Bonaparte and Hitler: Juggernauts of History

The Little Corporal

Powerful men in their prime who tried to change the world and rule it.  Powerful men who enthralled men, women, armies and countries using their ability to manipulate weaknesses and strengths.  Powerful men who became the best generals the world has ever seen as they cut down military commands one by one.  Bonaparte of France and Hitler of Austria wrote history by plotting world domination using different strategies that resulted in different victories and same defeats.

            Napoleon Bonaparte was born on the 15^th of August 1769 in the Corsican island of Ajaccio.  He came from a wealthy family of Corsican gentry though poor compared to bigger French Aristocracies.  In a time where the glory of the family name rests on the firstborn son to enter the military, Napoleon, due to his father and mother’s manipulation and his own ability landed him in a position in an academy at Brienne in 1779.  During his stint in the military, the Little Corporal was much lauded with praise as he finished a supposedly three-year course in a year.  But this glory was short-lived as they had to flee the island to go to mainland France due to the civil war.

            But it is said that great men never get trapped in idleness, this was a true with Napoleon as he became the hero of Toulon and rapidly grew into becoming one of the country’s most respected military authorities as he delivered a victory for the Army of Italy at the Battle of Arcole against Austria where he was purported to more lucky than clever.  He also became the Consulate after the Brumaire coup in 1799 where he strived to reform the economy, legal system (Code Napoleon), church, military, education and government.  Due to his reforms and military ability, he became the Emperor of France in 1804.

            All of these were not enough for Napoleon as he planned to take control of the world by starting the Napoleonic Wars in 1799 which gave birth to the evolution of military armaments.  His army has been a success in most of the duration of the Napoleonic Wars as he defeated the Austrians and the Prussians several times but, since no man is perfect, he was due to make mistakes.  His first mistake came in the proclamation of his brother to sit on the throne of the depose King of Spain which start the Guerrilla War.  The Spanish guerrillas joined forces with the British troops led by General Lord Wellington at the Peninsular War where they succeeded in invading Southern France.

            With the large number of his troops tied in Spain, Napoleon decided to invade Russia in 1812 with an army of 500000 men but failed to invade Moscow due to the harsh Russian winter.  This mistake cost him most of his men.  This resulted in his abdication but he tried to stage a daring return at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 where the troops of General Wellington called a halt to Napoleonic Wars by defeating him once again and saw him exiled to St. Helena where he stayed  until his death.

            Adolf Hitler was born on the 20^th of April 1889 in Braunau-Am-Inn in Austria.  Unlike Bonaparte, he came from a poor family where his father is a customs officer on the border crossing prompting the whole family to move from village to village.  At this time, Hitler was attending school but due to his poor record he left before completing his tuition with an ambition to become an artist.  This dream never came to fruition as he was denied an acceptance at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts.

The Nazi Leader

            In 1909 he moved to Vienna since his parents have left him an orphan having died earlier and lived in homeless shelters and eating at charity soup-kitchens.  In 1913, being a penniless vagrant, he moved to Munich in southern Germany where, at the outbreak of the First World War was accepted into the 16^th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment.  Hitler fought bravely in the war and was promoted to the rank of Corporal and decorated with both the Iron Cross Second Class and First Class.  The was of the announcement of the armistice in 1918 where he was in the hospital recovering from temporary blindness caused by a British gas attack in the Ypres Salient.  This was the beginning of his hate for the Jews since he blamed them for letting Germany lose the war by not working hard enough.

            His time in the army proved to be beneficial as it honed his oratory skills which landed him a position in the German Workers’ Party.  His strength in convincing people prompted him to create his own party which he called the Nationalist Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nazi for short) on the 1^st of April 1920.

            A dozen years after that, Hitler tried to take control of Germany by running for the Presidential Elections against Hindenburg.  Hindenburg failed to get the majority so a second election was called in which he was re-elected for office and Hitler was forced to wait for another opportunity to gain power.

            When Chancellor Burening abdicated his position of power, the shift went in favour of Hitler as this posed for the Reichstag elections where the Nazi party won which gave them 230 out of the 608 seats in the Reichstag.  Hitler became the Chancellor of Germany in 1933.

            Hitler ordered an army of 300000 men which broke the Versailles Treaty limit of 100000 in 1934.  He also gave orders to begin the construction of large warships above the maximum size of the treaty and submarines which were prohibited by the treaty.  He then re-militarised he Rhineland.  These flagrant obstruction of treaties and pacts wasn’t given an appropriate action as the British and the French turned a blind eye.  Hitler then started the Second World War by invading Poland in September 1939.

            In 1941, the Nazi forces have control of the Baltic Peninsula and the Baltic states.  They tried to invade Leningrad and Moscow but the Red Army of Russia prevented them.  These enraged Hitler as he tried to attack Russia, but like Napoleon he failed since his forces were tied in Britain and his submarines were lacking, adding insult to injury when they invaded Moscow, they found that it is burned to the ground as Stalin ordered the Russians to evacuate Moscow and set torch on it so that Hitler’s forces wouldn’t have a chance of surviving.

            This put a large dent on the Axis powers and started the beginning of the end as June 1994 came and the Allied Forces succeeded in liberated France by a massive military offensive.  The Soviet then liberated Poland and forcing Hungary to surrender.  The Allies bombed the German city of Dresden and American troops crossed the Rhine River.  The final Soviet offensive circled the capital of Germany (Berlin) which prompted Hitler to declare defeat and commit suicide.  World War II officially ended on September 2, 1945.

            Napoleon of France and Hitler of Austria proved that they could conquer the world but ultimately failed in Russia due to its winter.  Hitler may not have started as strongly as Napoleon but he showed that he could command a World War.  Napoleon then showed that his height had nothing to do with ability to lead and Hitler showed us the power of the spoken word.  Both have strengths and times of weaknesses but these weaknesses they overcame with sheer tenacity and ability.  Napoleon failed gracefully but Hitler took the coward’s way out, though no one would ever challenge their abilities to control massive armies and rule half the world.

Brain Drain: A Crisis in the Philippines

How could we stop this?

         For the past several years, we have seen the Philippines struggle against numerous economic crises that threatened to bring the country down.  And for the past several years, we still have not seen a notable change in the state of the nation’s economic standing.  This now leaves us in a limbo—vulnerable to the effects of these crises which we are supposed to live with, in the foreseeable future.  And one of the biggest problems of the Philippines today is brain drain which is caused primarily by the underemployment, unemployment, and the never-ending economic crisis.

                The Philippines first began experiencing a noticeable brain drain in the 1970s when the government set up a mechanism for international contract work.  These overseas contract workers were at first employed largely in the Middle East, primarily Dubai and Saudi Arabia, but an increasing number of workers were signing contracts in the Southeast, Europe and the Americas.  As of 2006, it was thought that approximately 8 million Filipinos were working abroad.  Philippine workers sent home about $11 million U.S. dollars which is equal to about 12% if the country’s GDP.  But remittances are such hollow solutions to the withering economy as brain drain worsens and affects every industrial sector of the nation.

                The aviation like the Philippine Airlines (the flag carrier of the country) recently lost some 30% of its pilots, most of them poached by airline in Hong Kong, South Korea, the Middle East and even Sri Lanka.  But the salt on the wound was that most of these pilots are trained on wide-body aircrafts like the Boeing 747 and the Airbus S340.  Philippine Airline (PAL) Vice President Captain John Andrews, who is now on standby to fly again due to the scarcity of pilots, contends that, “We can’t expand [the airline’s] capacity because of the uncertainty on the availability of the pilots”.

                Meteorologist, theologists, nurses, doctors among others are now leaving the country in pursuit of more gainful employments with an average of 880,000 people a year.  Economists predict that this would likely get worse before getting better.

                But what is the cause of brain drain?  If we look at it at an economic perspective, one of the factors is underemployment.  Underemployment is primarily the employment of workers with high skills in low level wage jobs that do not require such abilities.  For example, a trained medical doctor working as a taxi driver.  With the alarming rate of the underemployment of the Philippines—21.7% of the whole labor force of 2008 is underemployed, it is no wonder why people who feels that their abilities are undervalued see that going abroad is the way for them to utilize their talents.  But sometimes the true reason is that what they earn now is not enough so that they would risk being underemployed in other countries where they pay higher wages to menial jobs unlike in the Philippines.

                One of the most common reasons why there is brain drain in a third-world country like ours is unemployment.  This is the term used for the insufficient supply of jobs for those who seek to find work.  As of 2000, 11.2% of the labor force is unemployed and this has risen gradually over the years ending with a 20% unemployment rate in the year 2008, most of them coming from the slum areas whose people cannot afford to finance adequate education.  One of the reasons why there is a high unemployment rate in the country is because of the unbalanced occupational distribution and inadequate education attainment or practical skills.  The Philippine population is generally well educated but the critical problem lies in the disparity between worker skills and company needs.

                But perhaps the mother of all the causes that caused brain drain is the various economic problems in the country.  Ever since the millennium dawned, the country has been struggling not to fall but with negligible effect.  This consequence of this is the labor force seeking gainful employment overseas in order to support their family.  It is a given that the overseas remittances plays a big part in making sure that the economy is balanced between abject poverty and struggle, but the country cannot survive on this alone.  It is evident that there is a continuous downslide of the economy and results in a massive brain drain that would eventually cripple us.

                Brain drain is one of the problems our country is facing today but this is something that cannot be solved unless the causes are solved.  We could provide temporary measures but these would not last and we would be facing it yet again, but in a much larger scale.  So the only solution we could do is to solve the root of the problem before we could eliminate the effects of it.

What will happen to the Philippines now?

The face of Brain Drain

Pres. Noynoy Aquino: A New Beginning

President Noynoy Aquino

Would this be a new beginning for the Philippines?

The masses certainly hoped so as they congregated in front of the Manila Grandstand to watch the Presidential Inauguration of Senator Benigno Simeon “Noynoy” Aquino this June 30 at noon.

In the excitement to watch this historic event which could prove to be a turning point for the whole country, over 250000 people from all parts of the country and the globe went in droves a full three hours before the inauguration was officially started.

And they were not disappointed as President-elect Noynoy Aquino and outgoing President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo arrived with the incoming president exiting the left and the outgoing exiting the right, exactly on schedule.

When the outgoing president bid goodbye as she saluted the ceremonial troops and the military, Aquino went up the stage and sat at the centre beside his vice-president Jejomar “Jojo” Binay.

The ceremonies started with Filipina international singer Charice Pempengco sang the National Anthem which was applauded by the National Historical Institute for a correct rendition. This was followed by a national prayer headed by a Catholic priest, an Imam from Manila and a Protestant priest.

Famous composer Ryan Cayabyab, Apo Hiking Society, Ogie Alcaside, Regine Velasquez, Christian Bautista, Gary Valenciano, Noel Cabangon each paid homage to both the country and its new leader as they performed various songs which tells for the love of one’s country.

Eight minutes before noon, the President-elect became the highest person in the land as Aquino was sworn in as the 15^th President of the Philippines in front of Associate Justice Conchita Carpio-Morales, refusing the tradition of swearing in front of the Chief Justice as Aquino questioned the placement of Chief Justice Renato Corona.

The new leader then stated his inaugural speech which lasted 21 minutes as opposed to the agreed on ten minutes.  In his speech, President Aquino tackled the wrongs of society and the reformations he intends to do the minute he seats in his presidential seat at the Malacanang Palace, reviving the frayed and tattered hope of the Filipinos who had been through too much, asking only for the cooperation of the people and to trust him to do his job.

This certainly bodes well for the Philippines though his promises, whether he will keep it or not, remains to be seen.

The Morality of Vivisection

Stop Vivisection!

        Defined literally, vivisection signifies the dissection of living creatures.  Ordinarily, it means any scientific experiments on animals involving the use of scalpel.  Incorrectly, it is used for any experimental observations of animals under abnormal conditions.  According to Ancient Roman texts, vivisection started in Alexandria in the reign of Ptolemy II (285-247 B.C.E) and Ptolemy III (247-221 B.C.E) as living criminals were dismembered either for entertainment, scientific, or philosophical purposes.  While animals, starting the 16^th century Tudor Dynasty that continued towards the Middle Stuart period, were starved and taunted to fight each other to death (for example, a pack of starving dogs to a tortured gorilla) in a bloody entertainment called a “Baiting”, this was also used by the scientist to ascertain the order of supremacy among wild animals.  Lately, vivisection has been the norm for the scientific community but ethicists and moralists frown upon the practice stating that it is both inhumane and immoral because we are treating living organisms as objects.  In this paper, I will argue that, while the use of animals for experimentation is scientifically justified, it is morally questionable to use them as scientific articles instead of the living things that they are.

      The history of scientific observation of and experimentation upon animals, both bloodless and bloody, began at the moment when it was perceived that the processes of nature could be discovered only by the exact observation of nature and not by philosophical methods.

       For physiological and pathological research, experimentation on animals is indispensable, while for medical science it is of much value.  It gives a view of the working processes of the body if the living organism, for example, observing the artificially implanted diseases and the organic changes it produced.

        William Harvey (1578-1657) admitted that his discovery of blood circulation was the result of numerous vivisections of all kinds of animals in order for him to understand the circulation process inherent to living animals.  The Jesuit Jasphar Schott (1606-1666), a professor of Mathematics and Physics at Wurzburg, put animals in an enclosure with insufficient air to simulate deaths caused by suffocation as basis for experiments.  The discoveries during the Scientific Revolution started on animal experimentation.  Surgeons learned to extract degenerated organs from mammals in order to safely operate on human beings.  As such, there is no branch of medical science that cannot be essentially benefited by experiments on animals.  In the last instance, the results of the experiments do good to humanity.

       With vivisection considered as morally incorrect, the advent of technology today now provides means to study living organisms without actually killing or torturing them in the process.  One of which is called the “Corrositex” which is an example of synthetic skin created from plant fibers which act like the epidermis of the human body; another is called the computer modelling which simulates how the human body works, the processes it undergoes and how it reacts to foreign objects.  Computer modelling is partnered with an improved statistical design that shows the probability of the human body to react in an expected way against diseases or new antigens or antibodies.  Lastly, there is also a process called the Murine Local Lymph Node Assay (MLLNA) which is used to predict the “turning on of the oncogenes and the growth of cancer cells or tumour located in the body by means of extracting a lymph node specimen from a variety of people and putting it together with known or supposed carcinogenic chemicals or substances.

        Throughout the world, everyday, millions of animals are in laboratories, undergoing painful and invasive experimentation.  A large portion of this is used in medical researches or cosmetics and household reagents which serve the commercial industry.  This is not science.  A specie of another cannot replace the original, for there would be a very confusing and inconclusive variation since the genetic, chemical, and physiological make-up is different for every specie.

       There are no animal models for genetic diseases like the Down Syndrome, Klinefelter’s Syndrome, Parkinson’s disease, cystic fibrosis , autism and the like, but still animals are used in such researches on a massive scale.
     Retrospectively, the overall results from laboratory animal experiments cannot be extrapolated to apply to more than 50% of the cases investigated, thus like tossing a coin which is not of any assurance at all.  Only in retrospect do we learn which were useful and which were not, but in the true human fashion, this realization often comes too late.

           According to Robert Green Ingersoll in his paper, Vivisection: “A physician who would cut a living rabbit in pieces—laying bare the nerves, denuding them with knives, pulling them out with forceps—would not hesitate to try experimenting with men and women for the gratification of his curiosity”.  This was true in the case of the Imperial Japanese Army in the times of the Second World War (1939-1945) where they have undertaken lethal human experimentation in which numerous Prisoners of War were subjected to vivisection without anaesthesia and are infected with various diseases and undergo several surgeries.  In 2007, Doctor Ken Yuasa testified to the Japan Times that, “I was afraid during my first vivisection, but the second time it was much easier.  By the third time, I was willing to do it.”  He believes that around a thousand surgeons and doctors, both trained and untrained, are involved in the same form of vivisection throughout mainland China.

          This is an example of cruelty and a heinous crime.  Of course, it is widely accepted that we are animals, but we surely don’t have to act like one.  The main reason why we practice vivisection is because we the mentality that being able to think, we hold dominion over every other living thing, as such treating them as an inferior specie.  That should not be the case since we are tasked to make sure that the biosphere would continue to live on for countless generations from the start of time.  But this never happens because we always believe that our needs take precedence over others.

        I maintain that animals should not be used that way, we could think of alternatives; we just have to use what we have in front of us.  I agree that before it would be acceptable because they could see no other way but today is different, we have the resources and the brain to think of alternatives.  We have to adapt and we have to do what is right for everyone and not only what is right for us humans.  Ingersoll thought that, “a brain without a heart is far more dangerous than a heart without a brain.”  There could be science amidst morality and we need not make each other suffer by doing what we already know is wrong.  This is not the case of the Machiavellian thought that “the end justifies the means” because this end could all be the end of all of us.

Love and its Many Faces

           Many poets have written about it and many songwriters have praised it over the years, but what do we really know about love?  Is it something that would take you by surprise or is it something that would develop over time?  Is it the instant feeling of connection that binds two people?  Can love be qualified as the feeling between parents and their children and husbands to their wives?  Psychologists say that love is a cognitive and social phenomenon that has several degrees of manifestation depending on the emotion involved that could be intimacy, commitment or passion.  Simply put, love is a feeling born out of compassion, affection, and passion.

Psychologist Elaine Hatfield defined compassionate love as a feeling that involves mutual respect, trust, and affection.  This is a virtue in which emotional capacities of empathy are regarded as the foundation for a greater social interconnection and humanism.  The feeling of compassion is inherent to humans but classical philosophers thought that compassion must be disciplined by other virtues because as it is,  this would become a hindrance to situations natural to life like suffering.

Compassionate love is the level at which people love their friends or someone they perceive weaker than them.  This usually leads to the feeling of hero-worship where the weaker (usually a female) ‘falls in love’ with the stronger (usually a man).  Compassionate love between friends exists when they feel a natural sense of security, happiness and common ground together.

Look at a picture of a mother holding her child; one could see a connection between them, that is yet another manifestation of love which stems out of affection.  Affection is popularly used to denote a feeling amounting to more than goodwill or friendship.  Ethicists generally use the word to refer to distinct states of feeling, both lasting and spasmodic.  In the narrower sense, the word is connected to social or parental affection as part of a moral obligation.  American psychologist Henry Murray states that affection is a psychogenic need that plays a major role in developing our personality as it opens avenues that would develop past the feeling of moral obligations and become something stronger and enduring,

One of the bases of relationships today is what we call attraction or passion.  Passion is defined something intensely desired with strong emotion and feeling, often referring to one’s special activities or interests.  Dr. Robert Vallerand, of the University of Quebec identified two forms of passion: Obsessive passion—where passion controls the person—and harmonious passion—where the person controls the passion.  While harmonious passion has positive benefits and are more important to self-developmental efforts, obsessive passion can be destructive to the individual and those around him/her.

Elaine Berscheid and Elaine Walster (formerly Hatfield) proposed the distinction between love and passion and love as friendly companionship.  They construed that passionate love as a state of total absorption, including mood swings, intense emotion, and obsessive thinking.  Companionate love was identified as the affection between two people whose lives are deeply intertwined.

Most passionate relationships burn so hot then suddenly dwindle and die, ending with heartaches and sorrow.  Compassionate love sometimes loses its appeal as the protector or the protected may tire of the constant roles they play.  And affection burns out after one decides that the moral obligation has ended.  That is not to say that love doesn’t last because love takes hard work from both sides to really make it work.  Love could make you daft, love could make you care, love could make you weak at times, but true love, real love, actually makes you strong.  Love also has to be a free gift or it doesn’t hold any value at all.  But always remember that love is all you need, even the Beatles knew that.

Creampuffs at the La Casita

Creampuff at La Casita

           Creampuffs are considered to be one of the most famous desserts in the world.  This dessert goes as far back as the mid-16^th century France.  It has been a staple dessert in almost every party, soiree and court functions ever since.  Originally called “profiterole”, this dessert is one of the most versatile desserts in the world as it can host a variety of flavours and fillings such as butter cream, custard, or chocolate put between choux shells made from flour, butter, water, and egg.  Creampuffs are sweet, brown pastries that can be pleasing to the eye but unsatisfactory to an inexperienced palate.

            A chef once said that pastries and desserts are your very own Davids because for one to successfully create a dessert, one must have three qualities: Patience, devotion and creativity.  The same applies in the creation of creampuffs as it begins with a baked puffed shell of pate choux made from boiled mixture of butter and water with flour until it has the consistency of a dough.  Eggs are then slowly added to the mixture until thick and baked for a quarter of an hour before splitting them in half and filling them with the filling of your choice.

            I was in the La Casita canteen at the Andrew Building when I decided to buy a creampuff.  It first caught my attention since my blockmates were buying them, so i bought one as well since for me it really is appetizing though I don’t usually eat sweet things for breakfast.  I paid 23 pesos for this sweet-smelling brown pastry and took it to the classroom.  My blockmates were waxing poetic about this creampuff: that it is so delicious and it’s one of their favourites and that i made the right choice.  It was the first time I’ll eat a creampuff so I was hoping that it would taste good and will be worth what I paid for.

            My creampuff is actually the size of a pingpong ball and it looks like cinnamon bread with maple syrup on top.  It actually smells like mamon or ensaymada.  I think it’s due to the egg and butter in the crust.  When I bit into it, I tasted a bit of vanilla essence, egg and butter. I also tasted the custard cream filling which is a bit like leche flan but is not as sweet.  The crust was actually tasteless if it weren’t for the maple syrup.  It’s also really, really dry and coarse that I could feel at the back of my throat when I swallowed it, this made me think of drinking a tall glass of water.  The maple syrup, because of its stickiness, didn’t help because it just made me thirstier.

            The dessert could have been better in my opinion if it has a larger amount of butter and eggs.  It could also not be overcooked because it’s really hard to bite into a crust that is almost as hard as a rock.  I also think the there should have been more maple syrup to complement the tasteless crust.  The filling could have been better if it wasn’t custard because I’m not actually fond of brazo de mercedes (custard cake).  I also think that it shouldn’t have been refrigerated because nothing beats a freshly-baked pastry.

            I was disappointed with the creampuff since it didn’t live up to my expectations.  I really like eating but I’m not partial to sweet things so my opinion might have been a little off-track but that is my opinion and I’ll stick to it.  I may not have liked the creampuff the La Casita but that doesn’t change the fact that the creampuff would always be famous because of its uniqueness.