific issues and questions you sought to answer in prospect were decisively resolved within a mere dozen years afterwards.

The following were resolved, so speak, way ahead of schedule: whether or not Spain was going to accord the Filipinos equal treatment within the Spanish political system, which was actually the persuasive focus of your essay (resolved after three years, with your exile to Zamboanga as a consequence of your forming an economic welfare society); whether or not our countrymen were going to rise against the colonial “mother country” (resolved after three years with the founding of the Katipunan and the subsequent “Cry”)⁷ and prevail over this colonial master (resolved after nine years with the final Siege of Intramuros)⁸; and whether, after winning independence, our people would be recolonized and by which foreign power (resolved completely within twelve years).⁹

What could not be resolved was the future of our country as premised on a successful defense of liberty. Your vision of beloved Philippines “like the bird that leaves its cage” has had to be preserved as a vision emoted in lyrics from a favorite anti-colonial classic, “Ibon mang may layang lumipad…”¹⁰

Time frames have been shrinking, indeed! Contrast, for example, the months-long cycle of a complete exchange of correspondence carried by ships between the Philippines and the Iberian Peninsula, to present-day cross-continental long-distance telephone conversations carried by fiber optic cables and relayed by satellites anchored in the skies.

Man has conquered the skies and has even set foot on the Moon, but obviously he has yet to discard his predatory-animal tail. The decades that followed the publication of your essay saw the geometrically progressing acceleration of development of technologies of commerce, industry, communications and warfare. Unfortunately, all this progress was not accompanied by forward steps in man’s march  to justice. Instead of helping bridge the gap between the world’s rich and its poor, all this progress helped widen the chasm  even further. It helped the powerful “modernize,” and thus make more sophisticated and efficient – in short, more effective – their mechanisms for exploitation, deception and intimidation. Thus we now bear witness to the continuing net outflow of human and material resources form impoverished countries to their supposed benefactors.¹¹

What had sprung forth earlier in advanced countries as clearly a positive progression from monarchist feudal shackles to the emergence of free individual enterprise and free competition – the very positive and liberating system called Capitalism – developed into the concentration of industrial and financial capital in the hands of a few, putting an end to free competition as such. The immeasurable value of each human person, as well as the dignity of his labor, came to be honored only in lip-service, as man himself, specifically his waking hours and capacity to produce goods and services, became a very cheap commodity. As labor-intensive industries were affected by the still-quickening march of modernization, the price of human labor commodity dropped deeper and deeper to the level of near- or actual destitution, thus limiting to the elite the full benefits and amenities brought about by such modernization process.

Monopoly capitalism developed to Imperialism (the policy of building and maintaining worldwide empires for monopoly capital) and replaced simple trade interests as the moving force behind the conquest and maintenance of colonies.

After two world wars and in the face of advancing national liberation movements, the practice of keeping colonies gave way to the phenomenon of indirect colonialism. In this form of new colonialism, native politicians have become the formal and visible rulers. However, these countries’ manpower and economic resources and the basic government policies on the mobilization of these resources have been effectively controlled by foreign governments and multinational industrial-financial giants, collectively called the Imperialists.

Meanwhile, a worldwide movement developed from that Communist Manifesto that was already “haunting Europe” at the time you were there. The theories developed by Marx in Germany, France and England, reached a certain level of fruition in what was up to then the very backward monarchial country called Russia,, which later emerged as a world power. But since the time the Bolshevik Soviet revolutionaries led by Lenin were overthrowing tsarism in those “ten days that shook the world,” developments include the initial overwhelming projection of the Communist as simplistically equated to draconian policies identified with Lenin’s immediate successors.

All these had developed about halfway through that “something like a hundred years” you had sought to project in your essay, things the greatest thinkers of your time could not justly be expected to predict eleven years before the close of the nineteenth century. These and their resultant developments can only be expected to accelerate even further, with twists and turns we cannot now be confident we can foresee.¹²

For this reason, and also on account of the clear and present danger of our collective annihilation by nuclear weapons and by continued destruction of the environment, I would not attempt to guess what the Philippines would be like, say, even just a quarter of a century from today.¹³

______________________________

NOTES:

⁶For the study of Philippine history to attain any measure of any relevance to the interests of the students, the lessons of the past must be brought to explain present-day realities and to help enlighten present-day decision-making. Locked in the graveyard of the past the lessons of history, more so the details many history teachers habitually force their students to memorize, would have no practical value beyond exams and grades.

⁷On July 7, 1892, the Katipunan was founded as a clearly-separatist and revolutionary movement. It fist embarked on a four-year strategy of gathering ("tipon") the people into noble nationhood through education and archipelago-wide organizing work.

⁸Aguinaldo was tricked by US military officers to stay outside Intramuros while they took over the besieged walled capital from the surrendering Spaniards.

⁹By 1902— the American forces won their decisive victory in the US war of invasion in our country, also known as the Filipino-American war, the most downplayed chapter in official Philippine history.

¹⁰Judging from its lyrics, this was an anti-imperialist song. It got devalued when people used as the anthem of the struggle against the Marcos dictatorship without paying any mind to its nationalist spirit and content.

¹¹Desite the entry of resources into the country, in the form of foreign investments, foreign loans, and, since fairly recently, dollar remittances of overseas Filipino workers, there has consistently been a net outflow. That is, the outflow – in the form loan repayments (with interest), repatriated profits, payments for imports, giant honoraria for foreign consultants, and royalties – has always been much bigger than the influx. In fact, much of foreign direct investments consists of funds borrowed from Philippine funds as even guaranteed by the subservient government, while overtaxed Filipino capitalists find it hard to secure loans from these same sources.

¹²Unforeseeable twists and turns always abound in collective history because these are shifting configurations that are very real but not to be perceived in any of the individual lives and circumstances. Great paradigm shifts have taken place in the world especially as noted in such works as The Third Wave by Alvin Toffler and Megatrends by John Nisbitt.

¹³At the time this open letter was being written in 1989, there was no way we could predict that a majority of our senators would vote against the retention of the bases, they having been endorsed by President Aquino who was actively campaigning for the bases’ retention. Much less could we predict that Mt. Pinatubo in Zambales, thought to be a "dead volcano" for being perfectly quiet for more than six centuries, would suddenly blow its top in world-class eruption and fill large areas within both the two major US bases here with lahar.

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