A review of E. San Juan, MAELSTROM OVER THE KILLING FIELDS by Prof Paulino Lim

 Maelstrom over the Killing Fields

Interventions in the Project
Of National-Democratic Liberation

A Book Review by

Paulino Lim, Jr.
Emeritus Professor of English California State University, Long Beach

From one who has written innumerable books, this volume may be viewed as an “anthology of San Juan’s best essays.” It has a powerful voice that stirs the maelstrom over “the killing fields,” a metaphor that came out of the Vietnam War (1955-1975), and most apt for the Philippines, where the first killing fields took place when the U.S. military fought and conquered the insurgents and proceeded to colonize the country (1899-1912).

The anthology presents an “agenda for change and social transformation.” It focuses on particular themes, situations and personages, e.g. the diaspora, pandemic, Jose Rizal and Nick Joaquin. (Was Rizal gay? How do you account for Joaquin’s “tragic-comic consciousness?) In each essay San Juan goes deep into the subject, deploying various analytical tools drawn from history, philosophy and literary criticism, and synthesizes the findings into a coherent “knowledge” or information about the subject. The new information may add, amplify, or revise previously known “facts,” but does it constitute Truth? Is the latest interpretation analogous to the self-portraits that the artist paints in the course of his life? It is up to the reader to decide.

A critical tool that San Juan includes in the analysis is the “structure of feeling” that informs not only the interpretation or criticism itself but also the attitude of the critic himself–a technique he adopted from Charles Sanders Peirce credited in the. Acknowledgements. In fiction, laying the feelings of a narrative is the equivalent ofs scoring a film with music.

A simple exercise is to define the feeling of some elements of the Preface. San Juan calls in awe the pandemic as a “planetary upheaval”; condemns the exploitation by “rapacious” capitalists–with the aid of Karl Marx. (i) He mourns the death in 2020 of 67 Filipino nurses ministering to Covid-19 patients. He recalls with

muted pride the militant Filipino presence in the U.S. that marked the four-day riots in Watsonville, California, in December 1929. The event prefigured the violence against Asians, Filipinos included, being blamed for importing the virus from Wu Han.

What convinces the reader as in the case of Rizal and Joaquin, for instance, , is San Juan’s close reading of the author’s works (poems, essays and novels) and tracing the development of his “sensibility” reflected in the work. San Juan’s final word on Rizal is that he was “not a messiah, only a prophetic intellectual of colonized peoples “ San Juan recalls James Michener’s remark that Rizal’s novels were “directly responsible for the author’s death.” San Juan sums up Rizal’s challenge for Filipinos to “fight and win their independence by their own sacrifices.” The essay ends with a passage from “Mi Ultimo Adios.”

I die when I see the dawn break,
Through the gloom of night, to herald the day;o And if color is lacking my blood thou shalt take Pour’d out at need for thy dear sake,
To dye with its crimson the waking ray. (89)

What entertains the reader are the human-interest and gossipy details, embellished by San Juan’s often sardonic comments. Rizal’s Austrian correspondent Ferdinand Blumentritt tries to console him: “. . . but you are one of the heroes who conquer pain from a wound inflicted by women. (64) He met in 1888 a 22-year-old O-Sei-San, a samurai's daughter, “may have experienced carnal bliss.” (65) The historian Ambeth Ocampo has interpreted the recurrence of snakes as phallic symbols in Rizal’s dreams, suggesting that Rizal may have been a closet gay. (66) Rizal performed a common-law marriage ceremony with the “wandering swallow” Josephine Bracken by holding hands together and marrying themselves. The Catholic priest Father Obach refused to marry them. (67)

Of particular interest to me is the discourse on the Filipino diaspora. I write as an OFW (overseas Filipino worker/writer), the largest segment of the Filipino diaspora. (The discourse provides a prospectus for M.A. and Ph.D., defining six “theses” to pursue.) I am glad I am not writing in Myanmar (I am three-fourths Malayan) or in Hong Kong (one-fourth Chinese). I read Maelstrom during Advent anticipating the birth of Christ. What we got instead was the “second coming” of Covid-19. Nonetheless, I took Communion to celebrate the presence, and the

booster shot to ward off the pandemic. The pandemic has introduced new modes of learning, done away with SAT and college entrance exams, re-examined Ethnic and Women’s Studies, as Delia V. Aguilar explores in the Afterword. (201)

San Juan’s review of the colonization and decolonization of the Philippines has been a welcomed corrective to my naive reading of the country’s history. The structure of my feelings was centered on gratitude. Gratitude to Spain for bringing the Roman alphabet and the Catholic Religion; to America for introducing democracy, public education, and English–the lingua franca of the world and the Internet; and to Japan, after repulsion by the atrocities the military inflicted in the Bataan Death March, for Buddhism, calligraphy, and the films of Ozu and Kurosawa.

In San Juan’s capsule review, “The history of the Philippines may be read asseculaone long chronicle of the people’s struggle against colonialism and imperialism for the sake of affirming human dignity and universal justice.

Gratitude still centers my feelings toward the U.S., despite the white supremacy movement and the “Big Lie” of the 2020 Presidential Elections being. Stolen. UCLA exempted me from paying the $600 out-of-state tuition fee; now it runs to about $32,000. San Juan earned his bachelor’s degree in English at the secular University of the Philippines, modeled after the U.S. state university system. I attended the Dominican University of Santo Tomas, Manila, with its compulsory Scholastic curriculum requiring courses in Ethics, Cosmology, . And two semesters of Logic. This prepared me for writing term papers in my UCLA graduate courses in Linguistics, Drama, and American, Romantic and Victorian Literatures. (I did my Ph.D. dissertation on Byron).

Teaching at California State University, Long Beach, gave me time to research and write. I wrote four interrelated novels dealing with the Marcos Dictatorship that I call, perhaps inordinately, “The Philippine Quartet.” It is an homage to Lawrence Durrell whose Alexandria Quartette fascinated me as an undergraduate. In the first novel Tiger Orchids on Mount Mayon, the protagonist Mark is a surrogate for Marx. Mark studied at U.P., joined the teach-ins conducted by the Marxist professor Saldivar and read Mao Tse Tung’s
Red Book.

In Maelstrom over the Killing Fields, San Juan persuades Filipinos in the homeland and in the diaspora to act on an agenda for change and social transformation. No other Filipino approaches his scholarly output and world-wide

stature as an intellectual. I honor him, as I do the journalist Maria Ressa–the first Filipino to win a Nobel Peace Prize. There is so much love in what he writes, so much light in what he says

O0o

ON THE PHILIPPINE CRISIS: An Interview

RUMBLINGS FROM THE “BELLY OF THE BEAST”: A Diasporic View on the Philippine Crisis An Interview of Expatriate Scholar E. San Juan Jr., based in Washington DC, USA by Dr. Rainer Werning, Koln, Germany 

(Dr, Rainer Werning is a well-known political scientist and publicist based in Cologne, Germany. He has published widely on the Philippines, Korea, and Southeast Asian affairs. He lectures with the Dept of Southeast Asian Studies, University of Bonn, and the German Society for International Cooperation. His latest book is E. San Juan, Jr. is emeritus professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Ethnic Studies, Washington State University, and lectured recently at the University of the Philippines and Polytechnic University of the Philippines. His most recent books are Carlos Bulosan: Revolutionary Filipino Writer in the U.S. (Peter Lang), and Maelstrom Over the Killing Fields (Pantas/Popular Book Store). This interview was conducted via Internet in November 2021). __________________

1)  Where and under what conditions did you grow up? what were the most formative experiences for you during your youth?

 I was born in Manila, Philippines, at the end of 1938, a month before Barcelona, Spain, fell to the Franco army aided by Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. Memories of the Japanese occupation (1942-45)—running to air-raid shelters during Japanese and American fighting, fleeing from Japanese brutality—gave me lessons about the horror of war. My formative years occurred in the anti-Huk/Magsaysay CIA counterinsurgency witch-hunts at the height of the Cold War. I was influenced by the secularist, progressive faculty in the University of the Philippines where I taught English literature in 1958-60. My exposure and participation in politics began with my working for the Recto-Tanada electoral campaign, as well as the partisans for academic freedom and nationalism in the University against religious obscurantism and U.S. imperial domination. 

2)  What prompted you to go to the USA? 

Since I was already enrolled in the academic routine, the only way forward then was to earn a higher degree from a U.S. university. So I was lucky to receive a SmithMundt-Fulbright Award which enabled me to study at Harvard University in the historic period of the Civil Rights struggles (1961-65), 

3)  What were the most important stages of your political commitment and academic career there? 

While at Harvard, I was further indoctrinated in New Critical theories with I.A. Richards, the British mentor of William Empson and other scholars. However, my other professors were orthodox, traditional philologists like Jerome Buckley, my adviser for my thesis on Oscar Wilde, and Howard Mumford Jones, the major Americanist during that period. While finishing my graduate research, I began a correspondence with radical poet Amado V. Hernandez and other progressive artists. This led to my writing articles in Filipino (Tagalog) on William James and the Anti-Imperialist movement in the U.S. during the U.S.-Philippine War (1899-1903). When I returned to the Philippines in 1966-67, I became involved with the literary circles around Alejandro Abadilla, the avant-garde poet, and helped edit his pioneering review, Panitikan. My understanding of how subjugated the country was, and colonial dependency more subtly implnated—even before Marcos declared martial law—urged me to shift to writing mainly in Filipino and deepen my commitment to the national-liberation movement. In the meantime, I finished by book on Carlos Bulosan published in Sept. 1972 (which narrowly escaped Marcos censorship), especially after a year of teaching (1965-66) at the University of California, Davis, where I made contact with “old-timer” Manongs for the first time and discovered the roots of the farmworkers’ radical “conscientization”(to borrow Freire’s term). Since then, the community has changed—no longer are Filipinos farmworkers, some have assimilated to middle-class domains, while the rest struggle to survive in the interstices of a decadent, really strife-torn society. In the period 1967-1972, I was involved in party-building efforts in the United States amidst the turbulent anti-war movement and the debates within the marxist camp. We started the anti-Marcos movement among migrants, and helpted organize the Friends of the Filipino People which engaged mainly in pedagogical and lobbying efforts. Times have changed, however, so you find the majority of Filipino-Americans rallying to the white-supremacy program of Trump and his ilk. We face an uphilld battle from our beleaguered positions.

 4)  Where were you during the overthrow of marcos? how do you assess this event, which after all received a lot of attention worldwide? I was still teaching at the University of Connecticut where we mobillized local agencies to expose Marcos’ systematic violation of human rights, support political prisoners, and help Filipino union activists gain solidarity from U.S. counterparts. We were constantly in touch with our comrades in MetroManila and knew how the boycott tactic boomeranged, and how the left focus on armed struggle in the countryside failed to understand the concept of counter-hegemony. In short, the old Maoist dogma of protracted war of maneuver became a sectarian principle. It acquired an obsessive force that ultimately negated the war of position—the necessary political organizing and revolutionary strategy needed to win middle forces, isolate the diehard reactionaries, and affirm intellectual-moral leadership of the national-popular front. So the February event, while indeed a mass uprising in MetroManila, was mainly captured by the Aquino camp and led to the consolidation of oligarchic rule despite coups by disgruntled military elements. After Aquino, the Ramos presidency solidified the continuing dominance of those classes that once supported Marcos—the bloc of feudal landlords, compradors, and reactionary bureaucrat-capitalists—and the sordid surrogates behind Estrada, Arroyo, Aquino !!!, and Duterte. Duterte himself is a Marcos wannabe but without the faux legalism of his idol—a gangster, pseudo-populist trapo schooled in warlord violence, now subsidized by Chinese agents and druglords. Lacking any genuine political program, Duterte relies on vigilante methods, bribery, threats, and manipulation of military/police personnel. But this is an opportunistic and precarious mode of rule that, despite the alibi of pandemic exigencies, will not last. Duterte’s regime is the last gasp of neocolonial political shenanigans that the U.S. started when they coopted the ilustrado class in the early twentieth century, climaxing in Quezon-Osmena hegemony, and then by U.S. puppets Roxas, Quirino, Magsaysay, Garcia, Macapagal, and Marcos. The sequence from Cory Aquino to Duterte, at the tail of the Cold War and the advent of neoliberal globalization signalled by 9/11, is now sputtering out with the really bloody, vulgarian, incoherent rule of thugs, criminals, and their hireling, all symptomatic of the decline of U.S. imperial “democracy” and the onset of a multipolar world where China has become in fantasy the new enemy of the U.S.-led coalition of morbid corporate/finance capitalism. A new world war is in the works—unless climate change and ecological disaster overtake us. 

5)  in 2022 the next presidential elections will be held - with Bongbong Marcos as a promising candidate - and it also marks the 50th anniversary of the imposition of martial law by his father, ferdinand e. marcos. how do you explain this rather bizarre continuity? 

This is not a strange development because the 1986 February revolt did not change the class-conflicts enabling neocolonial injustice and inequality. The form of rule—from Marcos’ authoritarianism to elite/cacique demoracy—did not transform the mode of production and the associated social relations. The ideology of Marcos’ “New Society” was refurbished or retooled, while the country remained underdeveloped, lacking any viable big industry, reliant on the exploitation of natural resources. A new element in the political economy, initiated by Marcos’ policy of labor export, began to calibrate domestic as well as transnational policies. Dollar remittances from Overseas Filipino workers—the “new heroes” celebrated by Cory Aquino—became crucial for relieving the foreign debt, and also population density, unemcployment misery, alienation, anomie, etc, But this new stratum of workers harbors a potential for anti-oligarchic mobilization, that is why the Marcos-Duterte camp is trying to control it. But with the deterioration of the economy in city and countryside, this sector might introduce an unpredictable tendency whose politics depends on subjective political agencies. The United States has to reckon with Chinese support for Duterte, but so long as the extant mode of production remains feudal, with the rentier class tied to comprador/miitarized fractions, and the social relations pivots around clan/family dynasties, the structure is there to support versions of Marcos—whether Duterte or some other populist icon. Meanwhile, of course, the Makabayan bloc and other progressive-nationalist forces are still around, not as strong as before, but formidable in the cultural and intellectual fields. Whether they can build enough counterhegemonic efficacy, win more activists and collective energies, remains to be seen. The future is still open—the class struggle grows sharper everyday. Sooner or later, either the people’s representatives gain ascendancy and seize power, or the whole country edges toward unrelieve misery, criminality, more suffering and deaths under the reign of violent terrorist deathsquads and warlords. It is easy to conjecture, of course, since the conflicted eality is more complex and rich, as Lenin said, so we need to continue inquiring and analyzing the balance of forces changing everyday, and try to adapt our thinking to the needs of social praxis for more effective interventiion. Enough said. 

6)  How would you categorize the Duterte administration in sociological terms?

 Duterte inherited a structure of authoritarian rule inspired by the Marcos model of reliance on the State’s coercive agencies (Philippine National Police and Armed Forces of the Philippines). Like all State operations, it is based on the client-patron model managed by a patrimonial coalition of big landlords, comprador, and bureaucrats. We still suffer from the effects of 300 years of Spanish colonialism and over a hundred years of U.S. tutelage. The term “postcolonial” is thus a misnomer or an alibi for continuing dependency and marginality. In 2016, there was severe dissatisfaction with Noynoy Aquino’s laid-back style of governance culminating in the Mamasapano massacre as well as the collapse of social services during periodic natural disasters. So the mood prior to Duterte’s notoriety as Davao’s action-oriented mayor was a demand for aggressive leadership. The Marcos dynasty’s money and crony support funded the polling surveys and social media that inflated Duterte’s image as the awaited savior. His performance, misogynistic, vulgar and anti-intellectual, can only entertain but not produce substantive changes: the drug problem has considerably worsened. To aggravate nationalist sensitivity, China has claimed more territory in the West Philippine Sea despite Duterte’s inutile bravura, and acquiescence to China’s elite who will surely back his daughter’s (Sara Duterte’s) candidacy. Contrary to the pundit’s view that Duterte is a populist leader backed by grassroots farmers and petty-bourgeois stratum, Duterte’s pseudo-charisma exploits the cinematic role of a neighborhood tough-guy who can do things quickly, ignoring customary proprieties. His campaign against drugs—the killing of more than 8,000 suspects (according to government records)—coupled with the pandemic crisis, has intensified corruption. Officials siphoned off the budget for health/medical services and anti-Covid vaccines. It has allowd the police-military to inflict abuses. After using the peace talks to uncover Communist Party networks, Duterte has resorted to red-tagging under the cover of the Anti-Terrorism Act to maintain peace and public order. The real situation is chaotic, with citizens making-do and coping with hunger, sickness, desperation all around. Notwithstanding the arguments of Ernesto Laclau and Nicos Poulantzas, Duterte’s ascribed populism is a tawdry mimicry of Peron or any tinpot Latin-American jefe. Duterte has no wide trade-union support or ideoogical party machinery. He appeals to alienated individuals and fear-stricken middle-strata. But It has a Filipino provenance, dating back to Quezon’s “social justice” slogan to Magsaysay’s anti-Huk campaigns and recently to Marcos’ “New Society” agit-prop. Its hackneyed rhetoric glorifies Duterte’s role as protector of the masses, so its personalism bears affinities with fascist authoritarianism rathan than with Russian Narodnism of underprivileged, dislocated groups. Neither does Duterte’s regime resemble classic Bonapartism nor Caesarism. It’s really an ad-hoc setup of mediocre, thuggish compadres to shore up the bankrupt cacique democracy we suffer under. Duterte is annoyed or challenged by the critical ethos of nationalist, progressive forces of radicalized youth, women, religious activists, immiserated peasantry, rural and urban workers, etc. It is more worried by the indignant grievances ofmiddle-strata professionals who are forced to become low-paid migrant workers whose remittances of over $12 billion a year pays off the foreign debt and enables a tiny percentage of 110 million Filipinos to indulge in luxury consumption. 

7)  In your opinion, what are the main weaknesses and strengths of your compatriots? 

This question invokes the permanent need for historical specificity and contextualization. If you inquire closely into the vicissitudes of our anti-colonial struggles, we suffered two defeats or reversals: the suppression of the revolutionary first Philippine Republic by the U.S., and the breakdown of the Huk rebellion in the Fifties. One other defeat may be the failure of the EDSA rebellion to enact thorough land reform and eliminate political dynasties—the foremost being the Marcos one. Lessons have not yet been fully extracted from those events, given the inadequacy of our history textbooks and our amnesia-stricken national memory as a whole. We also lack fulltime organic intellectuals mediating between the middle-strata and the grassroots. We have no sustained public forums and genuinely free press to promote participatory democracy, given the terrorist government threats and rampant arrests, with hundreds of political activists jailed and tortured or extra-judicially neutralized. In my view, we as a people have not completed the process undergone by the masses in the French Revolution, or the decades of Mao’s systematic mobilization of China’s countryside. Our neocolonial situation does not permit it. Our “enlightenment” stage was cut off by the colonial imposition of U.S. individualist-utilitarian habits which continue to commodify bodies, souls, dreams, fantasies. Underlying it is the durable mould of feudal-dependent mores, customs, and sensibility that suppresses critical reasoning and prevents any integral judgment of the totality of collective experience. Our neocolonized belief-system has inculcated obedience and worship without questioning purpose, means, or ends. The compadrazgo mechanism functions under the umbrella of a comprador-middlemen way of conducting business that makes a mockery of the judicial-meritocratic paradigm of industrial capitalism. We are still a profoundly neocolonial formation without any heavy industry and an impoverished agricultural sector exporting cheap raw materials. Our main export now is Filipino Overseas workers, about 12 million worldwide, including Filipinos settled in North America. The market-oriented economy subsists on the hedonistic consumerism of people with relatives working abroad. Urban MetroManila, however, boasts of supporting a network of call centers and transnational corporate clearing-houses with sophisticated technological platforms required by inclusion in a neoliberal system of commerce and transnational communication. As for strengths, they are part of our weaknesses. Our sikolohiyang Filipino experts usually cite the bayanihan and pakikisama modes of cooperation. We have some formidable trade unions and public associations engaged in scientific research and humanistic pedagogy. Nonetheless, our public sphere is dominated by clan/familial networks of damayan and pakiramdaman. Witness to this is the nationwide sympathy for Flor Contemplacion, the Filipina migrant worker hanged by the Singapore government in 1995, that panicked the Ramos regime. And earlier, the country was shocked by the killing of Senator Aquino on the airport tarmac, a distant echo of the martyrdom of the three secular priests garroted by the Spanish tyrants that catalyzed Rizal and the Propagandista movement. Now, however, a form of inverted millenarianism has infected the academic milieu with the postmodern nihilism of Deleuze, Foucault, even Rorty and Butler, and other Western celebrities lauding the end of ideology, history, Marxism, etcetera. We are surely facing the end of Duterte’s presidency, but can the International Criminal Court and Maria Ressa’s Nobel Prize prevent the daughter from safeguarding the father’s responsibility for his crimes? My American friends always remind me that Filipinos have one of the longest and most durable revolutionary traditions in the whole world, not just in Asia. And so I should perhaps allude here to a certain stubborn, hard-headed quality of patience learned in centuries of surviving colonial privations, and a more than Christian sense of hope that the Messiah, flying the red flag and singing the “Internationale,” will intervene at any moment now, particularly when we are plunged in the moment of danger and intolerable suffering, while Duterte’s trolls whip up the old anti-communist hysteria. This moment of peril is the emergence (in polling surveys and social-media advertisements) of Bongbong Marcos as a favored candidate for president in the 2022 elections. An ironic twist of events? Or a bad joke by the algorithms of Twitter, Facebook and paid opinion-fabricators?

 8)  Why haven't the left had a real chance of doing reasonably well in elections so far? Do they lack mass appeal and/or won't a left-wing project - however well founded - fail because of the powerful bastion of Catholicism on the islands? 

There is a problem of implementing united-front policies or principles on the part of the national-democratic camp in the arena of electoral politics. This is an old stumbling-block since the Huk rebellion in the 1950s with its adventurism and sectarian dogmatism born of the complex alignments during the Pacific War. Especially in a predominantly Catholic country, Gramsci’s dialectic of war of movement and war of position needs to be examined again and carefully adjusted to our unique social formation. Religion or its manifestation in folk millenarianism, should not be a problem, as the theology of liberation has shown in the case of Latin America. We had a really flourishing native version of liberation theology in the seventies and eighties—until the Vatican stifled it, though Pope Francis seems to have revived it in his own unique way. But the conservative and even reactionary forms of cultish Bible-based sectarianism introducted by American evangelicals with the blessing of the CIA/Pentagon during Cory’s time to counter the National Democratic Front’s popularity may be a problem for Christians-for-National Liberation activists. We have many progressive democratic partisans in the Church and other religious formations, including the Muslim and indigenous (Lumad) groups who have all responded productively to the appeal of Bayan Muna and national-democratic programs and objectives. A united front of diverse groups may be emerging in the wake of Duterte’s terrorism and the Marcos menace. I think the proven success and viability of the Bayan Muna (Gabriela, AnakPawis, etc) bloc testifies to the left’s resourcefulness in electoral politics amid bribery of Barangays by traditional politicians. Money may win votes, but loyalty and political allegiance defy pecuniary distractions. By any measure, Bayan Muna’s peformance in previous electoral exercises has been a phenomenal success, despite Neri Colmenares’ failure to garner enough votes for a senate seat. As you will recall, the People’s Party in the 1990s initiated the first attempt to test if electoral politics can be utilized to promote a national-popular agenda. This resulted in the assassination of Roberto Olalia and murderous threats on all nationalist-democratic organizations. This symptom of Cold-War hysteria still infects the whole State apparatus, from the lower courts to the Supreme Court, Senate and Batasan. This fascist mode of conducting governance can lead only to the destruction of the unstable political economy of the country and the anarchistic war of olligarchic wolves.

 9)  Would you agree with me that that underneath the thin surface and facade of supposedly democracy electoral processes and  macropolitics in the Philippines still remain essentially feudal? 

That is precisely what needs to be addressed: the mixed, conflicted modes of production that constitute the singular social formation of the Philippines in this current conjuncture. “Feudal,” of course, is a general term in the political-sociological discourse, so we need to contextualize it in Philippine history. One aspect of feudalism experienced in the Philippines is the lack of awareness of racism—the white-supremacist ideology and practice of U.S. colonialism which reinforced the Spanish/Eurocentric strategy of dividing groups according to ethnic/racial categories, and establishing hierarchies of power. The techniques of how U.S. white-supremacist ideology and practices were institutionalized among Filipinos need to be fully analyzed and evaluated, an imperative task for all Filipino activists. So we can answer why a majority of Filipinos in the U.S. support Trump’s flagrant racism and demagoguery. Most Filipinos, both at home and abroad, have been educated/trained to identify with the white-racial code of norms, so that most Filipinos in the U.S. continue to support Trump and his unconscionable racist politics. They do not see themselves as victims of U.S. imperial domination. They are grateful for being tolerated or accepted as part of the hegemonic consensus because they see themselves as individuals, not as an oppressed group, rewarded for trying hard to adapt or adjust. The threat of anomie is warded off by identifying with Statist authority. The lack of any sense of national/racial solidarity among the victims of imperialist-colonialist subjugation may be diagnosed as a symptom of the feudal mentality, the native’s colonized ethos of subordinating herself/himself to the lord-master’s will. I submit that no amount of analyzing Hegel’s dialectic of lord and bondsman, or scrutinizing the intricacies of the class struggle portrayed in broad strokes in the Marx/Engels canon, can remedy the Filipino habitus (if I may use Bourdieu’s term) of subalternity. We have our own counterparts to Fanon’s discourse on racialized violence and resistance in the works of Rizal, Mabini, Agoncillo, Constantino, Sison, Lumbera, and vernacular artists such as Faustino Aguilar, Ramon Muzones, Amado V. Hernandez, Lualhati Bautista, etc.. But Filipinos don’t really know these writers, nor the Rizal-Mabini genealogy of counter-hegemonic resistance. So, again, we need a new age of Enlightenment (with appropriate pedagogy) to purge the toxic legacy of feudalism and its postmodern variants—a virus worse than Covid-19—sustained by imperialist patronage and charity. 

10)  II you take a look into the crystal ball, what do you think the outcome of the next elections in may 2022 is most likely to be? Would you like to venture a forecast?

 Cultural commentators (as the present interviewee) should refrain from forecasting the outcome of elections, so hazardous is the enterprise of gazing into the crystal ball. Prophets are often cast out from their homeland, if not crucified. However, one can speculate about trends. The trend is often manipulated, but one can discern the public’s desire for some form of reasonable, well-managed, efficient governance, especially in controlling wild skyrocketing prices of electricity, gasoline, transportation, food and other basic necessities, and helping the disabled, the unemployed, and the many victims of natural disasters. The shameful failure of Duterte’s militarized approach to the pandemic, which brought about the mushrooming of “community pantries” red-tagged by the police and military, is sure to spark opposition to the Marcos-Duterte collusion. In other countries, such a failed regime would have resigned, shamed widely, or booted out of power. Public figures like the mayors of Manila and Pasig are now highly acclaimed as honest, competent administrators, notwithstanding their links with traditional politicians. In this regard, the “pink” candidate Robredo is trailing behind the popularity of other candidates who are paid surrogates for shadow politicians, or just plain mediocre. In this climate of free-for-all jousting, even the boxer Paquiao has been toseed into the electoral ring. Senator Paquiao scarcely attended the Senate sessions; he has absolutely no qualification for the job except, maybe, his physical prowess and stamina—which, not to underestimate these qualities, may be what is lacking in Duterte’s debilitated and narcotic if not wholly moribund, wasted physiognomy. So I think if money-driven propaganda and poll-surveys are discounted, I think there will be a change to another regime with personnel not completely beholden to the Marcos-Duterte collusion. In any case, Filipinos have not lost hope in a change for the better, although their choice of Duterte landed them from the frying pan into the fire, so to speak. It is time to say, “Enough! Basta!” Indeed, how long can one endure imprisonment, torture, unwarranted arrests, extra-judicial killlings, rape, rampant abuse of authority, corruption, insult and injury to women and Lumads, and anyone who criticizes such atrocities? How long can one endure such brutal privations? How long can one suffer servitude without raising a cry of protest and vote one’s conscience (one act allowed by law) to transform the status quo into a more egalitarian and just society? There are, of course, collective means and ways other than elections to change the current situation. I expect the conscienticized citizenry in the Philippines to register their general will and elect a humane alternative to the bloody Duterte regime.—### ____________________________________ About E. SAN JUAN, Jr.:: E.SAN JUAN, Jr. is emeritus professor of English, Ethnic Studies and Com- parative Literature, University of Connecticut, and was recently visiting professor, University of the Philippines and Polytechnic University of the Philippines. He was previously a fellow of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University; and Fulbright professor of American Studies, Leuven University, Belgium. His recent books are In the Wake of Terror (Lexington), Toward Filipino Self-Determination (SUNY Press); Carlos Bulosan: R evolutionary Filipino Writers in the U.S. (Peter Lang), and Maelstrom over the Killing Fields (Pantas Publishing Inc.).

A review of Jose Aguilar's novel, THE GREAT FAITH

The Great Faith, A Novel, by Jose Aguilar (Quezon City: Pantas Publishing Inc., 2020)-A Book Review by Paulino Lim Jr. Emeritus Professor of English California State University, Long Beach, USA

For anyone who wants to understand what it means to be a Filipino, a good place to start is Jose V. Aguilar’s engrossing historical novel The Great Faith, First published over 70 years ago, the novel is about “the Japanese occupation of the Philippines,” in the words of the author’s daughter Delia D. Aguilar, who copyrighted this 2020 edition and gives intimate details about her father in the Introduction. She is contrite that she did not read the novel then and could not talk about it with him. (v) Aguilar was educated in 1921-1925 at Denison University, a Liberal Arts school located in Granville, Ohio. He was conferred a Ph.D. honoris causa by Central Philippine University in 1952. He was appointed Dean of the College of Education, University of the Philippines, and later as Director of the Philippine Center for Language Study. IdentIty is a theme of the novel, collaboration is another. The novel's main thrust narrates a fictional tale against the unfolding of actual historical events, with the characters that represent personages from the society of the time. Collaboration is pejorative in a wartime context, but not in the artistic that yields, such names as Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lennon and McCartney. In war and espionage, it implies traitorous cooperation with an enemy. In the Philippines during World War, there were prominent men who collaborated with the Japanese in administering the government and schools. There were also collaborators who betrayed the country by becoming informants of the enemy.. More importantly, the novel evokes previous colonization by Spain and America -- the atrocities their soldiers inflicted upon the insurgents and the civilians caught in the crossfire. What comes to mind is the massacre and burning by American soldiers of Samar, Philippines (1901) and My Lai, Vietnam (1968). I witnessed from the slopes of Mayon Volcano the bombing of Legazpi City from U.S. warships anchored in the bay. B-52 airplanes destroyed a barrio six kilometers from my hometown; the fifty plus civilians killed were buried in the craters left by the air raid. This essay focuses on the language and the fictional strategies that Dr. Aguilar deploys to make his novel come alive. The time setting (1941-1945) brackets the plot episodes. It starts with refugees leaving Manila for Capiz, viewed from the perspective of Concha, and culminates in the liberation of southern Panay, after a fierce battle between the Japanese invaders armed with machine guns and the guerillas fighting with automatic rifles. “It was a glorious epic.” (341| Concha, Spanish for “shell,” opens the novel with her awareness of two momentous events -- the untimely birth of a child carried by Florentina, and the impending Japanese invasion. Florentina’s husband is Captain Licdaw who was a school supervisor, and a reserve in the Philippine Army. Concha represents the consciousness of a country under siege and that, perhaps, accounts for Concha being depicted as “sickly.” Shells, however. are usually perceived as feminine -- a symbol of birth, good fortune, and resurrection -- hence Concha’s name portends her recovery. The narrative unfolds in the country’s archipelagic topography -- mountainous terrains, plains, and coastal areas. Using the omniscient point of view (POV) the novel displays a melange of prose styles: lyrical and pictorial, florid and overwrought, homiletic and didactic. The styles are shaped by the characters of various ethnicities -- aborigines, Malayan, Castilian, Chinese, and Japanese. The narrator describes their physical appearance, perceptions, memories, and truncates the English syntax to reflect their speech. E.g., the observant cook Panang says, “Maybe the master not coming soon.” (11) A Japanese soldier asks, “You Americang or Hirripino?” (64) In a homiletic turn, the guerilla captain Lino Seville muses, “War was hell is . . . Guerilla was a greater hell!” (251) The villainous traitor Bucarin rationalizes his “addiction to blackness” with an epigram, “the measure of patriotism consisted in lives saved.” (242) At the very least, Filipino identity-seekers can find counterparts among the tapestry of personages from various strata of the society: the collaborators both loyal and traitorous, who spied for the enemy and betrayed their country; the educated cadets and uneducated peasants who joined the insurgency; and the bandits who pillaged the countrysides and terrorized the peasants. These characters voice observations and opinions peculiar to their status, and shape the readers’ attitudes about staus, behavior, and relationships. The wealthy Dr. Juanico Luces with a Castilian complexion, reputed to be the son of a Spanish friar, heads the Luces family: his wife the sensitive and sickly Concha; his mestiza daughter Agnes, who possesses a “soft beauty and steely temper,” and adept with a “fan-dagger” (337): and the mischievous and athletic son Rustico who joins the guerillas as Lieutenant Luces. A foil for Agnes is the nurse Solinda, a “transcendent” Malayan beauty whose brown eyes, upon witnessing lightning and thunder, “lit up with the elemental love of nature in wild display.” (52) Agnes is an ambiguous character; she entertains Takahashi but fends off his advances that make her “dimly conscious of her nakedness above the neckline of her loose nightgown,” saying, without the least trace of a tremor, “No, captain, Filipino custom does not permit this.” The novel does not say that she yields, although Abordon who attempts to rape her says, “I’m willing to forget Takahashi has been here.” (337) As a symbol, Agnes represents the Filipino women who consorted with the Japanese, some bearing their children. Lino Seville is the protagonist who survives the Bataan Death March and joins the organized guerrillas. His school teacher mother Marcela has concealed from him the name of his father, until toward the end of the novel. Lino figures in two love triangles; the resolution of each drives the narrative, along with the skirmishes, garrison attacks by guerillas, and burning of houses by the Japanese, led by Captain Takahashi who also figures in the second love triangle. The following passage, that reads like Hemingway, locates Lino Seville in a panoramic setting and builds suspense: “Standing on the crest of the hill, he ordered Lieutenant Luces to reconnoiter the wooded swamp that spread away back of the old wooden schoolhouse and curved inward to join the low-lying hills toward the right. Behind him lay the expanse of the low mountains, bluish green in the dusk, and far beyond the outline of solid blue that rose up gradually from left to right, descending more abruptly toward the point where the big blazing sun had just disappeared. (249) The following is an erotic memory of Agnes rendered in feverish prose that evokes Nick Joaquin: Oh! You are alive now! Lino, your masculinity, the man that is in you -- Oh! You remember on the cove on the shore of Manila Bay -- inky blackness, a gentle wind making the water lap the beaches, your hand, fine masculine hand, creeping up, hot, not to be denied? The unquenchable desire of the flesh that makes one tremble for its satisfaction! But you, Lino, your hand, hot, conquering -- These fevered nights has the dream of that hand recurred, and the reality of it has shaken the aching body. (197) Aguilar’s juxtaposition of the female and male attributes risks being called sexist today, as in this line that describes Bucarin as “a singular combination of masculine perspicacity and feminine vindictiveness.” He describes an eyebrow-raising love scene in lush operatic terms, complete with a “brilliant finale”: She held his face in her arms; they were hot hands, and they burned his face. The earth exuded an elemental smell . . . lighted by the aroma that hung on her toilette, mixed with it a pungency that went to his head like strong wine. (264) Aguilar uses the Victorian misplaced-missive trope, popularized by Thomas Hardy, with a couple of variations of where the message is concealed-- a green bottle and a cut in a pomelo.(200) Jose Rizal writes a poem and hides it in an coconut oil lamp, Jose Aguilar writes a political treatise and hides it in a green bottle. Rizal’s “Mi Ultimo Adios” at least has thirty-five English translations, including Nick Joaquin’s etched in bronze at the Rizal Park. Aguilar’s treatise, ostensibly written by his fictional surrogate Licdaw, is an analysis of Japan's plan for the Philippines. Aguilar’s deployment of the omniscient POV enables his characters to voice opinions and explicate abstract ideas, such as Licdaw’s green-bottle essay on the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. The concept was created and promulgated by the government and military of the Empire of Japan. It represented the desire to create a self-sufficient "block of Asian nations led by the Japanese and free of Western powers." Another way of looking at Aguilar’s strategy is to think of the novel as a forum that enables the “guest speakers” to speak their minds. Licdaw’s lucid exposition of Japanese philosophical ideas, such as Shintoism and the ideology of the state, making them understandable and attractive, earned him from his detractors the indictment of a “collaborator,” and therefore guilty of treason. This was also the accusation confronting prominent families, like Dr. Luces’s family, “who have chosen to throw their lot with the enemy.” (250) A guerilla commander vows, “These men… must suffer the consequences of their acts.” (251) The novel raises the issue of collaboration but does not completely resolve it. Some outright collaborators get their comeuppance during the fighting, while ambiguous cases, like the Captain’s apparent embrace of ideas of the enemy await the judgment of post-war courts. This calls for another narrative that The Great Faith does not pursue, neither does this essay. The preparations for battle scenes are reported by witnesses. Takahashi organizes three columns to attack the guerillas entrenched on a mountain ridge, burning barrios as they advance. The military guerillas have decided to engage the enemy now that submarines from Australia are dropping off arms and supplies, including American cigarettes. (249) The climactic “epic” battle is brutal and bloody: a beautiful girl hanged from the floor beams is disemboweled; a military officer is decapitated, his head stuck on a pole; and a western-style shoot-out that avenges the killing of a Filipino spy mysteriously named Phantom. (310) To conclude, The Great Faith imparts the lesson that to understand one’s Filipino identity one must know the country’s history. In the process of telling a gripping tale, Aguilar alludes to key points of that history in such a way that moves the reader to learn more. I braved the rain at the Luneta Park in Manila that day in July, 1961, to listen to General MacArthur deliver at age 81 his “ultimo adios,” and I cheered with the drenched crowd when he repeated his famous pledge “I shall return.” (The top floor of the iconic Manila Hotel, which was MacArthur’s suite, is now a museum exhibiting his memorabilia.) Dr. Jose V. Aguilar “is recognized worldwide as the founder of the Philippines’ Community School system. He received the first Ramon Magsaysay award for Government Service in 1959 as ‘a far-sighted innovator and a dedicated educator.’” (342) I cherish his legacy as a writer and educator, and deeply honor his memory. ###

CRISIS IN THE PHILIPPINES

CRISIS IN THE PHILIPPINES IN THE TIME OF THE PANDEMIC 

by E. SAN JUAN, Jr. Philippines S tudies Center, Washington DC, US A

From 1899 to 1946, the Philippines was the only U.S. colony in Asia annexed at the cost of 1.4 million Filipinos dead, and several thousand American troops killed in the Philippine-American War (1899-1913). From 1946 up to today, the Philippines remains a neocolony, with the recent ex- tension of the U.S.-Philippines Visiting Forces Agreement allowing U.S. forces to intervene in Philippine affairs. During the Cold War, U.S. bases in the Philippines functioned as strategic springboards for intervention in the Korean and IndoChina wars. The neocolonial archipelago continues to do so with Washington's ongoing confrontation with China. While the Covid-19 Delta variant ravages the imperial heartland, in the tropical out- post President Duterte's carnage rages on, devastating the lives of 110 million Filipinos four million of whom reside in the United States as migrant workers, Navy personnel, engineers, doctors, nurses, women, and others exposed to the global pandemic crisis. Less augury than symptom, the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic betokens a profound crisis of the neoliberal capitalist global order. Over four million people worldwide have died, 609 thousand in the U.S., 539 in Brazil, and 413 in India (as of July 15, 2021). Variants are multiplying, with no end in sight. People of color, the poor and marginalized everywhere, suffer more than the propertied, as usual. We transitioned from 9/11 “disaster” and “global war on terrorism” to the 2008 meltdown of casino/finance capital without much retribution—except the misery of the impoverished millions. Perhaps the survivors are now regrouping and strategizing their next moves to overturn the predatory iniquitous system. Crisis is essential to capitalism as a way of what Marx called “the forcible adjustment of all the contradictions of capitalism” (Harvey 2014, xiii). Dispossession as capital accumulation, creative destruction, prof- itable waste—such as the paradoxes, antinomies, aporias that litter the postmodern landscape. Antagonism between the few plutocratic managers of the security/surveillance state and the redundant majority are bound to sharpen as we face worldwide discontent—witness the mass mobilization after George Floyd’s killing. Aside from the pandemic, drought, fires, floods and all sorts of natural disasters are wreaking havoc on economies and lives in many continents, on top of internecine and mul- tilateral conflicts for control of markets, resources, territories, hopes, dreams, etc. What we are facing now is however quite unprecedented It is not rebellion from the exploited masses but an ecological catastrophe that capitalist globalization cannot stop, much less prevent from worsening since it has exacerbated the process of disintegration. Commodity- fetishism reigns supreme. Mike Davis has incisively diagnosed our current predicament: “We see a world system of accumulation everywhere break- ing down traditional boundaries between animal diseases and humans, increasing the power of drug monopolies, proliferating carcinogenic waste, subsidizing oligarchy and undermining progressive governments commit- ted to public health, destroying traditional communities (both industrial and preindustrial) and turning the oceans into sewers. Market solutions leave in place Dickensian social conditions and perpetuate the global shame of income-limited access to clean water and sanitation.” Davis sums up the convergent crises of our civilization as “defined by capitalism’s inability to generate incomes for the majority of humanity, to provide jobs and meaningful social roles, end fossil fuel emissions, and translate revolutionary biological advances into public health....The super- capitalism of today has become an absolute fetter on the development of the productive forces necessary for our species survival” (2020). The implications of this planetary upheaval was recently spelled out by the U.S. National Intelligence Council in its report, “Global Trends 2040.” Not only disruption of international trade would ensue but also an erosion of the world-order, fragmentation, polarization. Distrust and skepti- cism toward hegemonic institutions would intensify, calling for “alternative providers of governance” (Barnes 2021). Racial, ethnic and national divi- sions would multiply and deepen. Gobal politics would be more volatile and contentious, as evidenced by the smoldering confrontation between China and the United States. But, unfortunately, the conclusion of this report appeals to the corporate elite, the State executives, to be “anticipatory rather than reactionary,” and solve the crises (Editorial, New York Times, 2021). What about the rebellion of the Green parties and the coalition of indigenous communities defying corporate rapacity? Rumblings from the “Belly of the Beast” All accounts of the public response to the pandemic have praised the front-liners, the doctors, nurses and health-care workers in hospitals, for their dedication. The pandemic’s toll on Filipino nurses, however, sig- nals the racialized, unequal burden shared by this group. As of September 2020, 67 Filipino nurses have died of Covid-19, a third of total registered nurses nationwide, though they make up only four percent of nurses over- all. Why is this so? Because in the colonized periphery, “an American cur- riculum as early as 1907 granting degrees to English-speaking nurses who could slot easily into American hospitals” prepared the subalterns for such emergencies (Powell 2021, 30). With the severe staffing shortage in the 1980s due to the AIDs epidemic, recruitment of Filipino nurses for New York and San Francisco hospitals allowed thousands to secure visas. However, since then, this group has earned less than the majority of Americans of the same educational level (Catholic Institute 1987, 44-48), typical of a racialized system of redistribution and social recognition. About 3.4 million Filipino Americans constitute the second largest group of Asians in the U.S., with over 310,000 undocumented persons (Aquino 2017). Sixty percent of Filipino-Americans are women due to the feminization of exported labor as part of Philippine growth strategy. In 2008, we find 666,00 Filipino-born female workers employed in civilian la- bor, with 22.9 percent reported working as registered nurses. Throughout over a hundred years of linkage between the neocolony and its imperial tutor, scholars have concluded that Filipinos “endured discrimination, race- based violence, and a series of restrictive federal legislation impacting civil rights and immigration” (Morelli, Trinidad and Alboroto 2020). Nothing to be surprised about, given the pattern of discrimination and exclusion expe- rienced by migrant ethnic labor from Asia and other underdeveloped coun- tries. Filipino migrant labor contributed to capital accumulation in Hawaii and the West Coast soon after U.S. “pacification” of the islands in the Fil- ipino-American War of 1899-1913. But instead of social recognition, they encountered suspicion. Historians often cite the notorious Watsonville, California 4-day-riots of December 1929 when white vigilantes attacked Filipino farm workers and killed one of them with impunity (Takaki 1989, 327-28). The martyred worker Fermin Tobera was hailed a hero when his body was interred in his homeland.This is only one of many violent inci- dents that distinguished the militant Filipino presence in the imperial heart- land where their leadership of multiethnic union strikes—from the Hawaii sugar plantations to the grape-farms of California in the Sixties—prefig- ured the multiracial Civil-Rights mobilization of the last quarter of the twen- tieth-century. With ironic pathos, the Watsonville riot has been forgotten by Fil- ipinos who now celebrate assimilation as White House chef, Disneyland entertainers, rock stars, etc. With Trump’s canard about “kung-flu” stigma- tizing all Asian-looking folks, Filipinos are now targeted as easy scape- goats. Vilma Kari, a 65-year-old Filipina woman, was attacked on a street near Times Square, mid-Manhattan, New York City Three onlookers turned their backs on her (Hong et al, 2021, A15). Earlier, Filipino resi- dents as well as Chinese-American women were attacked in New York City and California as alien-looking migrants, carriers of the deadly virus from Wuhan, China. Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders have suddenly lost their “model-minority aura” and, with fear and trembling, now call for solidarity over and above class, ethnic or religious differences. They need triage and sanctuary from white-supremacist predation. Given the nationwide alarm over accelerating hate-crimes, the hashtag “#StopAsianHate” went viral on Twitter. Viet Thanh Nguyen (2021), the award-winning novelist, urged a common political identity for Black Americans, Muslims, Latinos and LGBTQ people to unite together for a decolonizing agenda. Without any warning, the massacre of six women of Asian descent in the Atlanta, Georgia spa, triggered a universal outcry and stirred the White House and Congress to take action. But with the Biden administration focusing on China as the prime enemy that needs to be controlled or contained, how feasible can the task of decolo- nizing Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders succeed in halting racialized imperial aggression around the world? In any case, pious teary-eyed wolves guarding sheep are hardly reassuring. Limahong’s Revenants Roaming the Orient Sea In the context of the end of neoliberal globalization, I recount in this book the U.S. conquest of the Philippines by bloody subjugation. Over one million dead Filipinos, unfortunately, were not able to enjoy McKinley’s “Benevolent Assimilation.” Regarded as the “first Vietnam,” the colonizing adventure inaugurated the start of U.S. imperial expansion into Asia, specifically China (San Juan 2007, 1-66). It was an earnest step in fulfilling the “civilizing mission” or “White Men’s Burden,” to quote Kipling’s poem written expressly as white-supremacist defense of U.S. aggression in the Philippines. Vladimir Lenin noted that “in annexing the Philippines, the United States cheated Filipino leader Aguinaldo by promising the country independence.” Apropos of Wilson’s 1918 “Fourteen Points” affirming self- determination for all nations, Lenin observed that “most peculiarly, your demands say nothing...about the liberation of the Philippines” (Institute of Oriental Studies 1978, 412-13). Lenin’s remark, as well as that of Rosa Luxemburg, were only footnotes to Mark Twain’s censure of U.S. butchery of the recalcitrant na- tives, among them 900 Moro men, women and children at Mount Dajo, on March 9, 1906 (1992, 168-78). The carnage persists with the help of U.S. drones, missiles, logistics, and U.S. Special Forces in the total destruction of Marawi City in May-June 2017. After World War II, the Philippines served as the convenient spring- board for intervention in the Korean and IndoChina War at the height of the Cold War. In 1957, U.S. foreign policy expert Vera Micheles Dean lauded Western colonialism as the midwife of a “plural society” while she lamented the death of the anticommunist, CIA-sponsored Ramon Magsaysay (1957, 180-85). After the IndoChina conflict, another expert William McCord touted Fukuyama’s apocalyptic triumph of market liberal- ism. At the same time, he bewailed the autocrat Ferdinand Marcos’ wast- ing of the great potential of the islands, making it “the economic basket case of Pacific Asia,” (1991, 57), while its industrialized neighbors prospered tremendously. The basket case may now be unsalvageable, plunged deeply in more dire circumstances. The February 1986 “People Power” revolt may be deemed more as cautionary farce than tragicomedy. After Marcos, the Aquino regime re- turned to the neofeudal, cacique-led democracy bequeathed by U.S. neo- colonialism (Bauzon 1991) and retooled by her successors from General Fidel Ramos to the rapacious Arroyo and the murderous Duterte. The once-vaunted “showcase of democracy” for the Free World now serves again to project U.S. power as Washington pivots to the Asia-Pacific re- gion. China is now the new upstart Leviathan to confront and contain, hence the strategic value of the archipelago, in particular the sea lanes next to the contested reefs and isles of the West Philippine Sea. Inaugu- rated when the Philippines became the “second front” after Afghanistan/ Iraq in combating Islamic extremism, this new role for the nation was reaf- firmed by then President Trump’s visit to Manila and Clark Field military base in February 2017. Boasting of the U.S. devastation of Japan in World War II, Trump threatened the People’s Republic of North Korea with “fire and fury,” a more savage version of the genocidal campaign against Fil- ipinos in pursuit of “Manifest Destiny.” Meanwhile, the war against the Abu Sayyaf and other extremists continues as the rationale for the operations of heavily armed U.S. “Spe- cial Forces.” The former U.S. military bases in Clark and Subic Bay have been refurbished as counter-insurgency centers against anyone protesting corporate plunder of the neocolony’s human and natural resources. Duterte’s corrupt demagogic rule is supported by U.S. military aid, logistics and advisers in its campaign against drug dealers as well as against ter- rorists/communists (the terms are interchangeable). This highly publicized campaigns function as pretexts to justify a Plan-Colombia mode of U.S. intervention. This is fully evident in the U.S. participation in the destruction of Marawi City, Mindanao, as well as in the ruthless bombing and mas- sacre of peasants, especially the villages of Lumads, Manobos, and other indigenes located in the rich mineral lands and forests of Mindanao. Of crucial importance is the controversy over islands in the West Philippine Sea which China claims, building military installations on them. This move is a flagrant rejection of the 2016 judgment of the Hague Permanent Court of Arbitration favoring Philippine jurisdiction over the disput- ed zone. The fishing grounds around the Scarborough Shoal (Panatag Is- land), Spratley Islands, and various reefs all lie within the Philippine Ex- clusive Zone. However, China has ordered its coast guard fleet and armed militia to intimidate and drive away Filipino fishing boats. Duterte has pub- licly abandoned protecting the territorial integrity of the nation he has sworn to uphold—a stark display of treason that, in other sovereign states, would have summoned the firing squad without much ado. The recent U.S. “pivot to Asia” has converted this region into a powder-keg, a verita- ble tinderbox, for a shooting match between two nuclear-powered states (already trading belligerent accusations) in which the Philippines may prove to be simply “collateral damage.” Moralizing Demagoguery & Banal Realpolitik For over a year now, over a hundred million Filipinos have suffered the ravages of pandemic due to the militarized abuses and criminal negli- gence of the Duterte regime, with the State apparatus practically managed by police and army officials, retired officers, and their entourage of para- sitic minions. The scourge of the planet continues to ravage the neo- colony. As of July 2021, 1,181 deaths due to Covid-19 have been report- ed. Up to now, there are no organized vaccination campaigns, no accessi- ble mass testing, no provision of adequate medical facilities such as public hospitals and clinics. Given the incompetent, avaricious bureaucracy, it is impossible to expect any humane community-oriented and rights-based approach to the pandemic. Unrelieved unemployment, widespread pover- ty, hunger, hopelessness and misery seem to be the unsavory prospect of millions for the future. Meanwhile, lame-duck Duterte is gearing to manipulate the 2022 elections to insure his impunity from the International Criminal Court’s on- going investigation. Duterte’s “crimes against humanity” are horrific. They include mass atrocities, particularly tens of thousands killed during the drug-war crusade and extra-judicial killings of opponents ranging from priests (e.g. Fr. Rustico Luna Tan of Missionaries of the Sacred Heart, Cebu, is the most recent), civil-society activists, human rights defenders, farmers, workers, students, professionals, and lumpen elements. Specifi- cally targeted are the indigenous communities of Tumandoks in Panay, and the Lumads and Manobos in Mindanao, with Lumad families, particu- larly children in schools being singled out for arrests, torture, prolonged detention, and assassination. Mass media and internet platforms cannot keep up with the regime’s punitive outrages. The inventory of victims has been diligently kept by Karapatan, the leading human-rights monitor in the Philippines. It has publicized online Duterte’s accomplishments to date: 414 victims of extra-judicial killings, 479 frustrated attempts to kill by State security agents; 1,126 illegal arrests and detentions; forced evictions of 469, 025 peasants, workers, etc.(Karapatan 2021). Currently, there are 713 political prisoners (among the 130 women detained are Senator Leila de Lima, Amanda Echanis, Cora Agovida, Grace Versoza, Reina Mae Nasino, and countless others for which we have no space here to enumerate). While Marcos killed and tortured 3,257 Filipinos, Duterte has surpassed him with a record of at least 30,000 deaths (54 of them children) since 2016 (Robertson, 2020). What’s scandalous is that this routine bloodletting seems to have inured the elected legislators, judges, and bureaucrats to a cursed, malevolent status quo. Vexed Cynical Perversions The consensus of pundits may be cited here. Duterte’s “populist au- thoritarianism” won him the 2016 elections because it addresses, accord- ing to Sheila Coronel, “the insecurity of people’s lives and their yearning for effective government” (2017). Unemployment and the seductive, toxic consumerism of a media-saturated milieu heighten this insecurity. The term “populism” is thus misleading since the “people” is a fabrication of commercial polls, social media, etc. It is a free-floating signifier represent- ing anyone not tied to the contested oligarchic hegemony, hence it can be articulated as an antagonistic discourse to challenge whoever is in power (Laclau 1979). Thus Duterte, with appropriate rhetoric and vulgar perfor- mance, posed as “the social bandit” who would rescue drug-addicts, the immoral poor, from perversity and perdition. He may be popular but not populist since his game is more theatrical or histrionic than ideological, yielding the illusion of a messianic reality-effect emanating from the pro- paganda of a local/provincial warlord in search of charisma. In short, it’s all a prestidigitator’s tawdry trick with catastrophic consequences. Sociologist Wataru Kosaka conducted a survey of impoverished groups and proposed this hypothesis: “Duterte’s extra-judicial violence has been largely accepted as ‘tough love’ because his legitimacy is rooted not in adherence to the law but in the persisting social bandit-like morality that revolves around the compassion and violence of a local patriarchal strongman, who maintains social order outside of the state” (2017, 72). Violence, yes, but compassion? No doubt the epithet “populist” is an adhoc rubric, not an analytical category. Instead of being a “populist,” in my view, Duterte performs as a master-magician whose technocratic handlers have manipulated the psy- che/habitus of poverty-stricken males into a compensatory politics of “we” versus “them,” the “good citizens” versus the criminalized “immoral others” who deserve to be wiped out (Almendral 2017). But this compromised bi- nary is apt to break out in irreconcilable contradiction. Lacking publicly de- liberated consensus, this moralizing performance relies on the capricious passivity, fatalism, and temporizing gullibility of its victims. It’s a precarious equilibrium that characterizes a crisis of transition in Philippine politics, from the glamorized Aquino/trapo dynasty back to a parodic Marcos-style clientelism supported by military-police vigilantes/death-squads. To be sure, Duterte’s power lacks authority in its rejection of tradi- tional jurisprudence and Constitutional imperatives. His tenure, resting on militarized coercion and fortuna (Arendt 1968), cannot last without a foun- dation in a sovereign, economically stable industrialized republic. Emer- gencies cannot excuse barbarism. Duterte’s presidency cannot even leave a negative residue (unlike his model Marcos’ martial-law regime) in a feu- dal-compradorized polity dependent on contingent Chinese investments, and the unrelinquishable hold of Washington-Pentagon via the 1946 Treaty of General Relations, the 2014 Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement, and their instrumentalities, the International Monetary Fund and global bank consortiums. Duterte’s gamesmanship with these compet- ing powers is bound to wreck the economy and damage the received so- cial contract. So far, this putative “social order”—a euphemism for draconian regulations, summary executions, and extra-judicial slayings in police crackdowns—have produced over 30,000 victims. The police operations only officially registered 4,075 deaths, while 16,000 cases are still under investigation (Sarmiento 2018). Impunity or lack of accountability by State agencies explains why the Philippines topped the 2017 Global Impunity Index over 69 countries surveyed, which included numerous Latin Ameri- can countries (Dalangin-Fernandez 2017). Duterte’s brutal policy in elimi- nating drug addiction resembles the devastating tragedy in Colombia where the alleged cure—executing suspected drug-addicts in impover- ished slums—was “infinitely worse than the disease” (Time Editors, 1-8 May 2017, 74). Meanwhile, new oligarchs linked to drug syndicates with clandestine links to Duterte associates are emerging from old and new compadre networks, as well as from revitalized patrimonial dynasties (Marcos, Arroyo & their ilk) all ready and eager to replace him. Resurrecting the “Cold War” Syndrome Shock and awe inflicted on millions by a “fatherly” disciplinarian may have worked wonders: slum neighborhoods are supposed to be safe, addicts out of sight; but is anyone accountable or responsible? How is it possible for a “homicidal sociopath,” a foul-mouthed ruffian, to carry out this barbarism in modern-day Philippines? On December 4, 2018, Duterte signed Executive Order 70 (EO70), also known as “the whole-of-nation approach to end the local communist insurgency.” Obviously the targets are the Communist Party of the Philippines and its armed wing, the New People’s Army, and recently the National Democratic Front. Duterte’s Task Force has now implicated their alleged legal fronts: Gabriela, Bayan Muna, Karapatan, Ibon, etc. No one is safe from the dragnet. Reactionary expediency serves to deflect attention from widespread corruption in gov- ernment to legitimize transnational corporate profiteering and plunder of public funds. Observes here and abroad have opined that, under cover of the pandemic, the crusade against communism is an attempt to legitimize the carnage of the drug-war and large-scale looting of the public treasury. Reminiscent of Cold War McCarthyism, EO70 has utilized the entire gov- ernment apparatus for counterinsurgency operations. It is an adjunct to the military’s Oplan Kapayapaan, part of the U.S. “Operation Pacific Eagle: Philippines” which activated U.S. armed participation in the Marawi bloodletting. Various agencies and bureaucratic machineries have been mobi- lized to redtag critics, dissenters, human-rights defenders, and practically anyone suspected of being critical of Duterte and his regime. EO70 has been reinforced with the Anti-Terror Law which imposes de facto martial law on the whole country, with the pandemic and Marawi City siege lend- ing credibility to the fascist weaponization of law and the judiciary. EO70 created also the National Task Force to End the Local Com- munist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC), the country’s prime red-tagger, staffed with military personnel and retired officers With the end of the 2017 peace talks with the “local communists,” the NTF now labels the insur- gents and their sympathizers “terrorists.” To implement its spiteful, relent- less program to extirpate those terrorists, the NTF was granted a huge budget of P19 billion diverted from the resources needed to address the extreme poverty of millions aggravated by the pandemic and lack of health-care, food, humane shelter, etc. With draconian measures, the State’s coercive agencies, together with the court system, continue to stigmatize and intimidate the poorest sectors of society represented by red-tagged organizations such as the Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP, the largest network of peasants struggling for genuine land reform, Anakpawis Party-list, Union ng mga Manggagawa sa Agricultura, KMU (Msy First Labor Federation), and other groups working for the interests of the most oppressed and exploited sectors of society. With his ascribed “gangster charm,” Duterte has openly endorsed the indiscriminate violence of his police and soldiers, urging them to follow a “shoot-to-kill” policy. He broadcast his command in public: “If a suspect draws out a gun, kill him. If he doesn’t, kill him anyway” (Simangan 2017; Sajor 2020). Over 30,000 suspects, among them juveniles, died, deprived of the citizen’s right to due process, presumption of innocence, fair trial, etc. After junking peace talks with the National Democratic Front (NDF), now labeled a terrorist group in addition to the Communist Party of the Philippines and the New People’s Army, Duterte has begun systematically bombing Lumad villages and terrorizing indigenous tribes occupying min- eral-rich regions for allegedly supporting communists. The fascist regime has now concentrated on the assassination of NDF consultants such as Randy Malayao, Randall Echanis, Agaton Topacio, Eugenia Magpantay, Reynaldo Bocala, Julius Giron, among others, and trumped-up charges leveled at environmental activists, human rights defenders such as Karap- atan head Cristina Palabay, church workers, indigenous teachers, all ac- cused of being communist fronts, sympathizers, guilty “fellow-travelers.” Inquiry and Rectification Diverse international groups such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, UN Human Rights Council, and the U.S. State Department have taken notice of Duterte’s record of killings and wanton defiance of universal norms of justice. Duterte’s regime might claim to honor the right to life, liberty, and security of persons guaranteed by the UN Declaration of Human Rights and other Covenants; but its practice consistently defiles those norms. Duterte’s Anti-Terrorism Bill, for example, nullifies the citi- zen’s right to due process, fair trial, rights to free speech and assembly, all promulgated in the Philippine Constitution. Under this Bill, anyone can be surveilled, framed-up and arrested without judicial warrant, jailed without charges, based on mere suspicion and planted evidence. The planting of evidence (guns, bombs, etc) has become the modus operandi for police and army. The Bill gives license to abduct, torture and kill suspects. It le- galizes Duterte’s full-blown fascist dictatorship without any need for him to formally declare martial law (Anakbayan 2020). Filipinos have alerted the international community. In her report, UN Special Rapporteur Agnes Callamard has charged Duterte with “wide- spread and systematic attack directed against a civilian population” (Umil 2921). The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights report- ed in June 2020 how the Anti-Terrorism Act and the National Task Force provided institutional mechanisms allowing extensive human rights viola- tions, without domestic remedies to resolve the abuses. The Philippine ju- dicial system has been complicit in repressing any critic or dissenter. Likewise, the Senate has abandoned its duty to inquire into such flagrant atrocities, with one senator even urging the body to grant emergency powers to the autocratic president so as to arrest anyone without a war- rant. Desperation and fragility characterize the despot’s last days. With the Congress and Senate rendered inutile, if not an accomplice of the per- petrator, Duterte has threatened to declare martial law—in imitation of his 12 mentor, Ferdinand Marcos—if the judiciary (Supreme Court) interferes with his war on drug-addicts. Dishevelled impotence and futility distinguish such threats. Justice may be delayed but not forever denied. Although Duterte withdrew the country from being a signatory party to the Rome Statute for fear of being indicted, the International Criminal Court has not been de- terred. It has decided to proceed in its investigation of Duterte’s crimes against humanity, specifically his sponsorship of extrajudicial killings and summary executions while he was mayor of Davao City and as president. On June 14, 2021, Fatou Bensouda, the Court’s outgoing prosecutor, rec- ommended investigation of the regime for “crimes against humanity.” The Court has documented 378 cases of recorded extrajudicial killings and 488 cases of attempted murder. The Court has included within its scope the record of massive human-rights violations in Davao City when Duterte was mayor. His notorious death-squad in Davao City has served as the institutional template for his ruthless war against drug-addicts, farmers, teachers, lawyers, doctors, journalists, trade unionists, indigenous leaders and urban poor organizers in their own homes. This looming indictment has driven Duterte to speculate on vying for the position vice-president in the 2020 elections to insure that he can use the state apparatus to defy and elude the Court’s outreach. Counter-intuitively, doomsday cannot be postponed. Denouement Without Catharsis The international group InvestigatePH has called on the UN Human Rights Council to hold the Duterte regime responsible for thousands of ex- tra-judicial killings, abductions, illegal arrests, detentions and other forms of violation of human rights and humanitarian law. It recommends that Duterte be held criminally liable for official orders to kill drug users and civ- il-society activists, allowing government agencies to utilize public funds and networks to weaponize the law and stifle dissent (Cabana 2021). Since the U.S. has been actively involved in funding military and police training, as well as providing arms and equipment, various international groups have called on the U.S. Congress to pass the Philippines Human Rights Act (PHRA). This Act will halt military funding, weapon sales and donations of armament, to the police and army until the Philippine government guarantees respect for the human rights of its citizens. It also re- quires the Philippine judicial system to prosecute members of the police and military responsible for human-rights violations. Since 2014, the US. has given $550 million in military aid or security assistance. More than $33 million of U.S. taxpayers money has been given to the Philippine police for its war on drugs. In 2018, U.S. aid amounted to $193.5 million. Last July 2020, the U.S. Congress was discussing the terms of $2 billion arms sales including twelve attack helicopters, hundreds of missiles and warheads, guidance and detection systems, machine guns, over eighty-thousand rounds of ammunition, and so on (Chew 2020). All these will be used in Duterte’s campaign to crush the opposition with the pretext of fighting terrorism. Much of the earlier aid has been used in the Marawi City battle where in- discriminate warfare by massive aerial bombing and artillery fire have killed civilians and displaced over 450,000 civilians. U.S. personnel, weapons, intelligence and training were all involved in this breach of in- ternational humanitarian law. This war on the BangsaMoro nation has pro- vided cover for land seizures from displaced residents, denying the Moro people’s right to self-determination (InvestigatePH, 2021), Vigil on the Eve of Judgment Day Responding to a worldwide campaign, the International Committee of the AFL-CIO has urged the passage of the PHRA to suspend U.S. tax- payer-funded military aid to the Duterte regime “until security officials stop the routine violations of human rights and those responsible for abuses are held accountable” (2020). This move is supported by the Communica- tion Workers of America, International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines, Malaya, and others. On the face of this international outcry, the plight of 110 million Filipinos has worsened with the militarized han- dling of the pandemic, aggravating the misery caused by lack of social provisions for health care and basic necessities of food, shelter, clothing, sanitation, etc. Precarity, fatalism, servility, and arbitrary violence charac- terize the chaotic milieu of millions of ordinary Filipinos today, including those in the diaspora. What’s the prospect? The research group IBON warned two years ago of the precarious situation of high inflation, high unemployment, slow- ing growth, rising interest rates, swelling trade deficits, a falling peso, stagnation of agriculture and industry, and decline of remittances from mi- grant workers. IBON also noted that sharpened political uncertainty from resurgent, wider protests induced by economic discontent, assertions of human rights, and opposition to corrupt authoritarian governance are bound to destabilize the old order (IBON 2018). These trends will surely intensify and ripen the fundamental contradictions of a neocolonized social formation. Meanwhile, the plague spreads and the fabled Geist/Spirit of con- tradiction rides on. What is to be done? Our civic duty/vocation seems clear. My conviction is that in the antagonism between the oligarchic State machine and the counter-hegemonic popular bloc, ultimately the conscien- ticized “wretched of the earth” will overcome. The future can only be forged by the people’s combative will for radical social transformation. In this wager, we are inspired by Marta Harnecker’s axiom of emancipatory politics as the art of making possible the impossible, “the art of construct- ing a social and political force capable of changing the balance of forces in favor of the popular movement, so as to make possible in the future that which today appears impossible” (2016). The spirit of negation is bound to release the repressed potentialities lodged in the past and present in the ongoing project of national-popular liberation. This process is ineluctable. Only the organized mobilization of millions of Filipinos can determine whether the maelstrom of resistance can generate the necessary structur- al changes that will bring about the conditions needed for the majority to enjoy the long-awaited benefits of social justice, participatory democracy, equality, and genuine sovereignty. REFERENCES AFl-CIO Executive Council. 2020. “Congress Should Introduce and Pass the Human Rights Act.” Council Statement. Washington DC: June 19. Amendral, Aurora. 2017. “The General Running Duterte’s Antidrug War.” The New York Times (June 2): A15. Arendt, Hannah. 1968. Between Past and Present. New York: The Viking Press. Anakbayan. 2020. “‘On the So-called Anti-Terrorism Bill.” Anakbayan (June 24). Aquino, Alyssa. 2017. “Undocumented Filipinos Are Living a Special Nightmare in Trump’s America.” Foreign Policy in Focus. Washington DC: FPIF. Bauzon, Kenneth. 1991. “Knowledge and Ideology in Philippine Society.” Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society 19: 207-34. Barnes, Julian. 2021. “Intelligence Report Warns Pandemic is Chipping Away at the World Order.” The New York Times (9 April): A 11. Cabana, Ysh. 2021. “Philippines: International pressure to investigate Duterte crimes against humanity.” MRonline (28 January). Catholic Institute for International Relations. 1985. The Labour Trade. London: Catholic Institute. Coronel, Sheila. 2017. “A Presidency Bathed in Blood.” Democracy Journal (29 June). 
Davis, Mike. 2020. “Beware the light at the end of the Covid tunnel.” The Nation (11 March). Danguilan-Fernandez, Lara. 2017. “Worst yet to come.” InterAksyon (22 Sep tember). 
Dean, Vera Micheles. 1957. The Nature of the Non-Western World. New York: New American Library.
Editors, The New York Times. 2021. “Opinion: Why Our Spies Say the Future is Bleak.” The New York Times (April 16): A22.
Harnecker, Marta. 2016. “Ideas for the Struggle.” Old and New Project/Monthly Review. 
Harvey, David. 2014. Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hong, Nicole et al. 2021. “Brutal Attack on Filipino Woman Sparks Outrage: Everybody is on Edge.” The New York Times (30 March): A15.
IBON. 2018. “Philippine Economy Deteriorating.” Ibon Features (29 August). Institute of Oriental Studies (USSR Academy of Sciences). 1978. Lenin and National Liberation in the East. Moscow: Progress Publishers. InvestigatePH. 2021. “Second Report of the Independent International Commission of Investigation into Human Rights Violations in the Philippines, 6 July 2021.” May 18, 20, 25, and 27 Hearings. New York: Investigateph. Karapatan. 2021. Karapatan Monitor. January-March 2021. Kosaka, Wataru. 2017. “Bandit Grabbed the State: Duterte’s Moral Politics. Philippine Sociological Review 65: 49-75. 16 Laclau, Ernesto. 1977. Politics and Marxist Ideology in Marxist Theory. London: Verso. McCord, William. 1991. The Dawn of the Pacific Century. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Morelli, Paula, Alma Trinidad, and Richard Alboroto. 2020. “Asian Americans: Filipinos.” Encyclopedia of Social Work. New York: Oxford University Press. Nguyen, Viet Thanh. 2021. “The Flawed Fiction of ‘Asian American.’ “ The New York Times (June 6): A23. Powell, Luca. 2021. “The Pandemic’s Toll on Filipino Nurses.” The New York Times (17 January): 30. Sajor, Leanne. 2020. “State Repression in the Philippines During COVID-19 and Beyond.” Open Democracy (7 July). San Juan, E. 2007. U.S. Imperialism and Revolution in the Philippines. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Simangan, Dahlia. 2017. “Is the Philippine ‘War on Drugs’ an Act of Genocide?” Journal of Genocide Research (October): 1-22. Takaki, Roland. 1989. Strangers from a Different Shore. Boston: Little Brown & Co. Time Editors. 2017. “Rodrigo Duterte.” Time (May 1-8): 74.
Twain, Mark. 1992. Mark Twain’s Weapons of Satire. Ed. Jim Zwick. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.
Robertson, Phil. 2020. “Another Spike in Philippine Drug War Deaths.” Human Rights Watch (28 September). New York: Human Rights Watch.
Umil, Anne Marxe. 2021.”Long Wait for Justice Finally Coming to Light.” Bulatlat (26 June). __________ About the Author: E.SAN JUAN, Jr. is emeritus professor of English, Ethnic Studies and Com- parative Literature, University of Connecticut, and was recently visiting pro- fessor, University of the Philippines and Polytechnic University of the Philip- pines. He was previously a fellow of the W.E.B. DuBois Institute, Harvard University; and Fulbright professor of American Studies, Leuven University, Belgium. His recent books are In the Wake of Terror (Lexington), T oward Fil- 17 ipino S elf-Determination (SUNY Press); and Carlos Bulosan: R evolutionary Filipino Writers in the U.S. (Peter Lang).

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Maelstrom over the Killing Fields

Interventions in the Project
Of National-Democratic Liberation

A  BOOK REVIEW BY

Paulino Lim, Jr.
Emeritus Professor of English California State University, Long Beach

From one who has written innumerable books, this volume may be viewed as an “anthology of San Juan’s best essays.” It has a powerful voice that stirs the maelstrom over “the killing fields,” a metaphor that came out of the Vietnam War (1955-1975), and most apt for the Philippines, where the first killing fields took place when the U.S. military fought and conquered the insurgents and proceeded to colonize the country (1899-1912).

The anthology presents an “agenda for change and social transformation.” It focuses on particular themes, situations and personages, e.g. the diaspora, pandemic, Jose Rizal and Nick Joaquin. (Was Rizal gay? How do you account for Joaquin’s “tragic-comic consciousness?) In each essay San Juan goes deep into the subject, deploying various analytical tools drawn from history, philosophy and literary criticism, and synthesizes the findings into a coherent “knowledge” or information about the subject. The new information may add, amplify, or revise previously known “facts,” but does it constitute Truth? Is the latest interpretation analogous to the self-portraits that the artist paints in the course of his life? It is up to the reader to decide.

A critical tool that San Juan includes in the analysis is the “structure of feeling” that informs not only the interpretation or criticism itself but also the attitude of the critic himself–a technique he adopted from Charles Sanders Peirce credited in the. Acknowledgements. In fiction, laying the feelings of a narrative is the equivalent ofs scoring a film with music.

A simple exercise is to define the feeling of some elements of the Preface. San Juan calls in awe the pandemic as a “planetary upheaval”; condemns the exploitation by “rapacious” capitalists–with the aid of Karl Marx. (i) He mourns the death in 2020 of 67 Filipino nurses ministering to Covid-19 patients. He recalls with

muted pride the militant Filipino presence in the U.S. that marked the four-day riots in Watsonville, California, in December 1929. The event prefigured the violence against Asians, Filipinos included, being blamed for importing the virus from Wu Han.

What convinces the reader as in the case of Rizal and Joaquin, for instance, , is San Juan’s close reading of the author’s works (poems, essays and novels) and tracing the development of his “sensibility” reflected in the work. San Juan’s final word on Rizal is that he was “not a messiah, only a prophetic intellectual of colonized peoples “ San Juan recalls James Michener’s remark that Rizal’s novels were “directly responsible for the author’s death.” San Juan sums up Rizal’s challenge for Filipinos to “fight and win their independence by their own sacrifices.” The essay ends with a passage from “Mi Ultimo Adios.”

I die when I see the dawn break,
Through the gloom of night, to herald the day;o And if color is lacking my blood thou shalt take Pour’d out at need for thy dear sake,
To dye with its crimson the waking ray. (89)

What entertains the reader are the human-interest and gossipy details, embellished by San Juan’s often sardonic comments. Rizal’s Austrian correspondent Ferdinand Blumentritt tries to console him: “. . . but you are one of the heroes who conquer pain from a wound inflicted by women. (64) He met in 1888 a 22-year-old O-Sei-San, a samurai's daughter, “may have experienced carnal bliss.” (65) The historian Ambeth Ocampo has interpreted the recurrence of snakes as phallic symbols in Rizal’s dreams, suggesting that Rizal may have been a closet gay. (66) Rizal performed a common-law marriage ceremony with the “wandering swallow” Josephine Bracken by holding hands together and marrying themselves. The Catholic priest Father Obach refused to marry them. (67)

Of particular interest to me is the discourse on the Filipino diaspora. I write as an OFW (overseas Filipino worker/writer), the largest segment of the Filipino diaspora. (The discourse provides a prospectus for M.A. and Ph.D., defining six “theses” to pursue.) I am glad I am not writing in Myanmar (I am three-fourths Malayan) or in Hong Kong (one-fourth Chinese). I read Maelstrom during Advent anticipating the birth of Christ. What we got instead was the “second coming” of Covid-19. Nonetheless, I took Communion to celebrate the presence, and the

booster shot to ward off the pandemic. The pandemic has introduced new modes of learning, done away with SAT and college entrance exams, re-examined Ethnic and Women’s Studies, as Delia V. Aguilar explores in the Afterword. (201)

San Juan’s review of the colonization and decolonization of the Philippines has been a welcomed corrective to my naive reading of the country’s history. The structure of my feelings was centered on gratitude. Gratitude to Spain for bringing the Roman alphabet and the Catholic Religion; to America for introducing democracy, public education, and English–the lingua franca of the world and the Internet; and to Japan, after repulsion by the atrocities the military inflicted in the Bataan Death March, for Buddhism, calligraphy, and the films of Ozu and Kurosawa.

In San Juan’s capsule review, “The history of the Philippines may be read asseculaone long chronicle of the people’s struggle against colonialism and imperialism for the sake of affirming human dignity and universal justice.

Gratitude still centers my feelings toward the U.S., despite the white supremacy movement and the “Big Lie” of the 2020 Presidential Elections being. Stolen. UCLA exempted me from paying the $600 out-of-state tuition fee; now it runs to about $32,000. San Juan earned his bachelor’s degree in English at the secular University of the Philippines, modeled after the U.S. state university system. I attended the Dominican University of Santo Tomas, Manila, with its compulsory Scholastic curriculum requiring courses in Ethics, Cosmology, . And two semesters of Logic. This prepared me for writing term papers in my UCLA graduate courses in Linguistics, Drama, and American, Romantic and Victorian Literatures. (I did my Ph.D. dissertation on Byron).

Teaching at California State University, Long Beach, gave me time to research and write. I wrote four interrelated novels dealing with the Marcos Dictatorship that I call, perhaps inordinately, “The Philippine Quartet.” It is an homage to Lawrence Durrell whose Alexandria Quartette fascinated me as an undergraduate. In the first novel Tiger Orchids on Mount Mayon, the protagonist Mark is a surrogate for Marx. Mark studied at U.P., joined the teach-ins conducted by the Marxist professor Saldivar and read Mao Tse Tung’s
Red Book.

In Maelstrom over the Killing Fields, San Juan persuades Filipinos in the homeland and in the diaspora to act on an agenda for change and social transformation. No other Filipino approaches his scholarly output and world-wide

stature as an intellectual. I honor him, as I do the journalist Maria Ressa–the first Filipino to win a Nobel Peace Prize. There is so much love in what he writes, so much light in what he says

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