PAGES FROM HISTORY
Understanding Imperialism

Part one

Editor’s note: We reprise this article because we wish to focus on how the empire exploits as natural allies mainstream liberals here and abroad.

By Joseph Santolan, wsws.org

This is the first part of a two-part article.

[C]orazon Aquino, former president of the Philippines, died of colon cancer on August 1. She had scarcely been dead for thirty minutes when eulogies and encomia began to flood the mainstream media.

Her death took no one by surprise. She had been struggling with cancer for eighteen months and her condition had worsened dramatically in the last six weeks.

News outlets, political groups of all ideological bents, and foreign heads of state had ample time to prepare their response to the passing of this woman. There is no excuse for the lack of historical analysis in the obituaries printed in the international and Philippine press. That they universally hail Aquino as the reluctant housewife, thrust into politics by the brutality of the Marcos regime and swept to power by nonviolent revolution, is shoddy journalism, an admixture of bourgeois cynicism and willful historical ignorance.

Philippine politicians have lavished praise upon Aquino in a truly shameless manner. The parties and petty-bourgeois organizations of the Philippine left have joined the stampede commemorating Aquino, each issuing its own solemn statement of grief at her passing. Two decades ago they shrilly denounced Aquino’s ‘fascist regime.’ Today they laud her as a ‘champion of democracy’ and ‘fierce opponent of totalitarianism.’

Corazon Aquino was a member of the Cojuangco family. The Philippines is dominated by oligarchic interests, familial economic dynasties which emerged during Spanish colonialism. The Cojuangco family owns vast landholdings in the Central Luzon province of Tarlac, including the 10,000 hectare Hacienda Luisita, and an empire of financial interests and agricultural and urban real estate.

This wealth both supports and emerges out of the Cojuangcos’ involvement in politics. In addition to Corazon Aquino’s presidency, Cojuangcos have been governors, mayors, senators and congressional representatives. This is characteristic of cacique democracy and oligarchic economic rule, and is the legacy of Spanish and American colonialism.

The origins of oligarchy

Spain held the Philippines as a colonial possession for 350 years with no real intention of developing any commercial ventures, industry, mining or agriculture. Manila served as an entrepot, a trading port for the galleon trade. Chinese silks and porcelain were traded for Mexican silver from Acapulco. These items were then sold at exorbitant prices in Europe. Colonial bureaucrats profited by administering and skimming off the top of this trade. The provincial Philippines was controlled almost exclusively by the Spanish clergy, who acquired vast estates.

The Mexican revolution of 1820 effectively severed the Seville-Acapulco-Manila galleon trade, leaving the Philippines isolated and unproductive. British investors were eager to seize upon the opportunities available to them in the undeveloped Philippines.

Fearful of colonial encroachment and Protestant influence, the Spanish enacted a series of capricious laws preventing foreigners from living outside of Manila. British investors set up commercial houses to facilitate trade, creating banks with sufficient capital on hand to cover letters of credit issued in Europe. They thus had capital sitting idle for much of the year, and were eager to find an outlet for investment. It was illegal to loan large amounts of money to indios, members of the native population.

An influx of Chinese males in the mid-eighteenth century, and a second influx after 1850, filled the economic gap needed for the development of an import-export trade, and provided an outlet for British capital looking for investment opportunities. The immigrant bachelors married indios; their families became Chinese mestizos.

To avoid racial reprisals from the colonial administration and from the indio population, these Chinese mestizo families hispanized themselves, adopting Spanish names, the Spanish language, and artifacts, accents, behavior and culture from the Spanish metropole. Within a generation, all indication of indio and Chinese origin had been erased, with the exception of the Hokkienese k’o, a title of respect, which was often incorporated at the end of the new surname—thus, Cojuangco.

The mestizos rapidly developed capitalist agriculture in the Philippines, export-oriented mono-cropping, funded by British capital and employing rural wage laborers and sharecroppers. The mestizos themselves were often tenants on the vast landholdings of the Catholic religious orders. With the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, direct trade with Europe was established. The Philippines became firmly incorporated into global capitalism.

In the wake of the Philippine revolution against Spain in 1896, the United States, eager to have colonial possessions of its own, conquered the islands in a brutal campaign which lasted well into the twentieth century. The mestizo oligarchs had long resented being the possession of a third-rate colonial power and had regarded Spain as a European backwater. They recognized that being an American possession could further their economic and political aspirations and they welcomed the new conquerors.

The United States colonial government eventually dispossessed the friars of their landholdings and the vast haciendas fell into the hands of the mestizo elite. The Americans established a representative democracy of sorts, which they closely monitored, limiting voting rights strictly to the propertied.

Even by the Second World War, only 14 percent of the population had the right to vote. The bicameral legislature which the Americans set up in Manila provided the opportunity for the oligarchs to dole out coveted positions in the rapidly expanding civil service, thus extending their power of patronage within their region. Every family sought to have members seated in government.

In the aftermath of the Japanese occupation and the Second World War, the Americans granted nominal independence to the Philippines, retaining substantial economic control over the islands through a system of parity agreements. With the end of direct American political control and the dramatic weakening of the central state, oligarchic politics entered its heyday. Familial dynasties acquired private armies, drawn from rural and urban lumpen elements. Elections were no longer simply corrupt. They were bloody affairs in which rivals were murdered and voters were routinely threatened.

During the American colonial period, many of the leading families had built their wealth upon special access to the United States market. Gradually in the post-independence period, tariffs and trade barriers were set up which cut sharply into profits.

The elite compensated for this by manipulating the state’s financial power. “Under the guise of promoting economic independence and import-substitution industrialization, exchange rates were manipulated, monopolistic licenses were parceled out, huge, cheap, often unrepaid bank loans passed around, and the national budget frittered away in pork-barrel legislation. Some of the more enterprising dynasties diversified into urban real estate, hotels, utilities, insurance, the mass media, and so forth.” (Benedict Anderson, “Cacique Democracy in the Philippines,” in The Spectre of Comparisons, London: Verso, 1998, p. 208). Politicians learned to mouth nationalist phrases, vacuous words serving sordid ends. It was during this heyday that Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino and Ferdinand Marcos entered politics.

Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos

Marcos was highly intelligent. Both he and his wife had limitless ambition, and they rose from the lower levels of the oligarchy to dominate Philippine politics. Marcos ran a charismatic campaign against cacique politicians and their private armies, and against communism, a largely non-existent and manufactured menace in the Philippines in the 1960s.

He won the support of the urban middle class, aspiring to be technocrats within a functioning, orderly state. Marcos was from the Ilokano-speaking region of the northern Philippines, and he won the support of the Ilokano peasantry and some sections of the urban poor. This was the class base of support for Marcos which brought him to power in 1965.

Ferdinand and Imelda, working in tandem, used the office of the president for their personal enrichment with stunning success. Imelda, simultaneously beautiful and grotesque, flitted about the globe, meeting with world leaders and shopping. Ferdinand entrenched his political power by dramatically expanding the armed forces and promoting through the ranks Ilokano officers beholden to him. The upper echelons of the military led lives of luxury once reserved only for the cacique leaders. When Marcos confiscated corporations from political rivals during martial law, he would place them under control of trusted generals. The military was simultaneously politicized and riven by Marcos’ ethno-nepotism.

Imelda Marcos conducted much of the Marcos’ foreign policy. She met with world leaders and gained support—military, political and financial—employing diplomatic machinations and personal chicanery. She could seem naive when it served her purposes. She wheedled, flirted, and haughtily demanded. She met privately with five American presidents, and became the confidante of Nancy Reagan.

She and her husband had a far better understanding of the ins and outs of American politics and policy than any American had of theirs. They used this to their advantage, manipulating American politicians to serve their ends, playing upon anticommunist fears, and always coyly flirting with the possibility of not extending the lease on the American bases in the Philippines. The Marcoses contributed $1 million dollars to Nixon’s 1968 election campaign, and another million in 1972. The money, of course, came from the coffers of the Philippine state.

Marcos bought his second term in office in 1969, spending on his campaign so egregiously that inflation in the Philippines increased 18 percent. To cope with inflation Marcos demanded, and received, $100 million in prepayment on the rent of the US military bases in the Philippines.

The Philippine constitution, directly modeled after the US, imposed a limit of two terms on any president. The impending election of 1973 loomed large in Marcos’ mind. He attempted in 1971 to force a revision of the constitution, eliminating term limits. He encountered trenchant opposition from rival political families, headed by Ninoy Aquino, and failed in the attempted revision. Thwarted in his legal machinations, he resorted instead to a declaration of martial law.

Working with a council of generals and two civilians, Eduardo “Danding” Cojuangco—cousin and bitter rival of Cory—and Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile, Marcos plotted his declaration. He received advice from Suharto’s generals, who had seized power in Indonesia in 1965 in an unmitigated blood bath, slaughtering 500,000 to one million members and supporters of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI).

In August and September, 1972, a string of bombings occurred in the dead of night at prominent business and government buildings throughout Manila. Marcos had orchestrated the bombings; he blamed the communists. Enrile, principal architect of martial law, staged an ambush on his own entourage, with gunmen opening fire on his vehicle. He rode with his security detail in a separate car. Marcos again blamed the communists, signed Proclamation 1081 declaring martial law, and dispatched soldiers to arrest all of his political rivals. The first arrested was Ninoy Aquino.

Aquino was a charismatic politician, similar to Marcos in many regards. His political career set a series of records: he was the youngest mayor, youngest vice-governor, and, at 35, the youngest senator in Philippine history. He came from a prominent political family.

His father had been speaker of the assembly under the Japanese occupation. Elite collaborators were quickly pardoned by the returning American forces and by the first administration of the newly independent Philippines. The peasant army which fought against the Japanese during the American absence, the Hukbalahap, fared far worse—they were summarily disarmed, many were arrested.

In addition to charisma and political prominence, Ninoy had the funding of the Cojuangco family. He was the man who would have been president in 1973, but 1973 found him in a cell in Camp Aguinaldo.

The writ of habeas corpus was suspended. Marcos arrested thousands of opponents. He seized control of the assets of rival families, turned them over to the control of his cohort of cronies, and plundered them. Certain sections of the oligarchy flourished under Marcos; others were pillaged.

Mass opposition met with brutal repression. Kidnapping, torture, and summary execution were routinely carried out by the military; the practice became known as ‘salvaging.’ As the 1970s progressed, Marcos lost his class base of support. The urban middle class, erstwhile aspiring technocrats, were slowly disillusioned. Those that could migrated from the country; those that could not kept their head down and silently and impotently watched for an end to the Marcos regime. Marcos’ power was now based on his firm control over a military which had tripled in size since his entrance to power.

Two groups benefitted from martial law: the military and the new Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and its armed wing, the New People’s Army (NPA).

The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and martial law

By the mid-1950s, the Stalinist Communist Party of the Philippines, known by its Tagalog name Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP), had entered a period of stagnation and dissolution. The rebellion of the PKP’s guerrilla army, Hukbo Mapagpalaya ng Bayan (HMB) —the peasant Hukbalahap reshaped after the Second World War—had been successfully suppressed by the Magsaysay administration through the combined use of psychological warfare and a limited program of land reform for surrendering “Huks.”

This program and the presidential candidacy of Magsaysay had been thoroughly orchestrated by CIA operative Edward Lansdale. In 1957, having already shifted tactics from guerrilla warfare to legal struggle, the leadership of the PKP announced its “single-file” policy. All cadres were to have contact with only one other party member and directives were to be disseminated orally in a “single file.” The networks and organizing groups of the PKP, in essence, self-dissolved. A few guerrilla units were preserved as bodyguards and security for those engaged in the legal struggle. Among the preserved units was Kumander Dante’s central Luzon command, which would be the founding unit of the New People’s Army (NPA).

The Philippine Communist Party was thus a nearly defunct organization when the simultaneous waves of bourgeois nationalist politics and student rebellion broke across Philippine society in the late 1950s. It continued in this moribund state throughout the 1960s. While Imelda Marcos hysterically denounced communist agitation in private conversations with LBJ and Nixon and gained millions of dollars in military funding, the Philippine Communist Party had, for all intents and purposes, ceased to exist.

Jose Maria Sison, known as Joma, founded a new communist party in the Philippines in 1969, this time under the acronym CPP. Joma was the child of a landholding mestizo family from Ilocos. He grew up on the rhetoric of politicians in the 1950s, and was profoundly inspired by their nationalism.

In the early 1960s, he briefly moved to Indonesia, where he encountered the Maoism of the PKI under Aidit. He returned to the Philippines, joined the PKP and established an active youth section. His activism and sharp criticism of the existing leadership earned him the ire of the central committee and he was expelled from the party in the late 1960s.

At the beginning of January 1969, in a remote barrio of Mangatarem, Pangasinan, Joma Sison met with 11 associates to found the Communist Party of the Philippines. The conference began on January 3, but by joint agreement the date of the congress was recorded as December 26, 1968, to honor Mao Zedong’s birthday. At the Congress, Sison submitted a previously written report, which he titled “Rectify Errors and Rebuild the Party.” Philippine society, he claimed, had a semi-feudal, semi-colonial mode of production, and the only viable solution was a “protracted people’s war” which was based on the idea that the “universal truth of the theory of using the countryside to encircle the city has been proven invincible.”

In need of a people’s army to carry out this “people’s war,” Joma Sison contacted one of the last remaining HMB guerrillas still in the field, Bernabe Buscayno, known as Kumander Dante. Under the leadership of Kumander Dante, the armed wing of the CPP was established on March 29, 1969 as the New People’s Army (NPA).

The CPP-NPA remained a small, insignificant organization. It recruited few and accomplished little. However, with the declaration of martial law and the crackdown on legal forms of organization, many felt that they no alternative but to join the NPA and the armed struggle of the guerillas in the mountains. Petty-bourgeois intellectuals, disgruntled peasants, and leaders of the working class—all were sent off to “surround the city from the countryside.” The tighter the imposition of the Marcos dictatorship, the more the NPA flourished. Martial law was the best thing that ever happened to the ideologically bankrupt CPP. The NPA grew in the 1970s from 60 members to 12,000.

To be continued

Special—By Andre Vltchek

I

[I] cannot believe that I am writing this short essay, but I feel that I have to; I simply have no choice; I am a determined internationalist who does not believe in ‘blood’ and ‘nations’.

Virtually every major Western press agency and the rest of ‘their’ mass media now carry those vitriolic propaganda outbursts exploiting the poor victims of the downed MH17 flight. All lines of decency have been crossed. What we are being fed here now resembles what one can see and hear and read in dusty archives stacked with Nazi Germany’s mementos.

Again, the West is killing, but Russia is declared a ‘villain’, and so is China and Latin America, Iran and Zimbabwe or Eritrea; just about any country or block of nations which refuses to yield to the horrifying terror being spread by Washington, London, Paris and other Western capitals.

The world is now clearly divided; there are two distinct camps:

In one, there are colonial and neo-colonial powers, which have been plundering the planet and its people for centuries. This camp also includes countless servile client states, such as Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Japan, South Korea, Kenya and Colombia.  The people and nature in most of these nations—like Indonesia and Philippines—are still being savagely exploited by dint of being led by utterly corrupt elites in cahoots with their imperial overlords. Shame has no meaning for such regimes.

The other camp is one great rainbow of countries that are standing proudly and determinedly against Western neo-colonialism and fascism: Cuba and Venezuela, Russia and China, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, South Africa, Eritrea, North Korea, Zimbabwe, Nicaragua, and several others. It consists of various ideologies and numerous economic systems, but it has one underlying principle: all these countries want to serve its people, not the bankers and neo-colonialists in London or Washington. While some are clearly succeeding, others are stumbling, corruption and upper class interests still play a major role, but all are at least making brave attempts.

And there are also several countries like India, that are somewhere in between, or ‘playing it both ways’. Remnants of the “non-aligned” camp we saw in the 1960s.

In the West – Russia, China, Cuba and Venezuela are four nations hated the most. It is because they form the backbone of resistance.

Russia is particularly hated, because for one hundred years it stood against and defeated Western Fascism, then shortly thereafter helped to liberate dozens of nations from European colonialism.

My good friend, Artem Kirpichenok, one of the leading Russian historians; a Jew who lived in Israel for 15 years, but decided to return to his native St. Petersburg after becoming disillusioned with racism and the institutionalized discrimination of the minorities living in the Jewish State, once clarified the issue:

“Nazi Germany, the same as England, USA and France, was based on a racist and colonialist mindset, widely accepted principles among the Western bourgeoisie in the 1930s. Hitler was building his empire in Eastern Europe on the British colonial design in India. Nazi racial theories did not differ too much from the racism in the US South or from the racial theories of French, Belgian, British or Dutch empires implemented in the colonies. The collapse of the Third Reich hit hard on all those ideals of colonialism and racism. And the Soviet Union was mainly to ‘blame’ for that collapse. The ideological basis of the European dominance over Asia, Africa and Latin America had been damaged. That could of course never be forgiven.”

What we see now is the 6^th time that the Russian people are being attacked by the West, in just a short historic span of one hundred years!

II

[R]ussia was invaded during the WWI, by German troops. Then, after the greatest revolution in the modern era (October Revolution of 1917), the UK, France and later US, crossed Russian borders (1918) and occupied cities like Vladivostok and Arkhangelsk. Involved were also Canadian and Australian soldiers. By then, the Czechoslovak ‘Legions’ were already plundering and raping all along Trans Siberian Railroad since 1917. President Wilson, who had deviously sent the troops to aid in the multi-nation anti-communist push and to ensure that American investors—in case of chaos—had a share of Siberia’s rich natural resources, did not withdraw the American troops until 1920.

Later came the WWII, and around 26 million Soviet people (mainly Russians, Ukrainians and Byelorussians) died while fighting and defeating Nazism. This was the equivalent of the population of Texas and California combined at the time. The Soviets were not only fighting Germans, but also countless complex plots from London, Paris and Washington, to destroy both Germany and the Soviet Union in one go.

Decades later, Brzezinski, Kissinger and others worked hard to create scenarios—a trap, Brzezinski himself admitted, that would drag the Soviet Union into Afghanistan, and exhaust it there, financially and mentally. The idea was to give the Soviet Union its “own Vietnam.” In Afghanistan, the Soviet Union was fought and mortally wounded by jihadi cadres, including Mujahidin, financed and trained by the United States and the rest of the West, as well as by then close allies of the West –Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

The final blow came in 1989, when both the United Sates and Europe outrageously fooled, outmaneuvered and humiliated a totally and inexplicably naive Soviet leader – Mikhail Gorbachev, who then moved to dissolve the Soviet Union. ⁽¹⁾ A few years later, under the leadership of a vicious degenerate, traitor and alcoholic, Boris Yeltsin, the West had managed to implement ‘the Indonesian scenario’ (1965) – Russia was ruined financially, with thousands of members of the opposition murdered, the Parliament (Russian White House) bombed, and the social safety net dismantled. That great country –the Soviet Union – had fallen apart, or, more precisely, been destroyed, from outside.

In the mid 90’s I witnessed top Soviet academics selling their books, their valuable libraries, in the freezing cold, at the entrances to the underground Metro system, in the city of Novosibirsk. Eventually, academics left, most of those from Tomsk to Argentina, and those from Novosibirsk to Brazil. Pensioners all over the country were dying from hunger and cold.

That is exactly what the West wanted – to turn their ‘biggest obstacle to absolute domination of the world’ – into some banana republic, even if the country never had  single banana!

*

Russia suffered enormously from the Western onslaught throughout the history. And so did China, of course, which was colonized and humiliated by French and British invaders. So were all Latin American countries, and Iran, Korea, South Africa…The list is long and most of you know it well.

The blood spilled in the fight for freedom amalgamates today’s coalition against the Western regime, and against the most terrible ills of the world that Western countries clearly symbolize – racism, fascism, and colonialism. And capitalism, of course, the fount of unending inequality for humans and ruination for the natural world.

Russia is strong again, and it is standing tall, working closely with Communist China and Cuba (it just forgave Cuba a 35 billion dollar debt), with Venezuela and Uruguay, with most progressive nations and movements all over the world.

It is far from perfect, we understand, and although President Putin has restored and implemented many social policies, it is still far from being ‘socialist’. It may be again, in the near future, but even this is not the point, right now.

Words of enlightened Russian ruler, Alexandr Nevsky are what is really ‘the bottom line’: “Go tell all in foreign lands that Russia lives! Those who come to us in peace will be welcome as a guest. But those who come to us sword in hand will die by the sword! On that Russia stands and forever will it stand!”

That’s how it is, and that is how it should be, damn it!

*

Russia made concessions. It went too far making them, I believe. If sanctions continue, it should impose reciprocal sanctions against the West. And so on.

If Russian people in Ukraine will go on being murdered in what is clearly becoming a horrendous campaign of ethnic cleansing, Russia should fight and defend them.

Libya, Syria, Iraq, and Palestine – all are bleeding, destroyed, ruined by Western terror and its inevitable accompaniment, mendacious, pervasive, cynical propaganda. Ukraine is next. In fact she is already well on the road to perdition.

Enough.

Who downed Boeing 777; MH17, is unclear. Who is responsible for the tragedy, is obvious – those who destabilized and destroyed Ukraine and overthrew its government – EU and the United States.

Russia never seeks wars. Now its people are dying again, but the ‘big bear’ is still calm, reasoning with the West, trying to appeal to human logic and decency.

Russia is a huge but peaceful nation. But do not push it to the edge. When attacked, it fights as no other country on earth. And it never loses. Do not provoke it! Go home. Stop killing innocent Russian people… You already did, millions and millions. You killed almost an entire family of mine, too, during the siege of Leningrad; even my mother – just a baby then – survived by miracle.

Do not come close to Russia with swords in your hands! Or you will face the brave Russian people and, most likely, the Internationalist Brigades.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Andre Vltchek is a novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. The result is his latest book: “Fighting Against Western Imperialism”.  ‘Pluto’ published his discussion with Noam Chomsky: On Western Terrorism. His critically acclaimed political novel Point of No Return is re-edited and available. Oceania is his book on Western imperialism in the South Pacific. His provocative book about post-Suharto Indonesia and the market-fundamentalist model is called “Indonesia – The Archipelago of Fear”. His feature documentary, “Rwanda Gambit” is about Rwandan history and the plunder of DR Congo. After living for many years in Latin America and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides and works in East Asia and Africa. He can be reached through his website or his Twitter.

NOTES
⁽¹⁾ The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) ceased to exist on 26 December 1991 by declaration no. 142-H of the Soviet of the Republics of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union,^[1] acknowledging the independence of the twelve republics of the Soviet Union, and creating the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). On the previous day, 25 December 1991, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev had resigned, declaring his office extinct, and handed over the Soviet nuclear missile launching codes to Russian President Boris Yeltsin. That same evening at 7:32 P.M. the Soviet flag was lowered from the Kremlin for the last time and replaced with the Russian tricolor. 

By Lawrence Weschler, Truthdig