The imperialist war on terrorism and the responsibility of cultural studies.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Date: 01 January 2002
• Author: San Juan, E., Jr.

There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. Walter Benjamin In the dawn, armed with a burning patience, we shall enter the splendid Cities. (A l'aurore, arme d'une ardente patience, nous entrerons aux splendides Villes.) Arthur Rimbaud When I left the United States in December last year, everyone was betting on when the war, or rather the US invasion of Iraq for regime change and the capture of huge oil reserves, would begin. The plot unfolded inexorably. But the real question was: when did the war really begin? Was September 11 really the day of reckoning, a singular event out of which history was born? (1)

I arrived in the Philippines at the beginning of another year of hope. But do we have that 'burning patience' to continue the struggle for change, for radical social transformation? Before we can revisit the goals of national democracy and liberation--genuine equality and social justice--we need to situate ourselves in a larger web of circumstances, in the 'thickness' of the historical process.

The recent, mysterious signing of the Mutual Logistics and Support Agreement--just like the Balikatan Exercises (2)--raised again the spectre of US military occupation of our country, this time under the pretext of mutuality, like the 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty and the Visiting Forces Agreement of 1999. The Philippines Congress was not consulted, much less the public. US troops can be stationed anywhere, enter or leave without consultation (surely a much better deal than the old Clark Field and Subic Naval Base arrangements), in tune with the new flexibility of globalizing cyber-capitalism.

Via the Internet we got the news, at around the same time as this mutuality shenanigans, of the bloodbath in Mindoro Oriental and the Campaign Plan Habol Tamaraw, led by the infamous Col. Jovito Palparan of the Philippine military. So many civilians were killed, among them Oscar Sacdalan, Vedasco Anilao Lalong-Isip and Jude Garcia; while Jun Saducos and Anthony Danez Martinez were abducted. Hundreds of families have become refugees in their own country, just like the thousands displaced in Basilan and other battle zones in Mindanao, while the government, incapable of learning anything, persists in suppressing the BangsaMoro people's right to self-determination.

Despite the appeals of KARAPATAN, (3) church bodies and Bayan Muna representatives in Congress, nothing seems to have stopped the military in their campaign of barbaric slaughter--not only in Mindoro but throughout the country. If the security of life and of the meager property of the peasants and indigenous peoples in Mindoro cannot be protected by the government, which holds the legal monopoly of violence and other coercive means, then this government has lost legitimacy. In fact, it is open to being indicted for state terrorism.

It is precisely on this ground--the massive state terrorism of the military, police and paramilitary forces of the GRP--that Luis Jalandoni, chairperson of the National Democratic Front Negotiating Panel, has responded to the Colin Powell-Arroyo doctrine of summary condemnation of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CCP) and the New People's Army (NPA) as 'terrorist' organizations. Jalandoni has called on the present regime to renounce state terrorism and indemnify its numerous victims, among them Benjaline Hernandez and 148 activists killed in assassinations, extra-judicial executions and indiscriminate massacres. It would be painful to recount the litany of human rights violations that have burdened our history since the Marcos dictatorship, nay, since the 1989-1916 Filipino-American War, when 1.4 million Filipinos and Moros were killed by the 'civilizing' missionaries of Manifest Destiny.

If the present order is a regime of state terrorism--even if selective in its targets--what are the majority of citizens doing about it? Since ours is a constitutional republic, citizens, from whom all power emanates, can alter the social contract if the government fails to answer their needs. All signs indicate that the social contract has been broken, violated. It has been damaged many times over since we became a mock-sovereign nation in 1946.

Right in the midst of the controversy over Powell's exorbitant act of extending the State Department's reach to the liberated zones of the NPA, we read this news from Canada: a Filipina domestic worker, out of the generosity of her heart, has given her kidney to her sick employer. Frustrated with the public health care system, this Canadian employer turned to the Filipina for help, claiming that she is part of the family. Earning $2 an hour, for twenty-four months under the Live-in Caregiver Program, Filipina domestics function as modern-day slaves, vulnerable to any and every kind of abuse and exploitation. Canada tolerates the import of Filipinas to provide rich Canadians with internal organs and body parts, according to the Philippine Women's Center of British Columbia.

Before addressing the question of the Moro struggle, which is to my mind the crucial 'weak link' in the imperialist-comprador hegemony, I want to shift your attention to this unprecedented phenomenon of the Overseas Filipino workers in our history which marks a qualitative change in our geopolitical status in the present global system.

Since our colonization, millions of Filipinos have migrated to distant territories, first as recruited workers for the Hawaiian sugar plantations, and then as seamen, as US navy personnel, nurses and doctors, and so on. There are about four million Filipinos in North America, and roughly seven million more in the Middle East, Europe, Africa, Asia and elsewhere. Since the end of Ferdinand Marcos's martial-law regime, the 'warm body export' (including mail-order brides and assorted cargo in the global sex traffic) accelerated tremendously. Every day 3,000 Filipinos leave for abroad, close to a million every year. In Hong Kong alone there are 200,000 Filipina domestics. Twenty-five per cent of the world's seafarers and cruise waiters are Filipinos. With about eleven million Filipinos (out of eighty million) scattered around the world as cheap or affordable labour, mainly domestics and semi-skilled workers, the Philippines has become a major supplier of what is euphemistically called human capital--in actuality, the...