E. San Juan, Jr. presents the Preface to
RECOGNIZING APOLINARIO MABINI: Inquiries into the Struggle for Justice and Sovereignty by E. San Juan, Jr.
(University of the Philippines Press, 2024)
PREFACE
Surprises, chance happenings, contingencies, gratuitous twists of events characterize our lived experience of the return of the Marcos dynasty to power. The 1986 February revolution overthrew the Marcos dictatorship and re-installed the old elite “cacique democracy” (Anderson) with the blessings of the Reagan administration. When Ferdinand Marcos Jr, who became president in 2022, presided over the return of U.S. military bases, now loaded with Tomahawk missiles, are we mesmerized by a “deja vu” scene? Was the island-nation ever truly free from colonial bondage to the United States, with the pervasive and durable Americanization of its economy, government, culture, psyche, etc.? Witness, for example, how the Clark Field Freeport Zone is buiding a new stadium big enough to accomodate the American pop superstar Taylor Swift (Kelly). Regular visits to Washington by Filipino presidents and oligarchs enact a perennial ritual of homage to reaffirm acquiescence to the Empire’s hegemony
One Filipino commentator opined that after 125 years of nominal independence, the U.S has repossessed its delinquent property (Bello). But in reality, after the U.S. destroyed the first Republic in the Philippine-American War (1899-1913) and its sovereignty, the country has remained a colony and, after its nominal independence in 1946, a full-fledged neocolony. Historical amnesia has overtaken otherwise astute scholars of neocolonialism. But not Daniel Schirmer, for example, whose incisive recounting of “The Conception and Gestation of a Neocolony” analyzes the fraud of McKinley’s “Benevolent Assimilation” via bloody pacification, “an orgy of racist slaughter” (Kolko 287). Schirmer states that the war the U.S. precipitated, “a war of unremitting harshness and brutality robbed the Filipino people of the beginnings of national sovereignty that they had just won for themselves, but this is not the perception of events that has lingered in the popular consciousness… What remains in the public memory is the official U.S. version of the origins of the U.S.-Philippine relations, namely, that the United States came to the Philippines on mission of benevolence and generosity,” to teach the “savage Filipinos” democracy and self government (38).
Rudyard Kipling celebrated the beginning of American conquest in his often anthologized poem, “The White Man’s Burden” written at the outbreak of the U.S. aggression. This fabled burden unleashed unbearable pain and sacrifices for its intended beneficiaries. The result of this tutelage and its aftermath is summed up by Jack Woddis (38-40): the Philippines acquired the classic status of a neocolony, not postcolony. Further sociocultural symptoms of victimhood and resistance are analyzed in Chapters 2-7, including the impact of neoliberal globalization on the Duterte regime and the prospect of transcending it by continuing the “unfinished revolution” of 1896-1898.
A snapshot of Anglo-Saxon tutelage is rendered by Filipina novelist Gina Apostol: “American greed and geopolitics entrenched Philippine oligarchy as a matter of policy because it strengthened U.S. control. Taking on a feudal template laid down by the Spanish, a few powerful families prospered in the U.S. neocolonial orbit, consolidating land, resources and power throughout the Cold War and into the current era of China’s global ascendancy…As U.S. leaders waltzed with Mr. Marcos Sr., he imposed martial law from 1972 to 1981…The tyrant thrived during the Cold War, using his U.S. funded counterinsurgency campaign—which targeted communists—to consolidate power. He imprisoned, tortured or killed thousands and stole an estimated $5 billion to $10 billion until a people’s uprising in 1986 exiled him and his family to Hawaii.” The immense disaster and damage to the country imposed by the Marcos martial-law regime has been fully assessed by IBON, Conspectus Foundation, etc. (Javate-De Dios, Daroy and Kalaw-Tirol) In Hawaii, Marcos found the vestiges of the Filipino diaspora—Filipino workers recruited to the Hawaii sugar plantations in the early decades of U.S. colonial rule. Retired Ilocano workers of Bulosan’s generation must have been surprised to find their illustrious Manong in their neighborhood.
Not only in Hawaii but all over the United States, Filipinos migrated, worked, and tried to heal the wounds of deracination during the decades before World War II. We were not yet renowned as “global servants.” It was Marcos’ labor-export policy initiated
by the Presidential Decree 442 and the 1974 Labor Code that started the exodus of OFWs (Overseas Filipino Workers). It was systematized in 1982 with the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration which encouraged thousands of Filipinos to seek work abroad for lack of decent employment at home (Catholic Institute). We now confront a diaspora of over 12 million OFWs with their unique problems, coping strategies, and collective biographies that I try to describe in Chapter 2, a follow-up to previous inventories of this globalizing trend with its diasporic entailment (San Juan 21-36). While there may be success stories in this overseas adventures (see DeParle), the preponderant experience is one of injury, rape, suicide, and murder. The most famous are the cases of Flor Contemplacion and Sarah Balabagan.
The last two chapters here following a discourse on the vicissitudes of women political prisoners attempt to reconcile the contradictions and hypothesize a constructive dialectic of opposites. The autobiographical mapping of the last chapter can be construed as an allegorical extrapolation of one individual’s experience as a narrative of the plight of the larger community. It is part of a project of prophesying what possible transformations may come about due to these movements, affective and cognitive, that have made the “Pearl of the Orient Seas” the crossroads of diverse pilgrimages and adventures that have shaped our life-histories.
Numerous historical accounts of the war have already exposed the racist/white supremacist ideology underwriting the Yankee mission civilizatrice. The only Filipino intellectual-protagonist of the revolution who perceived and understood this ideology was Apolinario Mabini. Mabini also laid the groundwork for theorizing the emergent historical consciousness of the subaltern communities that would sustain future mass struggles for justice and sovereignty, Mabini’s political vision is crystalized in his “True Decalogue” of which I reproduce the last section, a proposal that may trigger moral or ethical reverberations in our more vigilant compatriots:
Tenth. Always look on your countryman as more than a neighbor: you will find in him a friend, a brother and at least the companion to whom you are tied by only one destiny, by the same happiness and sorrows, and by the same aspirations and interests.
Because of this, while the borders of the nations established and preserved by the egoism of race and of family remain standing, you must remain united to your country in perfect solidarity of views and interests in order to gain strength, not only to combat the common enemy, but also to achieve alll the objectives of human life (La Revolucion 141; see another rendering by Ocampo, Ambeth 85).
The chapter on Mabini here is intended to be heuristic and provocative. It is designed to initiate further inquiry into the complex conjuncture of the war which allowed the oligarchic ilustrados to win ascendancy during the American colonial period up to the Cold War counterinsurgency begun by Ramon Magsaysay and carried out through the regimes of Marcos Sr, Aquino, Ramos, Arroyo, Duterte, and Marcos Jr. With the institutionalization of the U.S. War on terror via the NTF-ELCAC (National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict) and various anti-terrorism laws and coercive agencies, any opposition is stigmatized as “terrorist.”
The 2020 Anti-Terror Act annuls the Constitutional guarantee of free speech and assembly, serving as a legal weapon to sanction any authoritarian or fascist moves of the neocolonial State. Any expression of dissent is red-tagged and labeled a terrorist act (Ocampo; Bulatlat). In this way, the U.S. is guaranteed total surveillance and control of the polity without exposing the operatives or handlers such as those named by Raymond Bonner in his Waltzing with a Dictator: The Marcoses and the Making.of American Policy (1987). Marcos Jr.’s electoral victory in May 2022 recycles the old practices of vote-buying, red-tagging, and deadly violence inherited from U.S. tutelage in subverting popular needs and demands (International Observers Mission).
Concerning the forgotten Philippine-American War, we have many references to consult. One can cite the commentaries of Gabriell Kolko, Howard Zinn, Stuart Creighton Miller, and Roger Bresnahan as ripostes to the apologetics of Stanley Karnow, David Joel Steinberg, Theodore Friend, and others. The most powerful advocate for recovering our critical judgment of the Philippine-American War is Renato Constantino. In “Origin of a Myth” in his book Dissent and Counter-consciousness, as well as in the collection of essays, History: Myths and Reality, Constantino argued for a renewal of the historical consciousness that Mabini inaugurated in La Revolucion Filipina (see a new inquiry into the U.S. genocidal war on the Moros by Kim Wagner). Constantino’s call has been heeded by Filipinos whose conscience has been stirred, such as Alejandro Lichauco, Jose Maria Sison, Julieta de Lima, Bienvenido Lumbera, and others. Lichauco’s discourse on U.S. neocolonialism in the Philippines remains the standard anaysis and critique of U.S. strategy and tactics for preserving it dominance—not only through treaties and secret agreements but through the World Bank-IMF and its local free-market, neoliberal exponents. In effect, U.S. hegemony results from the calculated deployment of both ideological manipulation and brute coercion. These twin evils may explain the persistence of widespread human rights abuses and violations of international humanitarian law documented recently by the 2024 International People’s Tribunal hearings in Brussels, Belgium, published in their website.
With the decline of its industrial supremacy in the last two decades, the U.S. has
begun to reclaim the IndoPacific region as its backyard (Foster and Clark). Recall that
the colony was originally meant to serve as a naval/military zoutpost in Asia. Seven
decades of postWW2 security partnership beginning with the 1951 Mutual Defense
Treaty between the two governments are alleged to legitimize the new “interoperability”
of both military forces. We can also cite the presence of CIA and Pentagon advisers
(such as Col, Edward Lansdale, notorious for the Phoenix program in Vietnam) with the
Joint U.S. Military Advisory Group that oversees the AFP (Armed Forces of the
Philippines) up to the 2017 Marawi City devastation (Capozzola 220-26, 367).. Are we
witnessing a postmodern version of “Benevolent Assimilation” in the U.S. “Pacific
Century”?
With Obama’s “pivot to Asia” and the rise of China as an economic power, the U.S. began in 2014-16 to expand its military bases in Palawan, Zambales, Nueva Ecija, Pampanga, Cebu and.Cagayan de Oro (Acosta; Kelly). In February 1, 2024, thanks to EDCA (Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement), four new sites were established in Cagayan, Isabela, Balabac Island in Palawan, and Lal-lo Airport in Cagayan (Vergun). Joint US-Philippines military exercises have now been conducted beyond the 12 nautical miles of the Philippines’ territorial waters, in parts of the open sea claimed by China; thus, “for the US forces which have been retooling to prepare for a maritime war against China in the Indo-Pacific, ‘the access if phenomenal,’ said a U.S. military official” (Cabato and Tan).
Confronted by this new geopolitical dispute, the Fiipino people are confronted with the challenge of siding with one power against the other, either for the neocolonizer or the neighbor. Political scientist Francisco Nemenzo points out that “both protagonists are using us for their own ends….The best option is to work with our Asian partners to negotiate a binding version of the Declaration of Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea….What is wrong with holding bilateral talks?” A long time ago, Felipe Agoncillo was sent by the Malolos Republic to hold talks with Spain and the United States before they signed the 1898 Treaty of Paris in which Spain sold the Philippines to the U.S. for $20 million (Tan 19). But he was not heard, so would bilateral talks be the wedge to prevent antagonism between our neighbor and the obsolescent global hegemon?
Let us hear our compatriots at the barricades. The progressive organization BAYAN has denounced the re-possession or re-acquisition of their Oceanic property: “The massive deployment of US military personnel and assets…is meant to provoke China into engaging the US in intensified military conflict similar to how the US provoked Russia into a war by expandiing NATO into Ukraine, US military aid meanwhile is used in a US-inspired counter-isurgency program inplemented by various Philippine puppet presidents resulting in grievous violations of human rights and international humanitarian law…We oppose China’s aggressive actions and illegal claims over 90% of the South China Sea. Nonetheless, we object to the US using our legitimate dispute with China as pretext for greater US military intervention in the region, pushing the Philippines away from a peaceful resolution of the dispute through diplomatic means, and closer to armed confrontation which serves US imperialist goals in the region. Then and especially now, the US is the main driver of conflict in the region….We stand in solidarity with the peoples of the world fighting the US war machine, from Palestine to the Philippines. We hail all our heroes who have fought for genuine independence from colonialism, from the revolutionaries of the Katipunan to the freedom-fighters of the present struggle.”
Apolinario Mabini, deported to the barren island of Guam, would have been exultant hearing this manifesto. Meanwhile, in Tithu, Spratley Islands, in the contested South China Sea, in roughly 90 acres of land, a few hundred Filipinos have settled surrounded by Chinese war ships. They receive periodic rations of food and other supplies since there is no other way to survive, The family of Marjorie Ganizo and Junie Antonio Ganizo and their eight children are caught “in the middle of a tense geopolitical dispute” (Elemia 1). Though they left the cities, they are far removed from the fortuitous situation of the Portagana clan described by DeParle in A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves.
Despite the proverbial resilience of Filipinos and their indigenous diskarte maneuvers, the Tithu islanders may approximate Mabini’s punishment in Guam. It is not idyllic at all, but Ms. Ganizo replies to the New York Times reporter: “In the end, we had to ask ourselves; hunger or fear?…No matter where you are, if it’s your time to die, it’s your time to die.” For his part, Mr. Larry Hugo, the fishermen’s group leader in Tithu Island, seemed resigned to the uncertain pace of life: “This is my home…I’ll leave this island only when I’m dead” (Elemia 6A),. Hugo’s love of this tiny piece of land in the embattled West Philippine Sea, however precarious and desperate, reminds us of Mabini’s commitment to his country’s history of fighting for freedom and its vast potential for advancing people’s liberation everywhere even in the midst of defeat. The essays in this book may be considered as an exploration of what the struggling masses have achieved so far in various fields, following Mabini’s advice in “The True Decalogue” to “strive for the independence of your country, because you alone can have real interest in her aggrandizement and ennoblement, since her independence will mean your own freedom, her aggrandizement your own perfection and her ennoblement your own glory and immortality” (La Revolucion 140).
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*****
Epifanio San Juan Jr., also known as E. San Juan Jr. (born December 29, 1938, in Santa Cruz, Manila, Philippines), is a known Filipino American literary academic, Tagalog writer, Filipino poet, civic intellectual, activist, writer, essayist, video/film maker, editor, and poet whose works related to the Filipino Diaspora in English and Filipino writings have been translated into German, Russian, French, Italian, and Chinese. As an author of books on race and cultural studies, he was a "major influence on the academic world". He was the director of the Philippines Cultural Studies Center in Storrs, Connecticut in the United States. In 1999, San Juan received the Centennial Award for Achievement in Literature from the Cultural Center of the Philippines because of his contributions to Filipino and Filipino American Studies. More information HERE.
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