History Tells Us Why Filipinos Worship Foreigners

History never occurred to me merely as a list of straightforward facts and dates designed to make my life as a student every bit closer to the torture chamber. Oddly enough, it's always encapsulated me in a bubble of awe and fascination. I'd spend many afternoons ogling over the documentaries on the Discovery Channel about the latest archaeological finds in China, life in the Imperial Court of Russia or the dealings of the British East India Company. I noticed, though, that aside from one episode on the mummies in Benguet, the Philippines hasn't featured in another of the network's ubiquitous focus-on-Asia shows.

I realized in class that one nagging problem is the lack of an aggressive Filipino identity. When people mention 'China', temples, the Forbidden City and the Shanghai skyline come to mind. When they say 'Indonesia', people easily conjure up Balinese dancers, minarets and exotic spices. When the 'Philippines' comes up, what do people imagine? Barefooted islanders decked in the most fashionable leaves and twigs? When I was ten years old, I had a Canadian penpal who once thought she was doing me the huge favor of "civilizing" me by attaching a Coca Cola bottlecap to one of her letters. Hey, it's not her fault ok? I'm not going to go on rambling about what an ignorant hillybilly she was for doing that. At the time, I was baffled enough to laugh it off in bewilderment, but now I do realize it was a serious manifestation of how the world has been misled into believing that the Philippines is a tangle of forests and savage nature untainted by the wonders of microclimate air conditioning and express courier services. Well, admittedly, the local courier services are still reminiscent of the days when mail was delivered on horseback, but much of the world's backward perception of our islands and our people is all thanks to the historians who've taken up the noble task of chronicling our country's fortunes along the space-time warp.

Reading through historical accounts is like taking a gamble, entrusting your mind to sieve the nitty-gritties through the eyes of the historian. There are infinitely many sides to a story and it is the onerous task of the historian to faithfully recount the most important events-a definitive chronicle is impossible-and interpret them accordingly. What exactly happened? What makes this particular event significant? How does this influence history thereafter? It is the historian's grand task to creatively relate and accurately interpret events that have transpired to immerse readers into a particular time frame and reveal to them the secrets of certain historical contexts. The best historians are those that are able to filter through the prism of perspectives to situate us students along exactly that wavelength that is most precious and vital among the rest-judging of course from the historian's point of view.

Of course, stories can only take on as much significance as we give them. The best-remembered accounts are those we can relate the most with-lived experience, as Dilthey called it-as if digging through a trove of past experiences and deciding which ones to keep in memory. Oppressed people will, most likely, recall oppressive moments in history.

Most Filipinos have yet to realize that it's the foreigners that are educating them. Foreigners wrote their history books and it's the foreigners who continue to run their country de facto. The Philippines is probably one of the few places where history is taught to the students from the Spanish and especially from the American-her colonizers-points of view. Browsing through a fourth-grade history text, you're bound to come across entire chapters simply enumerating and expounding on the benefits and contributions brought about by the Spaniards or by the Americans. You don't see this in foreign history books; America will glorify America and Spain will glorify Spain. Who will boost the morale of the Filipinos, if not for themselves? This is an ironic reality that sadly, most Filipinos overlook. From birth, they're programmed to worship anything and everything foreign, and it's a mentality that plagues them to adulthood and has consumed the country till today. Thanks to the World Trade Association and all those global trade treaties, Taiwanese onions and Thai rice are much cheaper than local produce. Local farmers just can't match the rockbottom prices. Talk about justice in free trade!

What's even more saddening is how Filipinos themselves tend to prefer foreign products over the local. Many form the established impression that local is inferior in quality to foreign. It's a mentality that's bruised the nation's economic performance in so many ways, and until they find a quick fix to that, Philippine money will keep on falling into foreign pockets, pulling in more and more international debt to keep the country afloat. And the viscious cycle begins. As a prominent historian once put it, "There are no permanent friends (in the world of globalization), only permanent national interests."