THERE HAVE been celebrations held around the world this past week to mark the feast day of Saint Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland. People displayed the Irish flag, wore green clothes, and pinned on them sprigs of shamrock, an Irish plant associated with Ireland’s conversion from paganism to Christianity.
For some, it is a religious festival; for others, a secular tradition. In Chicago, which has a large Irish immigrant population, city officials turned the river green using dye. In Ireland’s capital Dublin, there were parades and parties joined in by thousands of people, yet few of them knew what they were celebrating or why.
It should be a celebration of the bravery of a young man named Patrick, who was 16 when human traffickers abducted him in Wales in the year 410. They took him across the Irish Sea to Ireland to be enslaved.
He was truly a victim of human trafficking — a common practice then that even persists today. Patrick then learned to speak Gaelic, the Irish language, and after some years as a slave herding sheep, he found the courage to escape and walked across Ireland to find a ship and worked his passage back to his home in Wales.
He later became a missionary, went back to Ireland, and persuaded the rulers there to embrace the values of Jesus of Nazareth. Over time, these leaders were converted and freed their slaves.
In the Philippines, there was a famous female freedom fighter named Gabriela Silang. She was the first woman who led a rebellion against Spanish forces in 1763 to free her people from oppression and slavery.
After the assassination of her husband Diego Silang, she took command of his forces and fought to liberate the Ilocos region, until her capture and execution later that year. She is known as the “Joan of Arc of Ilocandia.”
Jose Rizal was a highly educated and renowned ophthalmologist. He was also a novelist who exposed the oppression of his people by the Spaniards and inspired Filipinos to oppose colonial rule nonviolently through his writings. He exposed the injustices committed by the Spanish regime that imposed what can be called de facto slavery.
Thanks in part to Rizal’s works, his fellow Filipinos rose up to oppose the Spaniards. However, American forces landed in the country after defeating the Spanish fleet on Manila Bay, and pretended to be supporters of the Filipino revolutionaries and made a treacherous deal with the Spaniards. They attacked the Filipino freedom fighters and waged a bloody war against them, committing many atrocities.
The United States eventually conquered the Philippines in 1901. After granting independence to the Philippines in July 1946, America made it a neocolony, which it still is today.
Consider: there are nine US military bases inside Philippine ones today, with the approval of the Philippine government, which is run by an oligarchy. American multinational firms, with Filipino tycoons, control the archipelago economically. There are more than 800 member-companies in the American Chamber of Commerce of the Philippines. (To be continued)/PN
