That may be an underestimation. When the U.S. defeated the revolutionary forces of the First Philippine Republic –l the Aguinaldo government which had virtually defeated the Spaniards, it had to exterminate 1.4 million Filipinos in a war that lasted until 1913 because not only the Filipino guerrillas fought for a long time but also the Moros, the Moslems in the south also resisted American military domination and of course, cultural domination, too. We, the national democratic movement at home and abroad, are continuing that “unfinished” revolution. It is a durable tradition of resistance against imperialism, historically the first in Asia, and still continuing with all its vicissitudes, through defeats and resurgence…

I think what happened is that while there was a lot of physical destruction, the more serious effect of U.S. colonization was the loss of a distinctive Filipino sense of identity, what we call a sense of self-determination. And that has been the root cause of the profound suffering but also the long struggle of Filipinos, up to today, to become independent, to exercise the universally recognized right of national self-determination.

And today, of course, we are faced with several successive governments and administrations that have continued to carry out the policies of the U.S. Especially now, in the war against terror, the Arroyo government has been unconscionably complicit with the brutal genocidal war inflicted by the U.S. on the peoples of Iraq, Afghanistan, the Philippines, Colombia, and so on.

With an unprecedented record of nearly 900 extrajudicial killings, hundreds of forcible disappearances, torture and massacres, the Arroyo regime has been guilty of all these policies in which the state has become so repressive because, well, it has to follow the policies of the U.S. against any kind of resistance to world domination of the U.S., especially the predatory globalization policies of the World Bank, IMF, and WTO that virtually exercise a deadly control on the Philippine economy.

So I think in some sense, while the Filipino people have survived – in fact the population has increased to 87 or 88 million people now, the whole situation in terms of the economy, as well as its political and cultural impact, has really become insufferable. In other words, the neo-colonial State, with the U.S.-supported AFP (Armed Forces of the Philippines) and PNP (Philippine National Police) implementing a dual policy of rule by violence and electoral fraud, has continued to prove itself subservient to the U.S. corporate ruling bloc, to follow the policies of successive U.S. administrations, and of course the hegemonic program of the globalized corporate capitalists’ interest around the world which is now led by the US. This is one reason why the fight against the Arroyo regime has to involve the struggle against the fascist laws and measures of Washington and the Pentagon, the new Homeland Security State and its legitimization of torture, “rendition,” Guantanamo prisons around the world, and “Balikatan” interventions in Mindanao, Sulu, and all parts of the Philippines. We need to employ all means in the struggle – legal or electoral, armed self-defense, people’s justice to resist death-squads, etc. –in order to counter the enemy’s desperately indiscriminate methods of repression and exploitation.

Considering the slaughter of so many people around 1900, how can you explain it – is it embedded in some sort of culture of amnesia, that this atrocity was never properly addressed in Philippine textbooks, curricula, and so on?

That is true. I think you might probably credit the way U.S. colonial policy operated. In the beginning, of course, when they colonized the Philippines, the U.S. government said it was there to liberate the Filipinos from the oppressive rule of the Spaniards. So it had something like what is happening now – what the US was doing then in 1899 and 1900 up to 1946 – and what it is doing in Iraq has some resemblance because recently, before and after the war against Iraq, during the U.S. invasion of Iraq, many policy makers and also publicists in the U.S. began to, you know, recycle the propaganda stereotype that what the U.S. is going to do in Iraq is something like what they did in the Philippines in 1899, 1900, that is to say, to civilize the Filipinos, give them democracy and freedom – and which is exactly what Bush is claiming to do in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As you know, this is an old story, the “mission civilizatrice” of the European colonial powers carried out in Africa, India, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Oceania. The Spaniards did it through the Church side by side with quite unholy genocidal violence.

Times have changed. Mercantilism was replaced by industrial colonialism, and later what Lenin called finance capitalism, imperialism being the highest stage of monopoly capitalism, with contemporary globalization as a further elaboration of the good old “civilizing mission.”

So I think the way the U.S. operated, then as now, is to hide the actual acts of aggression in fact, genocide in some cases, by invoking all these slogans of freedom and democracy. Today it is “free trade,” individual choice for consumers, freedom to become migrant workers, etc. So, to repeat, that is the old policy of the pre-capitalist European colonial system, Spain, then France, England and so on, and this has its modern version in globalization discourse today: the “Washington Consensus,” free trade, neoliberalization, deregulation, privatization, and so on, that cannot be defeated simply by mouthing the slogans of the World Social Forum, however right or reasonable they may sound. We need mass mobilization, popular insurgencies across the world.

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