#16 — Sunday, 20th April 1901
Yesterday, a man surrendered his country.
Emilio Aguinaldo — president of the First Philippine Republic, the first constitutional republic in Asia, a nation that declared its independence on a June afternoon in 1898 while a band played the new national anthem and a flag sewn in Hong Kong was unfurled for the first time — issued a proclamation from Manila accepting the sovereignty of the United States and telling his people to lay down their arms.
Let the stream of blood cease to flow, he said. Let there be an end to tears and desolation.
He said this in English. I want you to notice that. He surrendered in the language of the people he was surrendering to. This is what it means to lose: not only do you give up your army and your flag and your government and your claim to your own future, but you give up in the vocabulary of the victor, because the victor’s vocabulary is the one that will be recorded, and recorded is the only thing that matters now, because everything else — the independence, the republic, the anthem, the flag — is already gone.
I want to tell you how this happened, because the how is the thing the century will repeat, and recognising the pattern is the only defence the living have against it.
Three years ago, the United States went to war with Spain. The Filipinos, who had been fighting for independence from Spain for years, were told — or allowed to believe, which is the same thing — that America was coming to help. Admiral Dewey sailed into Manila Bay, destroyed the Spanish fleet, and invited Aguinaldo back from exile in Hong Kong to continue the fight against Spain on land. The Filipinos did most of the fighting. They captured nine thousand Spanish prisoners. They controlled nearly the entire archipelago. They declared independence. They wrote a constitution. They elected a president. They believed they were free.
Then they discovered that the Treaty of Paris — signed in December 1898, without a single Filipino present at the table — had transferred the Philippines from Spain to the United States for twenty million dollars. The word transferred is the one the treaty uses. It is the word you use for cargo. The Philippines was not liberated. It was sold, by one empire to another, like a house whose tenants were not informed of the transaction.
When the Filipinos objected — when they pointed out that they had already declared independence, already elected a president, already written a constitution — the United States sent seventy thousand troops and spent three years teaching them the same lesson that every empire teaches: your constitution is not valid, your president is not recognised, your independence is not real, because we decide what is real, and we have decided that you are not ready.
The war has been brutal. American soldiers have burned villages, tortured prisoners with water — they call it the water cure, which is the ancestor of what a later century will call waterboarding and will argue about in congressional hearings as though it were a new idea rather than a technique perfected in the Philippines in 1901. They have herded civilians into zones of concentration. They have killed prisoners. A soldier from New York wrote home: Our men have been relentless, have killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners and captives. The letter was published. The war continued.
Aguinaldo, captured through deception on the twenty-third of March — American scouts disguised as rebel reinforcements — has been in custody for a month. Yesterday’s proclamation is the price of his life. He has been told that further resistance is impossible. He has looked at the arithmetic — seventy thousand American soldiers, modern weapons, unlimited supply lines — and concluded that the arithmetic is correct. He is surrendering not because he agrees but because he has counted, and the numbers do not lie, and the bodies are real, and the stream of blood that he asks to stop flowing is not a metaphor. It is his people’s blood. It is actual blood, in actual dirt, on actual islands that the United States purchased for twenty million dollars from a country that had no right to sell them.
The complete termination of hostilities and a lasting peace are not only desirable but absolutely essential for the well-being of the Philippines, his proclamation says. He is using the language of reasonableness. He is using the language of a man who has decided that survival is more important than dignity, because dignity does not feed children, and dead patriots do not build nations.
He is thirty-two years old. He will live to be ninety-four. He will spend forty-five years watching foreign powers govern his country — first America, then Japan, then America again — before the Philippines finally achieves independence on the fourth of July, 1946, which is America’s Independence Day, chosen as the date of Philippine independence by America, because the irony is apparently not visible from Washington.
I have now watched three republics die this year. Australia was born — that was the first of January, a federation created through negotiation and paperwork, civilised and unremarkable. The Philippines was killed — that was yesterday, a republic destroyed by the power that was supposed to be its liberator. And Cuba was leashed — that was the Platt Amendment, a republic permitted to exist provided it obeyed.
The pattern is already clear, thirteen weeks into the century: the powerful decide who gets to be a country and who doesn’t. The powerful decide whose constitution is valid and whose is paper. The powerful decide which flags fly and which are folded and put away. And the people who live under those flags — the farmer in Luzon who planted rice under Spain and planted rice under the Republic and will plant rice under America and will plant rice under Japan and will plant rice under America again — the farmer does not change. The flag changes. The farmer plants rice.
I come back to the farmer because the farmer is the point. The farmer is always the point. Aguinaldo’s proclamation is addressed to the Filipino people, but the Filipino people are not in Manila reading proclamations. They are in the fields and the villages and the markets, and what they heard yesterday, if they heard anything at all, is that the fighting is supposed to stop, and they may or may not believe it, because fighting does not stop because a proclamation says so — fighting stops when the soldiers leave, and the soldiers are not leaving, and will not leave for forty-five years.
Last week I wrote about Kim — the fictional boy who does not know what he is. This week I am writing about an actual country that has been told what it is by someone else. The parallel is not accidental. The century will be full of this — identities assigned from the outside, nations defined by their conquerors, people told who they are by people who have never met them.
And the resistance to this — the long, slow, unglamorous resistance — will not be fought with guns. Not primarily. It will be fought with language, with memory, with the insistence on calling things by their right names. The Filipinos will call what happened a war. The Americans will call it an insurrection. The difference between the two words is the difference between a nation and a nuisance, between a people and a problem, and the argument over which word to use will last longer than the fighting itself, because words are where power lives after the soldiers go home.
Aguinaldo surrendered yesterday. The Republic is dead. The flag is folded. The anthem is silenced. The constitution is waste paper.
And somewhere in Luzon, in a village whose name I know but will not tell you because it does not matter — all the villages are the same village, all the farmers are the same farmer — a man is planting rice. He planted it last week and he will plant it next week. He does not know Aguinaldo personally. He has heard of him the way you hear of distant weather — something happening far away, relevant but not immediate. What is immediate is the rice, and the water, and the mud, and the sun, and the child sitting on the dyke watching him work, and the fact that the rice must be planted regardless of who says they own the country, because the rice does not know about sovereignty, and the child is hungry, and hunger is the only government that has never been overthrown.
The stream of blood ceases to flow. The stream of rice does not.
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