“Living in the “belly” of the imperial beast, we Filipinos in the U.S. are confronted with class and racial violence every day.”
BY DR. RAINIER WERNING
Contributed to Bulatlat
Vol. VII, No. 18, June 10-16, 2007
This interview was conducted in the afternoon of March 22, 2007 during the now historic Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal Session 2 on the Philippines held at The Hague, Netherlands. The interviewer is Dr. Rainer Werning, a German political scientist educated in the universities of Osnabruck and Muenster. He is distinguished for his book of conversations with Jose Maria Sison, The Philippine Revolution: The Leader’s View (New York & London: Crane Russak, 1989), the recent Handbuch Philippinen (with Niklas Reese; Horlemann, 2006), and numerous articles published in newspapers and magazines in Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Luyxemburg. He has done research at various educational institutions in the Philippines, Japan, and UK. The original interview was recently aired over German public radio.
Professor E. San Juan, Jr. is an internationally renowned Filipino cultural critic residing in the United States. He recently retired from Washington State University and the University of Connecticut as professor of English, comparative literature, and comparative ethnic studies. He was a scholar of the Center for the Humanities, Wesleyan University; Fulbright professor of American Studies at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, and a fellow of the Rockefeller Study Center at Bellagio, Italy. He has lectured in various universities around the world, including the University of the Philippines and Ateneo de Manila University. He works with the Philippines Forum, New York, and the Philippines Cultural Studies, Connecticut, both of which assisted the People’s Tribunal. Among San Juan’s numerous books are the forthcoming In the Wake of Terror: Class, Race, Nation and Ethnicity in the Postmodern World (Lexington Books); US Imperialism and Revolution in the Philippines (Palgrave Macmillan); and Balikbayang Sinta: An E. San Juan, Jr. Reader (Ateneo University Press). He was involved in the U.S. anti-martial law movement in the seventies and eighties, and with diverse local/global forums with socialist platforms (among them, Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, and the journals, Nature Society and Thought and Left Curve). His regular commentaries may be found in Bulatlat and other online zines (see also http://www.rizalarchive.blogspot.com; http://www.esanjuanjr.com).
San Juan attended the entire weeklong session of the Permanent People’s Tribunal (March 21-25, 2007) and consulted with major protagonists in the global resistance against U.S. imperialism and its local allies in the Philippines. The following transcript is a slightly revised version of the taped interview, edited for style and accuracy. Questions by Dr. Werning are italicized.
It’s more than a century ago when the Americans stepped into the scene in Southeast Asia. Having spent so many years in the US and grown up in the Philippines, what do you think–as far as the US legacy in the Philippines is concerned–are the most outrageous and most critical aspects of U.S. oppression? And do you perceive some good aspects in the almost 50 years of official colonial rule?
Well, the question is large in scope but I think a brief answer would be to say that the Philippines after more than half a century of American colonial domination is still a very undeveloped, more precisely underdeveloped, economy largely agricultural still, in some aspects very backward in terms of technology and of course, it is basically a neocolony–that is, it is formally independent but the US exerts a deadly stranglehold on its politics and its economy, on both its base and superstructure, especially through the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and other multilateral agencies.
Culturally, it is an authentic subaltern, dependent formation. Why? Because most Filipinos now feel that the US seems to be the model of a “good society,” affluent and sophisticated, where most Filipinos would like to go and no wonder if you ask a Filipino today, what nationality he would like to be aside from being a Filipino, he would say “American.” That is, you know, the next best thing for the Filipino to be is an American—that is, to commit collective suicide and be reborn with another national trapping or identity– and that in itself encapsulates the achievement of more than one-hundred years of American hegemony in the Philippines. That is why this hullaballo about transnationalism, bordercrossing mutants without nationality, and “Filipinos” without any nation, is not only silly, highfaluting nonsense, but a symptom of pathetic victimization by the fashionable and trendy globalization ideology and discourse afflicting the intelligentsia at home and also the middle strata and pettybourgeois circles around the planet.
Good aspects? Are you kidding? Well, dialectically, the good aspects stem from the bad, so I will allow our listeners to do the extrapolations… There is of course a unity of opposites, but at present the contradictions and their possible resolutions insist on their saliency, to which we will patiently attend at length.
Isn’t it ironic – if I am not mistaken the population of the Philippines amounted to something between six and a half million people at the turn of the century around 1900. There are contradictory figures between around 500,000 thousand up to more than 1 million people were literally butchered among the civilians!
