U.S.
GENOCIDE IN THE PHILIPPINES AND THE CONTINUING STRUGGLE FOR NATIONAL-DEMOCRATIC
LIBERATION
by
E. San Juan, Jr.
[Of all the few progressive American writers, the late Gore Vidal was one of the few to call attention to the genocidal character of U.S. invasion and occupation of the Philippines (1899-1913). Hence this small tribure to Vidal's memory.]
Except during the sixties when the
Filipino-American War of 1899-1902 was referred to as “the first Vietnam,” the
death of 1.4 million Filipinos has been usually accounted for as either
collateral damage or victims of insurrection against the imperial authority of
the United States. The first Filipino scholar to make a thorough documentation
of the carnage is the late Luzviminda Francisco in her contribution to The
Philippines: The End of An Illusion (London, 1973).
This fact is not even mentioned in the tiny paragraph or so in most U.S.
history textbooks. Stanley Karnow’s In Our Image (1989),
the acclaimed history of this intervention, quotes the figure of 200,000
Filipinos killed in outright fighting. Among historians, only Howard Zinn and
Gabriel Kolko have dwelt on the “genocidal” character of the catastrophe.
Kolko, in his magisterial Main Currents in Modern American History (1976),
reflects on the context of the mass murder: “Violence reached a crescendo
against the Indian after the Civil War and found a yet bloodier manifestation
during the protracted conquest of the Philippines from 1898 until well into the
next decade, when anywhere from 200,000 to 600,000 Filipinos were killed in an
orgy of racist slaughter that evoked much congratulation and approval....”
Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980)
cites 300,000 Filipinos killed in Batangas alone, while William Pomeroy’s American
Neo-Colonialism
(1970) cites 600,000 Filipinos dead in Luzon alone by 1902. The actual figure
of 1.4 million covers the period from 1899 to 1905 when resistance by the
Filipino revolutionary forces mutated from outright combat in battle to
guerilla skirmishes; it doesn’t include the thousands of Moros (Filipino
Muslims) killed in the first two decades of U.S. colonial domination.
The first Philippine Republic led
by Emilio Aguinaldo, which had already waged a successful war against the
Spanish colonizers, mounted a determined nationwide opposition against U.S.
invading forces. It continued for two more decades after Aguinaldo’s capture in
1901. Several provinces resisted to the point where the U.S. had to employ scorched-earth tactics, and hamletting
or “reconcentration” to quarantine the populace from the guerillas, resulting
in widespread torture, disease, and mass starvation. In The Specter of
Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective (2003),
Prof. Gavan McCormack argues that the outright counterguerilla operations
launched by the U.S. against the Filipinos, an integral part of its violent
pacification program, constitutes genocide. He refers to Jean Paul Sartre’s
contention that as in Vietnam, “the only anti-guerilla strategy which will be
effective is the destruction of the people, in other words, the civilians,
women and children.” That is what happened in the Philippines in the first half
of the bloody twentieth century.
As defined by the UN 1948 “
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” genocide
means acts “committed with intention to destroy, in whole or in part, a
national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” It is clear that the U.S. colonial
conquest of the Philippines deliberately sought to destroy the national
sovereignty of the Filipinos. The intent of the U.S. perpetrators included the
dissolution of the ethnic identity of the Filipinos manifest in the rhetoric,
policies, and disciplinary regimes enunciated and executed by legislators,
politicians, military personnel, and other apparatuses. The original proponents
of the UN document on genocide conceived of genocide as including acts or
policies aimed at “preventing the preservation or development” of “racial,
national, linguistic, religious, or political groups.” That would include “all
forms of propaganda tending by their systematic and hateful character to
provoke genocide, or tending to make it appear as a necessary, legitimate, or
excusable act.” What the UN had in mind, namely, genocide as cultural or social
death of targeted groups, was purged from the final document due to the
political interests of the nation-states that then dominated the world body.
What was deleted in the original
draft of the UN document are practices considered genocidal in their collective
effect. Some of them were carried out in the Philippines by the United States
from 1899 up to 1946 when the country was finally granted formal independence. As with the American Indians, U.S.
colonization involved, among others, the “destruction of the specific character
of a persecuted group by forced transfer of children, forced exile, prohibition
of the use of the national language, destruction of books, documents,
monuments, and objects of historical, artistic or religious value.” The goal of
all colonialism is the cultural and social death of the conquered natives, in
effect, genocide.
In a recent article, “Genocide and
America” (New York Review of Books, March 14, 2002), Samantha Power
observes that US officials “had genuine difficulty distinguishing the
deliberate massacre of civilians from the casualties incurred in conventional
conflict.” It is precisely the blurring of this distinction in colonial wars
through racializing discourses and practices that proves how genocide cannot be
fully grasped without analyzing the way the victimizer (the colonizing state
power) categorizes the victims (target populations) in totalizing and
naturalizing modes unique perhaps to the civilizational drives of modernity. Within the modern period, in
particular, the messianic impulse to genocide springs from the imperative of
capital accumulation—the imperative to reduce humans to commodified
labor-power, to saleable goods/services. U.S. “primitive accumulation” began
with the early colonies in New England and Virginia, and culminated in the 19th
century with the conquest and annexation of Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guam, Hawaii,
and the Philippines.With the historical background of the U.S. campaigns
against the American Indians in particular, and the treatment of African slaves
and Chicanos in general, there is a need for future scholars and researchers to
concretize this idea of genocide (as byproduct of imperial expansion) by
exemplary illustrations from the U.S. colonial adventure in the Philippines.
What
happened in 1899-1903 is bound to be repeated with the increased U.S.
intervention in the Philippines (declared “the second front” in the “war
against terrorism”) unless U.S. citizens protest. Hundreds of U.S. Special
Forces are at present deployed throughout the islands presumably against
“terrorist” Muslim insurgents and the left-wing New People’s Army. Both groups
have been fighting for basic democratic rights for more than five decades now,
since the Philippines gained nominal independence from the U.S. in 1946. There
is unfortunately abysmal ignorance about continued U.S. involvement in this
former Asian colony—except, perhaps, during the 1986 “People Power” revolt against
the Marcos “martial law” regime universally condemned for stark human-rights
violations.
As attested to by
UNESCO and human rights monitors, the situation has worsened since then with
hundreds of killings of journalists, lawyers, women activists, and union
organizers. The current crisis of the Arroyo regime, ridden with corruption and
exposed for blatant vote rigging, is renewing alarm signals for Washington,
foreboding a repeat of mass urban uprisings sure to threaten the comprador
agents of global capital that abet the misery of millions—10 million of 80
Filipinos work as domestics and contract workers abroad—caused by World Bank,
World Trade Organization, and International Monetary Fund policies imposed on a
neocolonial government.
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
academic 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.
Despite
inroads of critical theory here and there, the received consensus of a
progressive modernizing influence from the advanced industrial Western powers
remains deeply entrenched here and in the Philippines. 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 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.
E. SAN JUAN, Jr., research fellow of the Harry Ransom
Center, U of Texas, Austin, was
recently a fellow of the W.E. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University. He was
previously Fulbright Professor of American Studies at the Katholieke
Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, visiting professor of literature and cultural
studies at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan, and fellow of the
Rockefeller Study Center, Bellagio, Italy.He directs the Philippines Cultural
Studies Center in Connecticut and helps with the Philippine Forum in New York
City. His most recent books are Racism and Cultural Studies (Duke UP), Filipinos
Everywhere (IBON), Working Through the Contradictions (Bucknell U Press), In the Wake of Terror (Lexington Books), US
Imperialism and Revolution in the Philippines (Palgrave Macmillan); Balikbayang
Sinta: An E. San Juan Reader (Ateneo de Manila University Press);From
Globalization to National Liberation (U.P. Press); Critique and
Social Transformation (Edwin Mellen Press), and Toward Filipino Self-determination
(SUNY Press).
