Bu-lat-lat (boo-lat-lat) verb: to search, probe, investigate, inquire; to unearth facts Volume III, Number 48 January 11 - 17, 2004 Quezon City, Philippines |
Critical Reflections on the Filipino Diaspora and the Crisis in the Philippines By
E. SAN JUAN, Jr. The
time has come for the disinherited classes to enter the full concert of social
life. The hour has come when men will be able to face one another without
humiliation or humiliating others, without feeling deep within them the
death-pangs of either suffering or tolerating injustice. – Isabelo de los
Reyes The
spirit, strength, and intelligence of the people are miraculous.
But truth should be their beacon and guide at all times.
This awakening to truth will lead to complete liberation. – Amado
V. Hernandez The
guideposts of a philosophy of liberation must be both historical and
critical…. The starting point is of course our reality. – Renato
Constantino They
are even afraid of our songs of love, my brother…. – Carlos Bulosan 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 supply
capsule histories comparing their situation with those of troops in the
Philippines during the Filipino-American War (1899-1902). A New York Times essay
summed up the lesson in its title, “In 1901 Philippines, Peace Cost More Lives
Than Were Lost in War” (2 July 2003, B1)), while an article in the Los Angeles
Times contrasted the 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 real connection between the Philippines and the current U.S. war against
terrorism? 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 tenuous 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 insurgent
partisans of 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
about ten million Muslims in the Philippines for dignity, justice, and
self-determination. What
is the background to the return of the former colonizer to what was once called
its “insular territory” administered then 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 been given an imprimatur of legitimacy. 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 formerly “owned” by the U.S. and scrapped by a
resurgent Filipino nationalism a decade ago. With the 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 Project for a New American
Century 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 other abundant
natural resources. 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, Malaysia, Vietnam, China, and
elsewhere. Overall,
however, the intervention of U.S. Special Forces in solving a local problem
inflamed Filipino sensibilities, its collective 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
El Salvador, Colombia and Guatemala, 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. Are
we seeing American troops in the boondocks (bundok, in the original Tagalog,
means “mountain”) again?
Are we experiencing a traumatic attack of déjà vu?
Historical
Re-Mapping of the Battleground A
moment of reflection returns us to what Bernard Fall called “the first
Vietnam,” the Filipino-American War of 1899-1902, in which at least 1.4
million Filipinos died. The campaign to conquer the Philippines was designed in
accordance with President McKinley’s 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 the barbarism that 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 accorded a marginal footnote, or a token
paragraph in school textbooks.
Miller only mentions in passing the U.S. attempt to subjugate the
unhispanized Moros, the Muslim Filipinos in Mindanao and Sulu islands. On 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 3,000) Moro defenders. Pershing was
true to form—earlier he had left a path of destruction in Lanao, Samal Island,
and other towns where local residents fought 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 three decades
which suppressed numerous peasant revolts and workers’ strikes against the
colonial state and its local agencies. With
the help of the U.S. sugar-beet lobby, the Philippine Commonwealth of 1935 was
established, constituted with a compromise mix of laws and regulations then
being tried in Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Hawaii. Eventually the islands became a
model of a pacified neocolony. Except perhaps for Miller’s aforementioned book
and assorted studies, nothing much about the revealing effects of that process
of subjugation of Filipinos have registered in the American Studies archive.
This is usually explained by the theory 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. If so, that war now rescued from the dustbin
of history signaled the advent of a globalizing U.S. interventionism whose
latest manifestation, in a different historical register, is Bush’s
“National Security Strategy” of “exercising self-defense [of the Homeland]
by acting preemptively,” assuming that might is right, imposing “regime
change” for the sake of corporate profit-making. Imperial
Terror and Grassroots Resistance Since
the period of the Marcos dictatorship (1972-86), the terrorism of the National
Security State has inflicted havoc on the lives of millions of Filipinos.
Despite the appeals of KARAPATAN (an alliance of human rights groups), church
bodies, and the pleas of progressive representatives in Congress, nothing seems
to have stopped the Arroyo military in their campaign of barbaric slaughter. If
the security of life and whatever meager property the peasants and indigenous
peoples in Mindoro, Mindanao and other areas cannot be protected by the
government, who has legal monopoly of violence and other coercive means, then
this government has lost legitimacy. In fact, it is open to being indicted for
state terrorism in the court of world opinion. Since the Philippines is a
constitutional republic, citizens from whom all power emanates can alter the
social contract if the government has failed to answer their needs. All signs
indicate that the social contract has been broken, violated, damaged many times
over since the country became a mock-sovereign nation in 1946. It
is precisely on this ground, the massive state terrorism of the military, police
and paramilitary forces of the neocolonial state, that Luis Jalandoni, the
chairperson of the National Democratic Front Negotiating Panel, has responded to
the Colin Powell-Arroyo doctrine of summary condemnation of the Communist Party
of the Philippines and the New People’s Army as “terrorist” organizations.
Jalandoni calls on the present regime to renounce state terrorism and indemnify
its numerous victims, thousands of activists killed in assassinations,
extrajudicial executions, and indiscriminate massacre. It would be painful to
recount the litany of human rights violations that burden our history since the
Marcos dictatorship, nay, since the 1899-1916 Filipino-American War, with1.4
million Filipinos and Moros killed by the “civilizing” missionaries of
Manifest Destiny. Right
in the midst of the controversy over Powell’s exorbitant act of extending the
State Department reach to the liberated zones of the New People’s Army, we
read this news from Canada: a Filipina domestic worker, out of the generosity of
her heart, has given her kidney to her sick employer in Toronto.
Frustrated with the public health care system, this Canadian employer
turned to the Filipina for help, claiming that she was part of the family.
Earning $2 an hour, for 24 months, under the Live-in Caregiver Program, Filipina
domestics function as modern-day slaves, vulnerable to any and every kind of
abuse and exploitation.
Canada tolerates the import of Filipinas to provide rich Canadians their
internal organs and body parts, according to the Philippine Women Center of
British Columbia. I
will soon move on to address the question of postcoloniality, particularly a
certain form of “Orientalism” applied to the Moro struggle for
self-determination in the Philippines. But I want to shift your attention first
to this unprecedented phenomenon in our history, a qualitative change in our
geopolitical status in the present world-system linkage of industrialized
centers and peripheral or dependent social formations.
Warm
Body Export Since
our colonization, thousands of Filipinos have migrated to distant territories,
first as recruited workers for the Hawaii sugar plantations, and then as seamen,
U.S. navy personnel, nurses and doctors, and so on. We have about three million
Filipinos in North America, but millions more in the Middle East, Europe,
Africa, Asia, and elsewhere. But since the Marcos martial-law regime, the
“warm body export” (including mail-order brides, and assorted cargo in the
global sex traffic) accelerated tremendously.
Everyday 3,000 Filipinos leave for abroad, close to a million every year.
In Hong Kong alone, there are 200,000 Filipina domestics. Moreover, 25% of the
world’s seafarers, and cruise waiters, are Filipinos. With about nine to ten
million Filipinos scattered around the world as cheap or affordable labor,
mainly domestics and semi-skilled workers, the Philippines has become the
supplier of what is euphemistically called human capital—in actuality, hands
to do work for minimal pay, work largely unpaid, producing enormous surplus
value (profits) for transnational corporations as well as for affluent families
in Europe, the United States, and the Middle East. Everyone
knows that these Filipino Overseas Workers’ remittance of billions of
dollars--$12 billion annually—(aside from fees and all kinds of taxes) is the
major earner of dollars needed to pay the foreign debt and keep the system
afloat. It guarantees the privileges of the rich and powerful. It preserves and
aggravates the impoverishment of over half of the population, as confirmed by
the recent statistics compiled by Representative Satur Ocampo’s office.
Despite the unrelenting cases of brutal treatment, rape, all kinds of
conceivable deprivation, and murder—about 4 or 5 coffins of Overseas Filipino
Workers arrive at the Manila International Airport, reminiscent of Flor
Contemplacion and others, the humorless Labor Secretary Patricia Santo Tomas was
quoted as saying: “It’s not politically correct to say you’re exporting
people, but it’s part of globalization, and I like to think that countries
like ours, rich in human resources, have that to contribute to the rest of the
world” (quoted in David Diamond, “One Nation, Overseas,” 1999, <http//wired.com/wired/archive/10.06.>
This is as if over four hundred years of colonization have not yet been
sufficient contribution to the enrichment of the Western metropoles and the
indulgent appetites of their citizen consumers. Indeed,
we have contributed prodigiously to the accumulation of surplus-value/profits
and wealth to the whole world—except our own country, the very soil and land
of which have been depleted, polluted, ravished, plundered, scorched, pillaged,
trampled upon and mutilated....
One commentator ascribes to Filipinos the common refrain: “Look Asian,
think Spanish, act American....” I doubt the applicability or appropriateness
of this ascription, something that not a few traditional anthropologists and
social scientists delight in when they proudly proclaim that ours is a culture
of diversity, hybridity, creative assimilation, and other disingenuous rubrics
to compensate for the horrific reality. Some usually resort to an apologetic
reprise about how the “third world” poor excel in spiritual beauty. But
inner wealth, like inner beauty, is precisely the symptom of the profound
alienation and disenchantment afflicting the benighted recipients of Western
modernity—multitudes of colonial subalterns blessed by commodity-exchange
(their bodies, among others), by the free-wheeling market and sacred private
property. As
many Filipinos have still not forgotten, there was a mini-people power when Flor
Contemplacion’s body was returned, but when Sarah Balabagan arrived, the mass
media “salvaged” her by sublimation—she was turned into a mini-star as
ephemeral as Nonie Juice, the miracle tonic, and other fads.
Was the public outrage over Contemplacion’s death merely melancholia
and mourning mediated by gossip and other kinship rituals, as some postmodernist
sages aver? Are
we still caught in the frame of hallowed Filipino values like hiya,
pakikisama, and smooth interpersonal relations? Are we ready to give
our remaining internal organs to the Colin Powells and the hustlers from the
World Bank/International Monetary Fund? Now
we know that all things develop via contradictions. The diaspora of 9-10 million
Filipinos is bound to generate forces of critique and transformation with their
own self-generated leadership. They will emancipate themselves, for nobody else
can do it for them. Already the Hong Kong domestics have organized as far as the
laws will allow; our compatriots in Europe, in countries where they are
subjected to vicious racist treatment, have also become more politically aware
and have mobilized to raise consciousness and protest their inhumane conditions.
If and when they return, we hope that they will not be cadavers but vibrant
bodies ready for militant, risky engagements in the political arena, not just
with the relentless pursuit of the creature comforts of a frayed if not mythical
civil society.
Genealogy
of People’s War 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 the 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 projects of national liberation, 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 U.S.
postnationalist and postcolonialist discourse 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 claiming to act in the name of freedom and democracy. The
Moro People’s Liberation Struggle I
have already alluded earlier to what happened in 2002, l’affaire Abu Sayyaf
and its use as a pretext for the invasion by over a thousand U.S. troops of this
second front of the war against terrorism, after Afghanistan.
Can you imagine what our country would have looked like if it were really
turned into another Afghanistan?
One may counter that the situation in Basilan and other regions is worse
than those of Kabul or Kandahar. Comparisons are really unavailing—if not
altogether self-serving. But what have we learned? I
have read reports of the resurgence of a “moro-moro” mentality in government
and the public. Fighters of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front are now branded
“terrorists” and subject to harassment (recently at the Muslim compound in
Barangay Culiat, Tandang Sora, Quezon City). It is expected that the MILF will
be classified as a “foreign terrorist organization”—foreign, of course, to
Americans, but not to Filipinos. We have always lived with the Moros, our Muslim
brothers and sisters, as comrades in the struggle against the American soldiers
who massacred thousands of men, women, and children at Mount Dajo, Jolo in March
9, 1906, and Mount Bagsak on June 13, 1913, among other barbaric outrages not
noticed by the sharp wit of Mark Twain and other philanthropic humanitarians.
These events are not memorialized for their horrors but cited to arouse a
sense of solidarity with the courage and sacrifices of the BangsaMoro nation in
their struggle for dignity and freedom. When
President Arroyo allowed the U.S. Special Forces to participate in the pursuit
of this group of bandits (more exactly, mercenaries), a creation of both the CIA
and the Philippine Armed Forces, did she not violate the Philippine
Constitution? Indifference to this question is a symptom of the larger problem
of either ignorance of the plight of the Moro people, or complicity with the
ruling class in the oppression and exploitation of at least 7.5 million citizens
who happen to subscribe to another faith. Thousands,
perhaps over a hundred thousands now, have died since the flare-up of
Christian-Muslim hostilities in the sixties, climaxing in the years after 1972
with the battle of Jolo, Sulu. The city was actually burned by government
forces, producing 2,000 corpses and 60,000 refugees in one night. A ceasefire
was reached after the Tripoli Agreement of 1976, but it was often honored in the
breach. The split of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front led Hashim Salamat from
Misuari’s more secular Moro National Liberation Front
introduced a sectarian but also conciliatory element in the scene,
precipitating the formation of the Abu Sayyaf along the lines of the
government-sponsored and CIA-funded Bangsa Moro Liberation Organization (BMLO)
in 1976. It
is now public knowledge that the Abu Sayyaf, like the MILF, was set up by the
government to split the Moro struggle for self-determination and pressure the
MNLF into capitulation. Since 1991, according to Senator Aquilino Pimentel, Gen.
Alexander Aguirre, former president Estrada’s National Security Adviser, acted
as “the handler” of the group some of whose members were involved in the
CIA-managed mujahideens recruited to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. But since
1995 the Abu Sayyaf has turned into a Frankenstein’s monster devoted to
hostage-taking for ransom and terrorizing civilian communities, as in their
attack on the town of Ipil, Zamboanga. In
the midst of U.S. intervention last year, an International Peace Commission went
to Basilan on March 23-27, 2002, and produced what I think is the most
comprehensive and detailed report on conditions in the region. The conclusion of
their report, entitled Basilan: The Next Afghanistan?, is unequivocal: the Abu
Sayyaf is a symptom of the disastrous failure of the state in ensuring not only
peace and security but honest and efficient government—both provincial
governance and military-police agencies—in a milieu where the proverbial
forces of civil society (business, church, media) have been complicit. Enmeshed
in corruption that involves local officials, military officers, and central
government, the region where the Abu Sayyaf thrives has witnessed the reign of
absolute terror over civilians. Nowhere in the entire Philippines is the
violation of human rights and the brutalization of civilian suspects so flagrant
and ubiquitous as in Basilan. In
this context, the deployment of U.S. troops in Mindanao, compliments of the
Arroyo administration, has only worsened the situation, demonized and mystified
the Abu Sayyaf as an Al Qaeda accomplice, and promoted hostility among various
ethnic groups. I
had occasion to deliver a public talk on the situation in Mindanao in Madison,
Wisconsin, last November—a Halloween week-end, and had reason to look up an
article by the American anthropologist Charles O. Frake in the prestigious
journal American Anthropologist, 1998 ISSUE, ENTITLED “Abu Sayyaf: Displays of
Violence and the Proliferation of Contested Identities among Philippine
Muslims.” While Frake is quite erudite in referencing the history of the
Muslims from the Spanish times to the present, he never examines seriously,
except in a tokenizing gestural mode, the political and economic context of land
dispossession and economic marginalization of the Muslim majority. Instead,
typical of postmodernist disciplinary discourse, he focuses on the Abu Sayyaf as
an attempt to solve “the logical gap in the identity matrix of Philippine
Muslim insurgency.” Since the Moro movement has been fragmented by ethnic
antagonisms among Tausugs, Maguindanaos, Maranaos, Yakans, and so on, the Abu
Sayyaf, according to Frake, is “militantly Islamicist.” And because its
leadership draws from the displaced and unaffiliated youth, as well as the
traditional outlaw areas, the group represents “a new layer in the strata of
kinds of identity laid down in the long history of conflict in the Muslim
Philippines” (1998, 48). In short, the Abu Sayyaf (according to Frake’s
postmodernist optic) is a symptom of the problem of “identity
proliferation,” since the fault-lines of identity construction are often
revealed in explosions of political violence. Frake
is an example of a knowledge-producer intent on unwittting mystification. The
result of applying Geertz’ “thick description,” that is, the focus on how
participants interpret everyday happenings, instead of clarifying the nexus of
causality and accountability, muddles it. Frake wants to answer the question:
“How can such nice people [meaning the anonymous members of the Abu Sayyaf],
at times, do such horrible things?” But his premise—that the central
motivation of individuals in society is to be recognized as somebody, to
establish an identity—is completely detached from historical specificities,
even from the basic determinants of any cultural complex or location. Despite
the empirical citations and putative data, Frake’s attempt to deploy
postmodern ethonography on the Abu Sayyaf phenomenon results only in a
simplistic reduction: that in situations of struggle, people fail to unite
because they continually interpret what’s going on around them, thus
multiplying “contested identities.”
I am afraid such “thick descriptions” are really thick, or makapal—obscuring
instead of illuminating the plight of the Moro people. Vincent Crapanzano’s
critique of Geertz may be quoted here: the method of “thick description”
“offers no understanding of the native from the native’s point of view,...no
specifiable evidence for his attributions of intention, his assertion of
subjectivity, his declarations of experience” (quoted in San Juan 2002, 234).
The same caveats apply to two indefatigable American anthropologists
intending to explain Filipinos to themselves: Thomas McKenna’s Muslim Rulers
and Rebels (1998) and Nicole Constable’s Maid to Order in Hong Kong: Stories
of Filipina Workers (1997). I
am not indicting all of American or Western anthropology, let alone the
hermeneutic methodology of the social sciences. But I would like to mention here
two other sources of historical and political inquiries, aside from the writings
of Cesar Adib Majul: one is the work of the Indian scholar Aijaz Ahmad (1982),
and the essay of political scientist Robert Stauffer (1981).
In both these thinkers, the differentiated totality of Filipino society
and its historical imbrication in the world-system of global capitalism are the
two necessary requisites for grasping the concrete linkages and contradictions
in the Moro struggle for autonomy and dignity.
For these intellectuals are not only practitioners of a mode of
scientific analysis of history but also protagonists in the search for solutions
to the most urgent social and political problems of our time. I
cannot imagine any intellectual who, endeavoring to grasp the roots of a
long-enduring, complex “Moro problem,” will preemptively assert or claim a
detached or disinterested stance. In fact, postmodernists like James Clifford
openly announce their point-of-view, their subject-positions—if only to wash
their hands, of course, of any complicity with US colonialism or imperialism.
Professions of neutrality have been replaced with gestures of liberal guilt
manifest in philanthropic compassion. Unfortunately, these gestures only prolong
the orientalizing supremacy of Western knowledge-production and its hegemonic
influence. In response to this Orientalism, we seem to offer only the famous SIR
(smooth interpersonal relations) codified by Prof. Frank Lynch.
Incidentally, in 1970, an American sociologist, George Weightman, noted
in his study of the Philippine intellectual elite that “the military academy
and Ateneo appear to dispense the best SIR techniques for dealing with
Americans” (1970, 28). In fairness to Ateneo University, I would like to
interpose here the observation that all educational institutions, all
pedagogical agencies (in Karl Mannheim’s phrase, the “everyday constituent
assembly of the mind”), are sites of ideological class struggle and none can
be hermetically insulated from the pressures of material local and global
interests. There is no vacuum or neutral space in the planetary conflict of
classes and groups for hegemony. For
this reason, and because the Moro struggle for autonomy and dignity is the key,
virtually the catalyst and crucible, of our all-encompassing struggle for
national democracy and liberation from imperialism, I would urge everyone to
learn more about the history and culture of the BangsaMoro nation, their ethos
and aspirations, which are all integral to the vision of a free and prosperous
Filipino nation. Interrogating
Establishment Cultural
Studies In
my article on Cultural Studies in Ateneo de Manila Unversity’s electronic
journal, KRITIKA KULTURA (sponsored by the Department of English), I called
attention to recent developments in Cultural Studies as a disciplinary practice
in North America and Europe that have subverted the early promise of the field
as a radical transformative force (see also my book, Racism and Cultural
Studies). In every attempt to do any inquiry into cultural practices and
discourses, one is always carrying out a political and ethical project, whether
one is conscious of it or not. There are many reasons for this, the main one
being the inescapable political-economic constitution of any discursive field of
inquiry, as Pierre Bourdieu has convincingly demonstrated. And in the famous
theoretical couplet that Foucault has popularized, knowledge/power, the
production of knowledge is always already implicated in the ongoing struggles
across class, nation, gender, locality, ethnicity, and so on, which envelopes
and surrounds the intellectual, the would-be knower, learner, investigator,
scholar, and so on. This
is the moment when I would like to close with some reflections, and questions,
on why problems of culture and knowledge are of decisive political importance.
Although we always conceive of ourselves as citizen-subjects with rights, it is
also the case that we are all caught up in a network of obligations whose
entirety is not within our conscious grasp. What is our relation to Others—the
excluded, marginalized, and prostituted who affirm our existence and
identity--in our society? In a sense we, all Filipinos, are responsible for the
plight of the Moros—yes, including the existence of the Abu Sayyaf--insofar as
we claim to live in a community of singular persons who alternatively occupy the
positions of speakers and listeners, I’s and you’s, and who have obligations
to one another, and reciprocal accountabilities. I
am following an argument elaborated by the late Canadian scholar Bill Readings
in his provocative book, The University in Ruins. Speculating on the
impossibility of subjective self-identity, of being free from obligation to
others, Readings comments on an attitude prevalent in the United States—an
attitude that, I think, became more articulate when, after September 11, most
Americans, newly self-anointed as victims, refused to see any responsibility for
what happened to them and disclaimed any share in causing such horrendous
disaster, what is indeed a terrible tragedy because it is uncomprehended and
disconnected from the flaws of the “egotistical sublime,” hence the hunger
for revenge. Readings of course includes his fellow Canadians in the following
remark—which we can immediately apply to our own relations with the Moros,
Igorots, and other ostracized neighbors: It
is the desire for subjective autonomy that has led North Americans, for example,
to want to forget their obligations to the acts of genocide on which their
society is founded, to ignore debts to Native American and other peoples that
contemporary individuals did not personally contract, but for which I would
nonetheless argue they are responsible (and not only insofar as they benefit
indirectly from the historical legacy of those acts).
In short, the social bond is not the property of an autonomous subject,
since it exceeds subjective consciousness and even individual histories of
action. The nature of my obligations to the history of the place in which I
live, and my exact positioning in relation to that history, are not things I can
decide upon or things that can be calculated exhaustively. No tax of “x
percent” on the incomes of white Americans could ever, for example, make full
reparation for the history of racism in the United States (how much is a
lynching “worth’?).
Nor would it put an end to the guilt of racism by acknowledging it, or
even solve the question of what exactly constitutes “whiteness.” (1996, 186)
If
we are indeed accountable for what is happening around us—the killings in
Mindoro Oriental, the Abu Sayyaf’s kidnapping and terrorism, President
Arroyo’s violation of our sovereignty in welcoming U.S. troops to carry out
police actions and exert a repressive pressure on Filipino citizens, and General
Powell’s doctrine of stigmatizing Filipino dissenters and critics of the
unjust status quo as “terrorists”—then we need to find out what needs to
be done. Is the breakdown of civility caused by the lack of a “strong
republic,” hence the need to institute authoritarian and quasi-fascist
measures? A state is strong or weak depending on the nature of the class
relations, the alignment of political forces, determining its conduct. Trajectory
of the Quest What
about for Filipinos in the fabled “land of promise,” otherwise known as
“the belly of the beast”? In the United States, the Filipino Americans have,
as you know, suffered from the latest act of vengeance against Osama bin Laden
and Al Qaeda: the Patriot Act. We are struggling against what is the initial
stage of authoritarian rule, “friendly fascism” in the new guise of Homeland
Security. We have to fight a version of pragmatic patriotism more arrogance than
before, planning preemptive or preventive strikes and other unilateral
interventions against Jihad International, against all those resisting the
domination of the “only remaining superpower.”
We have signed numerous petitions, one called “A Statement of
Conscience: Not In Our Name.” We oppose the Manichean outlook that the
struggle is between good versus evil, and that the only possible answer to what
happened in 9/11 is “war abroad and repression at home.”
What Susan Sontag calls the “dangerous lobotomizing notion of endless
war” or the pseudo-war of civilization versus barbarians, has already
encouraged all sorts of excesses—racial profiling, killing of innocents who
look like Arabs or “terrorists,” contingent on the demonology of the day. If
“measure and proportionality require the language of law and justice” (Asad
2002, 38), then the mad rush to war against Iraq after the ruthless devastation
of Afghanistan is breaking all records. Noam
Chomsky and other public intellectuals have called the United States itself “a
leading terrorist state” (Chomsky 2001, 16). Just to give an example of how
this has registered in the lives of Filipinos in the United States: Last June,
62 Filipinos (among them, doctors and engineers) were apprehended by the US
Immigration and Naturalization Services for overstaying their visa or for lack
of appropriate documentation. They were arrested as “absconders,” handcuffed
and manacled in chains while aboard a plane on the way to the former Clark Air
Base in Pampanga. About 140 Filipinos are now being treated as hardened
criminals, according to Migrante International, thanks to the Patriot Act. Over
a thousand persons, most of them people of color, are now detained in the United
States as suspects, already being punished. I am not referring to the prisoners
caputured in Afghanistan and confined to cells in Guantanamo, Cuba; I am
referring to American citizens who have been jailed on suspicion that they have
links with Osama bin Laden or other terrorist groups listed by the US State
Department (which now includes the CPP/NPA). Just last November, there was a
report of eigh Filipino aircraft mechanics who were detained since last June
without bail due to “suspected terrorist links”; they are now being deported
because of alleged inaccuraces in their immigration papers. I conclude with this
question: How many more Filipinos will suffer globalized state terrorism
spearheaded by the United States government, a fate that may befall any one of
us who as citizens (here or in the United States) may be branded as unpatriotic
or traitors because we dare to criticize, dare to think and resist?
I
want to conclude by focusing on the historical trajectory of people’s war in
the Philippines. 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 and its sequel, the Filipino-American war of
1899-1902, and the Moro resistance up to 1914 against U.S. colonization. Another
political sequence of events is the Sakdal uprising in the thirties during the
Commonwealth period followed by the Huk uprising in the forties and fifties—a
sequence that is renewed in the First Quarter Storm of 1970 against the
neocolonial state. While the feudal oligarchy and the comprador class under U.S.
patronage utilized elements of the nationalist tradition formed in 1896-1898 as
their ideological weapon for establishing moral-intellectual leadership, 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 fantasies 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 that 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, 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 vocation 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.
hegemony. The Philippines as an “imagined” and actually experienced
ensemble of communities, or multiplicities in motion, remains in the process of
being constructed primarily through modes of political and social resistance
against corporate transnationalism (or globalization, in the trendy parlance)
and its technologically mediated ideologies, fashioning thereby the appropriate
cultural forms of dissent, resistance, and subversion worthy of its people’s
history and its collective vision. REFERENCES Aijaz,
Ahmad. 1982. “Who
is the Moro?” and “Class and Colony in Mindanao.” Southeast Asia Chronicle
(February): 2-10. Asad,
Talal. 2002.
“Some Thoughts on the WTC Disaster.”
ISIM Newsletter 9 (January): Chomsky,
Noam. 2001. “The
United States is a Leading Terrorist State.” Interview by David Barsamian.
Monthly Review 53.6 (November): 10-19. Constable,
Nicole. 1997.
Maid to Order in Hong Kong: Stories of Filipina Workers. Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press. Frake,
Charles. 1998.
“Abu Sayyaf: Displays of Violence and the Proliferation of Contested
Identities among Philippine Muslims.”
American Anthropologist 100.1: 41-54. McKenna,
Thomas M.1998.
Muslim Rulers and Rebels.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Mulhern,
Francis. 2000.
Culture/Metaculture.
London and New York: Routledge. Readings,
Bill. 1996.
The University in Ruins.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. San
Juan, E. 2002.
Racism and Cultural Studies.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stauffer,
Robert. 1981.
“The Politics of Becoming: The Mindanao Conflict in a World-System
Perspective.”
Dependency Series No. 31.
Quezon City: University of the Philippines, Third World Studies Center. Weightman,
George. 1970.
“The Philippine Intellectual Elite in the Post-Independence Period.”
Solidarity
(January): 20-25.
[Portions
of this essay were delivered at one of the lecture series in St. John’s
University, New York, on 9 October 2003, sponsored by the Department of English,
College of Liberal Arts, and The St. John’s University Humanities Review] We want to know what you think of this article.
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