RE-VISITING THE SINGULARITY OF THE NATIONAL-DEMOCRATIC STRUGGLE IN THE PHILIPPINES
by E. San Juan, Jr.
Why is the United States planning to move its troops from Okinawa, Japan, to the Philippines and re-establish a military base in Mindanao larger than the former Clark Air Base and Subic Naval Base even as it proves itself incapable of stemming the tide of exploding insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan?
When U.S. occupation troops in Iraq continued to suffer casualties every day after the war officially ended, academics and journalists began in haste to draw up “fillers” comparing their situation with those of troops in the Philippines during the Filipino-American War (1899-1902). A New York Times essay was titled “In 1901 Philipppines, Peace Cost More Lives Than Were Lost in War” (2 July 2003, B1)), while an article in the Los Angeles Times contrastedthe simplicity of McKinley’s “easy” goal of annexation (though at the cost of 4,234 U.S. soldiers killed and 3,000 wounded) with George W. Bush’s ambition to “create a new working democracy as soon as possible” (20 July 2003, M2). Reviewing the past is instructive, of course, but we should always place it in the context of present circumstances in the Philippines and in the international arena. What is the connection between the Philippines and the current U.S. war against terrorism?
Demonizing the Moros
With the death of Martin Burnham, the hostage held by Muslim kidnappers called the “Abu Sayyaf” in Mindanao, the southern island of the Philippines, one would expect more than 1,200 American troops (including FBI and CIA personnel) training Filipinos for that rescue mission to be heading for home in late 2002. Instead of being recalled, reinforcements have been brought in and more joint military exercises announced in the future. Since September 11, 2001, U.S. media and Filipino government organs have dilated on the Abu Sayyaf’s links with Osama bin Laden. A criminal gang that uses Islamic slogans to hide its kidnapping-for-ransom activities, the Abu Sayyaf is a splinter group born out of the U.S. war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and used by the government to sow discord among the two insurgent organizations, the Moro National Liberation Front and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. Protected by local politicians and military officials, the Abu Sayyaf’s persistence betokens the complicated history of the centuries-long struggle of more than ten million Muslims in the Philippines for dignity, justice and self-determination.
What is behind the return of the former colonizer to what was once called its “insular territory” administered by the Bureau of Indian Affairs? With Secretary Colin Powell’s decision to stigmatize as “terrorist” the major insurgent groups that have been fighting for forty years for popular democracy and independence—the Communist Party of the Philippines and the New People’s Army, part of a coalition called the National Democratic Front, the introduction of thousands of U.S. troops, weapons, logistics, and supporting personnel has become legitimate. More is involved than simply converting the archipelago to instant military bases and facilities for the U.S. military—a bargain exchange for the strategic outposts Clark Air Base and Subic Naval Base that were scrapped by a resurgent Filipino nationalism a decade ago. With the Filipino military officials practically managing the executive branch of government, the Philippine nation-state will prove to be more an appendage of the Pentagon than a humdrum neocolony administered by oligarchic compradors (a “cacique democracy,” in the words of Benedict Anderson), which it has been since nominal independence in 1946. On the whole, Powell’s stigmatizing act is part of the New American Century Project to reaffirm a new pax Americana after the Cold War.
Immediately after the proclaimed defeat of the Taliban and the rout of Osama bin Laden’s forces in Afghanistan, the Philippines became the second front in the U.S.-led war on terrorism. Raymond Bonner, author of Waltzing with Dictators (1987), argues that the reason for this second front is “the desire for a quick victory over terrorism,… the wish to reassert American power in Southeast Asia….If Washington’s objective is to wipe out the international terrorist organizations that pose a threat to world stability, the Islamic terrorist groups operating in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir would seem to be a higher priority than Abu Sayyaf” (New York Times, 10 June 2002). Or those in Indonesia, a far richer and promising region in terms of oil and geopolitical considerations. As in the past, during the Huk rebellion in the Philippines in the Cold War years, the U.S. acted as “the world’s policemen,” aiding the local military in “civic action” projects to win “hearts and minds,” a rehearsal for Vietnam. The Stratfor Research Group believes that Washington is using the Abu Sayyaf as a cover for establishing a “forward logistics and operation base” in southeast Asia in order to be able to conduct swift pre-emptive strikes against enemies in Indonesia, a predominantly Muslim country with abundant natural resources, and in Malaysia, Vietnam, and China.
Overall, however, the intervention of U.S. Special Forces in solving a local problem inflamed Filipino historical memory still recovering from the nightmare of the U.S.-supported brutal Marcos dictatorship. What disturbed everyone was the Cold-War practice of “Joint Combined Exchange Training” exercises. In South America and Africa, such U.S. foreign policy initiatives merged with counter-insurgency operations that chanelled military logistics and equipment to favored regimes notorious for flagrant human rights violations. In Indonesia during the Suharto regime, for example, U.S. Special Operations Forces trained government troops accused by Amnesty International of kidnapping and torture of activists, especially in East Timor and elsewhere. In Colombia and Guatemala, as well as in El Salvador much earlier, the U.S. role in organizing death squads began with Special Operations Forces advisers who set up “intelligence networks”ostensibly against the narcotics trade but also against leftist insurgents and nationalists. During the Huk uprising in the Philippines, Col. Edward Lansdale, who later masterminded the Phoenix atrocities in Vietnam, rehearsed similar counter-insurgency techniques combined with other anticommunist tricks of the trade. Now U.S. soldiers in active combat side by side with Filipinos will pursue the “terrorists” defined by the U.S. State Department—guerillas of the New People’s Army, Moro resistance fighters, and other progressive sectors of Filipino society.
Pacification Without Tears?
Are we seeing American troops in the boondocks (bundok, in the original Tagalog, means “mountain”) again? Are we experiencing an attack of déjà vu? A moment of reflection returns us to what Bernard Fall called “the first Vietnam,” the Filipino-American War of 1899-1902, in which 1.4 million Filipinos and about five thousand Americans died. The campaign to conquer the Philippines was designed, according to president William McKinley, as a policy of “Benevolent Assimilation” of the uncivilized and unchristian natives, a “civilizing mission” that Mark Twain considered worthy of the Puritan settlers and the pioneers in the proverbial “virgin land.” In Twain’s classic prose: “Thirty thousand killed a million. It seems a pity that the historian let that get out; it is really a most embarrassing circumstance.” This was a realization of what the historian Henry Adams feared before Admiral George Dewey entered Manila Bay on 1 May 1898: “I turn green in bed at midnight if I think of the horror of a year’s warfare in the Philippines where…we must slaughter a million or two of foolish Malays in order to give them the comforts of flannel petticoats and electric trailways.”
In “Benevolent Assimilation”: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899-1903 (1982), Stuart Creighton Miller recounts the U.S. military’s “scorched earth” tactics in Samar and Batangas, atrocities from “search and destroy” missions reminiscent of Song My and My Lai in Vietnam. This episode in the glorious history of Empire is usually a blank, or accorded a token paragraph in the textbooks. Miller does not deal at all adequately with the U.S. attempt to subjugate the unconquered Moros, the Muslim Filipinos in Mindanao and Sulu islands. In March 9, 1906, four years after President Theodore Roosevelt declared the war over, Major General Leonard Wood, commanding five hundred and forty soldiers, killed a beleaguered group of six hundred Muslim men, women and children in the battle of Mount Dajo. A less publicized but horrific battle occurred on June 13, 1913, when the Muslim sultanate of Sulu mobilized about 5,000 followers (men, women and children) against the American troops led by Capt. John Pershing. The battle of Mount Bagsak, 25 kilometers east of Jolo City, ended with the death of 340 Americans and of 2,000 (some say 3000) Moro defenders. Pershing was true to form—earlier he had left a path of destruction in Lanao, Samal Island, and other towns where localresidents resisted his incursions. Anyone who resisted U.S. aggression was either a “brigand” or seditious bandit. The carnage continued up to the “anti-brigandage” campaigns of the first two decades which suppressed numerous peasant revolts, including the tragic Sakdal uprising during the Philippine Commonwealth.
With the help of the U.S. sugar-beet lobby, the Philippine Commonwealth of 1935 was established, a compromise mix of procedures then being tried on Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Hawaii; the islands became a model of a pacified neocolony. Except perhaps for Miller’s aforementioned book, Michael Salman’s The Embarrassment of Slavery (2001), and some scholarly articles, nothing much about the revealing effects of that colonial subjugation of the Philippines have registered in the American Studies archive. This is usually explained by the fact that the U.S. did not follow the old path of European colonialism, and its war against Spain was pursued to liberate the natives from Spanish tyranny. It signaled the advent of a modernizing U.S. humanitarian interventionism whose latest manifestation, in a different historical register, is George W. Bush’s “National Security Strategy” of “exercising self-defense [of the Homeland] by acting preemptively.”
Paradigm Shifts
The revolutionary upsurge in the Philippines against the Marcos dictatorship (1972-1986) stirred up dogmatic Cold War complacency. With the inauguration of a new stage in Cultural Studies in the nineties, the historical reality of U.S. imperialism (the genocide of Native Americans is replayed in subjugation of the inhabitants of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and Cuba) is finally being excavated and re-appraised. But this is, of course, a phenomenon brought about by a confluence of multifarious events, among them: the demise of the Soviet Union as a challenger to U.S. hegemony; the sublation of the Sixties in both Fukuyama’s “end of history” and the interminable “culture wars,” the Palestininan intifadas; the Zapatista revolt against NAFTA; the heralding of current anti-terrorism by the Gulf War; and the fabled “clash of civilizations.”
Despite these changes, the old frames of intelligibility have not been modified or reconfigured to understand how nationalist revolutions in the colonized territories cannot be confused with the nationalist patriotism of the dominant or hegemonic metropoles, or how the mode of U.S. imperial rule in the twentieth century differs in form and content from those of the British or French in the nineteenth century. The received consensus of a progressive modernizing influence from the advanced industrial powers remains deeply entrenched. Even postcolonial and postmodern thinkers commit the mistake of censuring the decolonizing projects of the subalternized peoples because these projects (in the superior gaze of these thinkers) have been damaged, or are bound to become perverted into despotic postcolonial regimes, like those in Ghana, Algeria, Vietnam, the Philippines, and elsewhere. The only alternative, it seems, is to give assent to the process of globalization under the aegis of the World Bank/IMF/WTO, and hope for a kind of “benevolent assimilation.”
What remains to be carefully considered, above all, is the historical specificity or singularity of each of these decolonizing projects or national liberation movements, their class composition, historical roots, programs, ideological tendencies, and political agendas within the context of colonial/imperial domination. It is not possible to pronounce summary judgments on the character and fate of nationalist movements in the peripheral formations without focusing on the complex manifold relations between colonizer and colonized, the dialectical interaction between their forces as well as others caught in the conflict. Otherwise, the result would be a disingenuous ethical utopianism such as that found in Hardt and Negri’s Empire which, in the final analysis, functions as an apology for the ascendancy of the transnational corporate powers embedded in the nation-states of the North, and for the hegemonic rule of the only remaining superpower at present.
The Philippine Example
The case of the national-democratic struggle in the Philippines may be taken as an example of one historic singularity. Because of the historical specificity of the Philippines’ emergence as a dependent nation-state controlled by the United States in the twentieth century, nationalism as a mass movement has always been defined by events of anti-imperialist rebellion. U.S. conquest entailed long and sustained violent suppression of the Filipino revolutionary forces for decades.
The central founding “event” (as the philosopher Alain Badiou would define the term) is the 1896 revolution against Spain together with the Filipino-American war of 1899-1902, with the Moro resistance up to 1914 against U.S. colonization anticipating today’s Muslim separatist movement. Corollary to those events are the Sakdal uprising in the thirties during the Commonwealth period and the Huk uprising in the forties and fifties with the founding of the neocolonial nation-state in 1946. While the feudal oligarchy and the comprador class under U.S. patronage ulitized elements of the nationalist tradition formed in 1896-1898 as their ideological weapon for establishing hegemony, their attempts have never been successful.
Propped by the Pentagon-supported military, the Arroyo administration today, for example, uses the U.S. slogan of democracy against terrorism and the promises of the neoliberal free market to legitimize its continued exploitation of workers, peasants, women and ethnic minorities. Following a long and tested tradition of grassroots mobilization, Filipino nationalism has always remained centered on the peasantry’s demand for land closely tied to the popular-democratic demand for equality and genuine sovereignty.
For over a century now, U.S.-backed developmentalism and modernization have utterly failed in the Philippines. The resistance against globalized capital and its neoliberal extortions is spearheaded today by a national-democratic mass movement of various ideological persuasions. There is also a durable Marxist-led insurgency which seeks to articulate the “unfinished revolution” of 1896 in its demand for national independence against U.S. control and social justice for the majority of citizens (80 million) ten percent of whom are now migrant workers abroad. Meanwhile, the Muslim community in the southern part of the Philippines initiated its armed struggle for self-determination during the Marcos dictatorship (1972-1986) and continues today as a broadly based movement for autonomy, despite the Islamic ideology of its teacher-militants. Recalling the genocidal U.S. campaigns cited above, the BangsaMoro nationalism cannot forget its Muslim singularity which is universalized in the principles of equality, justice, and the right to self-determination.
In the wake of past defeats of peasant revolts, the Filipino culture of nationalism constantly renews its anti-imperialist and decolonizing energy by mobilizing new forces (women and church people in the sixties, and the indigenous or ethnic minorities in the seventies and eighties). It is organically embedded in emancipatory social and political movements whose origin evokes in part the Enlightenment narrative of sovereignty as mediated by third-world nationalist movements (Gandhi, Ho Chi Minh, Mao) but whose sites of actualization are the local events of mass insurgency against continued U.S. political, economic and military hegemony. The Philippines as an “imagined” and actually experienced ensemble of communities (Christian, Muslim, secular, etc.) remains in the process of being constructed primarily through modes of political and social resistance against corporate transnationalism and its technologically mediated ideologies, fashioning thereby the appropriate cultural forms of dissent, resistance, and subversion.
Specificities of Decolonization
As a late-modern phenomenon, nationalism exhibits polymorphous forms and so resists abstract universalizing definition. A recent study by Michael Lowy, Fatherland or Mother Earth? (London, 1998), has cogently demonstrated the need to apply a historically determinate analytic (especially the imperative of historical specificity) in ascertaining the contradictory trends in various manifestations of nationalism if we want to avoid fallacious transferences and unmediated predications of one species (e.g., communalist, fundamentalist, racist nationalisms) on multiple others (e.g., civic, popular-democratic, anti-imperialist).
Because of the historical specificity of the Philippines’ emergence as a dependent formation controlled by the United States in the twentieth century, Filipino nationalism grounds its popular and democratic impulses on the anti-colonial revolution against Spain in 1896-1898. This central event of the nationalist movement evolved into the Filipino-American war of 1899-1902, articulated with the Moro resistance up to 1914 and beyond against U.S. genocidal aggression. Its anti-imperialist substance thus provides it a radical internationalist perspective.
Right from the start, then, anti-imperialist nationalism informed by secular democratic and socialist principles may be discerned in such developments as the Sakdal peasant revolt in the thirties and the popular Huk uprising in the forties and fifties. The neocolonial client state (from 1946 up to the present) came into existence only by a revision of the Philippine Constitution unprecedented in the whole world: U.S. citizens enjoyed the same rights as Filipinos to exploit the country’s natural resources. Mandated by ratified treaties and agreements, the U.S. maintained numerous military bases and installations, as well as supplied and supervised (and continues to do so up to now) the government military and other police agencies that served its global “Cold War” strategy and its current agenda of a “new American century.”
Dialectical analysis can grasp the regressive uses of fragmentary motifs from the nationalist tradition by the landlord, comparador, and bureaucratic-capitalist classes under U.S. patronage. This oligarchy exploited the legacy of the 1896 revolution to try to establish their hegemony, but their attempts have failed—violence and other coercive means enabled a fragile legitimacy enough to earn U.N. recognition. Four instances of U.S. forcible intervention may be cited to prove dependency: the manipulation of Magsaysay populism against the Huks in the fifties; the support for the Marcos dictatorship (1972-1986); the patronage of Corazon Aquino’s “total war” against the Muslims and the New People’s Army after the February 1986 insurrection; and its patronage of the Arroyo administration through foreign aid, military logistics, and the unlimited entry of U.S. troops presumably for carrying out the “war against terrorism.”
U.S.-backed developmentalism has utterly failed in the Philippines. The resistance against globalization and its neoliberal extortions is spearheaded today by a national-democratic mass movement with grassroots constituency. There is also a durable left-oriented insurgency which seeks to articulate the "unfinished revolution" of 1896 in its demand for genuine sovereignty against IMF/WB/WTO dikta, for equality and social justice for the majority of citizens (80 million) ten percent of whom are now migrant workers abroad due to economic backwardness at home. Filipino nationalism constantly renews its decolonizing energy by mobilizing new forces (women, church workers,, indigenous or ethnic minorities). It is organically embedded in emancipatory movements whose origin evokes in part the Enlightenment narrative of sovereignty as mediated by third-world left movements. Its sites of actualization are the local events of mass insurgency against continued U.S. domination. In effect, the Filipino “nation” remains in the process of being constructed primarily through diverse modes of opposition against corporate transnationalism, fashioning thereby the appropriate forms of cultural identity with a unique Filipino singularity open to solidarity and collaboration with the humanist, progressive struggles of people of color and working people around the world.
