Passionate Revolutions. Talitha Espiritu

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      For Marcos, the “third alternative” was strong leadership (i.e., authoritarianism) tempered by nationalism. Loosely referencing Peronism and Juan Perón’s “third way,” Marcos’s statement also appropriated the anticolonialist perspective of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon had argued that the Cold War battle between capitalism and socialism obscured the true struggle faced by Third World nations: decolonization. Always a violent phenomenon, decolonization, Fanon argued, necessitated “the replacing of a certain ‘species’ of men by another ‘species’ of men.” National liberation entailed the material eradication of colonialism; but more fundamentally, it required the psychoaffective transformation of the colonized subject. It is in light of this overriding imperative that Fanon exhorted Third World nations to reject the colonizers’ definitions of their values and identities and to seek instead to “find their own particular values and methods and a style which shall be peculiar to them.” Fanon is emphatic on this count: “Let us not pay tribute to Europe by creating states, institutions and societies which draw their inspiration from her. Humanity is waiting for something from us other than such an imitation, which would be almost an obscene caricature.”¹³

      In his Notes on the New Society of the Philippines, Marcos paraphrases Fanon: “It is important . . . that we extricate ourselves from the mental conditioning of ideologies foreign to our experience.”¹⁴ Clearly sharing Fanon’s views on the psychic wounds inflicted on the colonized subject, Marcos likewise prescribes the eradication of colonial subalternity. He advances his notion of a third way as nothing less than the symbolic slaying of a colonial father figure: “By choosing to take up a third alternative as other Third World nations have, we are conducting not America’s experiment but our own, free, independent and unfettered. Anti-American, one may say, because it involves the slaying of the great white father’s image; but more Pro-Filipino, on closer look, for the slaying of the father image means liberation for the brown son, his coming of age, his passage into full manhood in the community of nations.”¹⁵

      Marcos’s allusion to the brown son’s coming of age is indeed consistent with Fanon’s theorization of the new man born out of the struggle for national liberation. As Fanon put it, “the ‘thing’ which has been colonized becomes man during the same process by which it frees itself.”¹⁶ By invoking the slaying of the great white father, Marcos gestures toward the racial politics of modernization, which, in the Philippine context, could be traced back to the American colonial policy of benevolent assimilation. Indeed, a long historical thread linked modernization to this policy, which saw (white) U.S. citizens as the moral superiors, hence political exemplars, of America’s “little brown brothers.” Marcos’s third way was anti-American to the extent that it outwardly rejected this racist bias masquerading as cultural paternalism. However, in valorizing his third way as a “pro-Filipino” experiment, Marcos nonetheless borrowed the great white father’s rhetoric. His third way bore an ambivalent relation to what Vicente Rafael has described as puting pagmamahal (white love), the love of whiteness that has “come to inform if not inflict the varieties of Filipino nationalism that emerged under American patronage.”¹⁷

       White Love, Modernization, and Marcos’s Third Way

      To understand the operation of “white love” in Marcos’s third-way discourse, it is perhaps necessary to take a short detour into the history of U.S. colonialism in the Philippines. After the Spanish-American War, some seventy-five thousand U.S. troops were dispatched to the Philippines in 1899 to crush an indigenous revolutionary struggle. It would in fact take the United States almost four years of brutal warfare to wrest its booty from Filipino nationalists, a conflict that has since been tagged by revisionist historians as the forgotten war.¹⁸ Popularly regarded at the time as yet another “Indian war” in America’s expansionist history, the brutal conflict saw political demonology in action: American observers arriving in the islands in 1899 claimed that the indigenous leaders of the Philippine revolution were illegitimate representatives of the Filipino people. In fact, they claimed that there were no Filipinos as such, only a mixed collection of polyglot savages lacking a common culture and prone to impulsive and irrational behavior.¹⁹ Given the “absence” of a Filipino nation, the new colonizers rationalized U.S. presence in the islands, not as an act of imperialist aggression (since after all there was no nation to usurp), but as a benevolent act: they were in the islands to defuse the political instability unleashed by “deluded peasants and workers” led by a gang of mixed-race leaders.²⁰

      The fourteen-year conflict was thus paradoxically perceived as a humane war. Despite the thousands of Filipino deaths, it was characterized as a valuable learning experience for Filipinos and Americans alike. David Prescott Barrows, head of the Bureau of Non-Christian Tribes, wrote in 1901 that the conflict was a blessing, “for without it the Filipinos would never have recognized their own weaknesses; without it we would never had done our work thoroughly.”²¹

      It is well worth reiterating the racial politics underpinning the U.S. policy of Benevolent Assimilation. President McKinley, who coined the term, argued that the “earnest and paramount aim” of colonization was to “win the confidence, respect and affection” of the people.²² In William Howard Taft’s view, Filipinos were orphaned children, “little brown brothers” abandoned by their Spanish fathers. It was therefore imperative to enfold them within the compassionate and protective embrace of the United States. It was, in short, an instance of white love. As Rafael puts it, “As a father is bound to guide his son, the United States was charged with the development of native others. Neither exploitative nor enslaving, colonization entailed the cultivation of the ‘felicity and perfection of the Philippine people’ through the ‘uninterrupted devotion’ to those ‘noble ideals which constitute the higher civilization of mankind.’”²³

      Such has been the colonial thread of white love: the allegorical projection of a great white father whose love for his wayward children is served by creating a reciprocal relationship between a civilizing love and a love of civilization. Cultural paternalism clearly underpinned the policy of Benevolent Assimilation, which “required making native inhabitants desire what colonial authority desired for them.”²⁴ It also involved the enforcement of constant surveillance, for the Filipino, it was believed, was incapable of self-government. This fundamental incapacity—something we have seen repeated in Marcos’s time with the Huntington thesis and the view that Filipinos “just weren’t ready for democracy”—was in fact the official reason why U.S. colonial rule lasted until 1946. Benevolent Assimilation projected U.S. colonial rule as merely a transitional stage; self-rule would be granted as soon as the natives, in Taft’s words, “have been elevated and taught the dignity of labor . . . and self-restraint.”²⁵ In other words, self-government can be achieved only when the subject has learned to colonize itself. In Woodrow Wilson’s words, “Self-government is a form of character. It follows upon the long discipline which gives a people self-possession, self-mastery, and the habit of order and peace . . . the steadiness of self-control and political mastery. And these things cannot be had without long discipline. . . . No people can be ‘given’ the self-control of maturity. Only a long apprenticeship of obedience can secure them the precious possession.”²⁶

      As a precondition of Filipino self-rule, white love set standards of discipline and civility that required the tutelary subject to submit to strict regimens of training and the constant supervision of a sovereign master. By mid-century, white love evolved into the Cold War technology of modernization. Replacing direct colonial supervision with the application of the social sciences to the problems of decolonizing states, modernization worked to spread the culture and values of the United States throughout the Third World. Modernization, in expanding and reconstituting the colonial project of white love, had definite, if unstated, racial overtones. Its humanistic teleology, to borrow Fanon’s terms, “invit[ed] the submen to become human and to take as their prototype Western humanity.”²⁷

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