The post war Filipino nationalism and its anti-American posture

Abstract

Filipino nationalism, which took form during the second half of the nineteenth century and developed through the Revolutionary period, the American colonial regime, and the Commonwealth, may be said to have been atrophied during the few years immediately following the end of the Second World War. This phenomenon, when placed in juxtaposition to Filipino posture during the Revolutionary and American colonial periods appeared to be the anti-climax to the long and arduous struggle for national emancipation and seemed to presage the repetition of the tragedy that began with the defeat of the Spanish flotilla in Manila Bay in 1898 and ended with Japan's surrender on board the Missouri in Tokyo Bay in 1945. It was the immediate postwar years that witnessed the sudden atrophy of Filipino nationalism, for it was during those years of grave physical and spiritual sufferings, of lingering disease and shattered lives lived in ruined towns and cities, that the Filipinos ironically found themselves at the mercy of the United States for whom they offered their honor and their lives in the recently concluded global war. The Filipinos, childlike that they have always been, with an innocence that is at once touching and exasperating, trusted the American sense of justice and fair play too much and found themselves victims of their own delusion which still afflicts many of them to this day.