Tell it to SunStar: Independence Day rites: a reminder

WE celebrated the 120th Independence Day on June 12 when, in reality, we only became a sovereign state on July 4, 1946. That was when our second colonizer, the United States, granted us independence and the rest of the world recognized our sovereignty.

What many Filipinos don’t know is that our supposed independence from Spain (June 12, 1898) was aborted by the American colonizers using what is known today as fake news.” The press moguls responsible for that proliferation of fake news against Spain in American press were William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer.

Hearst was the founder of the Hearst conglomerate that now controls the American credit rating agency, Fitch Ratings, and partly controls ESPN sports network. Pulitzer had the prestigious Pulitzer prizes named after him.

When Spanish-American War happened and the Philippines untimely declared independence from Spain, the United States was a rising power like China is today. To compete with Europeans, the Americans created colonies in the Pacific. They annexed Hawaii a few years before waging war against Spain. The Americans competed, too, for the ultimate control of the Philippines.

At the end of 19th century, Spain was already a shadow of its former self. Its remaining colonies included Cuba, Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico and these hardly earned the needed revenues to sustain the Spanish economy.

Spain only retained those colonies due to lobbying among Cuba’s creole planters, who were afraid of a Haiti-like rebellion there, and the Roman Catholic religious orders, which profited from the Christianization of the Philippines.

At the beginning of the year when the Spanish-American War happened, Spain had already integrated politically Cuba and Puerto Rico. They had already been integral parts of Spain when the USS Maine exploded and sparked the war. Spain would have ultimately given up the Philippines to states like Germany or Japan or granted it independence to save its face.

The United States’ strained relation with Spain would not have reached the boiling point had business interests and the press in New York not agitated it by spreading lies against the Spaniards. If not for fake news spread by Hearst and Pulitzer, history would have been totally different for the Philippines. Not only was the country devastated economically by American colonization, it was also damaged culturally and linguistically.

The Americans provided a blueprint to shield the Philippine economy from the rest of the world through protectionism and the forging of one-sided trade deals like the Bell Trade Act in 1947. Americans also imposed their language on us to quell revolts whose leaders were using Spanish as medium.

It is really ironic that the Americans of today are crying about how the Russian government infiltrated their security apparatuses and spread fake news to allow Donald Trump to become president.

They should revisit revisit their history of spreading fake news.--Joseph Solis Alcayde