AMBET OCAMPO was right to be amused by the quarrel in social media over the movie Heneral Luna. To be sure, the movie was dead on arrival at the box office until social media brought it back to life again.
Emilio Aguinaldo may have betrayed Antonio Luna, but he never betrayed his country. After Luna was murdered, Aguinaldo fought the United States for—what?—two or three more years? And he wouldn’t stop until he was kidnapped by the usual suspects from Central Luzon; from where come our worst traitors after during foreign occupations and our best champions the rest of the time—like Taruc against the landed; Macapagal for the landless; and Ninoy and Cory Aquino for freedom against tyranny.
It is hard enough to tell the future; what more the past? But this much is true: Praise for Luna first came from our enemies to discourage us from fighting some more. If our only real general was dead, why fight on with no direction and even less hope? Yet, Luna never won a battle. The movie is faithful to that. The Americans withdrew from an encounter because the fight was not worth missing lunch. Pedro Paterno and Felipe Buencamino fought Spanish rule; Luna did not. He fought the Americans, but trusted only Filipino veterans of ex-Spanish Army to fight under him.
The two had early courage; Paterno and Buencamino figured in the political struggle for independence. Luna was a late bloomer in that regard. But he had the sense to know that fighting a declining Spain gave rising America the excuse to grab Cuba and the Philippines.
Paterno and Buencamino had the belated sense to see an American protectorate as the least bad of all the worst outcomes: Germans wanted a colony and Americans offered to sell us to them. We would have been exterminated because that early, the Germans believed in, preached and practiced the superiority of the white race. After exterminating Maguindanaoans in Indonesia, so that the sultan fled to Mindanao and destroyed all spice plantations there so as not to compete with the Dutch East India Co., the Dutch wanted to finish the job by taking Mindanao, as well, and decimating the remaining tribe.
In Indonesia, the Dutch killed every man, woman and child because they might know how to grow spices; and then established population-controlled plantations to supply the spice trade. No native knew more than one small part of the spice-production process. At least America despised colonialism, in principle, having been a colony itself. Manifest Destiny was not a call for colonies but empire. As early as George Washington, Americans expected an imperial republic, like Rome, from North to South Poles. But they could not stomach that empire demands citizenship for all Americans—be they of Irish, German, Italian, Mexican, Colombian or Filipino descent, side by side with the English who invented America.
Far from betraying our cause, Aguinaldo took the fight farther and harder, thereby inviting the near genocide of the Filipino race at the hands of US veterans of the Indian Wars who exterminated the Indians.
The pragmatism of Paterno and Buencamino prevailed after Aguinaldo’s hopes of independence were dashed by regional enemies as Luna’s brains were dashed by the same.
The point of history is not to fix blame but to enjoy a rip-roaring story of courage on all sides, of bold convictions, as well, and inevitably, treachery. The Americans had Benedict Arnold. Remembering history will never ever keep us from repeating it. The French were keen students of history—a history of victory over Germany in 1918, but also early defeat by Germany in 1870 and betrayal throughout. And yet the French betrayed France when the Germans invaded again. History teaches nothing except that nothing is sure until it is history. Yet even about that, we are never certain.