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Changing Colonial era Names (Philippines, Indonesia)

Should the Philippines and Indonesia be renamed?


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Maharlika was actually proposed to replace the name "Philippines" and a reporter claimed that Moros preferred the name Maharlika to the Philippines.

Maharlika | AsianWeek

‘Maharlika’ Reconsidered - INQUIRER.net, Philippine News for Filipinos

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‘Maharlika’ Reconsidered

By Rodel Rodis
INQUIRER.net
First Posted 13:26:00 09/02/2008

Filed Under: history, Legislation, Moro

Reader response to my column about a name change for the Philippines was phenomenal. From Mindanao, Kauban M. wrote that Moros prefer Maharlika as it is the name suited to our culture and character. A local reader, Joseph Vizcarra, also liked Maharlika because it pays honor to the advanced indigenous civilization we had before the coming of the Spaniards. It also betrays our Hindu roots as well as blood links with the rest of the Austronesian family. On top of this we would all be called Maharlikans!?

Many readers pointed out that our Moro brothers and sisters in Mindanao and Sulu despise the names ?Philippines and Filipinos because of their colonial stigma. Moro scholar Alunan C. Glang asserted that only those who were subjugated by Spain and bowed to the authority of King Felipe II should be called Filipinos. Since the Moros were never Spanish subjects, they were never Filipinos. In fact, for 350 years, generations of Moros had spilled blood precisely to avoid becoming Filipinos. Those unable to resist becoming Filipinos were regularly subjected to "Moro Moro" plays with the Spaniards as the heroes and the Moros as the dastardly villains.

While the Spaniards named their farthest-flung colony Filipinas, they did not call its inhabitants Filipinos. The people were called indios. Those who were pure full-blooded Spaniards from Spain were called peninsulares. Those with even a one percent drop of native or non-Spanish blood were contemptuously referred to as insulares or Filipinos. Historically, Filipino was used as a pejorative or had a discriminatory connotation attached to it. (Ironically, even now, to be a Filipina in England and other countries is to be a domestic helper.)

By the 18th century, a new class had emerged, a mixture of upper class indios and lower class insulares, propelled by indio intermarriage with the Chinese. (The Spaniards decreed that no Chinese man could leave the Parian, the Chinese community just outside Intramuros, unless he was married to an indio woman). This new class was the ilustrado class and one of them, an 18-year old boy named Jose Rizal, was the first to use Filipino to refer to indio. In his 1879 poem, A la Juventud Filipina (To the Filipino Youth), Rizal challenged the Filipino indio youth to be the hope of the motherland. Even though they were not insulares, Rizal and his classmates at the Ateneo considered themselves Filipinos

When Rizal went to Spain to study, he exhorted his fellow ilustrados to take pride in being an indio. In fact, he called his group Indios Bravos. Rizal and other ilustrados in Spain would later propagate the view that Filipino should mean all people born in the islands, not just the insulares.

This was not universally accepted. Andres Bonifacio, the founder of the Katipunan, referred to the country as Katagalugan and the Katipunans Cartilla, written and published in 1896, expressly stated: The word tagalog means all those born in this archipelago; therefore, though visayan, ilocano, pampango, etc., they are all tagalogs.

As Nathan Quimpo points out, the Philippine Revolution of 1896 was a misnomer as it began as the Katagalugan Revolution. It became the Philippine Revolution only in 1897 when Emilio Aguinaldo, the former gobernadorcillo (mayor) of Kawit, ousted Bonifacio from the helm of the revolutionary movement and had him executed. Aguinaldo, who had continued all along to use Filipinas, dropped Katagalugan.

At the Malolos Congress in October of 1898, Aguinaldo sought to establish a federation with the Moro sultanates of Mindanao and Sulu, recognizing that they were not yet part of the nation that was being forged in Malolos.

In 1913, Katipunan General Artemio Ricarte proposed that the Philippines be renamed Rizaline Islands and Filipinos, Rizalines. While in exile in Japan, Ricarte drafted a constitution for the ?revolutionary government of the Rizaline Republic.

There would be no serious effort to change the name of the country until 1971 when a new constitution was drafted and ratified. Article XVI, Section 2 states that "The Congress, may by law, adopt a new name for the country which shall be truly reflective and symbolic of the ideals, history, and traditions of the people.

After Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in 1972, he convened an Interim Batasang Pambansa to replace the Congress that he had abolished by presidential decree. One of the representatives appointed by Marcos was Kuya EddieIlarde, a popular TV-radio personality from the 60s and 70s, who sponsored a parliamentary bill on August 14, 1978 seeking to change the name of the Philippines to Maharlika.

Unfortunately for Ilarde, Maharlika was inexorably linked to Marcos who claimed that it was the name of the guerilla unit he formed and led in WW II. It turned out to be a hoax along with his claim that he was the most decorated soldier of WW II.

(Before his claim was exposed, Marcos had gotten his cronies to produce a Hollywood movie entitled Maharlika about his alleged war exploits. A Hollywood starlet named Dovie Beams played an American nurse who became the love interest of the fictional Marcos. What was supposed to only be reel became real when Lovey Dovie became Marcos's mistress.)

The term Filipino nationalism is a contradiction in terms. To be a nationalist is to be anti-colonial. Nationalism, declared Sen. Claro M. Recto, is the natural antagonist of colonialism. To be a Filipino is to be a subject of King Felipe II. To be a nationalist is to refuse to be a colonial subject. So how can one be a "Filipino nationalist"?

Whether it is Maharlika, Katagalugan or Bayanihan, the time has come to discard the name Philippines or Filipinas.


(Send comments to Rodel50@aol.com or log on torodel50.blogspot.com or write to Law Offices of Rodel Rodis at 2429 Ocean Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94127, or call (415) 334-7800.)

Copyright 2013 INQUIRER.net. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Should Mindanao secede from what could be turning into a failed state? « Get Real Post

Beyond the passive-aggressive approach Filipinos take to loudly assert their indigenous identity above the sheer weight of substance of European culture, not much more than a whimper comes out: laughable changes in the names of major roads, a curiosity of an initiative to change the country’s name to “Maharlika,” and, most misguided of all, imposing the northern imperial Tagalog dialect as de facto the “official” national language. This inability to get beyond a rather pathetic idea of what being “nationalistic” is all about begs a simple question:

Change the name Philippines to Maharlika
 
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What's in the name game? Philipp = Philippines, Amerigo = Americans, (Looney) Qin = China? we are all named after a person.

Yeah sure we are named after King Phillip, a glorious king and your named after a lunatic who thinks he will live forever by drinking poison, boom. He died, and buried along his concubines. You are the fruit of your emperor LOL, poisoned mind.

If your proud to be named after a looney emperor then good for you. :omghaha:
 
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Indonesia's real name is Sri Vijaya. Various proof are obtained from inscriptions in South India and in Indonesia
 
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Indonesia's real name is Sri Vijaya. Various proof are obtained from inscriptions in South India and in Indonesia

Sri Vijaya was just the name of a Malay Kingdom, not the archipelago or place.

What's in the name game? Philipp = Philippines, Amerigo = Americans, (Looney) Qin = China? we are all named after a person.

Yeah sure we are named after King Phillip, a glorious king and your named after a lunatic who thinks he will live forever by drinking poison, boom. He died, and buried along his concubines. You are the fruit of your emperor LOL, poisoned mind.

If your proud to be named after a looney emperor then good for you. :omghaha:

China doesn't call itself China in Chinese. Philippines calls itself after the syphillis ridden racist King who died horribly from gout and started the brutal colonization and rape of the natives.
 
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What's in the name game? Philipp = Philippines, Amerigo = Americans, (Looney) Qin = China? we are all named after a person.

Yeah sure we are named after King Phillip, a glorious king and your named after a lunatic who thinks he will live forever by drinking poison, boom. He died, and buried along his concubines. You are the fruit of your emperor LOL, poisoned mind.

If your proud to be named after a looney emperor then good for you. :omghaha:
What are you talking about.
The name of the ancient Chinese dynasty, Qin秦, was originally a name of a region 秦邑 ("Qinland") in China.
The name of modern China, Zhongguo, is directly translated to "the middle land" or "the middle Kingdom".
Both old and new names were not even related to any "person", nor any ruler or emperor.
PH are named after a person, China was not. In fact there are only few countries are named after person in the world.
 
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In the end, the naming of a country is PURELY an INTERNAL AFFAIR.
Here's a tip wholegrain, look at the bolded words.
 
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In the end, the naming of a country is PURELY an INTERNAL AFFAIR.
Here's a tip wholegrain, look at the bolded words.

Why are you being so upset, its an interesting topic actually. If someone tell me that "Oman" sounds better than Macau to him, I would just give him a "nope" then leave the topic.
 
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Why are you being so upset, its an interesting topic actually. If someone tell me that "Oman" sounds better than Macau to him, I would just give him a "nope" then leave the topic.

There's a fine line that divides suggesting and demanding. I do believe that it's interesting to consider the name, but goddamn, Look at the fuckin arguments.
A drunk passed out china merchant man that fuc,ked a native girl is different from this
First Chinese domination of Vietnam - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


And all of these things that you've said are still... NOT FUCKIN RELEVANT.
The topic is renaming the a nation
The topic is NOT about the MOROS
The topic is NOT about spratly

You gone OFF-TOPIC on you OWN TOPIC for 4times
 
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What's in the name game? Philipp = Philippines, Amerigo = Americans, (Looney) Qin = China? we are all named after a person.

Yeah sure we are named after King Phillip, a glorious king and your named after a lunatic who thinks he will live forever by drinking poison, boom. He died, and buried along his concubines. You are the fruit of your emperor LOL, poisoned mind.

If your proud to be named after a looney emperor then good for you. :omghaha:

Wow i think if forgot that his country name was a name of a warlord who killed millions its kinda fitting for him and his kind since they are all arrogant warlords who can only pick on peaceful weak countries. Hey jerkoff whole b.s how about change your country to republic of taiwan or taewan or republic of jerks or maoland jerkoff federal republic :omghaha:
 
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Wow i think if forgot that his country name was a name of a warlord who killed millions its kinda fitting for him and his kind since they are all arrogant warlords who can only pick on peaceful weak countries. Hey jerkoff whole b.s how about change your country to republic of taiwan or taewan or republic of jerks or maoland jerkoff federal republic :omghaha:

I just posted a post in #278 to correct the nonsense "we (the two countries names) are all named after a person". Why don't you go to the eye doctor and let him dig out your useless eyes.
 
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I just posted a post in #278 to correct the nonsense "we (the two countries names) are all named after a person". Why don't you go to the eye doctor and let him dig out your useless eyes.

Huh did i ask for you opinion? And on added note this coming from chinaman hahahahahaha eye doctor nice try on trash talk but again anything coming from you people are as bull as they come hahahaha
 
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Huh did i ask for you opinion? And on added note this coming from chinaman hahahahahaha eye doctor nice try on trash talk but again anything coming from you people are as bull as they come hahahaha

Oh~ I am sorry I didn't know that you blind ignorant bastard bullsxiter are the owner of this forum who has the authority to decide who can talk and who cannot :omghaha:.

Hey I just have a great idea, how about I pretend to be an ignorant idiot like you, tell nonsense and claim that the name of the PH was named after a ultra les ugly hooker. Oh and mind that I didn't ask for your opinion, don't you dare correct me~ :smart:

"sigh* How I miss the day I slap your ugly face and hear your ignorant piggy barking~
 
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