"Changing the name of the republic would greatly divide the nation."
"Changing the name of the republic would greatly divide the nation."
When President Duterte suggested changing the name of the Republic to “Maharlika,” he was met with a firestorm of opposition. Verily, the President’s suggestion is intended to erase our branding like cattle inhabiting in this particular ranch of the Spanish colonial empire.
The opposition came mostly from the conservative clergy and horde of pretending intelligentsia class who always style themselves as the keepers of the moral order. Their reason has no logic, except to denounce it because they attribute the idea of changing the name of the Republic to Maharlika as an idea first suggested by President Marcos. They began calling Duterte epithets like a dictator, a strongman, abuser of human rights, etc., which has no valid basis on whether or not to retain that colonial branding.
There is no record that Marcos suggested the idea of renaming this country Maharlika. Rather, they justify their denunciation as when he named his famous guerrilla unit “Maharlika” that fiercely fought the Japanese imperial forces in World War II as a manifestation of a megalomaniac ambition. When he became President, he named the longest highway Maharlika Highway, which he finally finished and improved with supporting bridges.
Marcos knew what maharlika means, but was farsighted and intelligent enough to know how those obfuscated people will react should the renaming took place during his administration. Nonetheless, the simmering issue continues to linger, for aside from the visible marking of our past colonial enslavement, the person upon whom we impressed the name of our archipelago did not really live up to the political, moral and religious standards that are supposed to epitomize our values and idealism as a nation.
Philip II lived an outrageously scandalous immoral life. He ordered the killing and execution of his own subjects suspected of heresy. His did not even stand as a true defender of his faith. He and his father Charles V ransacked the Vatican, partly burning the Sistine Chapel and looted its treasures. For that, the two were excommunicated by Pope Paul IV in 1552.
Long before that, people knowledgeable of our history have been advocating the changing of the name of the country to Maharlika, principally to erase from the minds of our people and to the world the unwanted colonial branding of being called Filipino, in honor of a monarch who was neither honorable nor had a glorious career. The advocacy to change the name of the Republic became formal when assemblymen Eddie Ilarde and Benjamin V. Bautista filed Parliamentary Bill No. 195 on August 22, 1978 titled, “AN ACT CHANGING THE NAME OF THE REPUBLIC OF THE PHILIPPINES TO MAHARLIKA.”
Our people who initially called themselves Filipinos think they have been liberated for getting rid of the term “indio,” a derisive term used by our early colonizers, which is wrong for we are not from India or natives of South America which the early Spanish colonizers mistook as Hindus of India.
The misguided opposition should have known better that Marcos could have exerted pressure to assure the passage of that bill if he wanted to. They constitute the majority of the members of the Batasang Pambansa. This explains why the proposed parliamentary bill failed to reach the second reading. Assemblyman Edddie Ilarde himself lamented that then First Lady Imelda R. Marcos, who was also a member of the Batasang Pambansa, did not vote or even exhibited enthusiasm to support the bill.
This is why many wonder where President Duterte got the idea that it was Marcos who first conceived the idea of changing the name of the Republic. Maybe Marcos had his sentiment of changing the country’s name to Maharlika. But he was aware of the backlash and was not prepared to create a firestorm, especially at that time when he was preoccupied in securing political stability for the country.
Changing the name of the republic would greatly divide the nation, and the wedge could be exploited by the opposition not because the idea is wrong but to purposely destabilize the government.
After more than 40 years since that proposal, the reactionary conservatives and the clerical zealots remain adamant and stupid in their opposition to changing of the name Felipe to Maharlika to emphasize that we are a nation with a civilization of our own and desirous to synchronize our history with the present, free from the barriers in what Karl Marx would say “alienation of ourselves”.
Many historians point out that King Philip II did not even know where that archipelago named in his honor by Spanish colonizer Ruy Lopez de Villalobos is. In the book written Eddie Ilarde, Maharlika: The Road to Renascence, he quoted British historian William Thomas Walsh that Philip II is the child of incestuous marriage. His parents were first cousins, a forbidden practice in the Catholic religion. He had four wives despite being staunchly anti-Muslim. Three of them were his first cousins and the fourth was his niece.
He practically lived an immoral life, having several mistresses and bore several children even while he was still a prince. His son by his first wife, Don Carlos, became insane and attempted several times to kill him. Don Carlos died under mysterious circumstance. Many suspecting it was his own father, Philip II, who ordered him killed.
Despite living an immoral life, Philip was still patronized by the Church, not for his faith to which he assiduously defended but for his unparalleled ruthlessness against heretics. He burned many at the stake, and executed Muslims and Jews in Spain. Remember, it was during his reign when the Spanish Inquisition was at its height. Thousands were tortured using macabre instruments to inflict the maximum pain but slow death.
Disemboweling the heretics to extract confession was routine. Philip was also responsible for beheading thousands of Protestants in Netherlands and in other parts of Europe under the control of the Spanish monarchy
Philip II died ignominiously of sexually transmitted disease known as syphilis. In describing his last moments, Walsh wrote: “The wounds became foul, and emitted pestilent odor… His head and eyes ached. He was unable to sleep. His stomach was swollen and dropsy, the rest of him so wasted by sickness that he seemed almost a skeleton. The foot that loved to dance was paralyzed…his hands were nothing but skin and bones and stinking sores …. Philip II, lord of all Spain, lay in accumulating filth of his own excrements. It seems incredible, but all the accounts mention it. The monks could only attribute it to God’s desire to prepare his servant for cleanliness and neatness. Nothing could try his proverbial patience like a streak on the wall or a spot on the floor…Now to have lie week after week [in his own excrement…His bed was crawling with vermin (insects of all kinds) when he summoned his son, the Prince and the Infanta to bear his last farewell on August twenty eight.” ‘
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