THE POLITICAL ANTHROPOLOGIST
Nov/Dec 2016
Why is Gentrification so Gay?
America at War with Itself
The After Lives of the Race Problem in Modern America
The Future of Film
GENDER CONFESSIONS AND
POSTMODERN AUTO-DAFE PAGE 19
THE POLITICAL ANTHROPOLOGIST NOVEMBER - DECEMBER 2016
4 8 12
America at War with Itself , p4
16
War
America at War with Itself Henry A. Giroux “Anti-Americanism” in the Philippines. President Duterte’s Subaltern Counter-Hegemony. Guerilla Incursions from the Boondocks E. San Juan Jr. The Curse of Aleppo and Understanding the Syrian Civil War Simon Mabon
Gender
Why Greater Gender Equality in Male-Dominated Sectors is Good For Women and Industry – and How To Do It Tessa Wright
19
Gender Confessions and Postmodern Auto Da-Fé Julian Vigo
23
Why is Gentrification so Gay? Dana Collins
27
Lesbian Culture is Being Erased Because Investors Think Only Gay Men (and Straight People) Have Money Marcie Bianco
Race 30
White Capital, Black Labour and the After Lives of the Race Problem in Modern America Paul R.D. Lawrie
34
The Good, The Bad, and The Rational Deborah Heikes
Gender Confessions and Postmodern Auto Da-Fé , p19
Immigration 37
WHY DO I LIVE HERE?: On Muslim Youth Growing Up on the Front Lines of Nationalist Politics in Denmark Reva Jaffe-Walter
Culture 40
American Millennials and the World A. Trevor Thrall and Erik Goepner
Film 44
Filming Genocide William Guynn
48
The Future of Film Holly Willis
Environment 52 The Future of Film , p48
Loss and Damage of Climate Change – from Managing Risks to the Politics of Compensation Swenja Surminski
Production & Design: Angela Lamcaster Print Strategy: Stefan Newhart Production Accounts: Lynn Moses Editors: Elenora Elroy, David Lean Managing Editor Europe & Americas: Yetunde Olupitan Group Managing Editor: Jane Liu Editor in Chief: The Political Anthropologist Publishing Oscar Daniel READERS PLEASE NOTE: The views expressed in articles are the authors' and not necessarily those of The Political Anthropologist. Authors may have consulting or other business relationships with the companies they discuss. The Political Anthropologist: 3 - 7 Sunnyhill Road, London SW16 2UG, Tel +44 (0)20 3598 5088, Fax +44 (0)20 7000 1252, info@politicalanthropologist.com, www.politicalanthropologist.com No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission. Copyright © 2017 EBR Media Ltd. All rights reserved. ISSN 2052-7403
empowering communication globally
From the Editors Race against Race
D
ubois said that the enduring problem of the 20th Century would be race. He probably meant that the enduring problem for the 21st Century would also be race. I love what we used to see and still see sometimes thanks to Hollywood called the American Dream. A country in which you can achieve anything you want if you work hard enough. However is that true? Has it ever been true for people of ethnicities that are not classified as white? Would it be true for someone of, let’s say, Turkish origin living in Germany or the USA who decided to keep his cultural identity flourishing? Was it ever true for anyone classified as the Other by the white establishment? Racism is an interesting phenomenon in the sense that it changes ever so subtly in the way that it effects those it infects. For example, you have the white supremacist who believes in the myth of white superiority as an innate characteristic that entitles some people called white-Europeans to rule the world. Now Hobson, in his marvellous and thoroughly researched book “The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation” demonstrates that the white supremacist jaundiced ideological construct really took off only in the 18th Century. Then there is the sad and inferioirising and extraordinary preoccupation of many millions of non-Europeans where their primordial ambition is to retain and or attain some semblance of white skin and or a deep seated, self-deluding and self-negating desire to either emulate the systemic organisational racism of our white European societies. You can see this whenever you go on holiday anywhere in the world and you study the ways that peoples of different cultures and racial backgrounds interact. This journal, The Political Anthropologist, is a forum for discussion on many issues. One of the issues is going to be race and racism. Race is often the way that we define ourselves and interact as sentient souls within the space in which we exist. Racism, or as we can functionally define it today, white supremacy, is alive and well and it is not going away. Look around the world and nearly every war or potential war that involves Europe or America and let’s say the Middle East or South East Asia has as its underlying driver Race. This is the key to understanding international relations. As political anthropologists, no analysis will be adequately satisfying and just unless we address the foundational racial ideological mind sets of warring parties and or with whom they identify and for whom they work. ISIS as a case study would prove this point of course.
www.politicalanthropologist.com
3
America at War with Itself
BY HENRY A. GIROUX
As the United States has moved from a welfare to a warfare state, it has militarised every aspect of society. This article examines the diverse ways in which a war culture has seeped into almost every aspect of American society undermining both its democratic ideals and the institutions and formative culture that make democracy possible.
4
The Political Anthropologist
M
ichel Foucault once argued that “War is the motor behind institutions and order [and that] a battlefront runs through the whole of society, continuously and permanently, and it is this battlefront that puts us on one said or the other.� Foucault’s insight is particularly relevant today as American society is increasingly being organised for the production of violence. Moreover,
November - December 2016
this new fault line has given rise not only to the dark forces of authoritarianism evident in the political ascendancy and popularity of Donald Trump as the Republican Party presidential nominee, but also to a new and dangerous rupture between those who believe in democracy and those who do not. America is now at war with itself in the most literal sense given the savagery of a neoliberal political and economic system willing to destroy the planet, while relentlessly dismantling those institutions that make a democracy possible. Not only are public spheres that serve the common good under siege, but American society is now conducting warfare against its own idealism, democratic institutions, the working and middle classes, minority youth, Muslims, immigrants, and all of those populations considered disposable. As profit is transformed into the essence of democracy, the market governs not only the economy but all of
War
social life, and the only relations that matter are commercial in nature. One consequence is that the discourse of compassion, justice, and trust gives way to an ethos that legitimates a sink or swim individualism, the celebration of self-interest, and a value system that disdains solidarity, empathy, and the public good. The war culture that saturates American society not only wages a relentless assault on the formative cultures and public spheres that make democracy possible, it also provides the breeding ground for a new mode of authoritarianism that threatens to engulf the whole of American society. As Etienne Balibar argues, war has taken on an existential quality in that we are not simply at war, “we are in war”, inhabiting a war culture that touches every aspect of society. War is no longer simply an instrument to be used by political powers, but a form of rule, a general condition of the social order itself – a permanent social relation and coordinating principle that affects all aspects of society. The US has moved from a welfare state in the last forty years to a warfare state, and war has become the foundation for politics, wedded to a war on terror, the expansion of the punishing state, police violence, and a culture of fear that have become symptomatic of its most important regulative functions. Politics has become an extension of a comprehensive war machine and culture that aggressively assaults anything that does not comply with the current underlying economic, religious, educative, and political fundamentalisms. As a comprehensive war machine, American society operates in the shadow of a police state that increasingly violates civil liberties while producing a military-industrial-surveillance complex that President Dwight Eisenhower could never have imagined. For instance, the largest part of the federal budget – 600 billion dollars – goes to the military. The US rings the earth with military bases, and the US military budget is larger than those of all other advanced industrial countries combined. And the latter figure doesn’t include the money spent on the National Surveillance State and intelligence agencies.
As Etienne Balibar argues, war has taken on an existential quality in that we are not simply at war, “we are in war”, inhabiting a war culture that touches every aspect of society.
War culture is everywhere and is used in the assault on women, especially around reproductive rights most evident in the closing down by right wing state governments of abortion clinics and the states’ refusal to accept Medicaid payments. There is also an ongoing war on youth, especially minority youth who are under siege in their schools, which are modeled increasingly after prisons and too often have more security forces and police in them than teachers. One consequence is that often trivial infractions by students such as violating a dress code or drawing a gun gets them arrested and put into the school to prison pipeline. War is being waged against poor minorities of class and color whose everyday behaviour is being criminalised as they are subject to debtor prisons and an expansion of the incarceration state, with the latter being one of the largest in the world imprisoning over 2.3 million adults, most of whom are poor African-Americans. At the same time, impoverished cities are turned into war zones. Weapons from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan are now given to police departments increasing the possibility of their use on poor minority communities whose neighbourhoods are converted into fields of combat. Moreover, the war culture now defines the police as soldiers who view the public as enemies and use force and violence in ways today that were unthinkable just a generation ago – every sphere of American life is now a police matter while the military and police together are lauded in the media as the highest expressions of national ideals. In addition, a war culture arrogantly expresses its disdain for democracy by implementing laws that restrict voting rights, weaken the social contract, and undermine civic institutions, and exhibit contempt for the common good, public employees, unions, and public goods such as public and higher education. Moreover, the war on poverty has become a war on the poor waged by corporate policies that deprive the economically disadvantaged, especially children, of public provisions such as food stamps, health care and decent jobs. Similarly, war is being waged against the middle and working classes as wealth and power are increasingly concentrated in the hands of the upper 1 percent. A war against all but the elite may perhaps be discerned in the connections between a corrupt capitalism that bails out Wall Street bankers, moves jobs overseas, and forecloses on homes with shameless zeal. At the same time, a war culture legitimates the building
www.politicalanthropologist.com
5
of private prisons in order to yield high returns and expand such operations into a new market: caging immigrants. A war against the citizenry is also evident in the chronic insanity of enacting laws that allow people to carry concealed weapons on college campuses and enact stand your ground laws that suggest an individual shoot first and ask questions later. The rising culture of violence, repression, and surveillance in the United States points to the dangerous transformation of American politics into a war machine reflected in many acts of domestic terrorism that plague society and extend from the lead poisoning of millions of children and the transformation of urban centers into war zones to the militarisation of public schools and the use of war as the central tool in our society to solve all social problems. Police power now runs through the heart of American society as the punishing state increasingly is relied upon to solve social problems. Everyone is now treated as a criminal or a threat to the social order, all the while the violence of poverty, rising inequality, foreclosed homes, unemployment, and other injustices breed conditions in which guns become the staple of choice in mediating everyday life. One sign of such violence is evident in the 500 children, adults, and innocent bystanders shot in Chicago in the first nine months of 2016 and the thousands of people shot and killed by guns. Any attempt to resist the emergence of a war culture and militarised social order in the United States might begin by recognising that democracy withers when war, combat, and militarisation embody the country’s highest ideals, especially when reinforced by a neoliberal ethos that celebrates unchecked competition, a hyper-masculinity, and the notion that violence is the primary vehicle to address pressing social issues. What must also be addressed is how language operates in the service of violence within the current historical conjuncture. What’s interesting
6
The Political Anthropologist
Police force protesters from the business district into nearby neighbourhoods on Aug. 11 in Missouri, United States. Police responded with tear gas and rubber bullets as residents and their supporters protested the shooting by police of an unarmed black teenager. © Scott Olson/Getty Images/AFP
about the language and culture of war is that it produces, legitimates, and celebrates precisely those institutions, policies, and practices that the American public should be ashamed of including the national surveillance state, military industrial complex, the war on whistle blowers, the spectacle of violence, the massive reach and spread of inequality, and the endless wars abroad waged by the US. Unsurprisingly, the celebration of war and the spectacle of violence that runs through the mainstream media mobilise desires, not only related to militarisation and social combat, but also to the creation of modes of agency, identity, and values that operate in the service of violence. Violence is now a staple of popular culture and has become one of the primary sources of pleasure in historical period dominated by visual culture, especially with regards to the production of violent video games, films, and even the daily mainstream news. It has become cool to be cruel to people, acceptable to bully others, and to embrace a hyper-masculinity that celebrates violence. The
November - December 2016
ultimate act of pleasure is now served up in cinematically produced acts of extreme violence, produced to both numb the conscience and up the pleasure quotient. It gets worse. As Hannah Arendt has observed, war culture is part of a species of thoughtlessness that legitimates desires, identities that makes people insensitive to the violence they see all around them. You can’t have a democracy that organises itself around war because war is the language of injustice, it’s the pedagogy of barbarism. It admits no compassion and revels in a culture of cruelty. The rise of a war machine and armed culture in the United States cannot be simply attributed solely to the rise of right-wing populism and the control of the commanding institutions of society by the corporate elite. Progressives bear some responsibility because they have repeatedly ignored the power of the pedagogical function of mainstream cultural apparatuses and the centrality of education to the practice of politics. Consequently, many on the left have lost the ability to understand how domination and
War
It is crucial to educate people to recognise that American democracy is in crisis and that the forces that threaten it are powerful and must be made visible.
resistance work at the level of everyday life. The left has relied for too long on defining domination strictly in structural terms, especially with regard to economic structures. They assume that the only form of domination is economic. What they ignore is that the crisis of economics, history, politics, and agency has not been matched by the crisis of ideas. They have failed to understand and address how much work is required to change consciousness in the service of individual and collective struggles. Central to any notion of politics is identification. What has been forgotten or overlooked is that people mostly respond to a politics that speaks to their condition. What the left has neglected is how crucial matters of identification and judgment along with belief and persuasion are central to politics itself. The Left has underestimated the symbolic dimensions of struggle, if not the nurturing of the radical imagination, when it gives up the use of education as a central element of politics. The Left and other progressives appear to have little interest in addressing education as central to how people think, see things, how they invest something of themselves, and recognise that the problems they face need a new language that speaks to the problems they face in everyday life. What is particularly crucial here is the need to develop a politics in which pedagogy becomes central to enabling people to understand and translate how everyday troubles connect to wider structures. In short, I am arguing that it is crucial to educate people to recognise that American democracy is in crisis and that the forces that threaten it are powerful and must be made visible. In this case, this is especially regarding the merging of neoliberalism, institutionalised racism, militarisation, oligarchy, inequality, and the power of the financial elite. The United States is no longer a democracy. The myth of democracy has to be dismantled, especially the notion that capitalism and democracy are synonymous. To understand that, we need to connect the dots and make diverse forms of domination visible – extending from the war on terror and the existence of massing inequalities in wealth and power to the rise of the mass incarceration state and the destruction of public and higher education. Moreover, focusing on isolated issues has become a liability and has served to fracture progressive forces who need to develop a comprehensive global social movement. Progressives have to make clear that decisions made by the state
when controlled by the ultra-rich and big corporations do not serve the general interest. As a matter of strategy, any viable notion of politics and collective struggle must connect the war on Black youth to the war on workers, the war on middle class, and expose the workings of a barbaric system that extorts money, uses prison as a default welfare measure, and militarises the police. We must learn how to translate individual problems into larger social issues, create a comprehensive politics, a third party with the aim not of reforming the system but restructure it. As Martin Luther King, recognised at the end of his life, the linkages between the war at home and the war abroad cannot be separated. Such linkages remain crucial to the democratic project. At another level, the dark forces of authoritarianism cannot be addressed by simply focusing on the rise of a demagogue such as Trump, but how he and others are symptomatic of a much larger set of issues deeply embedded in the body politic. This means developing a broad and comprehensive view of politics that brings together the various anti-democratic economic, religious, political, social, and educational forces at work in producing the dark shadow of authoritarianism and the death of our democracy. Such a comprehensive politics demands not only a discourse of sustained critique, but also a type of resistance bound up with real possibilities of a politics aimed at reclaiming the ideals and promise of a real democracy. Featured image: Protesters marched through Minneapolis to protest the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Š Fibonacci Blue
Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department. His most recent books are Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism (Routledge 2015) coauthored with Brad Evans, Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of Spectacle (City Lights, 2015), and America at War with Itself (City Lights 2017). His website is www.henryagiroux.com.
www.politicalanthropologist.com
7
History
Anti-Americanism in the Philippines. President Duterte’s Subaltern Counter-Hegemony Guerilla Incursions from the Boondocks BY E. SAN JUAN JR.
This complex geopolitical situation entangling the United States and its former colony/ neocolony, cries for deeper historical contextualization and empathy for the victims lacking in the Western media demonization of Duterte and his supporters, over 70% of a hundred million Filipinos in the Philippines and in the diaspora.
“A
howling wilderness” was what General Jacob Smith ordered his troops to make of Samar, Philippines. He was taking revenge for the ambush of fifty-four soldiers by Filipino revolutionaries in September 1901. After the invaders killed most of the island’s inhabitants, three bells from the Balangiga Church were looted as war trophies; two are still displayed at Warren Air Force Base, Cheyenne, Wyoming. Very few Americans know this. Nor would they have any clue about the 1913 massacre of thousands of Muslim women, men and children resisting General Pershing’s systematic destruction of their homes in Mindanao where President Rodrigo Duterte today resides.
8
The Political Anthropologist
Anti-American military protesters head toward the U.S. embassy in Manila ahead of President Barrack Obama’s visit to the Philippines, April 23, 2014. ©Simone Orendain/VOA
Addressing this dire amnesia afflicting the public, both in the Philippines and abroad, newly-elected president Duterte began the task of evoking/ invoking the accursed past.
November - December 2016
Addressing this dire amnesia afflicting the public, both in the Philippines and abroad, newly-elected president Duterte began the task of evoking/invoking the accursed past. He assumed the role of oral tribune, with prophetic expletives. Like the Filipino guerillas of Generals Lukban and Malvar who retreated to the mountains (called “boondocks” by American pursuers from the Tagalog word “bundok,” mountain), Duterte seems to be coming down with the task of reclaiming the collective dignity of the heathens – eulogized by Rudyard Kipling, at the start of the war in February 1899, as “the white men’s burden.” The first U.S. civil governor William Howard Taft patronizingly adopted this burden of saving the Filipino “little brown brother” as a benighted colonial ward, not a citizen. White Men’s Burden The Filipino-American War of 1899-1913 occupies only a paragraph, at most, in most US texbooks, a blip in the rise of the United States as an Asian Pacific Leviathan. Hobbes’ figure is more applicable to international rivalries than to predatory neoliberal capitalism today, or to the urban jungle of Metro Manila. At least 1.4 million Filipinos (verified by historian Luzviminda Francisco) died as a result of the scorched-earth policy of President McKinley. His armed missionaries were notorious for Vietnam-style “hamletting.”
They also practised the “water-cure,” also known as “water-boarding,” a form of torture now legitimized in a genocidal war of terror (Iraq, Afghanistan) that recalls the ruthless suppression of Native American tribes and dehumanization of African slaves in the westward march of the “civilizing Krag” to the Pacific, to the Chinese market. Today the struggle at Standing Rock and Black-Lives-Matter are timely reminders. Stuart Creighton Miller’s 1982 book, “Benevolent Assimilation,” together with asides by Gabriel Kolko and Howard Zinn, recounted the vicissitudes of that bloody passage through Philippine boondocks and countryside. Not everyone acquiesced to Washington’s brutal annexation of the island-colony. Mark Twain exposed the hypocrisy of Washington’s “Benevolent Assimilation” with searing diatribes, as though inventing the “conscience” of his generation. William James, William Dean Howells, W.E.B. DuBois and other public intellectuals denounced what turned out to be the “first Vietnam” (Bernard Fall’s rubric).
It was a learning experience for the conquerors. In Policing America’s Empire, Alfred McCoy discovered that America’s “tutelage” of the Filipino elite (involving oligarchic politicians of the Commonwealth period up to Marcos and Aquino) functioned as a laboratory for crafting methods of surveillance, ideological manipulation, propaganda, and other modes of covert and overt pacification. Censorship, mass arrests of suspected dissidents, torture and assassination of “bandits” protesting landlord abuses and bureaucratic corruption in the first three decades of colonial rule led to large-scale killing of peasants and workers in numerous Colorum and Sakdalista uprisings. Re-Visiting the Cold War of Terror This pattern of racialized class oppression via electoral politics and disciplinary pedagogy culminated in the Cold War apparatus devised by CIA agent Edward Lansdale and the technocrats of Magsaysay to suppress the Huk rebellion in the two decades after formal granting of independence in 1946.
America’s “tutelage” of the Filipino elite (involving oligarchic politicians of the Commonwealth period up to Marcos and Aquino) functioned as a laboratory for crafting methods of surveillance, ideological manipulation, propaganda, and other modes of covert and overt pacification. The Cold War Leviathan continued to operate in the savage extrajudicial killings during the Marcos dictatorship. After Marcos’ death, the Marcos family and the despot’s cadaver were allowed by then President Ramos to return. Given the re-installment of the feudal-comprador elite due partly to the failure of the national-democratic forces to educate, organize and mobilize the masses, the Marcos family recovered institutional power. The current reactionary Supreme Court Justices and Duterte’s link to the Marcoses are a symptom of fierce internecine conflict within the oligarchic bloc. It fosters sectarian partisanship and opportunist fantasies. The controversy over Marcos’ burial last November 18 cannot be fully assayed without factoring in, in this conjunctural crisis, the role of patronage-clientelism syndrome in the body politic and the U.S.-oriented State ideological-military apparatus of a decadent oligarchic elite. Mournless Melancholia U.S. Cold War Realpolitik defined Corazon Aquino’s “total war” against nationalists, progressive peasants, professionals, Igorots, Lumads – all touted by Washington/Pentagon as the price for enjoying individualist prerogatives, esp. the right to gamble in the capitalist casino. This constitutes the rationale for U.S.-subsidized counterinsurgency
www.politicalanthropologist.com
9
History
schemes to shore up the decadent, if not moribund, status quo - a society plagued by profound and seemingly durable disparity of wealth and power – now impolitely challenged by Duterte. This is not strange, given the long history of Filipino “miseducation” documented by Renato Constantino. Perhaps the neglect if not dismissal of the Filipino collective experience is due to the indiscriminate celebration of America’s success in making the natives speak English, imitate the American Way of Life shown in Hollywood movies, and indulge in mimicked consumerism. What is scandalous is the complicity of the U.S. intelligentsia (with few exceptions) in regurgitating the “civilizing effect” of colonial exploitation. Every time the Filipino essence is described as violent, foolish, shrewd or cunning, the evidence displays the actions of a landlord-politician, bureaucrat, savvy merchant, U.S.-educated professional, or rich entrepreneur. Unequal groups dissolve into these representative types: Quezon, Roxas, Magsaysay, Fidel Ramos, etc. What seems ironic if not parodic is that after a century of massive research
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte
10
The Political Anthropologist
and formulaic analysis of the colony’s underdevelopment, we arrive at Stanley Karnow’s verdict (amplified in In Our Image) that, really, the Filipinos and their character-syndromes are to blame for their poverty and backwardness, for not being smart beneficiaries of American “good works.” “F–ck you,” Duterte might uncouthly respond. Hobbes or Machiavelli? An avalanche of media commentaries, disingenously purporting to be objective news reports, followed Duterte’s campaign to eradicate the endemic drug addiction rampant in the country. But the media, without any judicious assaying of hearsay, concluded that Duterte’s policy – his public pronouncement that bodies will float in Manila Bay, etc. – caused the killing of innocent civilians. His method of attack impressed the academics as Hobbesian, not Machiavellian. The journalistic imperative to sensationalize and distort by selective framing (following, of course, corporate norms and biases) governs the style and content of quotidian media operations. Is Duterte guilty of the alleged EJK (extrajudicial killings)? No doubt, druglords and their police accomplices took advantage of the policy to silence their minions. This is the fabled “collateral damage” bewailed by the bishops and moralists. But Obama, UN and local pundits associated with the defeated parties seized on the cases of innocent victims (two or three are more than enough, demonstrated by the photo of a woman allegedly cradling the body of her husband, blown up in Time (October 10) and in The Atlantic, September issue, and social media) to teach Duterte a lesson on human rights, due process, and genteel diplomatic protocols. This irked the thin-skinned town mayor whose lack of etiquette, civility, and petty-bourgeois decorum became the target of unctuous sermons.
November - December 2016
Stigma for All Seasons: “Anti-Americanism” What finally gave the casuistic game away, in my view, is the piece in the November issue of The Atlantic by Jon Emont entitled “Duterte’s Anti-Americanism.” What does “anti-Americanism” mean – to be against McDonald burgers, Beyonce, iPhones, Saturday Night Live, Lady Gaga, Bloomingdale fashions, Wall Street, or Washington-Pentagon imperial browbeating of inferior nations/ peoples-of-color? The article points to tell-tale symptoms: Duterte is suspending joint military exercises, separating from U.S. government foreign policy by renewing friendly cooperation with China in the smoldering South China Sea, and ”veering” toward Russia for economic ties –in short, promoting what will counter the debilitating, predatory U.S. legacy. Above all, Duterte is guilty of diverging from public opinion, meaning the Filipino love for Americans. He rejects US “security guarantees,” ignores the $3 billion remittances of Filipinos (presumably, relatives of middle and upper classes), the $13 million given by the U.S. for relief of Yolanda typhoon victims in 2013. Three negative testimonies against Duterte’s “anti-American bluster” are used: 1) Asia Foundation official Steven Rood’s comment that since most Filipinos don’t care about foreign policy, “elites have considerable latitude,” that is, they can do whatever pleases them. 2) Richard Javad Heydarian, affiliated with De La Salle University, is quoted - this professor is now a celebrity of the antiDuterte cult – that Duterte “can get away with it”; and, finally, Gen Fidel Ramos who contends that the military top brass “like US troops” – West-Point-trained Ramos has expanded on his tirade against Duterte with the usual cliches of unruly client-state leaders who turn against their masters, and seems ready to lead a farcical version of the 1968 People Power revolt,
one of the symptoms of fierce internecine strife within the corrupt oligarchic bloc. Like other anti-Duterte squibs, the article finally comes up with the psychological diagnosis of Duterte’s fixation on the case of the Davao 2002 bombing when a “supposed involvement of US officials” who spirited a CIA-affiliated American bomber confirmed the Davao mayor’s fondness for “stereotypes of superior meddling America.” The judgment seems anticlimactic. What calls attention will not be strange anymore: there is not a whisper of the tortuous history of US imperial exercise of power on the subalterns. This polemic-cum-factoids culminates in a fauxfolksy, rebarbative quip: “Washington can tolerate a thin-skinned ally who bites the hand that feeds him through crass invective.” The Washington Post (Nov 2) quickly intoned its approval by harping on Ramos’ defection as a sign of the local elite’s displeasure. With Washington halting the sale of rifles to the Philippine police because of Duterte’s human-rights abuses, the Post warns that $9 million military aid and $32 million funds for law-enforcement will be dropped by Congress if Duterte doesn’t stop his “anti-US rhetoric.” Trick or treat? On this recycled issue of “anti-Americanism,” the best riposte is by Michael Parenti, from his incisive book Inventing Reality: “The media dismiss conflicts that arise between the United States and popular forces in other countries as manifestations of the latter’s “anti-Americanism”….When thousands marched in the Philippines against the abominated US-supported Marcos regime, the New York Times reported, “AntiMarcos and anti-American sloganst and banners were in abundance, with the most common being “Down with the US-Marcos Dictatorship!” A week later, the Times again described Filipino protests against US support of the Marcos dictatorship as “anti-Americanism.” The Atlantic, the New York Times, and the Washington Post share an ideological-political genealogy with the Cold War paranoia currently gripping the U.S. ruling-class Establishment. Predictably, the New York Times (Nov. 3 issue) confirmed the consensus that the US is not worried so much about the “authoritarian” or “murderous ways of imposing law and order” (Walden Bello’s labels; InterAksyon, Oct 29) as they are discombobulated by Duterte’s rapproachment with China. The calculus of U.S. regional hegemony was changed when Filipino fishermen returned to fish around the Scarborough Shoal.
“Anti-Marcos and anti-American sloganst and banners were in abundance, with the most common being “Down with the US-Marcos Dictatorship!” This pivot to China panicked Washington, belying the Time expert Carl Thayer who pontificated that Duterte “can’t really stand up to China unless the US is backing him” (Sept 15, 2016). A blowback occurred in the boondocks; the thin-skinned “Punisher” and scourge of druglords triggered a “howling wilderness” that exploded the century-long stranglehold of global finance capitalism on the islands. No need to waste time on more psychoanalysis of Duterte’s motivation. What the next US president would surely do to restore its ascendancy in that region is undermine Duterte’s popular base, fund a strategy of destabilization via divide-and-rule (as in Chile, Yugoslavia, Ukraine), and incite its volatile pro-American constituency to beat pots and kettles in the streets of Metro Manila. This complex geopolitical situation entangling the United States and its former colony/neocolony, cries for deeper historical contextualization and empathy for the victims lacking in the Western media demonization of Duterte and his supporters, over 70% of a hundred million Filipinos in the Philippines and in the diaspora. For further elaboration, see my recent books US Imperialism and Revolution in the Philippines (Palgrave) and Between Empire and Insurgency (University of the Philippines Press). The original source of this article is Global Research. Copyright © Prof. E. San Juan Jr., Global Research, 2016
E. San Juan, Jr, an Emeritus Professor of Ethnic Studies and Comparative Literature, was a fellow of W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University, Fulbright lecturer of American Studies at Leuven University, Belgium, is currently professorial lecturer, Polytechnic University of the Philippines, Manila.
www.politicalanthropologist.com
11