Soldiering through Empire: Volume 48 (American Crossroads) by Simeon Man

Author:Simeon Man [Man, Simeon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520959255
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2018-01-26T05:00:00+00:00

CONCLUSION

Radicalizing movements for democracy in South Korea and the Philippines that unfolded in the years after the Vietnam War laid bare the contradictions of the U.S. claim of supporting a “free” Asia for Asians in the age of decolonization. Time and again, American officials exploited this claim for imperial ends. When President Johnson called on these Asian nations to contribute to the U.S. war effort, to show their gratitude and to repay their debt to the U.S. liberating empire, South Korean and Philippine state leaders seized the opportunity. At a time when citizens in these countries escalated their calls for greater economic and political autonomy from a resurgent imperial Japan and the United States, the war in Vietnam appeared to satisfy multiple nationalist desires. Major financial and political concessions secured through troop contributions helped jump-start the Philippine and ROK national economies; at the same time, state officials justified their countries’ participation in the war in racializing and nationalist terms, presenting their troops as “fellow Asians” and dutiful nationals. As the war progressed, nationalism and militarism became evermore entwined. By the mid-1960s, these forces worked in tandem to fortify the U.S. military-industrial complex across Asia and the Pacific.

Nationalism and militarism mobilized working peoples in South Korea and the Philippines in unprecedented and largely unforeseen ways. As Philippine and South Korean leaders charted their nations’ economic future through the war, unemployed and underemployed men and women found new opportunities for mobility and work within the emerging subempire. Their incorporation into the modernizing nation-state through soldiering and other militarized labor, however, exposed them to increasing state violence that reinforced the precariousness of living and working on the margins of nation and empire. The state’s narrowed pursuits of capitalist growth could not ultimately satisfy the people’s aspirations for a citizenship free from the exercise of state violence within and beyond the nation. If the search for economic security propelled working peoples to the front lines of the war, then the same desire, coupled with a refusal to accept subempire as the condition for postcolonial freedom and nationhood, drove people to revolt. At issue for the democracy movements in South Korea and the Philippines was never just the war itself, but the conditions of militarized modernity that made participation in the U.S. war a matter of course. Thus, by the 1980s, anti–U.S. imperialism would emerge as an organizing framework for the protracted movements against authoritarian rule in both countries.

These movements tell a complex story of a past still unfolding, of the making of an inchoate social world that had been foreclosed by the rush to decolonization through militarization. People who were conscripted into that modernity, often through their participation in imperial violence, were in a position to radically rethink their relationship to nation and empire by imagining and pursuing relationships with other decolonizing subjects, and to realize a different world altogether. As the next chapter shows, this was true of Asian Americans who were enlisted in the U.S. military during the Vietnam War. Asian American

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