Another war movie

Is there an attempt to re-kindle the "bond" between Filipinos and Americans with the film The Great Raid? Or another attempt to play up the image of brave and daring American soldiers?

The Great Raid, starring Benjamin Bratt alongside Filipino movie icon Cesar Montano, tells how a group of US soldiers slip behind Japanese lines in the closing stages of World War II to rescue more than 500 American prisoners in a camp in the northern Philippine province of Cabanatuan. [The New Zealand Herald]

Hmmm... If America hadn't been such a greedy colonialist in the first place, there wouldn't have been any need to "rescue 500 American prisoners" at all.

Gee, I've always wondered why history books glorify conquerors as "heroes". And Hollywood is making them "bigger than life." Julius Caesar. Richard the Lion-Hearted. Alexander. They killed millions to extend their empires. And we're supposed to look up to them? What about the adventurers--the navigators who "discovered" the rest of the world and laid claim on every land they landed on? Why... they are nothing but mercenaries. Paid henchmen who stole lands and lives for the glory of their kings (in some cases, in the name of the king that PAID them). Geez. History should condemn them. They weren't heroic; they were greedy.

The Philippine flag

Carl sent a link to a story in The San Francisco Chronicle about an old red, white and blue flag with hand-painted yellow sun and three stars that hangs by a single thumbtack in the Trophy Room of the San Francisco's War Memorial Building.

Nobody knows from where the red, white and blue flag that hangs anonymously in a corner of a display case in San Francisco's War Memorial Building came. The weathered satin banner can be easily missed among the swords, rifles and medals of various wars that surround it.

But the flag, with its hand-painted yellow sun surrounded by three stars, may very well be the first Filipino "Stars and Sun" flag, which was believed to have been captured by U.S. troops more than a century ago during the Philippine-American War. SFGate.Com

American Legion War Memorial Commissioner Rudy Asercion thinks it is the original Filipino flag sewn and painted by Marcella Agoncillo.

The report mentions that Senators Dick Gordon and Franklin Drilon, and a representative of the country's National Historical Institute in Manila have gone to San Francisco to look at the flag.

I have not come across this story in any local newspapers (have you?). Didn't Gordon and Drilon think this was important enough to issue a public statement about? Or did they and media didn't think it important enough? Alright, perhaps I just missed the story if it had in fact appeared in any local paper.

It sounds so ironic that the flag hangs--forgotten--in the museum's "Trophy Room." Kind of symbolic, to my mind. A forgotten trophy.

On March 23, 1901, American forces led by [Gen. Frederick] Funston captured Aguinaldo. Historians believe the flag was taken as a souvenir, possibly by Funston, who then resided in San Francisco until his death in 1917...Id.

Duh! The Philippines should demand a public apology from the United States. In fact, instead of playing the role of the eager-to-please slave, the Philippine government should demand an apology and reparations from the United States for snatching our independence, and killing our revolutionaries, towards the end of the 19th century.

The Asia connection

Oliver recalled that in my earlier entry about a speculation that islands may someday be sumberged relative to the continuous rising sea level, I was musing about the theory that the Philippine archipelago was connected to the Asian mainland millions of years ago. He sent me a link to a project of the Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory of the Natural Environment Reserach Council (NERC) of the United Kingdom. The aim of the project is "to illustrate the changes in the Earth's shorelines during the past 20 kyr caused by the deglaciation of the Late Pleistocene ice sheets."

According to its calculations, the Philippines was connected to the island of Borneo which, in turn, was connected to mainland Asian as late as 20,000 years ago. In fact, if you look at the map, Asia was a much, much bigger land mass 20,000 years ago.

Nakaka-bitin. What if the calculations were extended to a hundred thousand ears ago...?

Anyway, perhaps some other future project will tell us more.

Thanks for the link, Oliver.

Just so I don't go nuts

What do I do with blog entries I can't post? Both my domains are down because my webhost's servers are down.

Why waste time?

This blog is an alter ego. Whenever I can't post on my "real" blogs, I'll do my posting here. Who knows? Maybe, I'll even reproduce everything here from now on. Who knows...