Friday, June 18, 2010

Bagong Istorya

I've been silent for the past few days because I am finishing my second and third books. The first is entitled "Bagong Istorya: Essays in Philippine History", a collection of new essays on certain events in Philippine history. The second one is basically a guidebook for corporate communications managers and PR men on how to effectively deal or manage PR crises.

God willing, there will also be a television (and possibly a radio show) program before the year ends for my favored leader. I am not at liberty to disclose it yet since it is still in the planning stage. If they, however, agree on the concept of the show, then, expect to see it hopefully aired in one of three of our top networks before the year ends.

Bagong Istorya, I hope, will be acceptable as a sort of "bible" by the New Patriots, the Bagong Katipuneros. Philippine history should be re-interpreted in a new light. There are many new facts unearthed by historiographers and archaeologists that have'nt been exposed to the public yet. I wrote about them in the book and I just hope that the paradigm that I used in my interpretation of Philippine history be used by later generations.

When I was still a young lecturer in Philippine History at the University of the Philippines in Manila in 1992, I used historical materialism in my interpretation of history. In this book, I relied more on Hegel's philosophy of History, taking his developmental theory and fusing it with a Filipino flavor or interpretation. History, it seems, is still a narrative of how the Spirit or the collective Consciousness behaved based on certain "pressures" or "things"

There is also a re-interpretation of what the "Filipino Nation" is. Traditional interpretation makes it a "group of people belonging to several ethno-linguistic groups. I re-interpreted the Filipino Nation to mean a group of people composed of Malayu, Chinese, Spanish, Arab, Japanese, Persian and Indian races. Filipino is not just the different ethno-linguistic groups but also includes these other races.

Pre-colonial times, there is no dominant racial group in these islands. These islands were centers of regional trade. Most communities are composed of different races, a mixture of different racial groups. Racial inter-marriages produced the first generation of "Filipinos" yet prior to the conceptualization of the term " Filipino", these generations were named after their traditional place names, meaning the place where they were born. That's why we have Cebuanos, who were basically Chinese mestizos, Indians, and Arab-looking "Cebuanos" or "Ilokanos" who were basically of Japanese and Formosan mestizo stock.

When we liberated ourselves from the yolk of the Spanish, and the Mestizos created a "class" for themselves, unwittingly, they also created a new "race" separate from their rulers.  More on this in my book. Wait for it in bookstores.

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