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SPEAKING
FREELY
US designs on the
Philippines
By E San Juan
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please click here
if you are interested in
contributing.
Incontrovertible
signs from Washington and elsewhere indicate that
the Bush administration and its reactionary cabal
have already instructed their local agents in
Manila to replace President Gloria
Macapagal-Arroyo with one of the elite factions,
together with a bloc of traditional
military-business groups.
This is a
routine maneuver for the US State Department and
Pentagon. As in the February 1986 overthrow of
Ferdinand Marcos, their agents will use both
normal and violent means to maintain US hegemony
in its neo-colony, particularly when its Mindanao
military/political base is at stake.
The
Philippines has historically been pivotal to the
US projection of its military power in Asia and
the Middle East. Besides, Filipinos are famous
worldwide for being 200% Americanized and martyrs
for "Americanism" everywhere.
Washington
is now plagued with the mounting disasters of the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Public resistance to
the wars is increasing, especially among military
families and business sectors. Meanwhile, the
challenges of Iran, North Korea and of course
China, not to mention Hugo Chavez's Venezuela and
insurgents in Colombia, Nepal and elsewhere, are
extremely worrisome to the corporate power elite.
The Philippines is not comparable to
oil-rich Indonesia or even touristy Thailand.
Nonetheless, the US hegemonic bloc is extremely
fearful that a nationalist, nay a left-wing,
alternative may take advantage of the chronic
weakness of the Filipino oligarchy ridden with
corruption, internal antagonisms and sycophancy to
corporate US and foreign interests. Preparations
to transfer the Okinawa military operations to the
Philippines are being expedited, even as the
militarization of Japan proceeds without let-up.
The Philippines also provides about 10 million
migrant contract workers to service corporate
globalization around the planet (for example,
building Guantanamo prison cells and cleaning the
barracks of troops in Iraq).
After
September 11, the New People's Army (NPA)and the
Communist Party of the Philippines were promptly
declared "terrorist organizations" by the US State
Department. This was meant to paralyze any
international support for the nationalist
insurgency. The millions of Filipinos abroad might
be a support base for the NPA and the National
Democratic Front - just as Islamic nations
supported the Moro National Liberation Front
during the Marcos dictatorship.
The
systematic media exploitation of the Abu Sayaff as
somehow comparable in scale to al Qaeda and Osama
bin Laden, together with its linking of the Abu
Sayaff with left-wing and nationalist dissent, has
conditioned the US public to recent military
incursions ("exercises") in the Philippines. It
has allowed Bush and his generals to refurbish the
politically bankrupt Arroyo and the armed forces
of the Philippines as part of their united front
against opponents of US neo-colonial encroachment
wherever profits can be made.
Ever since
the local economic think-tank, Ibon Foundation,
and pollsters began documenting the decline of
public support for Arroyo amid illegal gambling
(jueteng) scandals involving her family,
the US has begun to follow their tested modus
operandi on "regime change". They have
consulted with opposition politicians, the
Catholic Church, the judiciary and of course their
military operatives.
Foreign Secretary
Alberto Romulo recently solicited the backing of
key US lawmakers for Arroyo, such as Republican
Senator Thad Cochran, chair of the US Senate
Appropriations Committee; Republican senators
Robert Bennett of Utah and Jim Kolbe of Arizona,
as well as Democratic Senator Diane Feinstein of
California (where the majority of Filipino
Americans reside). Romulo also got the support of
World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz, former deputy
defense secretary and adviser to Bush, and one of
the shrewd authors of the project to resuscitate
the obsolescent American empire in the post-Cold
War epoch.
A revealing interview with US
diplomat Karen Kelley, which appeared in the
online Inquirer (reported by Agence France Press,
June 29), suggests the duplicitous mode of
preparing for "regime change" as seen from the US
Embassy in Manila. While former lackeys of Arroyo
are abandoning ship and jumping into the Susan
Roces bandwagon, the US poses to defend orderly
transition, which means appearing to endorse
transparency and accountability while engaged in
cloak-and-dagger shenanigans to preserve business
and military interests in their former "showcase
of democracy" in Asia. The cases of "Cold
Warriors" Ramon Magsaysay, Benigno Aquino and
Colonel Edward Lansdale of the notorious Phoenix
program in Vietnam easily come to mind.
Given the pre-emptive and unconscionable
means used by globalizing capital to prevent any
real substantive change in the local power
hierarchy, we shouldn't be deceived by all this
legalese rhetoric about democracy and freedom. It
is necessary for all progressive forces not to
rely solely on bureaucratic or parliamentary means
to get rid of Arroyo and her business network. The
few wealthy families have never relied only on
peaceful means to seize power and maintain
supremacy. Nor have the bourgeoisie anywhere in
the world. "Civil society" and state as presently
constituted only serve to maintain the seemingly
"normal" unequal division of power and wealth. We
need to be critical of current institutions and
practices, and also guard against sectarian
dogmatism and opportunist vanguardism. Let the
dead bury the dead.
As events in our
history have proved, representatives of the ruling
class can never represent the genuine long-term
interests of the people. Neither ex-president Cory
Aquino nor Arroyo (who represent sections of the
privileged minority) can solve the systemic evils
of rampant poverty and unnecessary deaths caused
by the unequal division of wealth (in particular,
land and other means of production) and the
chronic backwardness of the economy due to
subservience to US dictates (via World Bank - WB -
and International Monetary Fund - IMF -
conditionalities).
Nor can populist
gimmicks tied to ousted president Joseph Estrada
and assorted "social democrats" obsessed with
capitalist globalization elsewhere except in the
Philippines, mobilize informed grass-roots support
for a thoroughgoing land-reform program,
industrialization, a halt to the overseas workers
warm-body export policy, and the genocidal war
against Moro and indigenous communities.
How can the owners of Hacienda Luisita and
the plantations in Negros, Davao, and elsewhere
support the loss of their property and class
privileges? How can the classes represented by
Aquino, former president Fidel Ramos, Estrada and
Arroyo really allow the break-up of feudal
privileges and their monopoly of political power
in their territories? Behind them stand the
corrupt mendacious officers of the armed forces
and the police (notwithstanding the presence of
some nationalist middle-level personnel in the
ranks), as well as warlords and gangster-vigilante
formations sponsored by the CIA.
This is
not to exclude individual members of these
conservative and reactionary groups from joining
the anti-imperialist united front. What we need is
adherence to and step-by-step implementation of a
tactical and strategic program of nationalist
development that will mobilize the masses of
workers, peasants, women, youth, professionals and
indigenous communities. We do not need to repeat
the mistakes of the past. What is needed? Not a
mountain stronghold policy of imposing a party
line in a sectarian manner, but a way of
unleashing the energies, wit, cunning and
intelligence of the masses to destroy the old
structures of oppression and exploitation that
have victimized us since the days of Spanish
colonialism, and particularly since the missionary
agents of the US. "Benevolent assimilation" landed
on our shores and civilized 1.4 million dead
Filipinos.
We need to initiate and explore
new radical means of emancipatory transformation.
A transitional nationalist and popular-democratic
government is needed to prevent the usual trick of
using so-called legal procedures that have always
reproduced the status quo to restore peace and
"business as usual". If we want to avoid repeating
the mistakes of the "People Power I" revolution
and the delusions of "People Power II" , we need
to rely on a united alliance of armed workers' and
peasants' councils, community organizations,
existing guerilla forces, and other grass-roots
agencies to destroy the mechanisms of imperial
domination through the institutions used by the
landlords, compradors, bureaucrats and traditional
politicians. Otherwise, we will prolong the
injustice of the present set-up and the suffering
of millions of Filipinos now and in the future.
Only a massive mobilization of the
majority of citizens, of all oppressed and
exploited sectors, in particular the Moro people
and the tribal communities, can rid us of the
evils of the exploitation of labor, political
tyranny of the US, the WB/IMF, and World Trade
Organization, foreign control of the economy, and
the racialized inferiorization of our cultural
heritage. We need to arm the masses to defend
themselves against the counter-revolutionary
violence of the US and its local followers.
A thousand defeats and sacrifices litter
the past; is history repeating itself? But our
countrymen who gave their lives fighting against
Spanish, US and Japanese colonialisms speak to us
from the future, saying: "A new world is possible.
It is there for us to win." Let us seize this
crisis of the enemy - the oligarchic elite and US
imperialism - as an opportunity to advance the
national democratic revolution of the Filipino
masses and liberate ourselves from the evils of
neo-colonialism, racial and gender oppression,
commercialization and globalized misery.
Dr E San Juan Jr was recently
Fulbright professor of American Studies at Leuven
University, Belgium, and fellow of the Center for
the Humanities, Wesleyan University. He also works
with Philippine Forum in New York City.
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please click here
if you are interested in
contributing. |
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