The Wily Filipino

The War Against the People

March 28, 2005
The War Against the People: Scholars Denounce Killings in the Philippines and Calls for a World-Wide Action

Statement of the Critical Filipina and Filipino Studies Collective
Contact: cffsc@REMOVETHISfocusnow.org

Northampton, MA - The Critical Filipina and Filipino Studies Collective (CFFSC) condemns the growing spate of killings and human rights violations of political activists, peasant rights advocates and sympathizers, lawyers and priests in the Philippines. The Philippine military is targeting and murdering leftist activists and civilians under the pretense of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo regime’s “War on Terror.” The U.S.-backed Arroyo regime’s campaign of surveillance, abduction, torture, and execution is a campaign of terror against the Filipino people.

International and Filipino human rights groups have documented that since 2001, forty-nine activists have been killed or otherwise brutalized by the Philippine military or paramilitary. On March 7, 2005, unidentified gunmen attempted to assassinate Romeo T. Capulong, UN Ad Litem Judge and a human rights lawyer who served as counsel to striking farm workers at Hacienda Luisita, a large sugar estate owned by the family of former President Corazon Aquino in the province of Tarlac. The attempt on Judge Capulong’s life follows the infamous massacre at Hacienda Luisita. Last November 16, 2004, the Philippine military and police attacked striking peasant workers, killing seven and wounding many. Since then, death squads have killed supporters of the peasant farmers: Abelardo Ladera, a city councilor; William Tadena, a priest; and Marcelino Beltran, a peasant leader and key witness to the November massacre. Five more have been abducted and believed dead.

In deep sympathy and solidarity with the progressive individuals and organizations, such as BAYAN-MUNA, BAYAN, ANAKPAWIS, and GABRIELA, who continue to be targeted by such militarist brutality, the CFFSC strongly deplore the unbridled state tyranny exercised by the Philippine government to silence any and all manner of dissent and resistance against its political and economic policies, which have reduced Filipinos to unprecedented levels of poverty and suffering. We denounce the support of the Arroyo regime by the imperialist George Bush administration, which continues to deploy U.S. troops in the Philippines to train Philippine paramilitary forces to infiltrate and destroy progressive Filipino organizations and ordinary civilian activism. We censure the Bush/GMA administration’s false accusations against anti-imperialist activism as “terrorism” and progressive insurgent activists as “terrorists.” This strategy masks a deceptive and wholly undemocratic campaign to coerce the Philippine people and the peoples of the world into justifying and condoning the brutal military suppression of the legal and collective right to organize against injustice and exploitation.

We also decry global-U.S. “War on Terrorism” which provides both legitimation and financial and military support for the Arroyo regime’s domestic war against its own citizens. The global “War on Terrorism” is itself globalization by other means, a globalization of crony capitalism and the military-industrial complex. It is a global project seeking to destroy entire communities for the purposes of creating new sites of investment and profit and new opportunities for the aggrandizement of unlimited power and wealth for the few.

It is vitally important for the progressive international community, which finds cause to protest the U.S.-led war against and occupation of Iraq as the hallmark of a new imperialism, to also show solidarity with Filipino human rights activists and mass leaders, whose terrible fates under the Philippine Republic show the disastrous consequences of a “democracy” under the sponsorship of a globalizing U.S. military-corporate state acting at the behalf of transnational capital and national elite interests.

We must view the flagrant atrocities committed by the Philippine state against its citizens; the civil tyranny and repression insidiously exercised against vocal critics of Empire in U.S. universities (such as Ward Churchill at the University of Colorado and many Middle Eastern studies professors at Columbia University such as Hamid Dabashi, Joseph Massad, Lila Abu-Lughod and others); and the undeclared suspension of the writ of habeas corpus and the flouting of the Geneva Conventions in the case of suspected enemies of the U.S. State detained in Guantánamo Bay and other sites of “extraordinary rendition”(subcontracted torture in foreign territories), as all instances of a world-wide escalation in the use of coercion and unmitigated violence, including political assassinations and torture. If we do not connect these disparate instances of repression and violence as parts of a trend in global tyranny, our hopes for a better and more just world will remain divided and unrealizable. And the alliances forged between state, military and corporate powers under the auspices of the imperial project of global security will continue to go unchallenged.

We therefore appeal to concerned Filipinos everywhere and progressive citizens of the world community to:

· demand that local and national authorities put an end to these killings and to hold the Philippine state accountable for the relentless persecution and murder of Filipino activists, critics and journalists
· call for an invigorated global anti-imperialist movement that recognizes the everyday conditions of violence, dispossession and repression produced by crony capitalism and military-industrial complex
· organize local fora, start solidarity organizations to raise consciousness and build support for the Philippine progressive movement
· Envision and make real global justice, self-determination (rather than the dictates of the elite or global multinational corporations), and human dignity for all.

Signed,
THE CRITICAL FILIPINA AND FILIPINO STUDIES COLLECTIVE

1. Nerissa S. Balce
Assistant Professor
Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

2. Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns
UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of History of Consciousness
University of California, Santa Cruz

3. Richard T. Chu
Assistant Professor
Department of History
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

4. Peter Chua
Assistant Professor
Department of Sociology
San Jose State University, CA

5. Vernadette V. Gonzalez
Assistant Professor
Department of Global Studies
Saint Lawrence University, NY

6. Gladys Nubla
Doctoral student
Department of English
University of California, Berkeley

7. Robyn M. Rodriguez
Assistant Professor
Department of Sociology
Rutgers University, NJ

8. Joanne Rondilla
Doctoral student
Department of Comparative Ethnic Studies
University of California, Berkeley

9. Jeff Santa Ana
Assistant Professor
English Department
Dartmouth College, NH (Commencing fall semester 2005)

10. Rowena Tomaneng
Associate Professor
English Department
De Anza Community College, CA

11. Luis Francia
Journalist, Village Voice and Philippine Inquirer
Author and Lecturer, Asian Pacific American Studies
Program
New York University, NY

12. Dylan Rodriguez
Assistant Professor
Department of Ethnic Studies
University of California, Riverside

13. Ronald R. Sundstrom
Assistant Professor of Philosophy
University of San Francisco, CA

14. Neferti X. Tadiar
Associate Professor
History of Consciousness Department
University of California, Santa Cruz

15. Benito Vergara Jr.
Assistant Professor
Asian American Studies Department
San Francisco State University, CA

For additional information on human rights abuses by the Philippine state:
http://www.geocities.com/arkibo21/mass/lentenmass4jph.htm

http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.phpURL_ID=26425&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html

Amnesty International: http://asiapacific.amnesty.org/apro/aproweb.nsf/pages/index
http://asiapacific.amnesty.org/apro/aproweb.nsf/pages/appeals_philippines_ASA350012005

Asian Pacific Mission for Migrants: www.apimigrants.org

To find more on information on collaborating with or joining local and national efforts to support progressive and anti-imperialist movements in the Philippines and the U.S:

In the Philippines: BAYAN MUNA: http://www.bayanmuna.net/
GABRIELA: http://www.gabrielaphilippines.net/index1.htm

In the U.S.: BAYAN-USA: statement: http://www.indybay.org/news/2005/03/1728977.php
Critical Filipino and Filipina Studies Collective: http://www.cffsc.focusnow.org

To send letters of protest and contact Philippine government officials:
Ms. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo
President
Republic of the Philippines
Malacañang Palace
J.P. Laurel St., San Miguel
Manila, NCR 1005
PHILIPPINES
Fax: +63 2929 3968

Ms. Purificacion Quisumbing
Commissioner
Commission on Human Rights
SAAC Bldg., Commonwealth Avenue
U.P. Complex, Diliman, Quezon City
PHILIPPINES
Tel. No. +63 2 928-5655/926-6188
Fax: +63 2 929-0102
Email: drpvq@chr.gov.ph

Sec. Teresita Quintos-Deles
OPAPP (office of the Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process)
Government Peace Negotiating Panel for Talks with the CPP-NPA-NDF
4th Flr. Agustin 1 Bldg. Emerald Ave. Ortigas Center
Pasig City, Philippines
Telefax: +63 2 6377259
Email: gpnp_cnn@opapp.gov.ph

Mr. Avelino J. Cruz Jr.
Secretary, Department of National Defense
Room 301 DND Bldg.,
Camp Emilio Aguinaldo
E. de los Santos Avenue, Quezon City
PHILIPPINES
Fax: +63 2911 6213
Email: osnd@philonline.com
P/DEP. DIR Gen. Arturo Lumibao
Chief, Philippine National Police (PNP)
Camp Crame, Quezon City
PHILIPPINES
Tel: +63 2 726-4361/4366/8763
Fax: +63 2 724-8763

Atty. Jasmin N. Regino
Regional Director
Commission on Human Rights (CHR III)
3/F, Kehyeng Bldg.,
Mc Arthur Highway, Dolores
San Fernando, Pampanga
Philippines
Tel: +63 45 961 4830/ 963 5311
Telefax: +63 45 961 4475

Your New Favorite Song.

I don't know very much about the Finnish band Circle -- I think Aquarius Records gushes over each release, but that's about all I can remember -- but I happened to have this (apparently exclusive) track on a free CD given out by The Wire called Klangbad: First Steps.

And let me tell you, it's smokin': my friend Darren and I were driving, caught in a downpour, and the music was jumping out of the car speakers. Yes, it does kind of sound like Can's awesome "Vitamin C," as it mines that same, relentless, funky motorik groove, but there's this added guitar squall and psych keyboard flourishes and an overall paranoid urgency to the track.

(The next series of uploads will depend on who wins the Movie Quiz -- there'll be more of those in the future, by the way.)

Hear it (10.52 mb).

Shonen Knife, 3/26, Slim's, SF.

Just got back: Shonen Knife is, at heart, a punk-pop band, and their Ramones covers ("I Wanna Be Sedated," for one) bear that out. I went with my friends Sean and Eloise (Greatest. Winggal. Ever.) and had a great time -- the trio tore through "Konnichiwa," "Twist Barbie," and "Flying Jelly Attack" at the start, then revisited most of their discography ("Map Master," "Kappa Ex," "Rubber Band," "Banana Chips," "E.S.P.," and the two versions of "Tortoise Brand Pot Cleaner," one of which verged on speed metal). Great stuff.

(Somehow we ended up dancing at Studio Z.tv and the DNA Lounge later, where I ran into three of my current/former students. I was so embarrassed. They probably were too.)

Blog Roundup.

I haven't really "blogged" in a while. As Jean told me over lunch last week, explaining why she was supposedly signing off from blogging: sometimes bloggers would be seized by a moment of self-consciousness. I know what she means.

I haven't been reading others' blogs either. Back in the day I always knew what Barb and Eileen and Rhett and Michelle were up to. Not anymore. (So I'm still kicking myself for missing the poetry reading at the SF Public Library last week.)

- Pat Rosal's Kutibeng (finally met him last week, but not at the reading).

- Oliver de la Paz's Pugnacious Pinoy.

- Stevie Nixed's Zero Interrupt.

- Dan moves The Square of the Hypotenuse around.

- And my friend Karen makes her blog debut with The Tacit Diseuse, and instead of a more appropriate Theresa Cha-related post (at least that's what I think the title refers to, but my Dictee's at the office), she blasts The Polyphonic Spree, which I love.

When I wrote her that PJ Harvey (who was at the Spree show) clearly had better taste than her, she answered, "PJ can kiss my ass these days." How's that for music criticism?

And about that "Screen Shot Movie Quiz:" SEND ME YOUR ANSWERS at wily@removethisthewilyfilipino.com. You have until the end of the month.

And finally, responding to Jean:

You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?

I don't know how to answer that one. Ricky Jay's Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women?

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
Franny in John Irving's The Hotel New Hampshire?

The last book you bought is:
Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything.

The last book you read:
Billy Childish's Hunger at the Moon.

What are you currently reading?
Look on your right -- that's what I have All Consuming for!

Five books you would take to a deserted island:
William Eggleston's The Democratic Forest.
T.S. Eliot's Collected Poems.
Gilbert Hernandez's Palomar / Jaime Hernandez's Locas.
Jose Rizal's Noli Me Tangere.
J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.

Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why?
- Karen, so she can write more than just posts attacking the Spree;
- Happy, because I owe him a phone call and more;
- and the Sassy Lawyer, because I haven't read her blog in ages.

Lav Diaz's Evolution of a Filipino Family.

"Hindi tayo pamilya nang mga baliw (We are not a family of lunatics)," characters keep repeating in Lav Diaz's raw, transcendent, monumental, extraordinary masterpiece, Ebolusyon ng Isang Pamilyang Pilipino (Evolution of a Filipino Family), but if they aren't, it's only because the world around them has already gone mad. It's a genuine epic, not in the grand Hollywood sense, but in terms of sheer scale; efforts to compare it with other media -- an Andreas Gursky photograph, a Morton Feldman composition -- don't quite work. It isn't sweeping in the sense of a John Sayles film either, where every sector of society (or, in his last few films, every stereotype) is represented; Diaz's film is a closeup shot (though there are no closeups) of a small handful of Filipinos buffeted both directly and indirectly by fifteen years of political turmoil.

The fact that the film is 630 minutes long -- no, that isn't a typo, it really is ten and a half hours long -- may explain why my attempts to see it with friends failed, as they started dropping like flies (or indeed, may have had better fish to fry). But everyone I talked to would joke about bringing baon, and, a little more nervously, about cups to pee in. In short, it was cinema not just as event, but as experience, and, bladder jokes aside, it was more fulfilling and profoundly moving than any cinematic experience I've had in a long time.

The movie takes place in unspecified locations mostly in the rural Philippines -- though the end credits later reveal the locales to be Benguet, Tarlac and Marikina -- and it is filmed in a way that it could be most anywhere on Luzon. The film follows the lives of two families (though there's a reason for having only one family in the title), none of whom are "nuclear" in the traditional kinship sense: nephews, grandchildren, and orphans assembled or thrown together either by violence, necessity or love. The political events in Manila -- signaled primarily by incorporated footage of the EDSA Uprising, or Aquino's assassination, or Marcos' declaration of Martial Law -- while seemingly remote, affect the families in quite direct ways, even if they are not fully aware of it.

It is a quite still movie -- which makes the moments of violence all the more shocking (some real, in the case of footage from the massacre of farmers at Mendiola) -- with long takes shot with fairly rigorous formality: the natural landscape as proscenium, with the actors entering from stage right or left (or the background), then the cut, a beat after the last character exits. (The fact that it's filmed in black and white serves to blunt the abundance of foliage in the film, at least in the Benguet scenes; people are almost literally swallowed up by the landscape.) The camera very rarely takes any of the characters' points of view -- and when it does it's jarring -- and usually sits a respectful distance from the actors.

People walk a lot in this film, and my initial attempt to interpret this as symbolizing a kind of weary futility was deflated by Diaz in the Q&A session as his way of portraying the literal: that the rural poor do indeed walk for great distances. (They also wait, seemingly endlessly, for the sun to come down lower on the horizon, so they can keep working or walking.) Diaz takes an almost ethnographic interest in everyday life: we see characters make coffee, pack food, plant rice seedlings, eat dinner, and so on, almost in real time.

Such naturalism is somewhat offset by his use of digital video. The flashbacks to the '70s are filmed, it seems, on (deliberately?) degraded video, as if it were a fourth-generation bootleg, rendering daytime a somewhat nauseous blur and nighttime a pixelled abstraction. Many of the scenes set in Quezon City are shot in blinding white light; in a later scene when a character collapses to the ground, he is seen to seemingly disappear in the overexposed, white void. (Imagine my chagrin when Diaz later explained the overexposure as the fault of the projector. "We haven't graded the film," he said. "It was fine in Rotterdam when we showed it there, but obviously, not here.")

The night scenes in particular have a Dogme '95 feel to them, with hardly any sources of ambient light except a guttering torch or a miner's headlamp. Practically half the movie is set in close to total darkness, so much so that it becomes effectively and palpably oppressive to the viewer; Diaz later explained that this was literal, as many of the poor, in the absence of electrification, lived their lives in such a manner. But the effect of this is, like the film's duration, a new viewing experience at least for me: in some scenes we are left watching bobbing flashlights or a single candle flame, and it has the effect of reducing cinema to its purest essentials: light and sound.

This may make the movie sound forbidding, but really, it's not; the narrative is riveting at many parts, and there are some scenes of such quiet poignance (a prisoner singing Rey Valera's "Kung Kailangan Mo Ako (If You Need Me)" off-key to a roomful of sleeping, half-naked men in jail, the grandmother kissing old photographs, or her telling her eldest granddaughter about her plans to send her to college -- the acting, by the way, is consistently superb) that it offsets the seemingly audience-unfriendly sections.

We are, after all, invited to compare it to a soap opera, and there's a certain familiar melodramatic shape to the tragedies that occur to the family. Some of the most brilliant sequences in the film are these running scenes between families huddled around a radio, a constant motif, intercut with voice actors performing a radio drama in a sound booth, as if to underscore perhaps, the artifice of both radio and cinema, or the materiality of labor that the film depicts in such obsessive detail. The movie places itself (perhaps boldly) squarely in a literary and filmic (okay: by now, Filipino-mythic) canon: there's the Sisa character, from Noli Me Tangere, clearly embodied in the insane Tita Hilda, and Kadyo's search in Quezon City for his nephew deliberately echoes Maynila Sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag. (A later seemingly bizarre subplot involving the director Lino Brocka is a slight misstep, if only because it's such a politically self-aware blip in the narrative, but it also self-consciously sets up the film in its entirety as a bid for a different Filipino cinema.)

If there are any shortcomings, it's the overall humorlessness, except for a few instances (like when a man on a train plays "Bikining Itim" on a harmonica). Indeed, the funniest scene in the movie quickly sours: the radio performers are rehearsing an attempted rape and the subsequent beating of the victim, but it is literally an auditory distancing from a rape that occurred offscreen a couple of hours earlier; the effect is amplified by having the grandmother relate the story to her daughter later.

But perhaps the largest question would still revolve around duration; the day before, I was talking to someone who talked about Diaz's "refusal to edit" (though admittedly he hadn't seen the film). Was it really necessary to take ten and a half hours to tell what Diaz wanted to tell? And indeed, there were times when my attention span was almost stretched to the breaking point. Still, many of the establishing scenes, for instance, contained bits of essential information: the tire tracks in the foreground as the farmers and their carabaos wended their way across a field, the faint sound of a chainsaw in an otherwise idyllic landscape -- indeed, this latter scene prefigured a long slow-motion sequence of logs falling into a river about ten hours later.

And sometimes the sequences aren't long enough. There is, for instance, a devastating scene in the seventh hour that consisted of (it seemed) a twelve-minute (could it have been fifteen?) uninterrupted tracking shot of one of the characters walking. (I was reminded, later on, of the famous scene in Tarkovsky's Nostalghia, when the Andrei character walks with a lighted candle across the drained pool.) Even after the audience had cumulatively seen perhaps an hour's worth of walking, the effect was, at least for me, the exact opposite; I was willing the character (indeed, maybe even saying a silent prayer) to keep going.

In Lav Diaz's film, time and duration, for the character and for the audience, ceases to matter after a while. Towards the end, one sister asks the other about what would happen if their grandmother died, and if their missing relatives never returned. The other answers simply, "Tayo, mabubuhay pa rin (We'll continue living)." So will the Filipinos, Diaz seems to be telling us, and, in a life-affirming, cinematic gesture to the audience who has just vicariously lived these characters' lives, so will you. So will his characters, for those lucky enough to have seen the film. Some people may call the film to be a product of self-indulgence; I can only call it an act of pure, brilliant generosity.

It's Movie Quiz Time!

[Quiz done; answers already posted.]

Your New Favorite Song.

Continuing on the J-tip: Phrases like "black hole of noise," or "shaman summoning the ancient gods," or "exorcism of demons" are bandied about when describing the mighty Keiji Haino, and they're probably all true. (The fact that he's all dressed in black, with a long mane of hair, and sunglasses that never seem to come off, adds to the mystique.) I saw him live in a small club in San Francisco a few years ago and it was like one of the whirlpools from Higuchinsky's Uzumaki had materialized on stage.

What I really wanted to include was a rarity from the Purple Trap box set -- specifically, a track from the Forest Of Spirits project: electronic sighs and mutterings that sounded eerily like a field recording if it could pick up voices from the dead. But not only was it 24 minutes long, it was also atypical of Haino's output. (If one could actually call any of his albums representative, that is: one album-length track, for instance, is composed of a barely-changing sine wave for about 20 minutes, until he finally breaks the tension with his unearthly singing.)

What you get here is a track from the power trio Fushitsusha, from, um, one of their live albums (sorry, it's one of the untitled PSF double albums, maybe 15/16 -- you know, the one with the black-on-black cover). Again, it's unrepresentative, since the standard live track usually goes on for at least 15 minutes -- but it's a good example of their technique: seemingly meandering groove one minute, molten lava and the yammerings of a blind idiot god the next.

Hear it (8.6 mb).

More Outsourcing!

I'm hemming and hawing about posting an anti-NAATA broadside which may get me into so much trouble, but this is more important. Check out this article from The Washington Post, via Philippine News. (Thanks to Nerissa for the original post.)

The Philippines is apparently -- I shudder at the turn of phrase -- one of five "emerging target countries," along with Somalia, Yemen, Indonesia, and Georgia, where a spy organization will be operating as part of "developing a more efficient antiterrorist initiative."

This is, of course, nothing new.* But it helps to be reminded of the ramifications of such clandestine operations:

This official, declining to speak on the record about espionage in friendly nations, said that the Defense Department sometimes has to work undetected inside "a country that we’re not at war with, if you will, a country that maybe has ungoverned spaces, or a country that is tacitly allowing some kind of threatening activity to go on."

Laos and Cambodia were, of course, countries that the U.S. was not at war with...

But here's the best part:

This program includes "human intelligence operations," as opposed to such high-technology gathering as using "satellite photography," and range from "peacetime recruitment of foreign spies" to "interrogation of prisoners [my italics] and scouting of targets in wartime."

Finally! The Philippines gets to be the happy beneficiary of more U.S. outsourcing, from call centers to torture -- oh, wait, it isn't torture if it ain't on U.S. territory. My bad.

*One of these days I'm hoping to post this scary recruitment letter sent to me from Langley last year. This was because I was sitting calmly having breakfast at a conference in San Diego when this PsyOps woman asked to share my table. So we chatted, me busily gulping down my coffee once I discovered who and what she was, and we ended up exchanging business cards anyway and several months later, to my horror, I received a letter from the chief of the "PACOM Strategic Studies Detachment 4th Psychological Operations Group" looking for "a well-qualified individual who is fluent in Tagalog, loves the challenge of rigorous academic research and enjoys the possibility of foreign travel." I must note, however, that an "intelligence specialist" position at Fort Bragg has a way larger starting salary than I'm currently making.