INQUIRER Global Nation

CALIFORNIA, United States?A hundred years ago, the Philippines was being ravaged by war, as Filipino revolutionaries battled American occupation forces in a struggle for independence. It was a bloody conflict that changed the course of Philippine history, and helped establish the United States as a power in the Asia Pacific.

When I moved to America 20 years ago, I was stunned to find out that, for many years, the Philippine-American War was not considered a war.

It was referred to as the ?Filipino insurrection against the United States.? Which was like saying, ?It?s not that big a deal. ?A major conflict that killed more than 200,000 Filipinos?some estimates are higher?got downgraded to minor disturbance, a silly tantrum of a pesky people defying a higher power.

As Steve Haller, a military historian at the Presidio in San Francisco, where many American troops were stationed before being sent to the Philippines, told me years ago, ?What's in a name by Shakespeare is dead wrong in politics. Insurrection implies insurrection against legitimate authority. As far as the Americans were concerned, it was legitimate. As far as the Filipinos were concerned, it was a war to assert their nationalist rights against a colonial power.?

The view of the war changed eventually, thanks in part to the Filipino American students who fought for the right to have aspects of Philippine history and the Filipino American experience taught at US schools. It was a sign of this change that a Presidio exhibit on the conflict, ?War and Dissent: The US in the Philippines, 1898-1915,? has been brought to the National Museum in Manila. The exhibit will run until March 7.

Views of the war also changed thanks to academics and historians like Howard Zinn, who died recently at the age of 87.

When I moved to America two decades ago, two Berkeley friends welcomed me with a gift, a copy of Zinn?s ?A People?s History of the United States.? It offered an alternative view of many events in American history. Christopher Columbus? so-called discovery of America was retold from the perspective of the natives who were decimated with the arrival of the Europeans.

And the Spanish-American War, which marked the beginning of US efforts to assert itself as a world power, was revisited, but this time from the perspective of the peoples who were subjugated as a result of Manifest Destiny.

Zinn ?singlehandedly turned American historiography on its head by adducing the forgotten histories of the marginalized, colonized, and abused to weave a work of true brilliance,? Matt Kennard said in the London Guardian.

History has generally been regarded as the winners? version of what happened. Well, Zinn chose to tell stories through the eyes of those who lost, those who were robbed, mutilated, beaten up, and humiliated. And those who fought back.

Zinn challenged the idea of the writing of history as being totally neutral. Of his book, he once told the New York Times, ?It?s not an unbiased account; so what? If you look at history from the perspective of the slaughtered and mutilated, it?s a different story.?

As expected, Zinn?s version of history became controversial. Arthur Schlesinger accused him of being a polemicist, not a historian. But the book has become a bestseller winning admirers from ordinary students, to famous figures like Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Bruce Springsteen, and the brilliant Jon Stewart of the Daily Show.

The main actors in Zinn?s version of history are the rebels, the union leaders, the feminists, the protesters, the Filipino revolutionaries fighting for independence. For while individuals leaders play important roles in history, Zinn said, it is usually ordinary people acting as one community with a common goal who make change possible.

As New York Times columnist Bob Herbert wrote, ?Think of what this country would have been like if those ordinary people had never bothered to fight and sometimes die for what they believed in. Mr. Zinn refers to them as ?the people who have given this country whatever liberty and democracy we have.??

Asked on the radio program Democracy Now about how his version of American history may lead young people to be disillusioned, Zinn responded: ?Should we tell kids that Columbus, whom they have been told was a great hero, that Columbus mutilated Indians and kidnapped them and killed them in pursuit of gold?

?Should we tell people that Theodore Roosevelt, who is held up as one of our great presidents, was really a warmonger who loved military exploits and who congratulated an American general who committed a massacre in the Philippines? Should we tell young people that?

?And I think the answer is: We should be honest with young people; we should not deceive them. We should be honest about the history of our country.?