Foreword 

A 'Continuing Dialogue' with Rizal

Jose Rizal’s “The Philippines a Century Hence” may be the best-known scenario paper about the Philippines that was written by a Filipino. A review of it, in the form of an open letter, has emerged a full century later to engage that hero in a dialogue on the possible scenarios that he had projected. This dialogue is a continuing one.

In his long essay, which was carried in installments by the ilustrados’ democratic magazine La Solidaridad, Rizal named the countries that would possibly colonize or invade the Philippines after the Filipinos would have won their independence in a bloody national war against the imperialist Spanish occupiers. In Rizal’s list, the United States of America stood out as the most probable aggressor. Rizal was proven correct. McKinley’s America did invade the “Pearl of the Orient” and dismantled the Malolos-based Philippine Republic. The American Occupation cost one million Filipino souls.

Rizal’s prediction was published in 1889-1890; the US war of aggression occurred in 1899.

Rizal’s forecast came true a second time with another aggressor on his list. Hirohito’s Japan also invaded the Philippines in 1941 and occupied it until 1945. Rizal’s hundred-year coverage hit the mark again in 52 years.

Who would have benefited from Rizal’s foretelling? Don Emilio Aguinaldo was president of the Malolos Republic, and he failed to stop the American sneak attack in Manila in February 1899. Worse, he allowed himself to be captured a day after his birthday in 1901 by a special unit of the enemy army. Manuel Luis Quezon was president of the Philippine Commonwealth in the late 1930s. But, unlike the hapless Aguinaldo, he was alert to the likelihood of a new invasion, this time by the Japanese.

Quezon knew that war was coming soon. In his autobiography, he related, “For several months, I had been almost certain that war with Japan was inevitable in view of the positive stand taken by the United States vis-a-vis the so-called ‘China Incident’ and the announced Greater East Asia policy of Japan.” [The Good Fight. New York: D. Appleton-Century Company, Inc., 1946, p. 183]

Quezon was a competent chief executive and he prepared his people for the coming conflagration the best he could. Alas, the Filipino leader’s efforts were stymied by the lackadaisical policies and management of the Americans who sat as the colonial masters of the Philippine Islands.

The Americans did not lack scenarios of coming conflicts with the Mikado’s minions. As early as 1907, the Joint Army and Navy Board of the United States began drawing up contingency plans for a war against Japan. A year later, Homer Lea published “The Valor of Ignorance,” arguing that a state of war already existed between the US and Japan.

In 1914, one American, an indefatigable writer of novels and short stories, published his own outline of a fictional future war. Jack London, better known as the author of White Fang (1906) and The Call of the Wild (1903), wrote The Unparalleled Invasion wherein he correctly extrapolated the trajectory of Japanese aggression in Asia. To wit:

“Having decisively thrashed the great Russian Empire, Japan promptly set about dreaming a colossal dream of an empire for herself. Korea she had made into a granary and a colony; treaty privileges and vulpine diplomacy gave her the monopoly of Manchuria. But Japan was not satisfied. She turned her eyes upon China. There lay a vast territory, and in that territory were the hugest deposits in the world of iron and coal - the backbone of industrial civilization.”

The Russo-Japanese War was won by the latter ten years before Jack London’s story. Tokyo’s formal annexation of Korea was in 1910, and back in 1895, Imperial Japan had taken Formosa, the Penghu Islands, and the Liaodong Peninsula from the Qing Dynasty of China.

In World War I, Japan seized German holdings in East Asia, including the Chinese territory of Kiaochow. And with its infamous “Twenty-One Demands,” Tokyo forced the Chinese acceptance of extended Japanese influence in China.

World War I ended 1918, the same year when Tokyo’s Imperial Defense Policy designated the US as the potential enemy number one of Japan.

It was China that became the real danger to the world, not because of a large standing army, but due to the “fecundity of her loins.” With her hundreds of millions, this China overran Southeast Asia in 1970-75, wresting Indo-China from France, Burma and the Malay Peninsula from Britain, and the Kingdom of Siam.

Incidentally, in Rizal’s “The Philippines A Century Hence,” China was also a potential colonizer.

Rizal foresaw his countrymen standing up and standing toe to toe with the colonialist Spaniards. Independence was inevitable, but Rizal also forecast the heavy possibility that a squad of expansionist states, besides Spain, would try to take down the Philippines.

Of these annexationist powers, it was the United States first, and Japan later, that did invade Rizal’s homeland in a span of 55 years.

Rizal was right. Was he clairvoyant? Perhaps. But his true power came from a synergy of the abilities to observe, analyze and extrapolate. Such extrapolation requires a re-examination of previous trends. As Rizal began his essay, “In order to read the destiny of a people, it is necessary to open the book of its past.”

We have had Jose Rizal’s far-sighted essay, wherein the ilustrado’s fear was centered on a racial war between a colony and its colonizer. The Philippines “will declare themselves independent after steeping themselves and the mother country in blood.”

This same fear led Rizal, who predicted an insurrection activated by a movement springing from the people themselves and basing its causes upon their woes, into a rejection of the Katipunan’s offers of leadership and rescue and a repudiation of his nation’s war of self-determination.

In spite of Rizal’s phobic dismissal of a revolutionary struggle and his preference for a peaceful evolution, the natives of the Philippine Islands opted for a republic won through a war of national liberation.

This republic was born in 1896 and managed to reach 2006 relatively intact though imperfect, indolent and immature.  From the vantage point of the end of Rizal’s “something like a hundred years,” an open letter was written recalling and analyzing what exactly happened in those ten decades that followed the publication of Rizal’s forecasts. 

Now on its third incarnation (it was first circulated as a monograph in 1989), Ed Aurelio Reyes’ “The Philippines A Century Thence” has continued the dialogue between the First Filipino who belonged to the end of the 19th century and the citizens of Jose Rizal’s homeland now living in these early years of the  21st century.

Reyes’ 1989 essay is a heartfelt reply to Rizal’s “The Philippines A Century Hence,” and it was this work that launched the campaign to raise the historical awareness among the resurgent Filipinos in the booming Philippine Centennial years.

It was a successful lift-off and KAMALAYSAYAN today is a reputable ensemble of heritage-conscious, liberty-passionate nationals.

Reyes and Rizal did more than review the relevant trends of the past; they put forward the patterns that dyed their present, which failed to fade in their futures. In telescoping the days of yore, Reyes and Rizal also remote-sensed the days of fore.

Prof. Bernard LM. Karganilla

Chair, KAMALAYSAYAN (Kaisahan sa Kamalayan sa Kasaysayan, formerly Kampanya para sa Kamalayan sa Kasaysayan); and Chair, Katipunang DakiLahi para sa Pambansang Pagsasanib-lakas (DakiLahi)

Manila, Philippines, January 2007

[Prof. Karganilla is also associate professor in the social sciences and public management of the University of the Philippines Manila and University of the Philippines Open University; columnist of Malaya, a nationally-circulated daily broadsheet newspaper; and convenor of the Filipino Indigenous Healers Study Group of the National Institutes of Health of the Philippines.]

previous   top   next