The Philippine Online Chronicles

70 years ago this month our country was not even ours. The Second World War was in full tilt and the Imperial Japanese Army had just penetrated our American-fortified defense. Manila was occupied. Filipino and American forces were forced to retreat all the way back to Bataan where many of them (1,200 Americans and 10,000 Filipinos) would meet their death a couple of months later in the infamous “Bataan Death March”.

For the second time in the last forty years, we saw our “independence” slip away into the hands of foreign bullies. The irony of course is that the last bullies to do that to us now fought on our side – The United States of America. It was an irony to punctuate a series of ironies, dating back to the turn of the 20^th century – the point where nationalism, as an ideology, began to spread all across the globe like wildfire. In 1942 this ideology was threatening to blow the whole world – including our own country – into smithereens.

Nationalism on steroids

So how did we get here?

Let’s go back to the early 1900s, when America was brimming with an unprecedented nationalistic fervor. They were at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution, making millionaires of European immigrants overnight and changing the world economic landscape forever. It was nationalism on steroids: a swagger unseen since perhaps the heydays of the British Empire.

American nationalists were convinced that the fate of civilization rested on the hands of white people and that it was their destiny to move westward, believing that “civilization follows the sun”. This belief was advocated by no less than President Theodore Roosevelt: “The persistent Germans swarmed out of the dark woodland east of the Rhine and north of the Danube to conquer their brethren…conquered southern Britain…until, with the discovery of America, a new period of even vaster race expansion began.” In 1898, when the Philippines finally “won” their independence from Spain with the “help” of the U.S., Roosevelt had this to say: “Filipinos are not capable of self-government and cannot be for at least a generation to come. It takes a thousand years to build up an Anglo-Saxon frame of liberty.”

Hence, the Americans “bought” us from the Spaniards as part of their manifest destiny to “go west”. When we resisted, they used force, resulting in the less-chronicled Fil-American War. In the first day of the war, U.S. forces killed more than three thousand Filipinos – more than the number of American casualties in Normandy, in the much romanticized “D-Day” of World War II. General Arthur MacArthur, Military Governor of the Philippines, echoed Teddy Roosevelt’s “go west” dogma: “By due process of expansion to the west our Aryan ancestors occupied Europe, developed arts and sciences, and created a great civilization…incidentally crossing the Atlantic and thereby reclaiming and civilizing a hemisphere. As to why the United States was in the Philippines…this phenomenon have recently forced one of the currents of this magnificent Aryan people across the Pacific – that is to say, back almost to the cradle of its race.”

This was three decades before Adolf Hitler popularized the word “Aryan”.

Sowing the seeds of war

At the height of the Fil-American War, American forces called us “Indians”, “Niggers”, and “Pacific Negroes”. By the turn of the century, the Japanese were regarded as “Honorary Aryans”. Seeing how the Western World subjugated the rest of Asia, the Japanese made a smart decision: separate themselves from other Asians and identify themselves more with white westerners. Soon, they were dressing like them and embracing their values: their militarism and their belief of racial supremacy.

In 1872, American Charles LeGrende introduced the Monroe Doctrine (the belief that only the United States had the right to meddle in the Americas) to the Japanese and encouraged them to embrace their own “Monroe Doctrine for Asia”: “One must act courageously for the purpose of pushing forward the flag of the rising Sun in Asia and for the sake of the expansion of our empire.”

This is the ultimate irony of World War II and what often gets lost in the United States’ dramatization of its role in what they’d like to call “The Good War”: Imperial Japan was a monster that they themselves created. When Teddy Roosevelt negotiated a secret agreement with Japan in 1905 by handing Korea over to them in exchange for the rest of Asia, it set the stage for World War II. By the late 1930s, it was too late: Japan was taking over China and the Philippines, in its aim to unite one Asia under Japan, just as what Nazi Germany was trying to do over in Europe.

Non-manifest destiny

For us, World War II was the culmination of almost forty years of race supremacy doctrines: one by the western world’s self-proclaimed messiahs and another by its Asian counterpart. But while we took the brunt of two nations’ misplaced nationalism, our own nationalism was galvanized in those excruciating days 70 years ago. While General Douglas MacArthur and his troops were kept at bay, Filipino guerrilla fighters kept the struggle going, attacking the enemy despite being grossly overmatched, like in the Revolutionary War against Spain, like in the Fil-American War.

Much has changed since 1942 – Japan is now one of the most progressive and peace-loving nations in the world, while the United States no longer see us Filipinos and Asians as inferiors but as partners. After two atomic bombs ended the war for Japan, it gradually rose from the ashes, building a globally-competitive economy from the ground up. The United States, virtually untouched during World War II, went on to dominate the rest of the century – both economically and culturally. While it is currently on the throes of a great recession, the U.S. is still considered one of the great powers in the world.

The Philippines – the country that Japan and America fought over in 1942 – has faded into the fringes of obscurity and mediocrity. Our nationalism is alive and well, but with every year removed from World War II – or from any bloody struggle that gave credence to our patriotism – our sources of pride get increasingly flimsier. “Pinoy Ako”, “Iba ang Pinoy”: these are the vague clichés we come up with every time the subject of our nationalism comes up. We take pride in our boxers, in our YouTube sensations, in our food, in our idiosyncrasies – in anything that sets us apart from the rest of the world, not because they necessarily warrant pride, but because it defines us. We do this just to get by, just to rationalize our national identity.

For countries humbled by the consequence of World War II, like Japan and Germany, the lesson was clear: nationalism, when taken to its extreme, leads to tyranny and the subjugation of other races. For us Filipinos, the lesson was equally sobering for a totally different reason: we need nationalism to survive. 70 years ago, we fought to our last breath against foreign threats. We defended ourselves from a superiority complex masquerading as nationalism. We fought for our survival.

It was in those days of war that our own nationalism was defined. To this day we still use our nationalism the same way; not to excel, not to dominate – but just to survive.

Alex Almario has won a Nick Joaquin Literary Award for his fiction; his reality, though, is a lot more mundane as a Junior Creative Director in his day job and a writer of essays in his own blog, Colonial Mental. He also recently just realized that twitter exists, so you can follow him there @ColonialMental.

Photo: from google images