THE GREATER ENEMY OF THE FILIPINO IS HIMSELF

 

written by Justo Perfecto Dipalulupig Dimaculangan

Brothers, we have a greater enemy than the Americans ... ourselves. - Gen. Antonio Luna.

Until now, the greater enemy of the Filipino. are not the foreign invaders nor the fellow Filipinos turned traitors but the common Filipino himself. The Filipino revolutionaries fought with the Spaniards in 1896, but the supposed victory by the Filipinos against the Spaniards was derailed by the personal political ambitions of Emilio Aguinaldo by ordering the execution of his rival Andres Bonifacio and his brothers.

The Filipinos have not finished their fight for freedom against the Spaniards because the Filipinos' colonizers changed hands after the Spanish-American war, which war was won by the Americans who later become the new colonial masters of the Philippines.

The fight by the Filipino revolutionaries for freedom under America was not realized by the same by way of an armed struggle, because the freedom fighters were fragmented due to envy and insecurity, as a matter of fact, Gen. Antonio Luna was killed by his fellow freedom fighters who were clearly supported by some politicians who have some leanings to America like Buencamino, and even by Aguinaldo who was personally threatened of being probably booted out of power via a military coup d'etat.

The Philippines would later secure its independence from America through diplomacy, and not through armed struggle.

When Japan attacked the Philippines for being an American ally, plenty of Filipinos turned their backs from their loyalty to their motherland and sided with the Japanese. The Philippine struggle against the Japanese aggression was partly stifled because of some Filipino collaborators with the Japanese. Again the Filipino had shown in such a page of Philippine history that he himself was his own enemy.

During the dark years of Marcos's Martial Law, the Philippine dictator, Ferdinand Marcos Sr. has destroyed the Philippine democracy and economy, because of his ambitions in perpetuating himself from power and for enriching himself and his family via his almost DIVINE RIGHTS OF KINGS style of ruling. However, after a twenty-year political slumber, the Filipinos have awakened and revolted against Marcos which became the key to his deposition from power, and the rest as they would say is history.

Almost four decades or exactly thirty-six (36) years of Marcos's deposition from power, his son and namesake Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. was elected as the seventeenth (17th) president of the Republic of the Philippines. This reprehensible turn of events is indeed a great sign that the Filipino is a forgetful creation of nature, that he himself has not learned from the pages of Philippine history, and that he HIMSELF IS HIS GREATEST ENEMY.