First of a series
A QUOTE from former American soldier Erwin Tulfo recently circulated in social media, where he said, “We fought foreign invaders in the past with only crude weapons but a lot of courage, sweat and blood — and we succeeded.”
Before that, however, I want to lay down the context for the statement. Apparently, Chinese Ambassador to the Philippines Jing Quan was quoted reacting to the portrayal of China as a “troublemaker” during a recent conference on the South China Sea in Quezon City:
“That’s nonsense. Troublemaker? Who’s the troublemaker? Look at who go (sic) after Chinese teachers — they’re innocent.”
The Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post newspaper surmised that Ambassador Jing was referring to news reports that dozens of Chinese language teachers in the Philippines are returning to China due to suggestions from high-ranking Filipino officials that educational exchanges involving Chinese educators could pose national security concerns for the Philippines.
Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jr. suggested recently that foreign-linked educational initiatives had a risk of being exploited as conduits for “gray-zone” influence and state-sponsored disinformation. Special Warfare, the official professional journal of the United States Army Special Operations Forces, defines “gray zone” (security challenges) as “competitive interactions among and within state and non-state actors that fall between traditional war and peace duality” which are characterized by “ambiguity about the nature of the conflict, opacity of the parties involved, or uncertainty about the relevant policy and legal frameworks.”
Teodoro’s warnings were apparently triggered by an academic conference in China earlier this year where scholars arrived at a conclusion that Batanes fell under Chinese sovereignty.
Ambassador Jing continued:
“Those groundless accusations against China try to hype up the false narrative theory, try to incite that kind of hatred between the two countries. Who every day [tries] to always create new problems, incidents that lead two sides to confrontation? Who’s the troublemaker?”
The Philippines, he asserted, should “feel fortunate enough that you have a neighbor like China in this region.” The Chinese ambassador added: “If we want to use force, we may easily win. But no, we’ll not use force. We love peace.”
Tulfo pounced on Jing’s statements, Dunning-Krueger style. To be sure, the Dunning-Krueger effect is a cognitive bias where people with low ability, skill or knowledge in a specific domain drastically overestimate their own competence.
As a historian, I immediately recognized Tulfo’s statement as one that came from an indelible colonial lineage, consistent from someone like Erwin who is only Filipino by birth but became an American by choice: he put his life on the line for the US as a member of their armed forces.
Similar to Tulfo’s words, Spanish and American colonizers had the habit of giving two simultaneous statements about Filipinos when they came to colonize our country: one belittling Filipinos for being uncivilized, backward, etc., and another simultaneously praising us for the wisdom to embrace the civilizing agenda of colonial rule.
Tulfo praised Filipinos for their courage and willingness to shed blood and sweat to defend the nation — as he did for the US — on the one hand, but also disparaged our kalinangan for producing crude weapons only vis-a-vis the superiority of foreign invaders.
More than that, Erwin exposed what everyone already suspected about the political Tulfos from the start, that while he is convinced about the superiority of his intellect, in reality he is akin to an “ampaw” or “empty husk” in the Proto-Malayo-Polynesian language.
In contrast to Tulfo’s Dunning-Krueger style “crude weapons” reference, Filipinos during the period of contact with Spanish colonizers in the 16th century were armed with the most sophisticated weapons given their political and economic circumstances. Let me explain.
My historiography professor Zeus Salazar and I had a lengthy discussion when I delivered a magisterial lecture on the economic history of the country more than 10 years ago that the precolonial Philippine economy was divided into one oriented toward maritime trade anchored on coastal “polities,” and another centered around agricultural production in the inland/hinterland regions of the archipelago. To save on time, I shall only focus on the maritime trade-oriented economy of the coastal polities in the country.
In comparison to the Europeans, the similarly seafaring Filipinos did not employ the same kinds of cannons that generally had longer barrel length and wider bore diameter, which meant they were heavier and consumed larger amounts of gunpowder to fire projectiles across longer distances. Some of these European cannons made during the 16th century had barrels exceeding 10 feet in length and weighed up to 20,000 pounds. These kinds of cannons were unnecessary for the Filipinos who were, in general, not engaged in siege warfare.
Filipinos were also not engaged in long distance sea travel, thus our ancestors were not in the habit of building large ships — with large and heavy cannons — such as the Spanish galleons. While Filipinos had the technical competence to build such ships — our ancestors built the galleons in the shipyards of Cavite under forced labor — they were unnecessary for our specific needs and purposes.
Our economy revolved around entrepot trade and interisland commerce; we did not need large ships for our purposes. Smaller and swifter boats with better maneuverability were more relevant for our needs. Consequently, we utilized the smaller and lighter lantaka instead of the larger and heavier cannons of the Europeans. A lantaka is a small, portable bronze or brass swivel cannon broadly used across maritime Southeast Asia.
Filipinos also did not have the equivalent of the European arquebus or hand culverins of the 16th century because these had a notoriously slow reload process, with poor accuracy and range limits, as well as safety hazards such as bursting and misfiring. Better suited for the needs of the Filipino trader-warriors were a wide array of bladed weapons and shields.
Ferdinand Magellan, in particular, learned firsthand the impotence of European weapons against battle conditions in the Philippines. It was not just courage and valor that gave Lapulapu victory in the island of Mactan in 1521; it was also superiority in weapons and tactics.
More on Tulfo’s Dunning-Krueger style ignorance next week.
To be continued