Biased American historians scored

It has been more than a century since the United States went on a campaign to colonise the Philippines in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War.

Yet, such historical tragedy, as U.S.-based professor Epifanio San Juan describes it, still finds justification among various American scholars.

He said this is not surprising at all in the current period of Pax Americana where the U.S. as the only remaining superpower continues to flex its muscle worldwide.

"Until the errors of the historical interpretation of American colonialism in the Philippines are corrected, Filipinos will find themselves forever under the shadow of Mother America," said San Juan.

The U.S.-based Filipino professor noted in his essay the 'reactionary tendencies' in the U.S. production of knowledge about Filipinos, in the Philippines and elsewhere.

According to him, reactionary tendencies would refer to the apologetic mode of recounting or explaining U.S. colonial domination of the Philippines in the wake of nationalist resurgence in the 1960s to the 1980s in the Philippines.

"The exemplary text here is the prize-winning book by Stanley Karnov, In Our Image (1989)," San Juan quipped.

Unable to blink the violence of U.S. military pacification, San Juan said Karnov reduces its significance by perpetuating the myth of conquest as inadvertent.

Karnov contends that the United States lacked a 'colonial vocation', although the American presence in the Philippines was preceded by centuries of North American experience with conquests, enslavement, genocidal policies and the general political and social subordination of non-European peoples.

San Juan said Karnov is making a chronicle of U.S. adventure in the Philippines, including its 'Benevolent Assimilation' policy divorced from that contextual ground of 'internal colonialism' tied to the rise of merchant capitalism.

"The contention of Karnov is quite impossible, because U.S. history before 1898 already displays the habitus of hierarchy, subordination and racial domination. So the U.S. colonisation of the Philippines is not divorced from the emerging world system of core and periphery inequalities," San Juan argued.

Aside from Karnov, San Juan also criticised Benedict Anderson's highly influential article, Cacique Democracy in the Philippines: Origins and Dreams, that appeared in the New Left Review (May-June 1988).

San Juan said Anderson's article espouses 'reactionary tendencies' about the Philippines.

According to San Juan, Anderson is propagating a thesis saying that the internal structures and institutions of Philippine society was scarcely altered by over half a century of U.S. rule, which explains to a large extent the backwardness of Filipino democracy now classified as 'cacique democracy', developed during the 300 years the Philippines was subjected to Spanish colonial rule.

Cacique democracy as defined by Anderson refers to Mestizo (Spanish-blood) elite in the Philippine society who would later on deal with American colonisers.

Anderson contends that due "to the mestizo's loyalty to Spain, American authorities created only a minimal change in the internal structure of Philippine society and quickly turned over of some component positions to the natives – up to the end of the American era the civilian machinery of state remained weak and divided".

Anderson said 'cacique democracy' becomes a stigmatising mark of Philippine sociopolitical formation in which the heritage of Spanish colonialism outweighs the legacy of U.S. imperial rule.

"This is patently false," argued San Juan adding that Anderson is obscuring if not hiding completely the profound extent of U.S. control of the economic, political and military institutions that determine elections and the techniques of governance.

He pointed out that American electoralism was the instrument of perpetuating Spanish caciquism which signifies inequality and the unjust distribution of resources, rights and obligations.

"But does the ritual of periodic elections, 'politics in a well-run casino', explain why the mestizo like the Aquino and Cojuangco families and the entire oligarchy continue to exploit the majority of workers and peasants in the Philippines?" asked San Juan.

San Juan also criticised Anderson for downplaying U.S. complicity in creating a legitimate governance established by violence and lawmaking effects. Again, this is false, San Juan said.

Filipino recalcitrance toward the U.S. never abated. The sporadic rebellions throughout the islands, the ferocity of guerrilla resistance, and the nationalist temper of the intelligentsia required massive U.S. military campaigns of repression, seditious laws, and other coercive measures to insure peace and order.

"Indeed, U.S. rule was not at all that minuscule as propounded by Anderson."

According to San Juan, Gen. Douglas MacArthur's draconian suppression of the communist Huk rebellion in the late 1930s and the Cold War rearming the Philippine military for over 20 years after the end of World War II, during the Korean War and the Vietnam War, speak well of the intrinsic American autocratic rule over the Philippines.