I’ve ruffled a few feathers with recent posts. One invites a “measured critique;” the other one deserves nothing less than “outright condescension:” (I’ll respond to Joel Tesoro’s “Usable Pasts” post later.)

The anonymous writer wrote:

You and Joel Tesoro should have pointed out when and where the Filipino American War and its aftermath emerged as a legitimate object of academic study before throwing around loaded terms like “obsession” which only serves to smear the historical consciousness of Filipino Americans. You as well as I know — or am I mistaken here? — that the finest work on the Filipino American War was and is being produced not (only) by Filipino-Americans but by (white) American scholars as well as by “Filipinos” who are scattered all over the globe but who had been born and raised in the Philippines. The Filipino American War and its aftermath is therefore a trans-Pacific obsession — if an obsession it truly is — and Filipinos in San Diego, Canberra, Cebu, Manila, Kyoto, and yes, even San Francisco (and New York!) are equally among the obsessed.

I have no arguments with what you write; no smear was intended either. While it may sound like a bit of a cop-out, “obsession” was my friend’s word, not mine; I think it should also be clear from what I wrote that I purposely used “loaded terms” like “obsession” and “obsessive” to refer to my own thoughts as well. I’ve been studying the American colonial period in the Philippines for over a decade now, and by that token I’m equally “obsessed.” (Probing the psychological effects of the colonial period — about which I’m not especially enthusiastic, as a student of anthropology — is not a solely Filipino American endeavor either.)

S/he continues:

Indeed in the eyes of some non-Filipino critics what matters more for the Philippines is the obsession with American colonialism of Filipino nationalists in the Philippines rather than any of the feverish imaginings of Filipinos abroad. Remember the claims made by Ian Buruma and James Fallows that such an obsession is the root cause of Philippine underdevelopment? I don’t believe that it is of use to anyone to reproduce their foolish arguments in a multicultural American setting.

Once again, you and I agree!

And ends with:

Both you and Joel Tesoro seem to be engaged in a more reprehensible game of one-upmanship than that played by other minorities in the US. I find it disturbing that two Filipinos now living in relative comfort in the United States would cast themselves as somehow more politically conscious and more authentic than those poor Filipino American scholars who can’t seem to get past their obsessions, however understandable those obsessions may be. Many of us are in a desperate search for a usable past and many of us stumble intellectually in the process. But, to put it defensively, there are also many of us who can and do think critically about the uses and abuses of history in American and Philippine life without your measured critiques or your outright condescension.

First of all, Joel Tesoro is, I believe, in the Philippines, but you should address him yourself.

Secondly, I don’t think I’ve expressed myself very well; nowhere did I mention “authenticity” or “political consciousness,” much less attribute them to myself! (The Authenticity Game is even worse than the Who Suffered More Sweepstakes.) In fact I put forth, in two posts, the tentative argument that Filipino American scholars are, in that respect, more “politically conscious” than their fellow scholars in the Philippines because they are, at the very least, doing all that remembering! (And I explain as well why all this remembering — okay, to use a loaded term: “obsessing” — is important, if not crucial, to understanding and engaging (and hopefully, contesting) American empire.)

I really am puzzled by your response; I condescend every now and then, but certainly not in the post to which you commented.

Now for the second message — [sigh], this is what I get for allowing anonymous comments on my weblog. I won’t bother with a response because the letter writer is plainly a fool. But I’m posting it here anyway so that you all know what the rantings of a Marcos Moron™ look like:

At least yung mga anak ni Marcos… matatalino. They were all highly educated. Talagang maipagmamalaki. Matalino rin kasi ang mga magulang! Eh yung mga anak ni Cory? Saan sila nag-aral? Palibhasa ‘housewife’ lang na naging presidente. Baka nga pagluto lang ng ulam, palpak pa — tulad ng NANAY nila.

Kaya ikaw Wily…magpakamatay ka na lang. Seriously. Ang mga BAKLANG katulad mo…na ‘nahuli sa akto’ tapos nagtatakip pa… tumahimik ka na lang. DAHIL ALAM KO KUNG SINO KA!! OKAY???

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The other day I was having a discussion with a fellow Filipino scholar, and he was criticizing what he called “the Filipino American obsession with the Filipino-American War” — that there was, as he put it, “a Fil-Am orthodoxy of ‘I am Pinoy and I feel the pain of the American colonial period.’”

I didn’t necessarily disagree with him. Previously I had, somewhat unfairly, criticized in print a couple of my colleagues in Filipino American Studies for, shall we say, obsessing over the subject. (I’m biting my tongue hard here, and any more dropped hints or blunter comments would be imprudent.) Suffice it to say that I saw this phenomenon as well, but wasn’t as puzzled about it as I was before. My friend, in any case, had “gotten over it,” meaning the colonial period and the war, and recommended that others should move on and get along with their lives as well.

What I couldn’t explain to him at the time was that the political dynamics of Filipinos in the U.S. were very different from those in the Philippines. First of all, the former is a minority, in almost every sense of the word, and with everything that that entails. And for Filipino Americans to seemingly keep rehashing the subject — why, it was new to many of them, after all, and even if it only served to personally deepen some sort of grievance — well, there was something there too. (I didn’t add, either, that at least someone was remembering it; centennials came and went, but it’s never clear that, say, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo actually “got over it” and “moved on” from something and was now able to declare undying friendship with the U.S. government. Selective memory is a wonderful and fearsome thing.)

Just the other day as well I was carrying on an e-mail conversation with another fellow Southeast Asianist who asked why it was necessary for there to be a “center” of “civilization” at all. (He was referring to my entry on Angkor Wat, where I wrote that it served as a reminder that not all “civilization” was centered in the West.) My response to him was that it was important because most American schoolchildren are taught otherwise, i.e., that at heart curricula, from elementary on up, are still very much Eurocentric. And he wrote: “Still?” And I wrote: “Still.”

Still, indeed. Yesterday there was a little flurry of articles on the Philippines on my browser’s home page (My Way), and Madeline pointed out to me one I had neglected — a little article, serving as a bit of a primer, if you will, from the Associated Press (!) called “Philippine Facts and Figures.” Here’s an excerpt from the “history” section:

HISTORY: Spanish colony from 1521 to 1898, when U.S. Navy defeated Spainish [sic] fleet at Manila Bay. Americans crushed Filipino rebels in six-year war. Japan occupied islands in World War II. Independence granted in 1946.

So now you see why we must remember still.

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There has been a lot of talk about empire lately, and even with Bush’s denials (“America has no empire to extend or utopia to establish,” he said in a speech last June) this vision of a Pax Americana — or at the very least, a kind of “liberal imperialism,” as David Rieff put it — seems more and more apparent. Michael Ignatieff’s now-notorious article in the New York Times has him, despite his denials, still essentially advocating taking up the white man’s burden:

America’s empire is not like empires of times past, built on colonies, conquest and the white man’s burden. We are no longer in the era of the United Fruit Company, when American corporations needed the Marines to secure their investments overseas. The 21st century imperium is a new invention in the annals of political science, an empire lite, a global hegemony whose grace notes are free markets, human rights and democracy, enforced by the most awesome military power the world has ever known. It is the imperialism of a people who remember that their country secured its independence by revolt against an empire, and who like to think of themselves as the friend of freedom everywhere. It is an empire without consciousness of itself as such, constantly shocked that its good intentions arouse resentment abroad.

The first two sentences made me choke; the last three made me stop and think. Why did this seem so new to him? Of course there was historical precedent for this “new invention;” as many scholars have long argued, the American military occupation of the Philippines was already the dawning of the American empire, a reopening of the closed American frontier, the first moment of America’s assertion of military might in a foreign land as a world power for the very first time. (Add to this the genocide of Native Americans, the colonization of Chicanos in the Southwest, the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii, the takeover of Puerto Rico (and Cuba) during the Spanish-American War — a war that took a lot less time to wage than the Filipino American War — and you have a beast that sure looks and talks like an empire. Richard Drinnon similarly argues in Facing West that the racist attitudes embedded in westward expansionism (and toward Native Americans) served as a template for foreign policy from the Philippines to Vietnam.)

In any case, “empire lite,” or “liberal imperialism,” still smells to me like “benevolent assimilation,” which was William McKinley’s policy for governing the Filipinos. He, too, passionately denied any mercantilistic aims for the colonizing of the Philippines, pretending instead that the country fell into his lap and that he was commanded by God to “uplift, Christianize and civilize” the poor Filipinos. McKinley and Taft and their cabal of colonizers similarly vowed liberation and upliftment for the hapless Filipinos — and they too, were “constantly shocked that [their] good intentions arouse resentment abroad.”

Some folks have at least taken notice of this historical precedent. (Gen. Tommy Franks has been likened to Gen. MacArthur and his occupation of Japan after the surrender, but as John Dower put in the New York Times Sunday Magazine a couple of weeks back, the comparisons are spurious: for starters, there was worldwide (and regional) support for the occupation. Similarly, the Japanese postwar economy was seen at the time to be a non-starter, unlike Iraq with all its oil resources. Okinawa, Dower said, would be the more historically accurate parallel.) This one, from Emphasis Added, looks at it differently, however. Comparing Iraq and the Philippines, the blogger writes:

[The United States] finds itself in charge of a hot foreign country, teeming with fanatics of various stripes with a long tradition of mutual hostility, for centuries under the sway of a backward and repressive religion.

Well, “hot foreign country” is at least accurate. (And while I have no real quibbles with “backward and repressive religion,” Catholic priests from the U.S. set up shop in the Philippines as well.)

Within a generation, American administration instills basic cultural values and a democratic political culture…

And so we see where he’s coming from: what exactly are these “basic cultural values” that the Iraqis and the Filipinos lacked?

By any measure, the impact of 45 years of US rule there during the first half of the 20th century must be seen as a net positive, and the Filipinos remain close, generally supportive allies.

This depends, of course, on what this measure would be: Economic? Political? And was this a “net positive” to Americans, or Filipinos, or both?

I can see how the parallels are tempting, but for all the wrong reasons. For all of the American government’s patting itself on the back for making the Philippines into a “showplace of democracy” in Asia, the colonial government was fairly inefficiently run, carpetbaggers were grabbing land and mines and fields, and bad deals were made with landlords with no real benefit to the peasantry.

Sure, “liberal imperialism” could certainly be used to characterize this particular form of the colonial yoke (albeit one supposedly padded in velvet) used in the Philippines: the Americans, after all, brought roads, bridges, hospitals, Hershey bars, and, most important — something the Spaniards weren’t particularly interested in — schools. For free. And there was English, too.

But to embrace the colonization of the Philippines as a “net positive” — and a template for governing Iraq — would be to discount the consistently brutal war that took the lives of… 200,000? 400,000? a million? Filipinos from 1899-1903. (These numbers — which don’t even include the death toll from the various skirmishes and massacres in Mindanao, where the war never really ended — vary greatly depending on the source. Both the Philippine and American soldiers kept fairly good records of casualties, but these do not include “indirect” deaths — exacerbated illnesses, hunger, and the like. Ken de Bevoise, in Agents of Apocalypse, cites about 1.7 million, which already includes people dying from the various cholera and malaria epidemics and those who died of natural causes.) And it would also have to take in consideration Filipinos who mourned the loss of national sovereignty, as well as the aftereffects of neocolonial dependency and exploitation well after independence was “given” in 1946.

No, the lesson to be learned from comparing Iraq to the Philippines is this: for the U.S., the war on Iraq is simply coming full circle to the imperial depredations it committed just about a century ago.

(Thanks to Javier Morillo-Alicea from Brindle Planet, whose comment a few posts back pointed me to Emphasis Added, and whose excellent posting “Where Is The West?” inspired me to write this. But Javier — horrors! — please don’t call it the “Philippine insurrection!” Scholars have tried for years to get the Library of Congress to change its categories from the “Philippine Insurrection” to the “Filipino American War” precisely because it shouldn’t count as an “insurrection.” The insurrectos — later denigrated as “ladrones,” kind of like those wandering Afghan “bandits” and “pockets of resistance” — were only defending their newly independent, sovereign nation-state from foreign invaders!)

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The other night I gave a lecture at UC Davis for BRIDGE, the Filipino Outreach and Retention Program. The topic was the Filipino American War, and current militarization in the southern Philippines (as part of Bush’s “war on terrorism” — to deflect criticism, I said, that the war on Iraq was making him neglect the war on Al-Qaida).

In any case, I read the following excerpt below by way of an ending. It’s from a letter by William James — known to most people as a psychologist and the writer of The Varieties of Religious Experience — but also an ardent anti-imperialist as well. (The excerpt is long, but read at least the final paragraph.)

The letter was written to the Boston Evening Transcript in March 1899, just a little over a century ago; I take the excerpt from Boone Schirmer and Stephen Shalom ‘s excellent The Philippines Reader: A History of Colonialism, Neocolonialism, Dictatorship, and Resistance (Boston: South End Press, 1987):

We are now openly engaged in crushing out the sacredest thing in this great human world — the attempt of a people long enslaved to attain to the possession of itself, to organize its laws and government, to be free to follow its internal destinies according to its own ideals. War… aims at destruction, and at nothing else. And splendidly are we carrying out war’s ideal. We are destroying the lives of these islanders by the thousand… But these destructions are the smallest part of our sins. We are destroying down to the root every germ of a healthy national life in these unfortunate people, and we are surely helping to destroy for one generation at least their faith in God and man. No life shall you have, we say, except as a gift from our philanthropy after your unconditional submission to our will….

It is horrible, simply horrible. Surely there cannot be many born and bred Americans who, when they look at the bare fact of what we are doing, and do not blush with burning shame at the unspeakable meanness and ignominy…?

Why, then, do we go on? First, the war fever; and then the pride which always refuses to back down when under fire. But these are passions that interfere with the reasonable settlement of any affair; and in this affair we have to deal with a factor altogether peculiar with our belief, namely, in a national destiny which must be “big” at any cost, and which for some inscrutable reason it has become infamous for us to disbelieve or refuse. We are to be missionaries of civilization, and to bear the white man’s burden, painful as it often is. We must sow our ideals, plant our order, impose our God. The individual lives are nothing. Our duty and our destiny call, and civilization must go on.

Could there be a more damning indictment of that whole blasted idol termed “modern civilization” than this amounts to?…

…The issue is perfectly plain at last. We are cold-bloodedly, wantonly and abominably destroying the soul of a people who never did us an atom of harm in their lives. It is bald, brutal piracy, impossible to dish up any longer in the cold potgrease of President McKinley’s cant… — surely as shamefully evasive a speech, considering the right of the public to know definite facts, as can often have fallen even from a professional politician’s lips. The worst of our imperialists is that they do not themselves know where sincerity ends and insincerity begins….

The impotence of the private individual, with imperialism under full headway as it is, is deplorable indeed. But every American has a voice or a pen, and may use it. So, impelled by my own sense of duty, I write these present words. One by one we shall creep from cover, and the opposition will organize itself.

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