blackshama's commentary on Philippine issues

Of course party poopers will raise up the fact that General Luna never won a big battle. That is true and the fact made Historian Teodoro Agoncillo fall from the Apo Lakay Ferdinand's graces. Apo Ferdinand wouldn't tolerate any slight to an Ilocano's honour! There will be a "what if" question still. What if he were not assassinated? How will the war been prosecuted? Here there are no clear and easy answers. The war may have lasted longer enough for the Americans to reconsider and seek a political settlement. That would happen 75 years later in the Paris Peace Talks, for a different war with similar aims, national liberation. The war would not end until the Americans recognised the North Vietnam republic as a sovereign belligerent state. Luna's guerrilla tactics may have likely worked. It did work 43 years later. The Japanese occupiers were really able to hold the main urban centres of Manila, Iloilo etc. Elsewhere they guerrillas were killing them off. Pr...