The Hero Of The Filipinos

A futile insurrection had been followed by terrible reprisals and a hardening everywhere of the articulated tyranny, terrorism, and espionage with which the Government ruled. Such from the beginning had been its practice in the long and uninspiring record of the Spanish occupation of the Philippines: sore oppression leading to inevitable revolt and then savage vengeance that sowed the seed of more revolt. Now, as always in that delirious procedure, innocent natives were swept to punishment indiscriminately with the guilty; men that had taken part in the uprising and men that had never heard of it. With the rest of these victims of insensate rage, marched, on the morning of February 28, 1872, three beloved priests and servants of God, of whose complicity in the plot was never a shred of ponderable evidence. One of them, lifting up his voice in prayer for his assassins as he went along, was eighty-five years old. Not his years nor his gray hairs nor those good works that had brought him honor availed to save Father Mariano Gomez from the most ignominious of deaths. With Fathers Burgos and Zamora, he was garroted on Bagumbayan Field, fronting the sea at Manila; a place consecrated in the Filipino mind to memories terrible and yet grand. Native poets and orators that have seen there every blade of grass springing from the blood of heroes are hardly over-imaginative. On that spot to the same cause the same dull power sacrificed victim after victim, ending with the nation’s greatest and best. But now, in 1872, forgotten medieval brutalities seemed to be brought back to darken life in a region the sunniest and of right the most cheerful. Prisoners were tortured with instruments the world believed to exist only in museums; tortured with thumb-screws, great pincers, and machines of devilish ingenuity that produced and reiterated the agonies of drowning. The whip was busy in the hands of men hired for their expert knowledge of how it could be used to yield the largest fruition of pain; many a wretched Filipino that had in his heart no more of disloyalty than you or I was flogged naked in the presence of officers in whose ears his shrieks seemed to sound like music. Hysteria and fear in the minds of the dominant class were added to the racial hatred always festering there. Under the empire of this triad of the beast, men that had worn the gloss of the almost classic society of Madrid became in the Philippines no better than hooting devils. To the typical haughty Spaniard there the Filipino was an Indio, an inferior creature designed to render service to the white man’s needs and to receive the white man’s blows. Each successive generation of rulers had learned at least once, and always with astonishment and disgust, that the lowly Indio was capable of combinations and resistances that sometimes shook the walls of Malacañan itself and started painful visions of massacres and wild fleeings. From the beginning to the end of the story, it was a discovery that first exiled reason and then multiplied work to the executioner. Yet the knowledge gained in this way by one generation never seemed to enlighten the next: each revolt created in its turn the same astonishment, as if for the first time in human experience wronged men had turned against their wrongers. Each generation, therefore, had the same obtuse notion of violent repression as the only answer to the natives’ complaint, a concept that each left with additions of its own to its successor. Hence the complex savageries of 1872, which might be regarded as in a way accretionary; not a soul in the governing class seeming to suspect, despite all this rich experience, that the essence of the slayings was no better than one revenge making ready for another.

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Dreadful and frightening monsters have come to destroy a small rural village. Only Isdaman, the little Filipino superhero, dares to stand up to them! However, he is just one boy-does he have what it takes to defend the village and bring back the peace? Join Isdaman as he battles foe after foe throughout the breathtaking lands of the Isles of the Philippines.

This book is about José Protasio Rizal Mercado y Alonso Realonda, widely known as José Rizal (June 19, 1861 – December 30, 1896). He was a Filipino nationalist and polymath during the tail end of the Spanish colonial period of the Philippines. An ophthalmologist by profession, Rizal became a writer and a key member of the Filipino Propaganda Movement which advocated political reforms for the colony under Spain. He was executed by the Spanish colonial government for the crime of rebellion after an anti-dd revolution, inspired in part by his writings, broke out. Though he was not actively involved in its planning or conduct, he ultimately approved of its goals which eventually led to Philippine independence.

Magdalo was the nom de guerre of a man named Emilio Aguinaldo, a revolutionary hero in the mold of William Wallace, George Washington, and Emiliano Zapata. Spain ruled over the Philippine Islands for more than 300 years, finally causing a violent rebellion led by Magdalo in 1896. The United States allied with him in the 1898 war against Spain; he secured land while Admiral Dewey secured seas. The Spanish beaten, the U.S. became the imperial masters of the islandsa]an uncharacteristic move from those commonly seen as the beacon of democracy. But the Filipinos rejected that authority, thus the Spanish-American War became the Philippine-American War. We have had three specific periods in our history which are eerily similarathe Philippine-American War, the Vietnam War, and the Iraq War. To hear those who oppose U.S. authority described as insurgents or insurrectos, echoes appearathe same terms were used for the Filipinos in 1900. Aguinaldo, the first president of the Philippine Republic, first fought with us, then against us, and finally forgave and redeemed us. Magdalo the warrior became Aguinaldo the statesman.

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Indolence of the Filipino" by José Rizal. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.