Wood and General John Pershing led other campaigns of slaughter in Mindanao, with Wood rationalizing, “Our Mohammedan friends … have to be thumped a little now and then.” Pershing asserted, “The Mohammedan Malay” possessed “a fanatical disregard of the consequences of crime and an inborn desire to fight and plunder” and hence was among “the most aggressive and determined Orientals.” This discourse justified another “asymmetric bloodbath” in June 1913 at Bud Bagsak in which US forces slaughtered “between three and four hundred hopeless fanatics and cattle thieves” compared to 14 US personnel dead. Like the other massacres, “Bud Bagsak barely registered on the metropolitan consciousness.”
In both the Indian Wars and in Muslim Mindanao, Joshua Gedacht argues, “The anxieties that accompanied the initial work of colonial conquest—combined with the ambitions of military officers and religious fears—repeatedly proved conducive to excessive, indiscriminate use of force.” Like General Nelson Miles in his justification of liquidating the Ghost Dancers at Wounded Knee, Wood and Pershing embraced “phantasmagorias of religious insurrection” that rationalized the subsequent slaughters of hundreds of innocent people. “Instead of stigmas, these massacres propelled the three officers to the highest echelons of the military establishment.”43
Ambivalences in the Philippine War
As in previous US wars, colonial ambivalences, both on the part of the Americans as well as the Filipinos, played a critical part in the conflict and its resolution. From the outset McKinley had framed the US intervention as a campaign of “benevolent assimilation” in which he glibly averred that the United States would “win the confidence, respect and affection of the inhabitants.” Following the lead of the commander in chief, from the outset the army focused on establishing municipal government, schools, and police forces as the anchors of the American mission civilisatrice. “Visible advances in education and health, both hallmarks of colonial order, helped legitimate the occupation in the eyes of ordinary Filipinos.”44
Much like President Grant’s “peace policy,” the United States would pursue a non-violent albeit ethnocentric reform program—but only so long as the indigenes accepted US colonial rule. “America’s benevolence was thus predicated on violence,” Julian Go points out.45 As in the Indian wars, many US commanders had more enthusiasm for waging war than trying to implement a project of nation building. Nonetheless, beyond question the United States devoted substantial energies and resources to road building, sewer construction, food distribution, literacy programs, disease control, and municipal, legal, economic, educational, and judicial reform.
US reform efforts won over many Filipinos, especially as the guerrilla effort waned and the civilian population suffered from the conflict. While the Americans could involve Filipinos in a variety of civic action programs, “the guerrillas could offer little positive inducement to avoid cooperating with the occupiers … beyond the ever diminishing hope of independence.” The Americans thus combined the allure of safety and, at least for some, opportunity with the visible threat of death and destruction. This ambivalent approach ultimately made the Philippine intervention, argues Linn, “the most successful counterinsurgency campaign in U.S. history.”46
In the ambivalent colonial setting the Americans thus simultaneously carried out both reform and exterminatory violence. General Young reported that the army had supervised elections, instituted local governments, and built roads and bridges while at the same time waging counterinsurgency warfare by employing, as he wrote to Roosevelt, “measures that proved so effective with the Apaches.”47 The
United States set up municipal governments as soon as an area could be pacified, a practice that began in the mountains around Luzon where hill tribes offered no resistance to American authority.
While colonial discourse depicted the Filipinos as “savage” and “treacherous,” they were alternatively viewed as childlike and thus in need of nurture and education. Children, with their undeveloped minds, required scolding and punishment. With the outbreak of guerrilla resistance, Americans embraced a “widespread characterization of Filipinos as uncivilized and unruly ‘children’ who had dishonored the United States and now required discipline and order.” Under ambivalent colonial policies, Americans built scores of schools enrolling thousands of children while at the same time destroying cities and towns and killing Filipinos young and old by the tens of thousands.48
Gender and racial discourses added to the complexity of the US occupation. Although thousands of American soldiers accessed the sexual services of Filipino women, and some courted women as girlfriends and as wives, Filipinas were also sometimes linked invidiously with Indian “squaws.” Colonial discourse often represented Filipino women as less attractive and more dangerous than Hawaiian and other “exotic” women who had recently come under American colonial influence. Jose de Olivares introduced Americans to the new islanders in the book Our Islands and Their People, published in 1899, which included hundreds of sketches and photographs. Filipino women came in “many grades,” some “highly cultivated,” he allowed, yet “a majority of the women of this archipelago belong to a low grade of civilization, and some are but little above the condition of beast of field and forest.”49
Racial ambivalences in the Philippines included the US deployment of two African-American units. The Filipino revolutionaries made a propaganda appeal for solidarity directed to “the Colored American Soldier,” but to little effect. In either the high or the low point of colonial ambivalence, on one occasion during a firefight some Filipinos reportedly yelled to the American “Buffalo soldiers,” “What are you coons doing here?” The American blacks responded, “We have come to take up the White Man’s Burden!” Years later a journalist explained, “It was commonsensical from an American standpoint, ‘niggers’ being ‘niggers,’ to let ‘niggers’ fight Filipino ‘niggers.’ “50
Clearly, US racial discourse encompassed the readymade pejorative N-word along with “goo-goo” and other slurs, yet the soldiers and officials also conducted commercial interactions, went to local dances and concerts, and often professed admiration for the dark-skinned Filipinos. Admiral Dewey found the Filipinos “far superior in their intelligence” and “more capable of self-government” than were the Cubans.51 “They are not savages,” Major Batson wrote to his wife. “There is scarcely a boy that cannot read, write, and do a little arithmetic … I find them exceedingly interesting people.” Although Batson thus seemed to suggest that the Filipinos were already civilized, nonetheless he orchestrated an indigenous counterinsurgency campaign against them.52
Batson’s fondness for the Filipinos made him the ideal officer to organize the Macabebe “scouts,” native auxiliaries employed in pacification. The Americans had used indigenous scouts in the Indian wars, just as the Australians had dispatched the Native Police to help subdue the outback, as the use of auxiliaries in pacification efforts was a common practice under colonialism. The Macabebes, an ethnic group from the province of Pampanga, had collaborated with the Spaniards and were historic enemies of the Tagalog and other Filipino ethnic groups. In June 1898, as the Spanish fled the town of Macabebe, Filipino rebels plundered and burned the town and beheaded scores of Macabebe soldiers. As the sworn enemy of other Filipino groups, the Macabebes were ripe for recruitment as part of the US counterinsurgency effort and proved highly effective in their campaigns. On October 29, 1899, Batson gleefully reported, “With my battalion of Macabebe Scouts I am spreading terror among the Insurrectos.” The Americans recruited other indigenous forces as well. By 1901, 50 “Native Scout” companies of 50 men each had been organized. Thousands of other Filipinos served in paramilitary units, militia, police, and as guides and scouts.53
The Macabebes and other “scout” units underscore internal divisions and ambivalences of Philippine society, not only ethnic but also regional, social, and economic, all of which the Americans effectively exploited. The term “Filipino” had been applied broadly by among others José Riz
al—the brilliant revolutionary leader executed by the Spanish in 1896—as part of an effort to promote an inchoate anticolonial nationalism in the archipelago. The term was both inclusive as well as exclusive, especially excluding the non-Christian “Moros.” “Philippine” society was further divided by social banditry, local fiefdoms and geographic divisions, and especially by the economic and social gulf between elites and the peasantry. During the war Filipinos “fought not only against the Americans but also against each other.”54
The tribalization of the Filipinos in colonial discourse hardened the categorizations and divisions of Filipino society—contrary to what Rizal had tried to achieve—and helped justify US intervention. Framing the archipelago as a colonial space in which a primitive amalgam of ethnic groups competed, from “uncivilized hill tribes” to “savage Muslims,” the Americans promoted a discourse in which “only a paternalistic colonial state could discipline, contain, and transform this complexity into a civilized nation.” Colonial discourse thus “re-inscribed internal categories of difference” because they functioned to justify external colonial authority.55
The McKinley administration created the Philippine Commission to effect the transition from military rule to civil government by exploiting the cleavages within Philippine society. In 1900, the second Philippine Commission under the well-connected Taft clashed with the army command under General Arthur MacArthur, who eventually was forced out for challenging “the administration’s cherished dogma that the Filipino people wanted United States rule and opposed it only out of fear and ignorance.” The Filipinos displayed remarkable adaptability, as they “cooperated enthusiastically with the civic action aspect of pacification—the roads, schools, sanitation projects, improved trade—but they resisted all efforts to use these municipal governments for the purposes of military pacification, and they continued to support the guerrillas with contributions, recruits, and shelter.”56
As the United States pacified areas and cultivated defections of insurgent leaders, it evolved “complex structures of collaboration.” The elite became “essential to ‘pacification,’ mediating between U.S. colonial authorities and the Filipino masses.” US colonialism, as Kramer explains, established a “tutelary framework” that “accommodated elite demands for political participation while forestalling broader and deeper questions of independence.”57
US authorities thus mobilized a largely oligarchic elite as part of the broader colonial project of reining in the insurgency and establishing postcolonial authority. By showing respect for and empowering a Christian Filipino elite, including priests and members of the Catholic hierarchy, the United States cultivated alliances in order to quell the revolution and establish a framework for colonial rule. In Batangas, as in Manila and on Luzon, American colonialism, as May points out, “forged an alliance of a sort with the elites, but made no effort to meet the needs of poor peasants.” Likewise in Cebu, as Resil Majares has shown, the Americans “provided Filipino leaders with an expanding arena for political participation” yet “politics remained an elite preserve.”58
US authorities encouraged Hispanicized Filipino elites centered in the cities to establish racial hierarchies and to project wartime discourses of savagery onto non-Christians and ethnic minorities. By separating out Muslims and other minority groups, the Americans and Filipino elites established a foundation for postwar collaboration within an emerging postcolonial framework. “The animists and Muslims of the archipelago, never defeated by the Spanish, would not for the most part be embraced within the emergent category of the Filipino,” Kramer explains. US military colonialism left a legacy of “anti-center, specifically anti-Manila and anti-Christian sentiments among its people, the reverberations of which would continue well into the post-colonial period,” Abinales points out.59
Within this “joint American-Filipino venture situated inside a broader, evolving colonial project,” a bifurcated racial state emerged in which Muslims and mountain peoples were excluded. Within colonial discourse the oligarchic Philippine elite thus transitioned from “treacherous savages” to “little brown brothers” and partners against an internal opposition. US authorities set up the Philippine Constabulary, comprised mostly of younger male Filipinos, to establish order and help rein in the “Moros” through merciless military campaigns that flowed out of the new arrangement.60
The postcolonial framework enabled the occupation to move forward with modernist initiatives to develop commercial infrastructure, make sanitary improvements, and evolve a pervasive police state apparatus of surveillance and often-brutal suppression of revolution and reform efforts, as well as of freedom of speech and political activism. These characteristics outlived the US occupation and became thus far permanent features of an inveterately corrupt and often repressive Philippine society. “In the accommodation of American and Filipino conservatisms, much was preserved,” Majares points out. “The basic problems of poverty and dependency remained and were heightened, the basic social configuration was preserved, and the character of the economy sustained.” After “massive destruction wrought by the American invasion,” what emerged was “a neo-colonial Philippines.”61
The Postcolonial Philippines
Although some 300 years of Spanish colonization left an imprint on Philippine society, primarily in the form of Catholicism, the US occupation established the enduring framework of postcolonial history. As scholars point out, “The broad contours of recent Philippine history are best understood not against the backdrop of ‘traditional’ Filipino culture or Hispanicized society, but rather in the context of the state structures erected and imposed in the course of the American colonial era.” Building upon the collaborative arrangements established during the counterinsurgency war, the United States and a privileged minority of Filipino elites established a security state backed by a “ubiquitous secret police.”62
US military presence, covert operations, security assistance, political frameworks, and hundreds of millions of dollars outlasted the US pacification campaign normally framed from 1898 to 1902. Within the first decade of civil rule, as McCoy notes, “the colonial government covered the archipelago with a coercive apparatus that was invisible in its covert penetrations, omnivorous in its appetite for information, and enveloping in its omnipotence.” In each postcolonial decade thereafter, the United States “intervened to revitalize the country’s security forces with massive infusions of aid and advisory support, a process that continues today.”63
The Americans and the Filipino elites collaborated on a postcolonial project centered on stifling reform, destroying the left, enriching the oligarchy, and securing the archipelago as a formidable US military asset. During the continuing occupation in the early twentieth century, the Americans oversaw transformation of the judicial and political systems including the establishment of a powerful executive branch limited by few checks and balances and thus open to myriad abuses of power. The postcolonial system empowered elite Filipino businessmen, local bosses, and politicians while the security state protected their interests and insulated them from accountability. Security forces policed the press, the church, political parties, labor unions, and fraternal organizations, keeping them compliant.64
The domination of the Philippines by an oligarchy of landowners, commercial magnates, and politicians from connected families reflects “enduring patterns of narrow class rule already discernible before independence.”65 The American colonial framework perpetuated elite rule and enabled widespread corruption. Philippine society became “essentially a multi-tiered racket” through the establishment of a “complex set of predatory mechanisms for private exploitation and accumulation of the archipelago’s human, natural, and monetary resources.”66 As Eva-Lotta Hedman and John Sidel point out, “The features of Philippine politics most frequently derided and diagnosed as pathologically ‘Filipino’—’bossism,’ ‘corruption,’ ‘personalism,’ and ‘rampant’ criminality and political violence—are best understood as reflections of en
during American colonial legacies.”67
While Filipino elites dominated politics and society, the United States solidified the Philippines as an imperial outpost within its burgeoning postwar global security regime. After the United States and the Philippines allied against the Japanese in World War II, the Philippines received independence in 1946. In the postwar period the United States built Clark Field Air Force base and Subic Bay naval base into the two largest overseas US military bases in the world. With the United States controlling external security, “internal security remained the primary concern of the coercive apparatuses of the Philippine state.”68
As Americans conceptualized a global cold war, and conceived of Filipino space as vital to containment of communism across the “great crescent” of Asia, they collaborated with the internal security regime in a campaign against the left. The Hukbalahap—the People’s Army Against the Japanese—had led the resistance during World War II, liberating most of Luzon, yet after the war the Americans arbitrarily arrested, disarmed, and incarcerated the Huks as alleged radicals and subversives.
The Huk resistance movement had “evolved out of earlier uprisings and acts of resistance against the unequal landowning system and repression of the U.S.-Philippine colonial government.” Comprised “largely of rural peasants and farmers,” the Huks pursued land reform and had sought to work within the political system for “social and economic justice.”
American Settler Colonialism: A History Page 32
