“BBM should urge Secretary Angara to move to update Philippine history, not only to place events in their proper perspective, but for the sake of truth”
A BILL has been filed by Cagayan de Oro Rep. Rufus Rodriguez to have 12 Mindanao revolutionaries declared as national heroes. I believe it’s time our history books be corrected, Santa Banana, since a reading of Philippine history only cited national heroes from Luzon..
I used to teach history at the Ateneo de Manila before it became a university and I wondered why history books only mentioned national heroes from Luzon because historians from Luzon wrote them.
My gulay, it was clearly a bias in favor of our heroes from Luzon! I had urged Vice President Sara Duterte, then Secretary of Education, to endorse the Rodriguez bill to correct Philippine history.
Unfortunately, the Vice President, who is from Davao City, did nothing. Now that we have a new secretary of education, a former senator, Sonny Angara, it would do him well to have the Senate file a counterpart bill of the House Bill 1461, to correct history for the benefit of this and future generations.
House Bill 1461 covers the following revolutionaries from different areas of Mindanao, who resisted the Spanish and American colonizers; some of them even died in the process.
From Cagayan de Oro City and Misamis Oriental, General Nicolas Capistrano, Colonel Velez, Captain Vicente Roa and Apolinario Pabayo; from Misamis Occidental, Simeon Ledesma, Rufino Deloso and Capitan Daligdig; from Surigao, Simon Gonzales, Wenceslao Gonzales and Daniel Toribio Sison; from Zamboanga, General Vicente Alvarez; from Cotabato, Datu Uto and Datu Ali; from Marawi, Amai Pakpak.
Actually, this should be a job of the historical commission, but since there is already a bill filed to correct Philippine history, it would do well for President Marcos Jr. to make this move to declare Mindanaoan revolutionaries as national heroes.
BBM should urge Secretary Angara to move to update Philippine history, not only to place events in their proper perspective, but for the sake of truth.
Santa Banana, I find it very strange that no one, especially BBM, has made any move to rectify history.
If the Spanish and American colonizers did not entirely colonize Mindanao, it’s because of these revolutionaries. Their heroism in the fight for Philippine Independence against the colonizers must be recognized.
Yamahita’s Treasure
In my past column, I wrote about the surrender of the “Tiger of Malaya,’’ General Tomoyuki Yamashita of the Japanese Imperial Forces that occupied the country for nearly four years until the hanging of Yamashita by the Americans leading to the end of the occupation.
My story about Yamashita being responsible for the “Rape of Manila” would not be complete without recounting the “Yamashita Treasure.”
It all began after Yamashita was reassigned to the Philippines that word spread about the Yamashita Treasure he had looted when he first occupied the French Indo-China.
Yamashita was said to have plundered the temples of those countries he occupied and stole what was known as the Golden Buddha.
The story was so famous that after World War II, a movie was produced about that legend, so much so that treasure hunters from all over the world came looking for that treasure.
One after another they came, digging all over alleged places where the treasure was supposed to have been buried.
Santa Banana, the late strongman Marcos Sr, must have believed the treasure really existed because I know he had commissioned my late brother Desi to tell General Zosimo Paredes, who later became the governor of Ifugao, to look for the treasure.
My brother Desi recounted to me his group, with a platoon of soldiers, went all over the Cordilleras, Cagayan Valley, Nueva Ecija, including Baguio City, Pangasinan and La Union, looking and digging for that treasure.
It took them three months and the only thing they found in the forest of Nueva Vizcaya was a cave that contained the remains of a Japanese soldier in full uniform.
The tale of the Yamashita Treasure was fueled by a story in Baguio City where a man was said to have bought a buddha full of jade in it, not the Golden Buddha.
That story of the Golden Buddha was actually a myth, without any foundation, because of stories that those temples of Indo-China were alleged to have contained treasure.
But, I would call it the biggest hoax of the century.
