The last quarter of the 19th century was perhaps the most significant stage in the development of the Philippines as a nation — the moment nationalism began to flourish. It took centuries for the natives to finally unite against their colonizers. Like the sun rising in the east, spreading its golden light to signal a new day, this emerging solidarity became a portent of greater things to come — things that, in the end, never came.

The essential ingredient for national development was finally taking shape among Filipinos. The seeds of nationalism began to sprout, nourished by the influx of liberal ideas from Europe, the rise of the middle class, and the martyrdom of Fathers Gomez, Burgos, and Zamora (GomBurZa) — events widely credited with fanning the flames of national unity.

It was a long and difficult road to national solidarity, made harder by a combination of factors: a geographically fragmented island nation, a people divided by dialect, and the Spaniards’ relentless use of “divide and conquer” tactics.

The Spaniards employed that tactic so effectively that they reigned for more than three hundred years. But once Filipinos began to forge a cohesive spirit that bridged their geographic divides, once they tore down the language barriers with a unified cry for freedom, the days of Spanish rule became numbered. The colonizers suffered humiliating defeats at the hands of the very people they had held by the neck for so long, and were forced to retreat behind the walls of Intramuros.

But the next chapter of the Philippine story did not unfold according to the script the Filipinos had written. It unfolded the way Hollywood might have written it instead. And just as the Filipinos were ready to drive the final nail into the coffin of Spanish tyranny, the Americans called, “Cut.”

There is little doubt the revolution begun in 1896 would have finally ended Spanish rule — the Filipinos were ready to storm Intramuros, the last Spanish stronghold, needing only to march together as one. But the Americans, whom they wrongly mistook for allies in their fight for freedom, stopped them just short of the finish line.

To cut the story short: the Americans occupied the Philippines once the Spaniards withdrew, and the Filipinos were forced to fight a war against a military far more powerful and far better armed than their former colonizers had ever been.

The natives lost, and the seeds of nationalism sown by earlier generations of Filipinos were never allowed to bloom. They were forcibly uprooted and trampled by an occupying power determined not to let them take root again.

Filipino nationalism was nipped in the bud. Historians call this period the “Era of Suppressed Nationalism.” While the natives were still nursing the wounds inflicted by their former Spanish masters, the Americans began inflicting new ones.

As is well known, the justification the new colonizers offered was that the Filipinos were not yet ready for self-governance, and that leaving them to their own devices would have led to chaos.

They may have been right. Or they may have been wrong. No one will ever know for certain. But what any critical-thinking Filipino today understands is that the Americans had no right to deny the Filipinos the opportunity to determine their own fate. The natives should have been allowed to face the consequences of standing on their own feet — to raise their arms in victory against Spain, however that victory might have unfolded. It would have meant so much for the colonizer to surrender to the colonized. That would have been a profound moral victory for a people who had been enslaved and deprived of their basic rights and freedoms for so long — a genuine boost to Filipino morale. Instead, American intervention wounded Filipino pride and stunted the growth of a stronger national character.

The Americans might have looked to their own history to understand how the Filipinos felt. The American colonists themselves fought for independence from Britain in the 1700s because they believed in the inalienable rights of the individual, and that taxation by Parliament without representation violated those rights [12]. They believed that a government’s power must rest on the consent of the governed. The Filipinos, too, wanted no part of another foreign power ruling over them — they had already had enough of the Spaniards. And the Americans never had the Filipinos’ consent to remain and govern.

But there was nothing the Filipinos could do; no country stood ready to come to their aid. The Americans had France’s support in their fight for independence from Britain, and perhaps the Filipinos hoped America might do the same for them. It was wishful thinking.

The Filipinos stood alone, in a world that, at the time, functioned like a jungle — where colonial powers were the predators and weaker nations the helpless prey.

The Filipinos could not even invoke any law to challenge the legality of the American occupation. Imperialism operates by its own laws, backed by brute force; armed power allows imperial law to override international law, since the legality of imperial activity rests largely on the imperial state’s judicial system and legal experts [13]. Yet wasn’t America supposed to champion liberalism — the belief that natural rights exist independent of any culture, custom, or government, and are therefore universal and inalienable [14]?

Two faces of the same Filipino emerged from those centuries of subjugation, and both carry the fingerprints of the colonizer.

On one face: a people famous for their warmth, resilience, and instinct to hold family and neighbor close through every storm. The hospitality that welcomed strangers ashore, the bayanihan spirit that still carries a neighbor’s house on bamboo poles, the family ties that never loosened even when everything else was taken — none of this vanished under three centuries of foreign rule. If anything, colonization tempered these traits the way fire tempers steel. A people stripped of land, labor, and self-governance had little left to hold onto but each other, and so they held on tighter.

On the other face: a people who, more often than history should allow, still doubt themselves before a foreigner even speaks — who shrug at misfortune and call it destiny, who eye a neighbor from the next province with more suspicion than they ever directed at the men who colonized them both. Fatalism, regionalism, colonial mentality — these were not accidents. They were cultivated by rulers who profited from a people too divided to unite, too resigned to resist, too eager to please to ever ask why. That same regionalism, inherited rather than chosen, still makes it difficult to think and act as one nation; it resurfaces today less as province against province than as camp against camp, with loyalty to a politician often commanding more devotion than loyalty to a shared and rightful cause.

Here, then, is the uncomfortable truth this series has been circling: colonialism did not simply wound the Filipino, nor did it simply fail to break him. It did both, to the very same people, across the very same three hundred years — and the strength and the wound came from the identical source. That is the paradox at the center of Filipino character: a resilience the world admires, built atop a self-doubt the Filipino rarely admits to himself.

The history itself, painful as it is, is water under the bridge now — the Spaniards and the Americans are both long gone. What remains, and what every Filipino still carries, is the paradox laid bare above. Revisiting the hallowed pages of that history is not about relitigating old wrongs; it is about understanding what they made of us, and why we still think and act the way we do.

Filipinos need to do some rewiring. They must remove the faulty code their colonizers left behind in their system — the lines that cause them to malfunction — replace it with something better, and reboot.

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[12] https://en.wikipedia.org

[13] http://www.globalresearch.ca

[14] http://www.crf-usa.org