The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism by Noam Chomsky

Author:Noam Chomsky
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, ebook
ISBN: 978-1-60846-448-7
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2014-10-24T16:00:00+00:00

4.3 Repacification in the Philippines

There is no better illustration of the promise that U.S. policy holds for Southeast Asia and the Third World in general than the case of the Philippines, the only official U.S. colony in Asia for half a century, and now still very much in the U.S. sphere of influence, one more militarized, repressive, and venal totalitarian free enterprise system, with the “haves” resorting once again to open violence to protect their interests against challenges from the “have-nots”. After a brief interlude of post-World War II quasi-independence and CIA-manipulated democracy, the democratic facade was suspended under Marcos in 1972—without significant negative response from the United States105 —and the standard client fascist model was put into place and given undeviating support by the Nixon, Ford and Carter administrations.

Filipino nationalists had declared their independence from Spain in 1898, only to be faced with an extended U.S. war of counterinsurgency, complete with massacres of civilians, burnings of villages, torture, and the other appurtenances of pacification. In those less cynical days U.S. commanders openly admitted their intention to turn resisting areas into a “howling wilderness.”106 The problem faced by the U.S. conquerors was well expressed by General J. Franklin Bell, who explained that “practically the entire population has been hostile to us at heart.” Thus it was necessary to terrorize them into submission, keeping them “in such a state of anxiety and apprehension that living under such conditions will soon become unbearable” and their “burning desire for the war to cease” will ultimately “impel them to devote themselves in earnest to bringing about a real state of peace...[and]...to join hands with the Americans.”107 Hundreds of thousands of Filipinos were pacified permanently in this early exercise in winning hearts and minds.

Filipino nationalists, incidentally, knew very well what was to come when they attempted to defend their newly-won independence from U.S. forces dispatched—on direct orders from the Almighty Himself, as President McKinley explained—to secure this outpost for freedom in Asia. One wrote that the Filipinos

have already accepted the arbitrament of war, and war is the worst condition conceivable, especially when waged by an Anglo-Saxon race which despises its opponent as an alien or inferior people. Yet the Filipinos accepted it with a full knowledge of its horror and of the sacrifices in life and property which they knew they would be called upon to make.108

The period of explicit colonial rule, lasting from 1898 to 1946 (with a brief World War II interregnum of Japanese occupation), was characterized by economic and political domination by U.S. administrators and a local and U.S.-based economic elite. The local elite was made up largely of major landholders whose interests were cemented to those of the United States by the privileged U.S. market position of Philippine sugar, though there was also a business class, partly independent but much of it servicing predominant U.S. economic interests. After the defeat of Japan in World War II, the Philippines were granted technical independence under the rule of a conservative oligarchy closely linked to the United States, with the pre-war colonial economy restored.

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