A Wartime Message: To My People

A Wartime Message: To My People

Dr Abe V Rotor 
Paaralang Bayan sa Himpapawid
with Ms Melly C Tenorio
738 DZRB AM Band, 8 to 9 evening class, Monday to Friday

Things seem easy and life is not as challenging as it was with our forebears who knew war and survived it.  Less and less of their kind can be found today. Now and then it would be good to revive some valuable memories for the new generation. 

Delivered by President Manuel L Quezon 

My fellow citizens: There is one thought which I want you to have in mind, and that is that you are Filipinos; that the Philippines is your country and the only country God has given you; that you must keep it for yourselves, for your children, and for your children’s children, until the world is no more and that you must live for it and die for it, if necessary.

Your country is a great country. It has a great past, a great present and a great future.

The Philippines of yesterday was consecrated by the sacrifices of lives and pleasure of your patriotic martyrs and soldiers. The Philippines today is honored by the wholehearted devotion to its cause of unselfish and courageous statesmen. The Philippines of tomorrow will be the country of plenty, of happiness, and of freedom; it will be a Philippines with her head raised in the midst of the west Pacific, mistress of her own destiny, holding in her hand the torch of freedom and democracy and pointing the way to the teeming millions of Africa and Asia now suffering under alien rule, a Philippines.

Heir in the Orient to the teachings of Christianity: and a republic of virtuous and righteous men and women all working together for a better world than the one we have at present.~

Manuel Luis Quezón y Molina served as president of the Commonwealth of the Philippines from 1935 to 1944. He was president of the Philippine government-in-exile in Washington DC during WW II.

This message inspired Filipinos to continue their fight for the restoration and preservation of freedom.   In Nazi occupied Europe, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill raised the battle cry, “Europe arise!” I saw its imprint on cement in Zurich, Switzerland, on the spot Churchill stood some 75 years ago.