Bulatlat is publishing below a review of Ricco Alejandro Santos’ recent book, The Untold Peoples History: Samar by Bob Couttie, a British writer/director living in the Philippines. Santos’ reply to Couttie’s review, which remains unedited, follows after. Santos co-authored the book with Bonifacio O. Lagos.

The Untold Peoples History: Samar, Philippines

A conspiracy theorist would point out that the book claims to be part of an effort to get the Balangiga bells returned to the town yet it intentionally presents a hectoring anti-American position not shared by the people of Balangiga that will ensure that the bells remain in Wyoming and Korea.

A Review by Bob Couttie

Marxist versions of history are so de rigueur that they can hardly be regarded as ‘revolutionary’ In The Untold Peoples History: Samar, Philippines, the writers, Ricco Alejandro M. Santos and Bonifacio O. Lagos, seek to re-establish the status quo in Philippine history founded on the writings of Renato Constantino and Teodore Agoncillo, in the face of an increasing shift of historical writing away from the paradigms established in the late 1960s and 1970s. In other words, it is a reactionary book rather than a revolutionary book.

The authors claim to present the ‘untold’ side of the history of Samar. A few of its 205 pages deal with the Balangiga incident, and these few pages reveal much of the book’s inadequacies. Since the introduction claims that the return of the disputed bells of Balangiga is one of its aims, it is a fair place to start a consideration of the work.

Herodotus wrote that it is the job of an historian to decide which of many lies is closest to the truth. One must, therefore, make truth a goal, however imperfectly. The Marxist/Constantinist paradigm, however, as admitted by Constantino in his groundbreaking ‘The Philippines: A Past Revisited”, is that ‘objective’ history must be suppressed until the ‘people’ have acquired a sense of appropriately politicized nationalism, only then may they be allowed the freedom to open the book of the past and read the often ugly warts that lay within it.

Like the wealthy honeymooner’s first experience with sex, objective history is too good for the poor.

Of course, facts can be inconveniently unappreciative of their role in this kind of historiography. But if primary sources decline to follow the party line then some secondary source is sure to do so. In its reactionary treatment of the Balangiga incident the book uses the technique in a manner that would certainly earn a bonus for the authors from George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth.

The Balangiga Incident, or Massacre occurred on September 28, 1901, when almost the entire active male population of the town of Balangiga launched a successful attack on a garrison of Company C, 9th United States Infantry. The incident remains controversial in part because of the retention by the United States government of three bells owned by the parish.

Here’s a grab-bag of random examples of NewSpeak in the book: According to this book, the water cure was carried out on Balangiganons by members of Vompany C. This claim is based on a paper by a University of the Philippines Professor who himself used a secondary source while actually citing a primary source, the statement by one of the survivors of Company C., William Gibbs, given in the transcripts of statements made before the Committee on Affairs in the Philippine Islands in 1902, the ONLY source cited.

The good professor concludes, as does the book, that, on the basis of Gibbs testimony, the water cure was carried out by men of Company C. in Balangiga before the attack. Unfortunately the primary source states very clearly that the water cure in this case was carried out by American Scouts in Catbalogan after the attack. In other words, in good NewSpeak style, the American Scouts have become Company C., Catbalogan has become Balangiga and ‘after’ has become ‘before’.

No such activity referred to by the Balangiganon participants in the surviving several interviews with them, nor did they pass such memories down to their descendants. The authors appear not to have spoken to any Balangiganons during the 12 day swing through Samar which is the basis for the book.

In its criticism of the Balangiga Research Group Preliminary Report the authors depend entirely on a short extract published on a website based on a one page summary of a 40 page document. The authors elected not to download the freely available original document to determine the vasis for the BRG’s preliminary findings..

Since this reviewer is a co-founder of the Balangiga Research Group and so will not deal with the ad hominem nature of the criticism except to say that the BRG is not attacked for any error or inaccuracy in its facts, which show that the Balangiganons did not fight for the Tagalog imperium.

A significant howler is the claim that the mayor of Balangiga wrote a letter to US officials requesting a US presence in the town. There is no evidence any such letter existed and the circumstantial evidence certainly shows otherwise. There was, however, a letter to General Vicente Lukban of doubtful authenticity, the original of which no longer exists, dated May 30. The authors of The Untold Peoples History decline to print the letter in full, leaving out the very important and final paragraph, as do most American versions. The authors prefer to accept an American-centric reading of the letter than a Filipino/Samareno-centric reading. Further, they impose a strictly 20th/21st century western mindset on Samarenos of the late 19th.

The authors’ treatment of William Denton, who got drunk while on post around August 23 and fell into Filipino hands in a way that made him appear to be a voluntary deserter is interesting to say the least. Unlike David Fagan on Luzon, or other American deserters on Samar itself, Denton begged Lukban not to put him on the front lines. Lukban did not trust him and shuffled him off to the care of Colonel Narcisco Abuke with whom he stayed, living a free, comfortable, well-fed life at Filipino expense until his capture by American forces in mid-February 1902.

Injured by gunfire will trying to escape, Denton begged his captor to lie about the circumstances of his arrest. The authors of The Untold History consider Denton a suitable hero for Filipinos to admire and emulate.

To finish this black museum catalogue of poor history, the authors insist that the Balangiganions rounded up and imprisoned by Company C. were dubbed ‘rebels’, for which not only is there not one iota of evidence but the freeing of those captives a couple of days later shows otherwise. They claim a pulahan involvement in the attack, yet there is no evidence of such involvement and the authors seem unaware of the rivalry between the Dios-dios/Pulahans and Lukban. The figure of 25,000 mortalities on Samar in the punitive expeditions that followed the attack simply doesn’t stand up to any sort of examination. To note any more is unnecessary.

More important than the specific examples of errors is the overall lack of critical thinking. We should be skeptical of data that contradicts what we would like to believe in but we must be a hundred times more skeptical of data that appears to confirm our own beliefs. This the authors have failed to do.

Allied to the lack of critical handling is an unsatisfactory logic. The authors wish to believe, despite contrary evidence, that the Balangiga town mayor, Pedro Abayan, invited American authorities to send a garrison to the town in order to kill American soldiers. If so, since this served no militarily tactical or strategic purpose, it reduced the Balangiganons to mere terrorists, about as clever as the folk who smuggled box-cutters onto the aircraft involved in the 9/11 attack. Putting aside the disservice this does to the Balangiganons, it also makes the behavior of Company C. during its occupation entirely irrelevant, the die had already been cast, so even if the imaginary water cures and equally imaginary rape actually took place they cannot be used to justify the attack.

Company C.’s actions only become relevant if a different set of behavior would have altered the outcome and stopped the attack happening.

Bad historical awareness is it good anti-imperialism? Sadly, again, the answer must be no. The authors claim that cruelty and atrocities are symptomatic of imperial expansion. They may be correct, for this was not only the case for American imperialism but Tagalog imperialism, too. Imperialism transcends nationality, race and skin colour. Atrocities against Filipinos were carried out under General Vicente Lukban’s watch in Bicol, Leyte and Samar, for which he bears command responsibility. Such atrocities were unfortunately common in various parts of the islands under men who claimed allegiance to Aguinaldo’s Philippine state.  [divide and rule]

Samar itself had been functionally independent since 1896. In December 1898, Vicente Lukban, inarguably a member of the cacaique class and loyal to the Tagalog-ruled State which intended to suppress even the Visayan language, was sent to Samar to colonize and acquire the island, which was farther from the Tagalog region than Britain is from France or Germany, and as far culturally from the Tagalogs as Baghdad is from London’s Chelsea.

Lukban’s occupation of Samar, with the help of an officer corps that largely excluded Samarenos, was just as much an act of imperialism as the American occupation of the archipelago. The conflict on Samar was a conflict between two colonizing powers. An exploration of that conflict in those terms may have produced some interesting insights.

It is worth noting that Lukban feared not American atrocities, but the apparent acts of American kindness – it is a consistent theme in Lukban’s message traffic. Ultimately, the Tagalog State lost the war because it actually made the Americans seem the better option. Indeed, there is reason for doubting the extent of Lukban’s hold on Samar.

Lukban is, in any case, a dubious candidate for a hero of the masses. He despised the Samarenos and considered the Philippines to have two classes, those born to rule and those born to e ruled. Lukban was, of course, of the former class and therefore entitled to rule.

The frontline, of course, is no place for the ruling class, which may explain why Samareno combat losses during the conflict were appreciable while Lukban’s officer corps suffered little.

The authors do not look at the class structure of Balangiga and its influence on the attack. Little happened in Samar unless it benefited the economic and political elite and it seems hardly likely that the Balangiga attack was any different. When Company C. closed the town’s port it hurt the economic elite. They could no longer make money exporting produce to Basey, Tacloban or Catbalogan, nor could they turn a profit by importing food stuffs and selling them to the townspeople. Did this influence the decision by the elite to drive the Americans out of town? The Americans also usurped the power of the local political elite, reducing its ability to exploit the people of the town and limiting its power to rule. Was an attempt to re-establish their traditional power an element in the attack? In neither case is there evidence at this time, nor may it be the case, but nevertheless it is an avenue worth exploring.

That said, somewhere lurking beneath the locks and bars of its heavy political overburden there may be a much needed history of Samar yearning to be set free. The island, the third largest in the archipelago, is poor and under-developed, yet surprisingly resource rich. It loses one of its most important resources, educated professionals, at an alarming rate. After a brief economic boom in the latter years of the 19th century it reverted back to its traditional poverty. The island’s penury will not be resolved by finding ‘others’ to blame for its situation but by creating an ‘us’ to redeem it through the traditional values expressed in the pintakasi. It certainly won’t be redeemed by divisive politics or politicking of the kind represented in this book..

A conspiracy theorist would point out that the book claims to be part of an effort to get the Balangiga bells returned to the town yet it intentionally presents a hectoring anti-American position not shared by the people of Balangiga that will ensure that the bells remain in Wyoming and Korea. Given that the return of the bells would have a positive effect on Philippine-American relations, one cannot help but wonder if the authors of The Untold Peoples History intend the bells to stay exactly where they are.

The Peoples Untold History by Ricco Santos & Bonifacio Lagos, Sidelakes Press, $11.95

Bob Couttie, a British writer/director who lives in the Philippines, is the author of Hang The Dogs: The True Tragic History of the Balangiga Massacre (New Day, Quezon City) and a co-founder of the Balangiga Research Group. He is a lifetime member of the Philippine National History Society and his historical writings have appeared in War Crimes: A historical encyclopedia (ABS-CLIO), the Bulletin of the American Historian Collection, Philippiniana Sacrae, Scribner’s Dictionary of American History and elsewhere. Posted by Bulatlat

Big White Brother, Little Brown Brother and Two vs Three Bells of Balangiga: Colonial versus Nationalist Writing of Philippine History   By Ricco Alejandro Santos

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