Capitalism, The

American Empire,
and Neoliberal
Globalization
Themes and Annotations from
Selected Works of E. San Juan, Jr.

Kenneth E. Bauzon
Capitalism, The American Empire, and Neoliberal
Globalization
 Kenneth E. Bauzon

Capitalism,
The American Empire,
and Neoliberal
Globalization
Themes and Annotations from Selected Works
of E. San Juan, Jr.
Kenneth E. Bauzon
St. Joseph’s College—New York
Brooklyn, NY, USA

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 For Kuya Leslie
for instilling in me a sense of history since youth
and for his invaluable contribution promoting
historical studies in the Philippines
 Preface

In an essay with a contested authorship (because it was published

unsigned; exponents assert either John O’Sullivan, Editor, or muck-
raking journalist Jane McManus Storm Cazneau as author), entitled
“Annexation,” in the July–August 1845 issue of United States Magazine
and Democratic Review, the author lamented the foreign interference of
countries like England and France in the conduct of United States (US)
foreign relations. The complaint singled out, in part, these countries par-
ticularly with regard to the westward expansion of the country through
a series of acquisitions-by-treaty and by expulsions and forced removals
of Native Americans the most infamous of which was the 1830 Indian
Removal Act giving the national government the authority to transfer
the native American population living east of the Mississippi River to des-
ignated reservations in the west, known popularly as the Trail of Tears;
at the same time, the article was highly critical of those opposed to the
impending annexation of Texas, e.g., Henry Clay who claimed that such
an annexation would be damaging to democracy, into the Union. The
article bewailed this foreign interference by the identified foreign coun-
tries which were doing so:

…for the avowed object of thwarting our policy and hampering our power,
limiting our greatness and checking the fulfillment of our manifest destiny
to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free develop-
ment of our yearly multiplying millions. (“Annexation” 2, italics added)

vii
viii PREFACE

Since Mexico gained its independence from Spain in 1821, the main
problem of its leaders was consolidating central control over the coun-
try’s expansive territory and enforcing its laws, which included prohi-
bition of slavery, over its diverse population. Their effort failed when
the slave-owning elites of the Mexican state of Texas, seeking to main-
tain the same socioeconomic system that sustained their status and
power, declared independence and sought to join the Union, a goal
finally attained in 1845 through congressional annexation. This US act
led directly to the outbreak of the US-Mexican War lasting until 1848
when, upon Mexico’s humiliating defeat, Mexico was forced to agree
to the onerous terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe, that year. This treaty
compelled Mexico, among other provisions, to relinquish any claim over
fifty-five percent of its original territory, including what are now known
as the states of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, California, and portions
of Colorado and Wyoming. The acquisition of these territories by the
US seemed to validate the belief of Sam Houston, one of the leaders
of the Texas secessionist uprising, who believed that the United States
was destined to possess “all of Mexico” and that Americans have a
“birthright” to claim the entire North American continent as their own.
With the above-mentioned territories having been acquired as a matter
of “manifest destiny,” as claimed in the first-ever recorded use of this
phrase in the above-cited article, what else is there for the proponents
of American imperialism to acquire beyond the shores of California
or Colorado as one looked into the vast expanse of the Pacific? Would
“manifest destiny” be similarly asserted over the Pacific? How would
such “manifest destiny” be actually fulfilled? For whose benefits and at
whose expense?
This work seeks to provide some answers to these and related ques-
tions. Others, no doubt, have previously endeavored to supply answers,
some more comprehensive than what I offer here. However. this work
contains features unique to itself. As such, it may complement some
while challenging others. The conceptualization of this project alone sets
it apart from the rest, including those which it may complement, nota-
bly those that offer an alternative narrative other than official or main-
stream versions of historical events as exemplified by Howard Zinn’s
now-classic A People’s History of the United States 1492—Present (1995
revised and updated edition). While it deals with historical subjects, it
does not conform to the strict narrative format that one may expect. It
 PREFACE ix

selects certain themes, explores the ideas behind these themes, and seeks
to identify the motives, the forces, and the effects inherent in the events
or consequences that these ideas have given rise to. Another unique fea-
ture of this work are the constant annotations from selected works of E.
San Juan Jr. (henceforth, San Juan), a noted literary and cultural theo-
rist whose works have become ubiquitous—hard not to notice—in his
own field of comparative literature that even someone like myself, pro-
fessionally trained in political science, cannot help but pay attention. The
annotations are a form of intervention on the part of San Juan in the
discussion especially at critical junctures—ranging in subjects that criss-
cross such fields as cultural studies, political science, philosophy, political
thought, sociology, and history in a cross-disciplinary fashion—wherein
San Juan offers his critical insight, interpretation, and meaning to assist
the reader make sense of these events.
That San Juan is of Philippine ancestry is less important than the fact
that his intellectual contributions—universal in appeal, encyclopedic in
scope, critical in style and commitment, and composed virtually during
his entire adult life and deserving of recognition as Philippine national
treasure—are his own modest attempt to stitch together and make
coherent a form of understanding of reality that is as total as he could
possibly make it in his lifetime—particularly in its historical, cultural,
and ideological manifestations—that would otherwise be loose, dispa-
rate, incoherent and, therefore, less meaningful because of their lack of
connection with the whole. The third feature of this work is its attempt
to preserve and recognize San Juan’s historical materialist approach not
only to literary and cultural criticism but also to those other fields that
have already been mentioned and, perhaps, more. San Juan’s use of this
approach has been consistent, uncompromising, and sustained, exempli-
fied by one of his early poems as an undergraduate, entitled, “Man is a
Political Animal,” published in the Philippine Collegian, student organ
at the University of the Philippines, in its July 25, 1957 issue (San Juan
1957). Composed in the Vorticist style of Wyndham Lewis, and just as
the original group of Vorticists in 1914 unsettled the Victorian sensi-
bilities in England, San Juan’s poem was composed in the wake of the
enactment of the McCarthyist Anti-Subversion Act in the same year,
putting a chill to academic freedom in the Philippines as a former US
colony; the poem itself proved embarrassing enough to the University
Administration that it was promptly censored, nay, condemned by
x PREFACE

leading personalities of the time like Amado Daguio, famed Filipino

writer and Republic Cultural Heritage recipient; Ramon Tapales, Dean
of the College of Arts and Sciences; and no less than Enrique Virata,
President of the University. San Juan’s faithful adherence to the tenets
of historical materialist approach is demonstrated most recently by the
publication of his very latest labor of love, too late for use in the present
work, published in Pilipino, entitled Kontra-Modernidad; Mga Pagsubok
sa Projekto ng Mapagpalayang Pagbabago (2019) (roughly and not an
official translation, Counter-Modernity; The Challenges of the Project for
Change Towards Liberation). However, the significance of this work is in
its use of the Pilipino language which, while it may have been in response
to comradely critique from some quarters of the Philippine literary com-
munity that he has not written enough in the national language of his
country of origin, nonetheless, upholds and respects the tradition of this
language as an organic tool in the project for national emancipation.
This conforms with the emergence of San Juan as being organic to the
neocolonial period in which he grew and ardently opposed; his contin-
ued existence is defined by a challenge to the assertion by the US empire
for normality, as a matter of presumed manifest destiny, and a resistance
to the world order that goes by this empire’s own rules, because that
claim to normalcy is but a construction and its victims, far from being
abstract, are real live human beings who, as agents of their own selves,
are not obliged to feel normal about their victimhood and whose free-
dom is yet to dawn. San Juan expressed his identification and solidar-
ity with these victims in bringing about this dawning when he wrote, in
a semi-autobiographical OpEd in a Manila newspaper in 2012, writing
of his memory as an undergraduate student: “…mine is a prismatic and
selective affair, conditioned by what I am now as an unfinished project…
caught between a dead world and one struggling to emerge” (San Juan
2012).
While San Juan’s consistency and fidelity to the historical materialist
approach have been notable by themselves, weathering the suppressive
periods of McCarthyism and the Cold War, many writers of San Juan’s
generation (along with mine too, albeit a step younger, if I may so add),
have effectively remained quiet or have evolved intellectually into some-
thing that deflects from any red-baiting charge of being a “communist,”
a “Marxist,” and the like. Consequently, academic disciplines throughout
much of the Cold War period until quite recently have been dominated
 PREFACE xi

by functionalism and formalism, or their respective “neo-” variants and

counterparts in related disciplines, whose proponents have found in them
a safe haven from the persecution to which their Marxist colleagues have
been subjected. Even a cursory look at the problem of racism in the US
would note how it has been turned benign and subsumed into a variant
of functionalism called critical race theory or conflict theory which, while
avoiding the class dimension of the problem, has spawned such solutions
as multiculturalism or race analysis without class. However, as noted in
one of the chapters below, there has been an observable “return to class”
with an appreciable recognition of the historical materialist approach
what with the failure of the mainstream approaches to account for trends
that are undemocratic, the rise of intolerant groups, the twin phenomena
of persistent poverty and inequality with the ubiquitous accumulation of
wealth—under the rules of neoliberalism—on the part of the Top One
percent of the global population, not through hard work but, rather,
through the stroke of a pen, and the sheer anomaly of a state that wants
to foster multiculturalism—popular especially among members of the
liberal class—within its own society while the same state engages in its
own self-righteous acts of gratuitous violence abroad disguised as a war
on terror causing unrecompensed death, destruction, and displacement
upon a massive number of people, while perfecting the art and science of
interrogation and torture in the process; and, without tolerance and with
an authoritarian streak, foists its own philosophy of development on oth-
ers wishing to experiment on other approaches, while it aids and abets its
own surrogate allies in the starvation of a population (e.g., in the case of
Yemen) or the ethnic cleansing of another (e.g., in the case of Palestine),
collective forms of barbarism against these peoples of color. Surely, some-
thing is amiss that could not be explained merely by repeating the tenets
of modernization theory or functionalism or multiculturalism or by any
of the dominant theoretical approaches that have occupied academic dis-
course in the social sciences during the past half-a-century.
As alluded to above, the revival of the Marxist critical tradition has
been noticeable in various disciplines. In the field of literary criticism,
this revival is exemplified by the publication of Barbara Foley’sMarxist
Literary Criticism Today (2019), coming after decades of virtual hia-
tus (with the exception of San Juan) in the field. In its advertisement,
Foley’s book is described as follows: “In the first introduction to
Marxist literary criticism in decades, Barbara Foley argues that Marxism
xii PREFACE

continues to offer the best framework for exploring the relationship

between literature and society. She lays out in clear terms the principal
aspects of Marxist methodology—historical materialism, political econ-
omy, and ideology critique—as well as key debates about the nature of
literature and the goals of literary criticism and pedagogy.” In the book’s
Prologue, Foley herself opens with the following words: “Marxism is at
once a method of socioeconomic analysis and a call for revolutionary
social transformation. It is also an interpretive framework indispensable
to an understanding of the relationship between literature and society—
and thus, more generally of the connections between ideas, attitudes,
and emotions on the one hand and their grounding in historical forces
on the other” (Foley). Clearly, thus, historical materialism holds the
prospect for an integrated critical understanding of reality that invites
practitioners from every discipline; offers a basis for a cross-disciplinary
collaboration in lieu of the parochial compartmentalization that has char-
acterized the relations between and among academic disciplines for some
time; and, holds the key to providing a possible solution to the persistent
problem of inhumanity among humans.
A note on the genesis of this project. This work is both an edited
and an expanded version of a project began in the spring of 2015. It
was originally intended for a special issue of Kritika Kultura dedicated
to the works of San Juan for publication the following year, in its Issue
No. 26 under the inspired and exemplary editorship of Charlie Samuya
Veric. Kritika Kultura is a refereed online journal of cultural and literary
studies at the Ateneo de Manila University in Quezon City, Philippines.
As the completed project was well in excess of the maximum allowable
for individual contributions to the special issue, only the first part dealing
with themes on the development of capitalism in the seventeenth century
up until the Spanish–American War of 1898 could be included. Thus,
the excess parts, which included discussions on the US colonization of
the Philippines, the racialized nature of the US state, and the structures
and principles of neoliberal globalization, languished for a while until the
prospect of publishing with Palgrave Macmillan came along. Then, it had
to be re-structured and significantly expanded. The result is the current
version.
The inspiration for the approach of using annotations, however, came
from a source over a century old. In 1888, Dr. Jose Rizal, who would be
the Philippines’ foremost hero, began his search at the British Museum
 PREFACE xiii

for a book, entitled, in Spanish, Sucesos De Las Islas Filipinas (roughly,

Historical Events of the Philippine Islands), written by one Dr. Antonio
Morga. Rizal eventually found a copy, in two volumes, published in
Mexico City by Casa de Geronymo in Balli in 1609. Rizal’s interest was
in learning how Morga, an influential lay historian and colonial bureau-
crat of his time, narrated the history of Spanish colonial administration
of the Philippine Islands, the motives behind this colonization, how the
Filipinos were portrayed, and the factors attributed for their apparent
socioeconomic backwardness. Based on his own research and accumu-
lated knowledge, Rizal then went about the laborious process of anno-
tating the book which, upon completion, he published in Paris in 1889
with the imprint of Garnier Hermanos. Rizal deemed his annotations
essential to correcting Morga’s views about the Filipinos, their pre-con-
quest civilization up until 1532, the nature of Spanish colonial policies,
and practices, and how these had contributed to the social and economic
backwardness of the Filipinos. Without, perhaps, intending it, Rizal had,
in fact, through his annotations, written the country’s first systematic
history from the Philippine viewpoint.
As an impressionable high school student reading Rizal’s annota-
tions, I learned early on how even a well-intended work of scholarship
like Morga’s could have a distorting effect on history. Rizal’s earnest
efforts at annotating Morga may not have been as famous as his two
novels, Noli Me Tangere (Touch Me Not, 1887), and El Filibusterismo
(Subversion, 1891), but being exposed to Rizal’s method nonetheless
left an indelible impression on me about the value of history-writing as
a vocation. As Morga himself explained in his work, he endeavored at
impartiality; yet, Rizal noted that Morga’s presuppositions underlined his
interpretations and colored his conclusions.
In the same vein, the history being offered here, highlighting
the interventions by San Juan at certain junctures in the narration is
intended to offer an alternative meaning of history that would otherwise
be different without such interventions. Any measure of satisfaction on
the part of the reader would be regarded as success. Otherwise, I take
full responsibility for any and all shortcomings.

New York, NY, USA Kenneth E. Bauzon

May 2019
xiv PREFACE

References
San Juan, E., Jr., “Man Is a Political Animal” (Poem), Philippine Collegian, July
25, 1957.
_____, “Remebrance (sic) of Things Almost Past by An English Major in U.P.
(1954–58)”, Manila Times, March 4, 2012 (Brackets added). Available in:
https://www.pressreader.com/@Sonny_Juan/csb_L0zQjf3TvXh9jl-Dbkb
dJQjA9aoHqRUmY4P7WHqRRbHnAaDAfuG0og0W4cXya27B?fbclid=
IwAR0WOOyGz70ZRWVidDp8xqCpEdYWPdHY1rU3YH9aZnV0ij76ty
MIQ-VMzwk.
 Acknowledgements

The broad conception for this work began with a contribution to the
Special Issue No. 26 (2016) of Kritika Kultura, a refereed online jour-
nal of cultural criticism of the Ateneo de Manila University, in Quezon
City, Philippines, dedicated to the life and works of Prof. E. San Juan Jr.
That contribution became foundational to, albeit different from, the
present work. With the end in view of preparing a monograph-length
manuscript, work continued in earnest. By the fall of 2018, the manu-
script, albeit still in raw form, was largely finished. It was at around that
time when I was fortuitously contacted by Professor Nassef Manabilang
Adiong of the University of the Philippines. A dynamic and exceptional
scholar, Dr. Adiong currently serves as Chief Editor of the International
Journal of Islam in Asia and of the Islam in the Philippines Publication
Series of the De La Salle University Publishing House, and recently as
Chevening Fellow at the Oxford Center for Islamic Studies in Great
Britain. My subsequent correspondence with Dr. Adiong has been prov-
idential in that it led to a reference, via correspondence, to Professor
Jonathan Bayot, Director of the De La Salle University Publishing
House, and to Palgrave Macmillan. Thus, it is to Dr. Adiong first and
foremost that I offer my heartfelt gratitude for opening the door for
the possibility of a publication, and to Professor Bayot and Palgrave
Macmillan for their respective decisions, following their requisite reviews,
to endorse publication by their respective organizations.
Thoughts contained in this work have been years in gesta-
tion. Particularly meaningful have been the intellectually engaging

xv
xvi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

conversations I have had with my colleagues in the Department over

many years. To them, I extend my sincere appreciation for their candor
and intelligence in sharing their expertise, particularly with Professors
Raymond D’Angelo, Chair, and Mirella Landriscina, both sociologists,
pertaining largely to race and class; with Professor Richard Torz, econ-
omist, pertaining to economic policy and inequality; and, with Professor
Stephen Rockwell, political scientist, about the role of US Presidents in
the shaping of colonial policy in the Philippines and in the administration
of Native Americans, with their implications on the US “pacification” of
the Muslim Filipinos.
To Professors E. San Juan Jr. and Delia Aguilar, my gratitude for their
abiding friendship over many decades, and for their exemplary lives as
intellectual-activists providing inspiration to current and future genera-
tions, including the present work.
To Ms. Meridith L. Murray, my appreciation for the competent and
invaluable service she provided in preparing the Index.
Last but not least, my eternal gratitude to family members Drs. Leslie
and Aurora Bauzon for their lifetime of selfless dedication to my pro-
fessional success, and to Rosaida, for her affection, support, and under-
standing as well as for being my source for daily inspiration more than
she realizes.
It goes without saying that none of the above are responsible for the
views or interpretations expressed herein and that nothing is implied or
inferred that they share the same in any way. Any remaining errors that
lurk in the following pages are solely my responsibility.

Queens, New York Kenneth E. Bauzon

June 2019
 Contents

1 Introduction 1
The Problematic of Postcolonialism 2
Enlightenment and Empire 4
Enlightenment to Neoliberal Globalization 9
The Present Task 14
References 20

2 Background to Colonialism 23
Early Capitalism as Subject of Study 23
Colonialism and Racism 24
Capitalism and the State 26
References 30

3 The American Empire in the Pacific 31

Justifications and Rationalizations 31
Exploration of the Pacific, and the Pathology of Violence:
The Case of the Malolo Massacre 33
The Claim to Exceptionalism, Pretext to Imperialism 53
1898—The Nexus of Global Events: The Spanish–American
War of May 1898, the Philippine Revolution of June 1898,
and the Expansion of the US Empire 59
References 73

xvii
xviii CONTENTS

4 Denials and Betrayals, Conquest and Capitulation 77

The State of the Philippine Revolution at the Point
of US Intervention 77
The Assassination of Bonifacio, the Pact of Biak-na-Bato,
and Exile 79
The Manipulation and Betrayal of Aguinaldo 81
Aguinaldo Returns from Exile, Proclaims Philippine
Independence 85
Dewey’s Plausible Deniability 88
References 97

5 The Philippine–American War, 1899–1913, and the US

Counterinsurgency and Pacification Campaign 101
Pacification of a People “Sitting in Darkness” 101
Racial Dimension of Pacification 110
Pacification of Moroland 116
Laying the Foundation for Racialized State Violence 151
Laying the Foundation for Colonial Education 153
References 167

6 The Cold War and the Post-Cold War Hegemony 171

Hegemony Based on Capital Accumulation
and Labor Extraction 172
State of Permanent Warfare 174
Principles and Institutional Structures of Neoliberal
Globalization 176
Uneven Development and Neoliberal Globalization 180
References 187

7 The Racialized State 191

Knowledge Production and the Cold War in the United States 191
Rise of the Neoliberal Pedagogy 194
The Fetish of Multiculturalism 199
Denial of Historical Materialism and the Postcolonial Retreat 203
The Problematization of Race Without Class
in the United States 207
The Recovery of Class, and the Class Basis of Racism 214
Prognosis 221
References 237
 CONTENTS xix

8 Teleology in History and Intellectual Responsibility 241

The Contemporary State of the World 242
Recapping Neoliberalism’s Rules, and Implications 251
US Militarism and the Threat of Nuclear Annihilation 254
Prying Open “Emerging Markets”: Corporations
as Imperial Tools 258
Contesting Empire and the Role of Emancipatory Movements 260
References 261

References 263

Index 285
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Any society is founded on the interaction between humans and the natural
world in order to transform it according to human needs. The conceptual
tools developed in the Marxist tradition enable us to analyze this interaction,
to engage in a conceptual mapping of the ensemble of interconnections and
the laws of motion that render social phenomena intelligible and open to
alteration. Materialist critique adopts a self-reflexive account of the varied
interconnections, avoiding any tendency to reify the separations and con-
tacts between different elements of the whole. In this process, the analyst
or knower is also examined as part of the critique of the conflict of class
ideologies. What this critique foregrounds is the totality of the dynamic con-
tradictions animating class society, not only the major contradictions between
the productive forces and social relations, etc., but also the tension between
the system of needs of any social formation and the objective circumstances
subtending it that underlie class conflict and its myriad sublimations. It is
only within this synthesizing framework, complicated by layered mediations,
that agency can acquire its measured effectivity.
E. San Juan, Imperialism and Revolution (2007)

© The Author(s) 2019 1

K. E. Bauzon, Capitalism, The American Empire, and Neoliberal
Globalization, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9080-8_1
2 K. E. BAUZON

The Problematic of Postcolonialism

In a 1994 essay, the late Arif Dirlik, extraordinarily gifted historian, mentor,
and friend, opened with the question: “When exactly… does the ‘post-
colonial’ begin?” The question was a quote from fellow cultural theorist Ella
Shohat, in her probing 1992 essay on postcolonialism, a school of thought
in cultural criticism which began its career in the early 1980s but which, by
the time of Shohat’s essay, had already acquired its orthodox status. The
phenomenal ascendancy of postcolonialism to become, in a short period
of time, accepted and be part of the Establishment, even to be embraced
by conservatives and the corporate community, “has less to do,” according
to Dirlik, “with its rigorousness as a concept or with the new vistas it
has opened up for critical inquiry than it does with the increased visibility
of academic intellectuals of Third World origin as pacesetters in cultural
criticism”1 (Dirlik, 329). With this acknowledgment, Dirlik’s response to
the original question posed, partially facetious, he admits, is: “When Third
World intellectuals have arrived in First World academe” (Dirlik, 329).
But the more serious side to Dirlik’s response to Shohat’s query is one
that deserves more attention. Not only does it have bearing to the cur-
rent work which distinctly bears the stamp of the Third World both on its
authorship and its subject; it also provides the critical context with which
its purpose may be understood. Near the conclusion of his essay, Dirlik
comes back to the question and offers this more profound response, which
is: “the emergence of global capitalism, not in the sense of an exact coin-
cidence in time but in the sense that the one is a condition for the other”
(Dirlik, 352). This loose consensual reciprocity is indicated by the “ab-
sence” of any meaningful criticism on the part of postcolonial intellectuals
directed at global capitalism. Dirlik describes this absence as “truly remark-
able [because] this relationship, which pertains not only to cultural and
epistemological but also to social and political formations, is arguably less
abstract and more direct….” (Dirlik, 352). “To put it bluntly,” Dirlik con-
cludes, “postcoloniality is designed to avoid making sense of the current
crisis and, in the process, to cover up the origins of postcolonial intellectuals
in a global capitalism of which they are not so much victims as beneficiaries”
(Dirlik, 353).
The description of global capitalism offered by Dirlik in his essay exactly
a quarter of a century ago remains prescient. He distinguished contempo-
rary global capitalism from the Eurocentric capitalism whose colonialism
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

pretty much directly “worked over” (his phrase) the Third World during
the past three centuries. Today, global capitalism serves as a concrete, rather
than abstract, basis for a global structuring principle not centered on any
one state wherein a private, unaccountable, profit-seeking but state-aided
entity—the transnational corporation (TNC)—sees the Third World not as
an abstract theme, as postcolonial language would reduce it to, but, rather,
as concrete location for “emerging markets” to be exploited but which,
as Dirlik views it, as sites also of struggles and resistance, a view comple-
mented by San Juan when he wrote: “Whenever there is imperial domi-
nation in any form, historical experience teaches us that there will always
be a ‘Third World’ subject of resistance and dialectical transcendence” (San
Juan 1995) (italics added). The appearance of TNCs as major international
actors occurs at the transformation of the division of labor characterized by
“increased spatial extension as well as speed of production to an unprece-
dented level” (Dirlik, 348). “These same technologies,” Dirlik adds, “have
endowed capital and production with novel mobility, seeking maximum
advantage for capital against labor as well as freedom from social and polit-
ical interference…. For these reasons, analysts perceive in global capitalism
a quantitative difference from past, similar practices – indeed, a new phase
of capitalism” (Dirlik, 348–349).
The ascendancy of global capitalism as a global structuring force has had
several discernible manifestations, each one related to all others. One of
these is the phenomenon of global migration of labor impelled by poverty
and oppression at the country of origin and the expectation of better
income at the destination. Some governments like that in the Philippines
have adopted as official policy the export of warm bodies motivated by
the expectation of migrant remittances to boost domestic revenue. Other
places, like in Central America, have seen conflicts imposed on peasants and
the urban poor to maintain centuries-old land tenure system maintained
by a native aristocracy in alliance with generals armed and trained by the
United States (US) in the art of counterinsurgency. These are exacerbated
by neoliberal rules—including punishing structural adjustment programs,
privatization, and trade liberalization—overseen by such institutions as the
World Bank, the World Trade Organization (WTO), and regional permuta-
tions as the Central American Free Trade Agreement—Dominican Agree-
ment (CAFTA—DR), and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) all of which
prohibit, through their respective charters, the enactment of protectionist
national laws that might impede “free trade” under the principle of har-
monization which seeks to conform national laws with neoliberal global
4 K. E. BAUZON

trading rules overseen and enforced by the WTO. Along with harmoniza-
tion rules, trading charters also grant investor rights to corporations and
diminish whatever rights are there for workers, health and safety standards
for consumers, and safeguards for a sustainable environment. In many of
the above cases, the work of “economic hit men” has preceded formal
negotiations designed to ensnare leaders into accepting terms that, in the
end, cede their respective countries’ sovereign claim over their resources;
failing that, jackals have taken their toll on more than one occasion.
These and similar machinations, repeated and enforced all over the
world, have contributed to the common perception, perpetuated by intel-
lectuals in First World academes, not the least of whom are political scien-
tists, that the Westphalian state system has become obsolete. What these
observers have failed to note is that while national boundaries are being
rendered porous and the sovereignty of smaller states is constantly being
battered down, the imperial US state has evolved to a point where it is
able to maintain its autonomy from these vicissitudes; not only that, it
has managed to maintain a global hegemony—in its political, military, and
economic manifestations—as though its maintenance is dependent on the
dissolution of the sovereignty of all others, except that of its close allies
and surrogates. Because its power is second to none at this moment in its
history, it has been able to summon at will its disciplinary authority at the
world stage, defining its own rules and undermining any shred of interna-
tional law governing civilized behavior. It has become law unto itself. To
understand how this current situation has come to be, I suggest that we
discuss and bring to light the thoughts and ideas that have provided its
essential foundation, commencing with the Enlightenment.

Enlightenment and Empire

In the lead chapter of my 1991 book, I wrote the following: “Knowledge
about society has been among the main goals of philosophers and social
scientists, especially since the advent of the Enlightenment. Modern science
has its origins during this period… Whereas before, the method of learning
was speculative and ritualistic based on the assumption that a cosmic and
social order determined the nature of human destiny, the modern period is
rooted in the optimistic belief that human nature is shaped by man himself.
If, therefore, man goes about constructing a society according to his image
of it and exploits all the resources at his command, he can control nature,
regularize his behavior, and predict the outcome” (Bauzon 1991, 3).
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

The subject of the Enlightenment and its relationship to empire has,

unfortunately, eluded generations of critical scholarly scrutiny for at least
the following three reasons, as follows: (1) Focus on the political and social
thought of Enlightenment thinkers has traditionally concentrated on their
ideas on politics, society, the nature of man, and reason or rationality—
represented by Cartesian dualism alluded to in the above quote—being
assumed to be uniquely endowed to man; (2) Foci on these and related
subjects by various thinkers have been of a Eurocentric nature empha-
sizing, wittingly or unwittingly, the accomplishments and superiority of
European civilization, and the deterministic conflation between mankind’s
future with European progress; and (3) contemporary commentators and
interpreters who admire Enlightenment thinkers for their advocacy of indi-
vidual freedom, in a political sense, often conflate it with nary a doubtful
thought with free markets, or capitalism. In other words, the principles
and practices of capitalism are deemed consonant with those of democ-
racy. Consequently, the study of Enlightenment social and political theory
has often allowed to slip by thoughts and ideas that rationalized colonial-
ism, seen as a natural extension of man’s endeavor to exploit “all resources
at his command” but which, in its essence, is undemocratic (Bauzon 1991,
3). Further, colonialism was seen as a vehicle to assert the universality of
Enlightenment values through the “civilizing” process and the taking up
of the so-called White Man’s Burden or as embodied in the French civiliz-
ing mission. Meanwhile, the expansion of liberal rights and the supposed
improvement in the quality of life among Europeans within Europe proper
were generally celebrated apart from and without regard to the violence
and plunder being inflicted at the edges of the empire.
Typical of Enlightenment thinkers was John Locke, a liberal darling of
the West whose ideas about political representation, separation of pow-
ers, and the right of citizens to rise up against a tyrannical government
have found their way enshrined into Western—including United States—
constitutions and laws. What has not gained equal attention has been his
economic ideas justifying, in today’s language, the privatization and com-
modification of the commons, acquisition of property through, among
others, the enclosure movement; his racist predisposition toward indige-
nous peoples in the New World who, in his view, were lacking both in the
capacity to reason and to labor; and his contributions to the flourishing
of the slave-plantation complex. I make note of these in my 2016 article
wherein I wrote, in reference to Chapter V of his 1690 essay, Second Treatise
on Government, dealing with the subject of property: “Locke quite literally
6 K. E. BAUZON

and figuratively unlocked the mystery of how to turn the commons, which
he acknowledged as God’s gift to all of humanity, into private property.
He writes, in Section 26: ‘God, who hath given the world to men in com-
mon hath also given them reason to make use of it to the best advantage of
life, and convenience’” (Bauzon 2016, 416) (italics added). Further, Locke
developed his conception of money, essential to the then-budding mercan-
tile trade, as a representation of value created by labor as well as a means to
facilitate acquisition and appropriation of property, especially in the New
World, in which the indigenous population—or Native Americans—would
be the primary victims. “The native Americans,” I wrote further in the
same piece, “were simply not meant to be served by this conception of
appropriation, for the necessary twin brother of this is the dispossession of
the native peoples” (Bauzon 2016, 417).
Locke was not the only prominent Enlightenment thinker justifying
colonialism and empire. In 1752, David Hume wrote, in an essay on com-
merce: “The greatness of a state, and the happiness of its subjects, how
independent soever they may be supposed in some respects, are commonly
allowed to be inseparable with regard to commerce; and as private men
receive greater security, in the possession of their trade and riches, from the
power of the public, so the public becomes powerful in proportion to the
opulence and extensive commerce of private men” (Hume). Further down
in the same essay, Hume adds: “As the ambition of the sovereign must
entrench on the luxury of individuals, so the luxury of individuals must
diminish the force, and check the ambition of the sovereign… The same
method of reasoning will let us see the advantages of foreign commerce,
in augmenting the power of the state, as well as the riches and happiness
of the subject” (Hume).
The two above quotes from Hume exemplify and validate my earlier
observation that the liberties that Europeans have come to enjoy have been
seen to be codependent with their ability to carry out foreign commerce,
which has brought them opulence. Further, as Hume openly suggests, the
success of the state and the well-being of its subject are intertwined, with
the latter presumed to have the ability to “check the ambition” of the
former. Hume, thus, clearly identified himself not only as a proponent of
commerce but also, as Singapore-based scholar Onur Ulas Ince describes,
in an illuminating essay, as “champion of modern commercial civility” (Ince
2018, 108). The description of Hume by Ince is not by happenstance. It
reflects the emerging debate during Hume’s time among intellectual circles
in Europe regarding the relationship between liberal ideas, on the one hand,
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

and commercial activities particularly with regard to slavery and the use of
force as empire expanded, on the other. To Ince, this represented Hume’s
“conundrum” which Ince explains as follows: “Hume’s writings on com-
merce and empire provide us with a window onto the challenges posed to
metropolitan conceptions of commercial civility by imperial instantiations
of commercial incivility in the eighteenth century” (Ince 2018, 108). Here,
Ince contends that the “colonial plantation slavery” was one such instance
that challenged Hume’s conception of civil commerce. This practice, Ince
writes, “constituted at once a powerful engine of global commerce and an
uncivil institution that contravened the conventions of modern European
civility that global commerce had made possible.” Ince, however, found
a loophole in Hume’s logic which allowed him essentially to resolve this
conundrum without much intellectual anguish. As Ince explains in the rest
of his essay: “I maintain that Hume treated slavery principally as a moral
and political problem, disavowing its economic centrality to the modern
world of global commerce. This took the form of diverting attention from
the modern, commercial incarnation of slavery (the colonial-capitalist plan-
tation), and confining the discussion of this practice almost exclusively to
its ancient, feudal or Asiatic variants” (Ince 2018, 109).
One might say, as Ince also does, that Hume’s critique of slavery repre-
sents at that time the typical “liberal critique” of that institution as well as
that of the empire that it sustained. By diverting attention, as Ince suggests,
to its “ancient, feudal or Asiatic variants,” it had little rationale to stop it nor
did it mitigate the violence that accompanied the growth and expansion
of empire, failing to recognize the inevitable entwinement between global
commerce and empire, and between liberalism and capitalism. Despite the
emerging critique of empire, particularly as the eighteenth-century mani-
festations of the Enlightenment came around, European empires, relying
on their unmitigated use of force and on their respective trading compa-
nies which they have chartered, continued to encroach not only along the
Atlantic but also in South and Southeast Asia, strengthening the global
capitalist network designed to facilitate the extraction of raw materials, the
transfer of wealth, and the remaking of the subject colonies after the Euro-
pean image. As to the prevalence of “barbarism” that accompanied the
growth of these empires, the British most notably, Ince, offers a sober-
ing observation to help his readers, including myself, make sense of it
in the following words: this barbarism “represented neither a temporal
relapse into more primitive attitudes of cruelty nor a spatial exodus from
the domain of civility that was coextensive with Western Europe. Rather
8 K. E. BAUZON

than an anomaly to Western commercial civility, it constituted a dynamic

internal to the historical emergence of global capitalist relations within the
politico-legal framework of colonial empires ”2 (Ince 2018, 133–134) (ital-
ics added). This barbarism was not lost on Fyodor Dostoyevsky who also
noted, in his travels to Europe, the moral malaise that the Western Euro-
peans seemed to embrace despite advances in knowledge and concomi-
tant economic progress. Through the words of the character of Mikhail
Osipovich Rakitin, a seminary student, conversing with another charac-
ter, Alyosha (Karamazov), in an early draft of Brothers Karamazov (1880),
published the year before his death, Karamazov captured the essence if not
the irony of the Enlightenment, at least on the part of those that con-
flated it with colonialism and progress, in the following words: “Well then,
eliminate the people, curtail them, force them to be silent. Because the
European Enlightenment is more important than people” (as quoted in
Treadgold, 207).
That the opulence achieved by Europe and, later, North America owing
to the growth of their industry has been undeniable. Further, the expan-
sion of European mercantile trade with the rest of the world alongside
the conquest and colonization of other people’s lands, aided by the state
as illustrated by the enactment of British navigation laws, has also been a
well-established fact. The so-called free trade has not been the success it
was without state intervention in behalf of merchants, traders, manufac-
turers, and, in general, the capitalist class. The Invisible Hand was a mere
figment of Adam Smith’s imagination. As legal historian Michael E. Tigar
notes, the tradition of state intervention in commerce has been a carryover
from feudal times through Middle Ages when merchants lobbied their
respective principalities to enact laws favorable to the rising merchant class,
laws which later evolved to be part of Western international law. This was
exemplified by the Crusaders—the Templars in particular—seeking state
protection of the trade routes they had either seized or developed, along
with the bounty they had accumulated. (Tigar, 35). With the advent of the
modern era dominated by Enlightenment ideas on human progress, along
with the formal abolition of feudalism throughout Europe, e.g., the 1789
decree of the French National Assembly, and the 1804 Napoleonic Code,
both seeking lineage with Charlemagne’s 1215 Magna Carta. Giving his
imprimatur to evolving marriage between the state and commerce, French
magistrate Charles de Secondat Montesquieu offered the following words,
as quoted by Tigar:
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

The natural effect of commerce is to bring peace… The spirit of commerce

brings with it that of frugality, economy, moderation, work, wisdom, tran-
quility, law, and order…. In order to maintain the spirit of commerce, it is
necessary that the principal citizens engage in it themselves, and that its spirit
rule alone, unhindered by any other, and that all the laws favor it. (as quoted
in Tigar, 219)

Thus, at least in the four centuries since the Enlightenment began, and
among the European states, extensive laws were passed, institutions were
created, practices were established, and rationales were elaborated that facil-
itated and justified the extraction of wealth from the peripheries of empire
to its center. Karl Marx wrote his astute observation of this process in
Chapter 31, Volume 1 of his Capital (1867) in the following words: “The
discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and
entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the
conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren
for the commercial hunting of black skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the
era of capitalist production” (Marx) (italics added).

Enlightenment to Neoliberal Globalization

Having identified Hume as an example of a liberal critic of slavery (of a
distant sort), and of imperialism (though not so much of the inevitable cap-
italist commerce that ensued from it), does not imply that criticisms were
confined to him and/or his contemporaries, among whom was Edmund
Burke. Burke, as member, in 1781, of the Select Committee of the Com-
mons investigating the actuation of the British East India Company, excori-
ated the company for its arrogant and “plunderous” practices in the Asian
subcontinent (Ince 2018, 133). In fact, over a century earlier, a Jewish
dissident intellectual, born to Jewish merchant-parents fleeing as refugees
from persecution of the Catholic Inquisition in Portugal to Holland, and
then banished from his own Jewish community for his unconventional—
even heretical—views, Baruch (also Benedict de) Spinoza (1632–1677)
became a source of such criticisms manifest throughout his works, chief
of which was his Ethics (1677), reputed to be one of the masterpieces to
come out of the Enlightenment period, written as his way of demystify-
ing the interrelationships between nature, man, and God. In combating
what he regarded as superstitions during his time, and promoting reason,
10 K. E. BAUZON

he postulated, among others, that God is nature, deemed as a metaphys-

ical rather than as matter. He also rejected the notion that God took on
a human form for the reason that the human body, just like the rest of
nature, is the extension of God’s essence. What has made Spinoza salient
to contemporary thinkers, after about two centuries of obscurity follow-
ing his death, has been his political views—as a political scientist—and, in
particular, his views on democracy, laws, the concept of “multitude,” and
the role it plays in the shaping of a political order. In his Political Treatise
(published posthumously in 1677), Spinoza declares that his aim was to
explore the possibilities by which a “commonwealth” may be “so ordered
that, whether the people who administer them are led by reason or by
an affect, they can’t be induced to be disloyal or act badly.” His personal
experience with the “people” or the “multitude,” used in his treatise as a
central conceptual framework, was given real meaning when the de Witt
brothers, Johan and Cornelius, personal friends to Spinoza, were lynched
in August 1672 at a courthouse in the Hague, not far from his home.
Johan was, at the time, the de facto head of state of the Dutch Republic,
and Cornelius was a successful career naval officer, scoring repeated victo-
ries against the British navy while serving as Deputy to Admiral Michiel
de Ruyter, remembered as one of the most skilled naval officers in Dutch
history. After having been at the helm of the Dutch ship of state guiding
it to what is referred to as the Dutch Golden Age, characterized by the
dominance of the Dutch East India Company of the trade routes to and
from Asia, the de Witt brothers succumbed to the long-standing rivalry
between the so-called Orange monarchists, Calvinist in their orientation,
on the one hand, and the republican-oriented merchant class, to which the
de Witt brothers were identified, on the other. The hysteria against the de
Witt brothers and the state that they led had them as scapegoat and accused
of treason for the weakened state of readiness against the twin threats of
imminent British invasion from sea and French incursion by land. The spec-
tacle of a lynch mob apparently impressed negatively upon Spinoza, and
this challenged his desire to establish a “community of free men” (Melamed
and Sharp, 5). Nonetheless, in his Political Treatise, he dedicated himself to
resolving the problem of controlling passions and harnessing them (these
passions) toward common good, leading him to develop his principle of
conatus (power). But just as he was concerned with controlling the pas-
sions of the multitude, he was particularly concerned with the passions of
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

political leaders and statesmen that lead them to corruption and who disre-
spect the law, sacrificing common interest for their private ends and turning
“civil order into a state of hostility” (as quoted in Melamed and Sharp, 6).
Spinoza’s thoughts have, interestingly, taken center stage in the tril-
ogy of works by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri commencing with
Empire (2000), followed by Multitude (2004), and, finally, Commonwealth
(2009). In this massive undertaking, Hardt and Negri have sought to
explain and help their readers make sense of contemporary neoliberal glob-
alization. In the first of their trilogy, Empire, Hardt and Negri describe the
concept of empire in a way that might surprise many. In their Preface, they
open with the words: “Empire is materializing before our eyes” yet they
do not associate this with any territorially based empire as it was in the
previous three centuries. Rather, they explain that “[a]long with the global
market and global circuits of production has emerged a global order, a new
logic and structure of rule – in short, a new form of sovereignty. Empire
is the political subject that effectively regulates these global exchanges,
the sovereign power that governs the world” (Hardt and Negri 2000, vi).
They then make the qualification that while the sovereignty of the rest is
diminishing, reduced to surrogacy, the sovereignty of this empire, deterri-
torialized as we speak, is increasing and “has taken a new form, composed
of a series of national and supranational organisms united under a single
logic of rule. This new global form of sovereignty is what we call Empire”
(Hardt and Negri 2000, xii). They deny that the United States is the center
of this new imperialist project. With this emergent new order along with its
“enormous powers of oppression and destruction,” one should not despair.
Hardt and Negri assure us that “[t]he passage to Empire and its processes
of globalization offer new possibilities to the forces of liberation. Glob-
alization, of course, is not one thing, and the multiple processes that we
recognize as globalization are not unified or univocal” (Hardt and Negri
2000, xv). The multitude has a task to do:

Our political task, we will argue, is not simply to resist these processes but
to reorganize them and redirect them towards new ends. The creative forces
of the multitude that sustain empire are also capable of autonomously con-
structing a counter-Empire, an alternative political organization of global
flows and exchanges. The struggles to contest and subvert Empire, as well
as those to construct a real alternative, will thus take place on the imperial
terrain itself – indeed, such new struggles have already begun to emerge.
(Hardt and Negri 2000, xv)
12 K. E. BAUZON

Hardt’s and Negri’s deployment of concepts from Spinoza is duly

acknowledged, most notably the concepts of sovereignty, democracy, and
multitude. Hardt and Negri restate an axiom that Spinoza has observed,
i.e., that the form of government is of little consequence—be it monar-
chy, aristocracy, or democracy—because in the final analysis “only one”
ends up ruling: the monarch for the monarchy, the few for the aristoc-
racy, and the many for democracy (Hardt and Negri 2004, 328). In this
respect, sovereignty as a dominant concept in traditional political philos-
ophy serves as “the foundation of all” because “one must always rule and
decide” (Hardt and Negri 2004, 329). However, a surprising turn occurs
when it comes to applying Spinoza’s concept of multitude, Hardt and Negri
appear to back off and come up with their own interpretation, leaving
Spinoza behind. Hardt and Negri write:

We insisted earlier that the multitude is not a social body for precisely this
reason: that the multitude cannot be reduced to a unity and does not submit
to the rule of one. The multitude cannot be sovereign. For this same reason,
the democracy that Spinoza calls absolute cannot be considered a form of
government in the traditional sense because it does not reduce the plurality
of everyone to the unitary figure of sovereignty. From the strictly practical,
functional point of view, the tradition tells us, multiplicities cannot make
decisions for society and are thus not relevant for politics proper. (Hardt and
Negri 2004, 330)

With the general acclaim that the trilogy has received, particularly
Empire, and the instant international celebrity status conferred on Hardt
and Negri by the corporate media and the academic establishment, one
wonders if their work is supposed to provide a radical alternative, in
any practical sense, to the existing imperial order that they describe.
Despite Hardt’s and Negri’s reputation as intellectual activists, with Hardt
ensconced in his position as professor of literature and Italian studies at
Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina, United States, and Negri as
an established figure in Italian politics, having personally suffered perse-
cution and actual imprisonment in the aftermath of the murder of Italian
Prime Minister Aldo Moro in March 1978 by the Red Brigades, the tril-
ogy does not exhibit the sharp critical edge of a Marxist analyst. It does
not even acknowledge historical materialism as the starting point of this
analysis as though consciously shy about it. The multitude referred to in
the work is not the working class that Marx alludes to as the progenitor of
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

revolution. Hardt and Negri seem to fail in making a distinction between

the high-profile protests in Seattle, Washington, against the WTO or in
Genoa, Italy, against the G8 Ministerial Conference, on the one hand, and
the down-to-earth resistance to neoliberal policies, e.g., water privatization
in Cochabamba, Bolivia, land privatization in Chiapas, Mexico, and the
diminution of food sovereignty in the Third World through food patent-
ing by the heavily subsidized and globally verticalized biotech and food
producing industry. More significantly, Hardt and Negri seem to ignore
altogether the role of genuine anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist revolu-
tionary movements in the peripheries of empire, the sort of movement led
by Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, and Amilcar Cabral, movements that have
borne the savage brunt of this empire but which have remained resilient
in their resistance through revolutionary violence. By not identifying the
United States as an empire in its own right, history, and motives, Hardt and
Negri, in effect, absolve it of any culpability, and by identifying abstractly
the network of global neoliberal institutions, e.g., the WTO and an assort-
ment of regional trading schemes, the World Bank and the IMF and their
regional surrogates like the Asian Development Bank, as “organisms,” they
also fail to assign proper blame to these reactionary institutions that have,
in a concrete sense, performed well in propping up what should rightly be
described as the American empire and have ignored the actual dynamics
and mechanisms by which this empire has used these to its advantage. In
invoking Spinoza, they have, in fact, blunted the edges of his critical phi-
losophy against empire, even implying that, in the domestic scene, he was
an advocate of conformity to the “universalistic” norms (or common cul-
ture in today’s multiculturalist terminology) of a liberal state, based on his
presumed experience as a member of a discriminated minority community
in Holland, thus turning him, in effect, a defender of the status quo. In
reality, Spinoza was anything but this. In the Preface to Commonwealth,
Hardt and Negri rationalize this project as follows: “With the title of this
book…, we mean to indicate a return to some of the themes of classic
treatises of government, exploring the institutional structure and political
constitution of society” (Hardt and Negri 2009, xiii). Then in Part 4 of
the same book, in the chapter “Metropolis,” Hardt and Negri develop the
concept of the metropolis as “the skeleton and spinal cord of the multi-
tude [a term they derive from Spinoza but which they use to mean simply
“humanity”], that is, the built environment that supports its activity, and
the social environment that constitutes a repository and skill set of affects,
social relations, habits, desires, knowledges, and cultural circuits” (Hardt
14 K. E. BAUZON

and Negri 2009, 149). They add: “The metropolis not only inscribes and
reactivates the multitude’s past – its subordinations, suffering and strug-
gles – but also poses the conditions, positive and negative, for its future….
We understand the metropolis… as the inorganic body, that is, the body
without organs of the multitude” (Hardt and Negri 2009, 149).
The essence of the above-quoted passages from Hardt’s and Negri’s
series of books is not missed by San Juan who regards Spinoza’s philos-
ophy of freedom as an essential “intellectual weapon for the victims of
imperial power, a resource of hope against nihilism and fatalistic commod-
ification” (San Juan 2004, 344). San Juan further cites the “inalienabili-
ty” of Spinoza’s principle of human rights arguing that it “can renew the
impulse for reaffirming the ideal of radical, popular democracy, and the self-
determination of communities and nations” (San Juan 2004, 344–345).
However, when San Juan turns his critical attention to Hardt’s and Negri’s
application of Spinoza’s notion of multitude as a vehicle for the “democracy
for the multitude,” and he discovers that Hardt’s and Negri’s democratic
multitude requires “no external mediation by any organization or party”
and that, San Juan continues, “the multitude’s constituent power somehow
will by itself actualize desire in action in a possible form of direct democracy
as the absolute form of government” (San Juan 2004, 345). This flaw illus-
trates the vagueness and indeterminacy of Hardt’s and Negri’s proposed
attempt at constructing an alternative “commonwealth,” complementing
the abstraction with which they define “empire” and the liberty they take
in interpreting Spinoza’s notion of “multitude.”

The Present Task

Given the foregoing discussion, the remainder of this work seeks to critically
identify the dual legacy of the Enlightenment as having brought progress
to Europe and colonization to much of the rest of the world touched by
colonialism. It seeks to draw the continuity between European dominance
over the past four hundred years, on the one hand, and America’s contem-
porary global hegemony, on the other. While the former was accomplished
through direct control of the subject peoples, the latter is sustained through
a series of semi-autonomous institutions operating under rules and princi-
ples that allow the United States a predominant voice and influence within
them. More importantly, the present work seeks to understand historical
and intellectual antecedents, particularly those that happened prior to the
twentieth century as the young American republic ventured out into the
 1 INTRODUCTION 15

Caribbean and the Pacific in fulfillment of a role that was understood to be

manifest, shaping how it emerged as the preeminent empire that it is today.
It seeks to validate a belief on my part but which was articulated by Ince
in an above quote, repeated here as follows: that the resort to force consti-
tutes, as it has constituted, “a dynamic internal to the historical emergence
of global capitalist relations within the politico-legal framework of colonial
empires ” (Ince 2018, 133–134) (italics added).
Along these lines, to be featured early in the discussion, is America’s
use of force in 1840 in the Fiji island group, herein taken as setting
the pattern for the use of force against peoples of color outside what
was considered the US proper, but paralleling the use of similar force
against the indigenous peoples and the descendants of black slaves within
the US mainland. But understanding the use of force accompanying the
emergence of the United States as an empire would not be complete with-
out the use of guile, ruse, and deception short of the use of force. One
or the other of these means has been used, and historians have duly noted
them as in the US pretense to aid and assist the Cuban revolutionaries in
their effort to overthrow Spanish colonial rule in 1898, only to own Cuba
motivated by the broader motive to assert hegemony over the Caribbean
region and, in particular, to claim a stake in the future of the Panama Canal.
Cuba would be “freed” only under the nefarious conditions laid down in
the infamous Platt Amendment of 1903, crafted by then Secretary of War
Elihu Root and introduced to the Senate by Connecticut Senator Orville
Platt as a rider to the Army Appropriations Bill of 1901, adopted by the
US Congress, and signed into law on May 22, 1903.3 The amendment
promised independence to Cuba only if, among others, Cuba would agree
to allow the United States to intervene in Cuban affairs at any time the
United States deemed necessary; if it agreed not to borrow money from
foreign sources without the permission of the US Congress to defray its
own expenses, including debts; and if it allowed the United States to estab-
lish a military base (subject to subsequent negotiations, resulting in the
establishment of the Guantanamo base the agreement under which may be
nullified only upon mutual consent of both parties, meaning, in practice,
from the US standpoint, never). To an observant historian, this is typical of
the unequal treaties imposed by European colonial powers on their hapless
colonies wanting independence throughout much of the nineteenth cen-
tury, lasting through the mid-twentieth century, and the American behav-
ior in this particular case is in no way exceptional to that by its European
competitors.
16 K. E. BAUZON

The overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893 wherein the US

Navy, in effect, outsourced the task of overthrowing the Hawaiian monar-
chy under conditions of plausible deniability to a private group of thirteen
US citizens many of whom also happened to be descendants of God-fearing
and Bible-thumping lay missionaries, Samuel Northrup Castle and Amos
Starr Cooke, landed in Hawaii as part of the American Board of Commis-
sioners for Foreign Missions. In 1851, Castle and Cooke formed a busi-
ness partnership, initially operating a department store. The partnership has
since grown into one of the world’s leading producer of fresh agricultural
products.
Members of the above-named private group, organized into an
Orwellian-type clandestine organization called the Citizen’s Committee
of Public Safety, were motivated by their desire to have Hawaiian land, at
the time under communal ownership protected by the monarchy, declared
open to privatization; they also envisioned ultimate annexation of Hawaii,
under their leadership into the United States. For its part, the US Navy,
influenced by Alfred Thayer Mahan’s ideas about US Navy-led imperialism
in the Pacific, began asserting its presence in the Pacific vis-à-vis European
competitors. Essential to this program is the acquisition of a much-coveted
deep water port, in a protective cove, in Hawaii which came to be known as
Pearl Harbor. The coup against the Hawaiian monarchy made this acqui-
sition a reality.
By the time the US acquired the Philippines in the aftermath of the
Spanish-American War in 1898, the United States appeared to have the
knack and appetite for more easy victories. The dynamics and speed with
which the American Empire established itself as a Pacific power was a real-
ization of the Tyler Doctrine promulgated by President John Tyler in a
special message to the US Congress on December 30, 1842, barely two-
and-a-half years after the Malolo Massacre, in which the United States
sought to replicate in the Pacific the Monroe Doctrine designed for the
Caribbean and the Americas in general.4 The Tyler Doctrine invoked how
the inhabitants of the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii) needed US protec-
tion, but behind which was the desire to satisfy the need of US whaling ves-
sels plying Pacific waters for a coaling station and the protection of the US
navy from potential competitors, a guise for securing—albeit as a latecomer
relative to European competitors—the broader economic and commercial
interests of the United States around the Pacific rim, particularly China.
What will be described below will all sound very familiar to the Native
Americans who have been subjected not only wanton violence but also
 1 INTRODUCTION 17

to chicanery, false promises, deceptions, duplicities, and broken treaties

throughout much of their history dealing with the US government. This
commences with the arbitrary action by Spain in 1898 to cede—and the
United States agreeing to purchase—the entirety of the Philippines, a ter-
ritory over which it had little or no effective control by 1898, except for a
fort in Manila (called Intramuros). In a manner that paralleled US actions
in Cuba, under pretense of humanitarianism and military assistance against
a colonial power, the United States, in effect, duped the leadership of the
Philippine Revolution, again under conditions of plausible deniability, by
appearing to provide small arms to the Filipino rebels and causing them
to expect independence after the overthrow of Spain, only to be pursued
in a vicious counterinsurgency campaign leading to the death of over a
million Filipinos—both noncombatant civilians and rebels—in the imme-
diate years that followed. The final act was the conquest and pacification
of the Moroland over which Spain never exercised effective sovereignty in
its more than three centuries of colonization of the Philippines but which
Spain arbitrarily included in the sale to the United States. This process saw
the duping of the Sultan of Sulu, yet again under conditions of plausi-
ble deniability, through a misleading translation of the Bates Treaty, by a
German national hired as translator on a retainership by the US military
and whose family maintained agricultural and commercial interests in Sulu,
causing the latter (the Sultan of Sulu) to believe his sovereignty over the
Sulu Sultanate would be respected by the United States. The US military’s
duplicity in Sulu was followed by the pacification of both the Maguindanao
Sultanate in the heartland of Mindanao as well as the Maranao Sultanate,
in the Lake Lanao region of northern Mindanao, through an assortment
of tactics as cooptation, divide and rule, and, when peaceable means failed,
scorched-earth methods against recalcitrant datus (chieftains) and their vil-
lages, invoking US conceptions of law and order held to be applicable in
the southern Philippine setting as well as the rest of the country for that
matter.
The pacification of the Philippines and of the Moroland, in particular,
has been held up ad nauseum as models of counterinsurgency by US-based
military historians, and the tactics and strategies developed, along with the
experience gained, during the Philippine campaigns have been found to be
instructive enough for inclusion in series of field manuals in most, if not all,
of the services of the US military, e.g., army, marines, navy, and air force.
Policing has also benefited from the experience particularly with the estab-
lishment of the Philippine Constabulary, later to influence the formation of
18 K. E. BAUZON

the Moro Constabulary, both reactionary quasi-military police forces use-

ful not only in pursuing rebels and bandits alike short of the full use of the
military but also in gathering intelligence and for the monitoring of village
population in the service of the foreign occupier. These studies, however,
presume the moral ascendancy of the US colonial order, the inherent evil
or misguided nature of the forces opposed to it, e.g., the anti-imperialist
resistance, and the ahistorical manner in which they disseminate knowledge
to generations of readers. Under these conditions, the US-led “war on ter-
ror,” especially since 9/11 at the peak of American unilateralism, has been
conducted in a manner that the United States has virtually been unchal-
lenged in defining who the enemy is, and in not being held accountable for
the innocent lives taken in the name of this “war.” Moreover, this war on
terror has spawned the growth of anti-terror-related industry producing
new weaponry and surveillance equipment, strengthening the hand of the
state but eroding civil liberties.
The academia has not been left unaffected as various institutions, often
with funding from government agencies or in collaboration with them, have
established anti-terrorism-related research institutes. Semi-independent
and semi-private research institutes have also been founded for similar pur-
pose, often making themselves available for commission, and for a fee, to
conduct studies on the causes and nature of terrorism either in general or
in specific cases. Many of these organizations conduct political forecasting
studies or risk analyses in behalf of security-related government agencies or
corporations wishing to make the best investment decisions under condi-
tions of neoliberal globalization. What is common to all these institutions
is their use of social science techniques, appearing to the both empirical
and dispassionate about which the academicians and researchers feel good.
What is not recognized, however, is the virtual weaponization of an entire
discipline—social science—deployed at the service of institutions that serve
as props for the neoliberal order and affirming, directly or indirectly, the
central role that the American Empire plays in maintaining it.
This study seeks to highlight episodes in the rise of the American empire
in the Pacific, particularly in the Philippines, that usually get ignored or
papered over by mainstream historians. However, this goal is secondary
to the broader purpose of drawing links between capitalism as a system of
accumulation of value, the American empire as the preeminent state that
ensures the persistence of this system amidst potential competing systems,
and the contemporary neoliberal globalization, as a reincarnation of classi-
cal colonialism, and invested with all the accoutrements essential to conquer
 1 INTRODUCTION 19

the commons for private profit, and, in the process, negate the meaning of
“public” from daily vocabulary as institutions of the state are converted as
conduit of public funds for private corporate welfare, all under the watchful
guidance and supervision of the American empire.
By defining its goals as such, I seek to align this work with those by
others who have labored to affirm the emancipatory purpose of knowledge
production and to contrast it to those who seek to place it at the employ
of the neoliberal global order. It is hoped that the reader gets the sense
of what history means to San Juan who recognizes that history’s teleol-
ogy and trajectory, rather than unilinear, are dialectically characterized “by
all kinds of cleavages, ruptures, discontinuities [to which humanity is sub-
jected] inherited from the past and reproduced daily by the unequal divi-
sion of international labor and distribution of resources” (San Juan 1995).
San Juan agrees with Edward Said that much of these disruptions have
emanated as a result of European colonial intervention. San Juan writes:
“In Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism, Said has cogently shown
how the Western epistemological construction of Other in the various dis-
ciplines serves the goal of asserting its own supremacy. The modalities of
the West’s representation of other peoples do not furnish objective knowl-
edge; instead they fulfill the historical agenda of confirming the ascendant
identity of the British, the French, the European in general, over against
non-Western/non-Christian peoples” (San Juan 1995).
Put in another way, the dominant Western idea of history is premised
on the Enlightenment concept of progress, with science playing a central
role in the production of knowledge, in the mastery over nature, and in
the art of governance. The logical culmination of this is the subordina-
tion of the individual to the state, and that of the Other to the Self, that
Said was describing. To San Juan, history’s teleological orientation con-
notes a dialectical struggle wherein the individual gains, in an immediate
sense, liberation from Western colonial and imperial domination. San Juan
writes: “‘National liberation’ is the phrase I used earlier to counterpoint
transnational postmodernism. Why can we in the Third World not skip this
stage since ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’ have acquired dangerous, pejorative
implications in the West? Because it sutures the fragments of colonized
lives in popular-democratic mobilization and so creates the historic agency
for change. Otherwise no collective transformation, only individual con-
versions. Its negativity possesses a positive side: it restores what [Mikhail]
Bakhtin calls ‘the dialogical principle’ as the matrix of social practices” (San
Juan 1995) (bracket added).
20 K. E. BAUZON

Notes
1. On the salience of the Third World as a specific place of origin for many
artists and scholars who now find themselves in the “belly of the beast,”
San Juan offers the following reflections, writing in the last decade of the
twentieth century: “Amid the ruins left by the whirlwinds of this century, we
find writers from the ‘Third World’ (the term is itself a survival of the Cold War
era) still writing/unwriting places, giving their habitations distinctive names
and singular histories. From inside the ‘belly of the beast’ (to evoke the great
Jose Marti’s sense of displacement), I offer the following notes as homage
to those kindred spirits, heirs of the rebellious Caliban, who are carrying on
their struggle to map on the terrain of the imagination the space for the
memoirs, sacrifices, and hopes of multitudes.” This homage is Chapter 9,
“Beyond Postmodernism; Notes on ‘Third World’ Discourse on Resistance,”
in Hegemony and Strategies of Transgression: Essays in Cultural Studies and
Comparative Literature (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press,
1995), p. 193. Later in the same chapter, San Juan offers reassuring words
as well as advice to the “kindred spirits” as follows: “For peoples who are
victims of the ‘modernist project’ of mastery over nature and all ‘the rest’, it
is less a matter of figuring out whether or not postmodernist styles can signify
their lived experience as one of defining first their collective predicament as
non-represented or unrepresentable in the present global hierarchy of power.
Subalterns have to seize the means, the occasions, to invent their own strategy
of resistance and self-presentations. The key lies in the nature of the modalities
of representation and their geopolitical valence” (ibid., 201).
2. To these thoughts, San Juan adds: “Beginning from the rise of merchant capi-
tal in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the messianic impulse to geno-
cide springs from the imperative of capital accumulation—the imperative to
reduce humans to commodified labor-power, to saleable goods or services”.
See his U.S. Imperialism and Revolution in the Philippines (New York: Pal-
grave Macmillan, 2007), p. xv.
3. For facsimile of original copy, see: https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.
php?flash=false&doc=55#.
4. For text of the Tyler Doctrine, see: https://loveman.sdsu.edu/docs/
1842TylerDoctrine.pdf.

References
Bauzon, Kenneth E., Liberalism and the Quest for Islamic Identity in the Philippines
(Durham, NC: Acorn Press in Association with Duke University Islamic and
Arabian Development Studies, 1991), 219pp. Print.
 1 INTRODUCTION 21

———, “Themes from the History of Capitalism to the Rise of the US Empire in the
Pacific, with Annotations from Selected Works of E. San Juan, Jr.”, Kritika Kul-
tura, 26 (2016): 408–443. In: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/
301338166_THEMES_FROM_THE_HISTORY_OF_CAPITALISM_
TO_THE_RISE_OF_THE_US_EMPIRE_IN_THE_PACIFIC_With_
Annotations_from_Selected_Works_of_E.
Dirlik, Arif, “The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global
Capitalism”, Critical Inquiry, 20, 2 (Winter 1994): 328–356. In: http://jan.
ucc.nau.edu/sj6/dirlikpocoaura.pdf.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Harvard University Press,
2009), 434pp. PDF version available in: http://www.thing.net/~rdom/ucsd/
biopolitics/Commonwealth.pdf.
———, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2010), 448pp.
PDF version available in: http://www.thing.net/~rdom/ucsd/biopolitics/
Commonwealth.pdf.
———, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 478pp. PDF
version available in: http://www.angelfire.com/cantina/negri/HAREMI_
printable.pdf.
———, (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2009), 434pp. PDF version
available in:
———, Multitude; War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin
Books, 2004), 448pp. PDF version available in: http://rebels-library.org/files/
multitude.pdf.
Ince, Onur Ulas, “Between Commerce and Empire: David Hume, Colonial Slav-
ery and Commercial Incivility”, History of Political Thought, 39, 1 (Spring
2018): 107–134. In: http://www.ulasince.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/
02/Ince-2018-Between-Commerce-and-Empire.pdf.
San Juan, E., Jr., Hegemony and Strategies of Transgression: Essays in Cultural Studies
and Comparative Literature (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press,
1995), 286pp.
———, U.S. Imperialism and Revolution in the Philippines (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007), 265pp. Print.
———, Working Through Contradictions: From Cultural Theory to Criti-
cal Practice (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2004), 426pp.
In: https://books.google.com/books?id=POQd0XbRsOQC&dq=San+Juan,+
David+Fagen&source=gbs_navlinks_s.
 CHAPTER 2

Background to Colonialism

Marxism begins with a grasp of the social totality in its historical development.
The key concept is the mode of production consisting of productive forces
and of relations of production.
E. San Juan, In the Wake of Terror (2007)

Early Capitalism as Subject of Study

In exploring the subject of this chapter, salute is given to earlier, much more
comprehensive efforts to understanding the origins and ramifications on
the rest of the world of capitalism and its global expansion over the last
five hundred years. The monumental, critically received two-volume work
of French historian Fernand Braudel, entitled Civilization & Capitalism
15th–18th Century (1979), deserves special mention. While avoiding use
of the historical materialist approach, Braudel nonetheless offers a wealth
of information derived from his social historical approach which he pio-
neered. He influenced later scholars who proceeded to further investigate
the nature of international political economy engendered by capitalism’s
spread worldwide. One of these scholars was Marxist-oriented Immanuel
Wallerstein who, in 1974, began publication of a series, headlined The
Modern World-System, the goal of which was to explore the history of the
global capitalist-oriented economic system, expounding in the process on

© The Author(s) 2019 23

K. E. Bauzon, Capitalism, The American Empire, and Neoliberal
Globalization, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9080-8_2
24 K. E. BAUZON

what has come to be known as world systems theory. Thus, the first vol-
ume was subtitled Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European
World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century; the second volume, Mercantilism
and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600–1750; and the
third, The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World Economy,
1730–1840. Wallerstein’s gratitude to Braudel was evidenced by his found-
ing in 1976 of the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies,
Historical Systems, and Civilizations, based at the State University of New
York, Binghamton. Since its founding, the Braudel Center has hosted a
long line of critical scholars, some of the Marxist persuasion and the major-
ity, non-Marxists, most of whom have contributed to the publication series
and gaining worldwide repute as a pioneering center of critical study.
Another notable book, less sweeping but no less profound book and
influential to my study of the subject, is Michel Beaud’s A History of Capi-
talism 1500–2000 (2002). In this book, Beaud offers a survey of capitalis-
m’s five-hundred-year history, employing his expressly historical materialist
approach to helping the reader make sense of the varied influences, e.g.,
social, political, cultural, religious, and economic, that have all contributed
to the growth, spread, and persistence of capitalism to the present period
albeit in its neoliberal form.

Colonialism and Racism

In the preceding chapter, I discussed some proponents of the Enlighten-
ment legacy that saw Europe as the fountainhead of civilization, on the
assumption that the Europeans were endowed with reason and industry,
attributes that other peoples outside of Europe did not possess. As dis-
cussed, Locke’s views on the matter were representative of those of the
dominant sectors of European society, particularly those of the merchant
class that reaped wealth through a state-induced and state-supported colo-
nial project. The racial implication of attitudes such as those held by Locke
is not hard to discern. For instance, Locke viewed indigenous peoples in
the New World as inferior in their intelligence as well as in their capacity for
industry, two measures that made Europeans distinct from other peoples
outside of Europe. The accumulation of wealth arising out of colonialism,
however, was also creating disparities in economic status so that classes
were emergent, indicating that while the Enlightenment became a ratio-
nale for the economic progress of some in European society, not all were
benefiting from it. This was especially true if one was poor in this society,
 2 BACKGROUND TO COLONIALISM 25

or in settler colonies in the New World and elsewhere, but also if one’s skin
hue is other than European or, in the contemporary term, Caucasian. This
was duly noted by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels whose critique of the
liberal ethos was substantiated by the type of racially loaded colonial poli-
cies that Europe had pursued to define its relationship with the rest of the
world reinforced, later on, by Charles Darwin’s biological theory of natu-
ral selection. Understanding European expansion and colonization partic-
ularly throughout much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in this
context is essential to understanding the race-based nationalism manifest in
the behavior of the European state vis-à-vis its colonies.1 This explains to
a significant degree why, despite attempts to provide moral justification for
the colonial project, e.g., the British sense of the “White Man’s Burden”
and the French conception of “Mission civilisatrice”, the sense of deter-
minism about the superiority of European civilization over non-European
societies has remained palpable, casting doubt as to whether or not the
European colonial venture was, in the end, civilizing or ennobling.2
The implications of these racialized assumptions behind the European
and, later, North American civilizing mission extend beyond merely treat-
ing the non-European race as inferior. Worse, they were treated as property
as John Stuart Mill observed in his 1869 essay on the subjection of women.3
In that essay that caught even Marx’s admiration, Mill alluded to his con-
cern not only about the subjection of women but also to what was referred
to as common law that allowed “something of a free hand” to take slaves,
more specifically, laws and statutes that had, in fact, been passed by the Par-
liament that defined slaves as property, secured the rights of owners, and
facilitated the trade in slaves. Exemplifying this was when Britain allowed,
in 1678, the sale of colonial subjects as though they were commodities.
And, in 1713, under the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht that ended the
War of the Spanish Succession, England was contractually bound to supply
Spain’s colonies with as much as four thousand slaves annually. For its part,
the US Supreme Court decision in the Dred Scott case in 1857 affirmed
the right of slave owners to pursue their fleeing slaves as property. Despite
President Abraham Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation in January 1863
and the subsequent reconstruction period following the Civil War, the for-
mer slaves and their descendants fared not much better, with the insult
added to injury by the High Court’s Plessy decision of 1896 affirming an
apartheid system of race relations in the US.
26 K. E. BAUZON

Capitalism and the State

To say that the passage and enforcement of laws and decisions that normal-
ized slavery on both sides of the Atlantic particularly prior to the US Civil
War were an important foundation for capitalism is an understatement.
Further, religion was part of the legitimating superstructure that allowed
capitalism to flourish and grow. From the historical materialist perspective,
racism and its manifestation through slavery were integral to the economic
structure at the time. This was recognized as much by Du Bois in his 1891
essay, entitled “The Enforcement of Slave Trade Laws” wherein, as San Juan
explains, “Du Bois analyzed the interface between ideology, politics, and
economic structure. ‘If slave labor was economic god, then the slave trade
was its strong right arm; and with Southern planters recognizing this, and
Northern capital unfettered by a conscience, it was almost like legislating
against economic laws to attempt to abolish the slave trade by statutes….’
Legal ideology and economic practice were so intricately meshed that one
cannot privilege one category over the other” (San Juan 2010).
The distinct experience with the dialectical relationship between race
and class in the United States, with its Civil War, and in Britain contending
with Irish resistance, as observed and studied by Marx, has had an effect
on the thinking of Marx, causing him to modify what would have been a
unilinear view of history. San Juan explains this change of mind by Marx,
citing a study by economic historian Kevin Anderson on Marx and the
Third World, as follows:

By 1853, and especially in his studies of Russia and non-western formations

(from 1857 to his 1879–1882 notes on indigenous peoples), Marx formu-
lated a multilinear and non-reductionist theory of social change that did
not focus exclusively on economic relations of production. Anderson con-
cludes that Marx’s mature social theory “revolved around a concept of total-
ity that not only offered considerable scope for particularity and difference
but also on occasion made those particulars – race, ethnicity, or nationality –
determinants for the totality”…. In 1862, before the Emancipation Procla-
mation, Marx had already conceptualized the subjectivity or revolutionary
agency of “free Negroes” as a crucial element in the victory of the Union
forces. (San Juan 2010)

The implications of Anderson’s and San Juan’s assessment of Marx’s

belatedly-discovered multilinear view of history are profound. To begin
with, by accepting the possibility of revolutions being led by non-workers
 2 BACKGROUND TO COLONIALISM 27

outside of the proletarian class, e.g., peasants in agrarian societies, Marx

consciously deviates from the prevailing Eurocentric interpretation of his
earlier views that transition to socialism could only be brought about by
workers in a maturing or mature industrialized society. Second, flowing
from the first, transition to socialism need not require a prior stage of
mature capitalism that creates exploited workers, e.g., the 1917 Bolshevik
Revolution; it may also emerge from semifeudal and agrarian conditions
from among the peasantry that have endured the ravages of colonialism.
And, third, the fact that these conditions have prevailed in much of Asia,
Africa, and Latin America—all continents of color—need not deviate also
from the fact that the racism that these continents have endured for cen-
turies, not dissimilar from the persistent racism endured by peoples of color
within the United States and within each of the European states that have
participated in the colonial enterprise, could not be detached from the
exploitative economic system that largely regarded them as source of labor.
This was pointed out by activist-scholar Angela Davis as she called out the
discrepancy between the liberal idealism of these states, on the one hand,
and the exploitation that has brought them affluence and progress, on the
other, when she wrote: “While the lofty notions affirming liberty were
being formulated by those who penned the United States Constitution,
Afro-Americans lived and labored in chains. Not even the term ‘slavery’
was allowed to mar the sublime concepts articulated in the Constitution,
which euphemistically refers to ‘persons held to service of labor’ as those
exceptional human beings who did not merit the rights and guarantees
otherwise extended to all.”4 San Juan adds his elucidation in clarifying
and in recognizing the inseparability between racism as a construction,
on the one hand, the emergence of classes as function of property rela-
tions, on the other, with the following analysis: “Our key heuristic axiom
is this: the extraction of surplus labor always involves conflict and struggle.
This process of class conflict in which identities are articulated with group
formation, where race, gender, and ethnicity enter into the totality of con-
tradictions between the social relations dominated by private property and
the productive forces, is crucial.”5

Notes
1. Here, San Juan elucidates on this important juncture of European history
wherein the bourgeois class emerged from among “heterogeneous classes”
and, from that position, proceeded to “resolve internal contradictions,” and
28 K. E. BAUZON

to “restructure the state,” in a “national form.” This nationalized state then

intervened “‘in the very reproduction of the economy and particularly in the
formation of individual’ whereby individuals of all classes were subordinated
‘to their status as citizens of the nation-state, to the fact of their being nation-
als’… The key term in this narrative of nationalization is ‘hegemony,’ in this
instance capitalist hegemony (domination by consent) based on the formal
nationalization of citizenship” (San Juan 2007).
2. At this juncture, it is significant to note, for purposes of clarity, that San Juan
makes at least two critically important interventions: first, over suggestions
that Marx, in his Capital, had intended for his mature capitalism in the Euro-
pean setting as rigid requisite for the creation of a proletarian class that would
carry out revolution and that, therefore, this is a model appropriate to emulate
everywhere else; and, second, over suggestions that Marx and Engels would
have endorsed British imperialism particularly in India for its presumably pro-
gressive role in transforming the maligned “Asiatic mode of production,” e.g.,
construction of a railway system throughout India, introduction of civil ser-
vice, promotion of a free-wheeling media, and replacement of (or attempts to
replace) ascriptive inequality, e.g., caste, with ethos of hard work and personal
achievements. In a 2002 essay, entitled “Postcolonialism, Uneven Develop-
ment & Imperialism: The Example of Amilcar Cabral” (a chapter in Crystal
Bartolovich and Neil Lazarus, eds., Marxism, Modernity, and Postcolonial
Studies , Cambridge University Press, 2002), San Juan explains that Marx, in
a letter to a Russian journalist in 1878, clarified his thoughts on precisely this
issue. Part of the letter reads: “[My critic] absolutely insists on transform-
ing my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into
a historico-philosophical theory of the general course fatally imposed on all
peoples, whatever the historical circumstances in which they find themselves
placed, in order to arrive ultimately at this economic formation that ensures,
together with the greatest expansion of the productive powers of social labor,
the most complete development of man. But I beg his pardon. (It does me
both too much honor and too much discredit.) [Here follows the instance of
the Roman plebeians.] Thus events that are strikingly analogous, but taking
place in different historical milieu, lead to totally disparate results. By study-
ing each of these developments separately, and then comparing them, one can
easily discover the key to this phenomenon, but one will never arrive there
with the master key of a historico-philosophical theory whose supreme virtue
consists in being suprahistorical” (1982, 109–110).
On the second point, regarding Marx and Engels’ alleged endorsement of
British imperialism in India, San Juan quotes from a letter written by Marx
himself to the New York Tribune, published on June 25, 1853, in which Marx
intimated: “England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindustan,
was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of
 2 BACKGROUND TO COLONIALISM 29

enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is: Can mankind
fulfill its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If
not, whatever may have been the crimes of England, she was the unconscious
tool of history in bringing about that revolution” (1959, 480–481). Thus,
in shifting the question over to whether or not British imperialism is really
the suitable instrument in bringing about a “fundamental revolution in the
social state of Asia,” Marx’s answer is clearly in the negative, which is hardly
an endorsement of it!
Three other significant points need to be made here. First, San Juan
attributes to Cabral, as signified by this article as a tribute, in order to illus-
trate precisely that a Marxist-inspired revolution could occur—as indeed it
has—in peasant and agrarian, non-capitalist, societies; second, to show dis-
ciples of postcolonialism, whose discipline thrives on, or in celebration of,
the idea of “post-marxism,” that Marxism is alive and well in the peripheries
of the empire; and, three, Marxism, as an idea, transcends both spatial and
temporal limitations imposed by its critics on the discredited assumption that
it is eurocentric and that it has been defeated at the end of the Cold War.
The fact that these revolutionary movements are greeted with fascistic state
violence and propaganda attest to their potency in raising issues that only
they have the courage to raise, e.g., “mode of production”, “accumulation
by dispossession”, “surplus value,” among others (San Juan 2002).
3. For text, see https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mill-john-
stuart/1869/subjection-women/index.htm.
4. See Joy James, ed., The Angela Y. Davis Reader (Blackwell Publishing, 1998),
p. 380.
5. See E. San Juan, “From Race to Class Struggle: Re-problematizing Criti-
cal Race Theory”, Michigan Journal of Race and Law, 11, 1 (2005): 85.
In: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mjrl/vol11/iss1/5. San Juan adds a
salient point: “Given this emphasis on class struggle and class formation,
on the totality of social relations that define the position of interacting col-
lectivities in society, materialist critique locates the ground of institutional
racism and racially-based inequality in the capitalist division of labor - primar-
ily between the seller of labor-power as prime commodity and the employer
who maximizes surplus value (unpaid labor) from the workers. The question
of whose answer would explain the ideology and practice of racial segrega-
tion, subordination, exclusion, and variegated tactics of violence will maxi-
mize accumulation of profit and also maintain the condition for such stable
and efficient maximization” (ibid., 86).
30 K. E. BAUZON

References
Beaud, Michel, A History of Capitalism 1500–2000, 2nd Edition (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 2002), 356pp.
Braudel, Fernand, Civilization and Capitalism 15th–18th Century, Volume I. The
Structures of Everyday Life—The Limits of the Possible. Translation from the
French, Revised by Sian Reynolds (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1979),
623pp.
San Juan, E., Jr., “African American Internationalism and Solidarity with the
Philippine Revolution”, Socialism and Democracy, 24, 2 (July 2010): 32–65.
In: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/Jqxa3MbH6e8pXFCcAHb9/full#.
VcjchPlUWUF.
———, In the Wake of Terror: Class, Race, Nation, Ethnicity in the Postmodern
World (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), 232pp.
———, “Nation-State, Postcolonial Theory, and Global Violence”, Social Analysis:
The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice, 46, 2 (Summer 2002):
11–32.
 CHAPTER 3

The American Empire in the Pacific

…This racial genealogy of the empire followed the logic of capital accumula-
tion by expanding the market for industrial goods and securing sources of raw
materials and, in particular, the prime commodity for exchange and maximiz-
ing of surplus value: cheap labor power. This confirms the enduring relevance
of Oliver Cromwell Cox’s proposition that ‘racial exploitation is merely one
aspect of the problem of the proletarianization of labor, regardless of the color
of the laborer. Hence racial antagonism is essentially political-class conflict’
(1948, 485).
E. San Juan, In the Wake of Terror (2007a)

Justifications and Rationalizations

The modern state system emerged as a consequence of the Treaty of West-
phalia of October 1648, which ended the Thirty Years’ War among warring
European principalities and forces, some wanting to establish religious rule
while others insisting on maintaining a secular order. In a way, this new
order signaled the end of the dominance of the church as the sole deter-
minant of order, and with the decline of the church, so did the concept of
universal ecclesiastical authority. This modern state that ensued was vested
with such attributes as sovereignty and territoriality, and it claimed juridical
authority not only over this territory but also over the resources therein
and the population that resided within this territory, conferring upon them

© The Author(s) 2019 31

K. E. Bauzon, Capitalism, The American Empire, and Neoliberal
Globalization, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9080-8_3
32 K. E. BAUZON

the status of citizens and as members of a duly formed nation-state. Sig-

nificantly, this state also claimed monopoly to the use of force, forbidding
anyone from using force without its sanction or approval. It maintained a
government that, while it claims to represent the will of its people, more
accurately reflects the will and interests of the class that controls it. It thus
makes laws consonant with these interests, and the enforcement thereof is
designed to extract compliance from among the citizens who are also com-
pelled, at one time or another, to serve in its military force. As described by
sociologist Giovanni Arrighi, reflecting a consensus among many social sci-
entists, the Treaty of Westphalia represented “the reorganization of political
space in the interest of capital accumulation” and, further, signaled “the
birth, not just of the modern inter-state system but also of capitalism as
a world-system” (as quoted in San Juan 2007a). This description echoed
the thinking of a Russian revolutionary theoretician Nikolai Bukharin who
described the power of the modern state as sucking “in almost all branches
of production; it not only maintains the general conditions of the exploita-
tive process; the state more and more becomes a direct exploiter, organizing
and directing production as a collective capitalist” (as quoted in San Juan
2007a).
The inter-colonial competition and rivalry, characterized by wars, dur-
ing much of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, as described
in the introductory chapter of this work, illustrates this exploitative pro-
cess referred to by Bukharin in the above-quote. Motivated by the desire
to accumulate wealth, the mercantile powers of Europe raced across the
globe, competed against each other, and tried to control as much of the
world’s resources, including labor and market, as possible. The slave trade
was an essential component. San Juan quotes Marx as having described
this trade as ushering in capitalism’s “rosy dawn”1 (San Juan 1995). The
inter-colonial warfare is illustrated by the cases of the British-French wars
over Canada, between the 1680s and the 1760s with each side using and
manipulating indigenous Indians as allies; the Opium Wars, fought in vari-
ous stages during the late 1830s through the early 1860s, mainly by Britain
against China but also involving France as a secondary player,2 and the Boer
Wars fought mainly between the British, on one side, and the Afrikaners,
of Dutch descent and who have migrated to and claimed dominion over
much of South Africa during much of the 1890s up until the early 1900s,
on the other. Attempts were made to diplomatically resolve inter-colonial
disputes and minimize conflicts as in the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885,
convened with the precise goal of partitioning Africa. Nonetheless, wars and
 3 THE AMERICAN EMPIRE IN THE PACIFIC 33

skirmishes along predetermined colonial borders were commonplace. And,

in the late 1890s, among the European powers, the Permanent Court of
Arbitration, headquartered at The Hague, was set up in the hope of “seek-
ing the most objective means of ensuring to all peoples the benefits of a real
and lasting peace, and above all, of limiting the progressive development
of existing armaments”; however, this did not prevent the onset of World
War I, which was a result of inter-colonial and inter-imperialist rivalry. These
legal frameworks established proved to be feeble attempts at curbing the
economic aggrandizement and territorial expansion for the maximization
of profit through war, lending credence to the assertions made by V. I.
Lenin, in his 1916 extended essay “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Cap-
italism,” as well as by Nikolai Bukharin, in his 1915 book, Imperialism and
World Economy. As will be shown in the following discussion, the belated
entry into the colonial fray by the United States was undergirded by the
same motives as those held by its European counterparts.

Exploration of the Pacific, and the Pathology

of Violence: The Case of the Malolo Massacre
US leaders pinned their claimed exceptionalism—to be discussed further
below—to their supposed disinterest in acquiring and conquering new ter-
ritories, and that their soon-to-be-manifest westward attention, at least
until the Spanish–American War of 1898, described in another section
below, across the Pacific was claimed to be benign, motivated by nothing
other than participation in the heightening inter-European competition
in commerce and trade in the region. Laying this as a foundation for the
claim to exceptionalism, in apparent contrast with European powers at that
time, historian Nathaniel Philbrick writes: “European powers had served
the cause of both science and empire, providing new lands with which to
augment their countries’ already far-flung possessions around the world.
The United States, on the other hand, had more than enough unexplored
territory within its own borders. Commerce, not colonies, was what the
U.S. was after” (Philbrick, xviii).
It was with this explanation, at least initially and at the surface, that the
United States sought to establish a stronger diplomatic and, eventually, a
military presence throughout the Pacific by the middle of the 1800s. Paving
the way was the commissioning by the US Navy of an exploring expedition
in order to gather intelligence and knowledge about the Pacific, suppos-
edly from top to bottom, through charts that would be of use to American
34 K. E. BAUZON

whalers, sealers, and China traders. It is interesting, as Philbrick notes,

that “[d]ecades before America surveyed and mapped its own interior, this
government-sponsored voyage of discovery would enable a young, deter-
mined nation to take its first tentative steps toward becoming an economic
world power” (Philbrick, xviii).
Thus was the declared intention of the US government when the US
Navy was commissioned, in 1838, to undertake and commence a four-year
scientific exploratory expedition of the Pacific that would lead to the dis-
covery of the Antarctic land- and ice-masses; the Columbia River outlet
to the ocean, following up on the Lewis and Clark Expedition that com-
menced from the inland between 1804 and 1806; and the charting of the
scores of islands that would constitute what would broadly be referred to
as the Fiji Island Group, all recounted in Philbrick’s much-acclaimed book,
Sea of Glory: America’s Voyage of Discovery—The U.S. Exploring Expedition
(2003). The US Ex. Ex., as it has come to be known, was commanded by
one egotistical Commodore Charles Wilkes who, at the time of his appoint-
ment to head the expedition, has been running the US Navy’s Department
of Charts and Instruments for about five years. Wilkes was also to be immor-
talized as the inspiration of Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab in his novel
Moby Dick (1851). As an avid reader of maritime history, Melville studied
and was inspired by the exploits of the Ex. Ex. whose many characters and
experiences would be used as models in his novel. In fact, to anyone famil-
iar enough with the journey of the Ex. Ex. as well as with Melville’s novel,
one could find justifiable comparison between real-life Commodore Wilkes
and fictional Captain Ahab in terms of their character but particularly with
their obsession to control and to conquer, at the cost of sanity and reason,
their respective objectives: in the case of Ahab, the white whale and, in the
case of Wilkes, the white continent at the bottom of the world. But the Ex.
Ex. which Wilkes commanded may also be understood as a metaphor for
something else: the America’s irrepressible, underlying quest to be a domi-
nant, preeminent player in the world of international politics, then as now,
commencing with the Pacific and at the cost of its image as being benign
and exceptional, for right within the recorded history of the Ex. Ex. would
one find contradictions which in the end would belie and negate any claim
to benignity or exceptionalism.
It was as though the first massacre in the Pacific to be committed by the
US military was foreordained against a people of color, the Fijians, an image
about whom has been constructed from impressions gathered from tales
from earlier contacts by other European explorers, e.g., the Swedes, the
 3 THE AMERICAN EMPIRE IN THE PACIFIC 35

British, and the French. In contrast to the sightings by the crew of Peacock
and Vincennes, and to be joined later by the Flying Fish and the Porpoise,
four of five ships commanded by Wilkes in the expedition, anchored, in
early July 1840, near the village of Levuka, of “many little villages peeping
amidst the trees and scattered huts clinging to the projecting ridges of
rocks…” which were, in turn, “hailed with joy our return to the ever green
Isles of the Tropics” following their Antarctic voyage, a more foreboding,
racialized image was forming about the inhabitants themselves that lived in
these villages. Philbrick offers a composite of this image, ultimately proving
prejudicial and detrimental, among members of the crew in the following
passage: “If the landscape was reminiscent of many of the islands they had
already seen, the inhabitants were something altogether different. It wasn’t
just that the Fijians were bigger and more muscular, with darker skin and
curlier hair than the Polynesians; it was the way they presented themselves
to this already nervous group of Papalangi, the Fijian word for the white
people. With a huge club resting on his shoulder, a Fijian warrior made
a most intimidating sight” (Philbrick, 196). In another passage, Philbrick
writes: “Whether it was due to the arrival of a new, more aggressive people
or the result of a rise in population that led to increasing competition
for natural resources, life on Fiji became decidedly more violent. In fact,
warfare appears to have become a way of life. Circular forts were built
just about everywhere, and cannibalism became one of the fundamental
institutions of the islands. In the words of one archaeologist, ‘man was the
most popular of the vertebrate animals used for food’” (Philbrick, 197).
This image of the natives of Fiji was not exceptional. In fact, it was com-
plemented by an image offered to Wilkes in his encounter with Wesleyan
Methodist missionaries from England, who have arrived in the islands in
1837, particularly in the island of Somosomo, to conduct evangelical pros-
elytization among the natives. In the opening chapter of a memoir by two
of these missionaries, Thomas Williams and James Calvert, they write:

The worst deformities, the foulest stains, disfiguring and blackening all the
rest, are the very parts of Fijian nature which, while the most strongly char-
acteristic, are such as may only be hurriedly mentioned, dimly hinted at,
or passed by altogether in silence. The truth is just this, that within the
many shores of this secluded group [of islands], every evil passion had grown
up unchecked, and run riot in unheard-of abominations. Sinking lower and
lower in moral degradation, the people had never fallen physically or intel-
lectually to the level of certain stunted and brutalized races fast failing,
36 K. E. BAUZON

through mere exhaustion, from the mass of mankind. Constitutional vigour

and mental force aided and fostered the development of every crime; until
crime became inwrought into the very soul of the people, polluted every
hearth, gave form to every social and political institution, and turned religious
worship into orgies of surpassing horror. The savage of Fiji broke beyond
the common limits of rapine and bloodshed, and, violating the elementary
instincts of humanity, stood unrivalled as a disgrace to mankind. (Williams
and Calvert, 1–2)

It was with this kind of image that Wilkes and the crew of his ships carried
with them when they arrived in the Fiji Island Group. It was also the image
that they had during the whole time that they conducted their survey of
the islands and in their encounters with the inhabitants of these islands, the
same image which also informed them of how they should behave toward
these inhabitants, a behavior intended to impress upon these inhabitants
the superiority of the white man and his law. An earlier indication of this
was provided by an earlier series of events wherein Wilkes, diverging from
his original mission of conducting a purely scientific expedition, had sought
to extend US law upon an inhabitant, now Chief Veidovi, who had been
accused of having led a massacre a few years earlier—in 1834—against crew
members of the US private merchant ship, Charles Doggett. This incident
was described to Wilkes by an adventurer named Paddy O’Connell, orig-
inally from Ireland but who has accordingly lived in these islands for the
past forty years. O’Connell claimed to have witnessed this massacre and,
based on his word, “Wilkes resolved to bring the perpetrator… to justice”
(Philbrick, 201).
Wilkes resolved to bring Veidovi into custody through a sealed set of
instructions that he issued to Captain Hudson of the Peacock. Hudson’s
subsequent actions later revealed what those instructions were, and they
included, among others, a scheme with which to bring Veidovi into cus-
tody. By today’s standards of international norm and behavior, the scheme
would most likely fall under the category of entrapment, kidnapping, or
hostage-taking, or a combination thereof, for it involved enticing Veidovi’s
brothers to a party onboard, one of them being a current chief, and then
declaring that none of them would be allowed to leave until Veidovi turned
himself in. The scheme worked but at the expense of alienating and mobi-
lizing the whole populace against the papalangi, Fijian term for the white
man, in possible retaliation. The contemplated punishment for Veidovi, at
Hudson’s discretion, was neither execution nor imprisonment but, rather,
 3 THE AMERICAN EMPIRE IN THE PACIFIC 37

a trip to the United States where he would live in forced exile for several
years following which “he would be returned to Fiji, having become a ‘bet-
ter man, and with the Knowledge, that to kill a white person was the very
worst thing a Feegee man could do’” (Philbrick, 202).
Making matters worse, at this time, one of the ships under Wilkes’ overall
command, the Vincennes, captained by a Lieutenant Oliver Hazard Perry,
assisted by second-in-command, a Passed Midshipman Samuel Knox, then
tasked to survey and chart Solevu Bay, was blown ashore by strong gale, and
stranded. Perry and Knox decided to abandon ship on a launch, hoping to
return to Wilkes’, but satisfied only by the safety offered by the open water
from the natives in canoes chasing them. This gave an opportunity for the
excited Fijians to essentially get aboard and loot the contents of the cutter
that the natives thought to be of value. Upon hearing of this development
a few days later, Wilkes had determined to retrieve the boat and all the
looted contents back and teach the natives a lesson in the process. Philbrick
describes Wilkes’ preparations to accomplish this as follows: “Upon hearing
Perry’s report, Wilkes announced that they were going to get the boat back.
He and Hudson would be leading a fleet of eleven boats, eighty men, plus
the schooner, in an assault on Solevu” (Philbrick, 210). As Wilkes and his
expeditionary force arrived at Solevu, he declared to the natives, through a
Hawaiian interpreter, Oahu Jack, that “the natives hand over the boat and
all the articles that had been left in it.” Not having previously encountered
such a “large body of white men [appearing] in arms, offering fight, upon
their very shores,” the native chief agreed to surrender the boat (Philbrick,
211).
But after Wilkes’ officers had inspected the boat and reported to him
that “the men’s personal effects” were missing, Wilkes found a pretext
to display his military might. Philbrick describes what happened next as
follows:

That afternoon, the fleet moved in for the attack. The boats grounded in
about two feet of water, and the men, all of them armed with muskets, waded
the rest of the way to shore under the leadership of Hudson. Wilkes elected
to remain in his gig, which had been equipped with a Congreve war rocket.
The village had been left deserted, and the natives, loaded with their
possessions, could be seen climbing up a nearby hill, where they paused to
watch the ensuing scene. In only a matter of minutes, the entire village was in
flames. The popping of burning bamboo sounded so much like the report of
a musket, that it was briefly believed that natives were fighting back, but such
38 K. E. BAUZON

was not the case. This did not prevent Wilkes from firing a few of his rockets
at the natives up on the hill. Part-way between a skyrocket and a modern-day
missile, the rocket left a smoky contrail before bursting into flame, and the
Fijians could be heard shouting out “Curlew! Curlew!”, or “Spirits! Spirits!”
(Philbrick, 211)

Following the operation, Wilkes and Hudson congratulated each other

for “having punished the insolence of these cannibals without any loss on
our side.” But the burning of this Fijian coastal village, unprecedented
as it was in its fury by the US military against a colored people in the
Pacific in this century, was a mere prelude to another unmitigated display
of brute force. Philbrick offers a premonition to this next episode with
the final sentence in his chapter entitled “The Cannibal Isles” with the
following: “Just eleven days after the burning of Solevu, Wilkes would do as
Dana [James Dana, the expedition’s geologist, in a previous conversation]
suggested. In addition to reducing yet another beautiful Fijian village to a
smoking ruin, he would drench its sands in blood” (Philbrick, 212).
In a roundabout way, Philbrick describes, in the following honestly titled
chapter, “Massacre at Malolo,” how this came about. Without belaboring
the point, this started during the last leg of the Fijian survey of the island
group’s westernmost constellation of tiny islands, by the second half of July
1840. Anticipating exhaustion of food supplies for the crew in the Leopard
and the Flying Fish, officered by James Alden and Joseph Underwood,
respectively, the officers decided to barter, say, some items of interest like
muskets for food with the natives, as fate would have it, in the tiny island of
Malolo. This then led to a chain of events in which the encounter with the
inhabitants did not go very well. In hindsight, contact with the natives was
conditioned by racially tinged arrogance and mistrust by the Americans, on
the one hand, and a combination of naivete and eventual fear by the natives,
on the other, complicated by the ebb and flow of the tide causing at some
point the Leopard to run aground, an event that would prove pivotal later
in the episode. Illustration of this contrasting demeanor was when, one
day, the food search party led by Alden encountered a native who offered
a piece of information about some hogs (four, in fact) that the Americans
might have, in a barter, but which were located in the southern part of the
island requiring a small boat to go fetch them. But Underwood took an
unexpected and, perhaps, unnecessarily provocative decision before Alden
embarked on his mission. As Philbrick describes: “Underwood insisted that
one of the natives, who claimed to be the chief’s son serve as a hostage to
 3 THE AMERICAN EMPIRE IN THE PACIFIC 39

ensure his men’s own safety [as they went to get the hogs]” (Philbrick,
215).
Here alone could one see the contrast in the demeanor between the
Americans and the Fijians: The Americans taking ironically as “hostage”
(Philbrick’s term) one of the natives who have graciously offered hospi-
tality so as the Americans will not go hungry, on the one hand, and the
natives naively agreeing to allow one of them to be held as “hostage” and
apparently thinking nothing of it and showing no malice in providing infor-
mation about the hogs being quite a ways from where they were, on the
other. In fact, the natives even helped push the Leopard into deeper waters,
some in their canoes, when it was in danger of running aground in shallow
waters despite fears on the part of the Americans that the Fijians would
“claim the boat in accordance with Fijian salvage customs” and that the
Fijians “had marked us as their victims,” especially so that some of them,
perhaps out of curiosity, had tried to clamber aboard during the process.
The deterioration of the situation came when the food search party
led by Alden took a little too long to return, making Underwood anx-
ious especially so as the Leopard had once again grounded. At that point,
Underwood decided to walk to a nearby village, accompanied by seven of
his crew, and, with the help of Oahu Jack, the interpreter, took a chance
of chatting with the villagers, congregated in the shade of nearby trees; he
also inquired as to the whereabouts of the hogs. After a while, Underwood
met the village chief, who also happened to be the father of the hostage,
with whom he (Underwood) tried to negotiate directly for the transfer
of the hogs. In exchange for the hogs, the chief had, at that point, asked
“for a musket, powder, and ball,” and, later, as an afterthought, a hatchet
(Philbrick, 217).
Meanwhile, in the course of these negotiations, the tide had once again
risen for the Leopard to return to deeper waters to where Underwood
had noticed Alden and his team had just returned. At around that point,
a group of natives had also ventured, uninvited, into the Leopard in a
canoe. The natives had presumably tried to make contact with the hostage
and, as inferred from what transpired next, had apparently encouraged the
hostage to break free, which he did. As the hostage jumped into the shallow
waters and waded in about two feet of water toward dry land, Alden and
Midshipman William Clark aimed their muskets at him but then decided, at
the last second, not to shoot the fleeing native thinking that “a dead hostage
would provide them with little leverage with the natives” (Philbrick, 218),
40 K. E. BAUZON

Alden lowered his musket and instructed Clark to fire only into the air but
in the general direction of the fleeing hostage.
Upon hearing of the musket fire, villagers started pouring from their
mangrove shades most of whom held some kind of a weapon. The village
chief was almost certain that Alden and Clark had tried to kill his son. The
villagers then ran after Underwood and his teammates, as they tried to
scamper toward their boat, who tried to fire their muskets in self-defense
but had no chance to reload. Midshipman Wilkes Henry tried to assist
Underwood “but was struck in the back of the head by a short club and
fell face-first into the water” and was quickly surrounded by the natives
who began stripping him of his clothes (Philbrick, 218–219). Underwood
himself was hardly able to flee and was struck by a club to the head and
shoulder before dropping to his knees and then to the water, face first.
Alden, who was in the Leopard the whole time, tried to maneuver the
cutter closer to the shore in the rising waters. He also jumped ashore,
though belatedly, to try to give aid to Underwood whom he found to be
“stripped of most of his clothing, lying on his back on the shore” (Philbrick,
220). He then looked around and saw Henry’s body “almost completely
naked” (Philbrick, 220).
It was not long after this incident that Wilkes, who had just returned with
his team of surveyors, onboard his cutter, the Flying Fish, from Linthicum
Island, another part of the island group, had learned that something was
not right, first, through the Leopard’s ensigns pulled at half-mast, then
the Union flag “down” after which he concluded “something must have
happened” (Philbrick, 221). He maneuvered his vessel close to shore, then
on a small boat, then joined Alden in his cutter, the Leopard, where he
viewed the lifeless bodies of Underwood and Henry. Wilkes was reported
to have wept inconsolably, and his men were “excited to fury.” There were
suggestions of hot pursuit of the natives to their village to exact revenge, but
Underwood, believing that if they had done so at that moment, it would
have been foolhardy to do for there were “hundreds of [native] warriors…,
and that there were less than two dozens of them [at the time]” (Philbrick,
221).
Following a burial for Underwood and Henry in the middle of a beauti-
ful islet, in a grove of banyan trees, and away from Malolo where Wilkes had
determined that there was no risk of exhumation by the natives, Wilkes now
had to contend with his officers’ demand that “immediate and crushing
action be taken against the natives of Malolo” (Philbrick, 222). Philbrick
explains that “[a]lthough no one had been more personally attached to the
 3 THE AMERICAN EMPIRE IN THE PACIFIC 41

victims than Wilkes, it was now his responsibility to, in his words, ‘prevent
a just and salutary punishment from becoming a vindictive and indiscrim-
inate massacre’” (Philbrick, 222). However, as subsequent events would
show, it was doubtful whether Wilkes had really intended to prevent vin-
dictiveness or indiscriminate massacre, or both. As everyone anticipated a
revenge action, “the men were already cleaning their muskets and pistols,
filling their cartridges with gunpowder, and making other preparations for
the impending conflict” (Philbrick, 223). “Although Wilkes would later
claim,” Philbrick writes, “that he attempted to exercise due restraint in his
actions against the natives, the journals of his officers tell a different story.
‘[W]ar was now declared against the Island,’ [George] Emmons wrote,
‘& orders issued by Capt. Wilkes to spare only the women & children’”
(Philbrick, 223).
The night of the burial, the Flying Fish, Porpoise, and the Leopard,
patrolled the shores of Malolo. Wilkes and his officers had assumed that
the natives were anticipating an attack and, hence, were also assumed to
be preparing to defend themselves. The following morning, as Philbrick
writes, “three divisions of about seventy officers and men,” commanded
by Lieutenant Cadwalader Ringgold, were landed on the southern shore of
Malolo. They were under instructions by Wilkes to “march across the island
to Sualib, the village where the murders had occurred” and, upon arrival
there, “to kill as many warriors as possible and burn the village” (Philbrick,
223–224). Meanwhile, on the northern part of the island, a fleet of boats
commanded jointly by Alden, George Emmons, and Midshipman Clark
but still under the overall command of Wilkes, landed with the objective of
burning down the village of Arro. The Flying Fish and Porpoise were also
instructed to watch out for fleeing canoes and to pursue and destroy them.
As the land expeditionary force bound for Sualib waded ashore, it
encountered a group of natives who had just boarded three canoes appar-
ently bound for the nearby island of Malololailai. Through the interpreter,
Oahu Jack, the natives were asked where they were from, and when they
replied “Malolo,” Philbrick writes: “Emmons unleashed his blunderbuss,
immediately killing six natives as the rest dove into the water” (Philbrick,
24). The survivors were then segregated: The warriors were put in chains,
while the women and children were put ashore in an exceptional obser-
vance of Wilkes’ initial instruction. Emmons also took credit, as captain
of the Porpoise, for pursuing five other fleeing canoes, each bearing eight
warriors, as they attempted to escape to Malololailai. As Philbrick narrates,
42 K. E. BAUZON

Emmons spotted the canoes at around 4:00 p.m. that afternoon, emerg-
ing from the mangrove swamps. “Emmons had half his normal crew – just
seven men. ‘I thought the odds were too great to allow [the Fijians] any
more advantages than they already possessed,’ he wrote. Emmons raised
the cutter’s sails, which enabled the men who had been pulling oars to take
up their muskets, and sailed for the nearest canoe. Once they were within
range, Emmons opened fire with his blunderbuss. ‘Many were killed at the
first discharge,’ he wrote, ‘and others were thrown in so much confusion
that but little resistance was made.’ One native, however, was able to throw
three spears at Emmons. After successfully dodging all of them, Emmons
could see that the native was reaching for yet another spear. ‘[H]aving
discharged my last pistol,’ he wrote, ‘I jumped into the canoe and jerked
[the] spear out of his hands while Oahu Jack [the Hawaiian interpreter]
dispatched him with a hatchet’” (Philbrick, 228). While one of the canoes
managed to escape to safety, those in the water tried to swim in “various
directions.” Philbrick adds: “After shooting at a group of four natives who
had reached the shallows (killing one and wounding two), Emmons and
his men set to work butchering those still in the water. He later told Sin-
clair that the Fijians’ “heads were so hard that they turned the edges of the
cutlasses and our men had in some cases to finish them off with their boat
axes” (Philbrick, 228). That night, Philbrick tells of a large group of sharks
swimming about the schooner and quotes Sinclair who wrote in his diary:
“[The sharks] must have had their fill of Fiji meat as they refused even to
taste a piece of fat pork that was put over for them” (Philbrick, 228).
Later, the same expedition, a division consisting of about seventy men
led by one of Wilkes’ trusted officers, Lieutenant Robert Johnson, had
approached the village of Sualib, which they found to have been converted
into a fortress. It was surrounded by a twelve-foot deep ditch behind which
was “a ten-foot high palisade built of large coconut tree trunks knitted
together by a dense wicker-work. Inside this imposing wall of wood was
another ditch, probably dug the night before, with the dirt piled up in
front to form a four-foot wide parapet. Natives were already standing in
the ditch, with only their heads exposed, prepared to fire their muskets and
shoot their arrows through narrow openings in the palisade” (Philbrick,
224). Just as the native chiefs, distinguished by their white headdresses,
stood just outside the fort and appeared to taunt the approaching sailors,
and, upon Ringgold’s order, the first in a series of Congreve war rockets
was fired aimed at the fort with the intention of setting the village on fire.
This was followed by a volley of gunfire from the sailors led by Sinclair
 3 THE AMERICAN EMPIRE IN THE PACIFIC 43

as they rushed to the first ditch. Upon seeing the ditch, Sinclair saw the
natives “thick as pigs” as bullets from his men poured through the stockade
“thick as hail” (Philbrick, 225). About fifteen minutes into the slaughter,
another Congreve rocket, launched from a portable launcher with bipods,
was fired hitting the grass roof of one of the houses and then burst into
flames. Congreve rockets were not known for their accuracy but could
do their job if the object is in the general direction of flammable target
which, in this case, wooden houses with thatched roofing. “If the fire should
spread,” wrote Philbrick, “the village would soon become an inferno. A
warrior climbed up onto the roof and attempted to dislodge the rocket,
but more than a dozen guns were quickly trained on him, and he fell, his
body riddled with musket shells” (Philbrick, 226). As the flames spread,
the native warriors abandoned the inner ditch and as they ran, they were
“exposed to unrelenting fire from the sailors’ muskets. Sinclair’s double-
barrel gun became so hot that he couldn’t touch the barrel” (Philbrick,
226). Philbrick quotes from Sinclair’s diary as follows: “The scene was
grand, and beautiful and at the same time horrible what with the volleys
of musketry, the crackling of the flames, the squealing of the Pigs…, the
shouting of men and women and the crying of the children. The noise
was deafening, above which you could hear rising now and then, the loud
cheers of our men with ‘There they go’, ‘Down with them,’ ‘Shoot that
fellow,’ etc. etc.” (Philbrick, 226).
As the flames have exhausted their fury, the sailors attempted to enter
the village. Philbrick then describes their experience as they inspected what
remained of it as follows: “About an hour, some of the men attempted
to enter the village. The heat was still so intense that Sinclair feared his
cartridge might explode. They found calabashes of water, hampers of yams
and many pigs, all burned to death; the villagers had clearly anticipated a
long siege. They found spears, clubs, and muskets that had been abandoned
by the natives in the ditch. In one of the houses, they found Underwood’s
cloth cap—‘all mashed up by the blows which had felled him.’ Most of the
dead had been burned to cinders in the fire, with only four or five bodies,
including that of the young girl, found lying amid the ashes. One of the
victims was identified as the chief whom Sinclair had dispatched with his
pistol. ‘[T]o satiate their revenge’, several of the sailors threw the body into
one of the smoldering houses ‘and roasted him’” (Philbrick, 227).
Philbrick notes that the sailors agreed that the natives have put up a
stiff but vain resistance; they were also satisfied that none of their fellows
suffered any fatality. One sailor, though, suffered a “bad gash in the leg
44 K. E. BAUZON

from an arrow,” but other than this, everyone emerged from the battle
unscathed. Following their complete and total destruction of Sualib, they
then decided to join their comrades in a march to Arro. As Sinclair wrote in
his diary, Philbrick notes, “We continued as we had commenced to destroy
every house and plantation that we came across, and we marched in three
lines, I do not think that one escaped us” (Philbrick, 227). As they arrived
in Arro, by around sunset, Sinclair wrote in his diary that he was impressed
that the village “must have been the most beautiful place situated as it was
beneath the shade of a grove of lofty trees” though it has been turned into
a wasteland, abandoned even before Alden, whose task it was to raze this
village to the ground, which he did. Sinclair wrote further, and with a sigh:
“Thank God we have taught these villains a lesson. [A] load has been taken
off my conscience. I hope, however, we have not yet done with them”
(Philbrick, 227).
One would think at this point that the thirst for vengeance has been
satiated what with the complete razing to the ground of two villages, the
massacre of much of the adult male population there, and the displacement
and dispersal of untold women and children into nearby mountains. But as
Sinclair had intimated in his diary, they were not yet done. As it turns out,
the full and complete satisfaction of Wilkes and his men would come only if
and when the physical and material destruction of Malolo and its population
would be complemented by a total emotional and spiritual humiliation of
what remains of the island’s population, as the next and final episode in this
drama would show. But it would also reveal the psyche among Wilkes and
his men that would give historians an invaluable insight into the thinking
and behavior of men in the US military as a tool of US foreign policy.
The following morning, Wilkes and his men, from their schooner
anchored not far from the beach, noticed a group of natives who appeared
to want to communicate something. So, Wilkes, accompanied by the inter-
preter, got on a small boat and approached the shore. As Wilkes walked
toward the group, the rest of the members of the native entourage with-
drew, leaving behind a woman bearing white chicken as a peace offering,
along with several pieces of items that were taken from Underwood’s and
Henry’s bodies. From his limited knowledge of Fijian customs, Wilkes
understood that it was a customary practice among the natives “for a
defeated people to sue for mercy before ‘the whole of the attacking party, in
order that all might be witnesses.’” Philbrick explains that Wilkes felt that
if he did not insist on this custom to be observed, “the people of Malolo
would ‘never acknowledge themselves conquered’” (Philbrick, 229). So,
 3 THE AMERICAN EMPIRE IN THE PACIFIC 45

Wilkes, took the articles belonging to Underwood and Henry, but rejected
the chicken and told the woman, through his interpreter, that if the natives
agreed, he (Wilkes) would assemble all his men up on a hill in the southern
part on the island later that morning for a ceremony to accept the chicken.
He also issued a warning that if the natives and their chiefs did not show up
for this event at the appointed time later that day, he would resume an attack
against them. By noon, Wilkes and close to a hundred of his men were up
on the hill. He wrote in his diary, “The day was perfectly serene, and the
island, which but a few hours before, had been one of the loveliest spots in
creation, was now entirely laid to waste, showing the place of the massacre,
the ruined town, and the devastated plantations” (Philbrick, 229). The
noontime passed but Wilkes appeared to manage to hold his patience until
about four in the afternoon, when he saw, from a short distance, a long pro-
cession of natives “wailing” and “moaning.” The line stopped at the foot
of the hill, and Wilkes then issued a warning that if they did not climb up
the hill “to do obeisance,” he would “destroy them with his war rockets.”
Fearing further destruction, the natives conformed. Philbrick describes the
scene as follows: “Falling to their hands and knees, with their faces toward
the ground, the natives crawled up the hill to within thirty feet of Wilkes
and his officers. As the natives behind him uttered ‘piteous moans’, an old
man stood and begged Wilkes for mercy, ‘pledging that they would never
do the like to a white man. Offering Wilkes two young girls, which were
quickly refused, the old man said that they had lost close to eighty men,
and that they had considered themselves a conquered people” (Philbrick,
229–230).
Wilkes’ response to all these shows of penance and humiliation, and
Wilkes, through his interpreter, proceeded to give a lecture to the natives
“about the power of the white man, insisting that if anything like this
should ever occur again, he would return to the island and exterminate
them.” And, anticipating their departure for the next leg of their journey,
i.e., a survey of Columbia River from its mouth in the Pacific northwest,
with a planned stop in Hawaii, he instructed the natives that, by the next
day, the natives must all come to the town of Arro “with all the provisions
they could gather and that they would spend the entire day filling casks of
water for his ships” (Philbrick, 230).
The following morning, the natives were in compliance, as seventy
of them had been waiting and tasked by their chiefs to provide, taking
all day, the provisions that had been demanded. As Philbrick describes,
“Three thousand gallons of water…, along with twelve pigs and about
46 K. E. BAUZON

three thousand coconuts. The natives also produced Underwood’s pocket

watch, which had been melted in the fire at Sualib, and Henry’s eyeglass-
es” (Philbrick, 230). Wilkes would later rationalize, according to Philbrick,
that “this was according to their customs, that the conquered should do
work for the victors” (Philbrick, 230). With the demand for provisions
having been fulfilled by the natives, Philbrick adds, not without a grain
of irony: “Wilkes was left with nothing but the enormity of his loss. For
the next few days he would be, by his own admission, ‘unfit for further
duty’” (Philbrick, 230). The loss, of course, that Philbrick was referring
to was the loss of Underwood and Henry to both of whom Wilkes was
particularly endeared, and not that of the natives who had just endured a
whirlwind of a vengeance resulting in a massacre of their own, not to men-
tion the destruction of their villages and plantations. Further, Wilkes nur-
tured lingering ill-feelings toward Alden whom he blamed for the deaths
of Underwood and Henry, feelings which would boil over into accusa-
tions and counter-accusations between him and his officers and men about
how the entire expedition was led and conducted, culminating in a court-
martial in Norfolk, Virginia with a decision unfavorable to Wilkes. But
this was still way into the future. As the expeditionary fleet departed the
Fiji Island Group by mid-August, 1940, just had to vent his anger at one
more object: Veidovi, the native chief who had been under detention for
having incriminated himself with an admission to playing a leading role
in the 1834 massacre of the crew members of the private merchant vessel
Charles Doggett, was on board the Vincennes bound for the United States
as part of his planned punishment. As a native chief, Veidovi was sport-
ing an immense hair extending as long as eight inches over his shoulders.
Before being taken captive, Philbrick narrates, Chief Veidovi “had more
than a dozen barbers to attend to him; instead of a pillow, he had slept on
a finely-crafted neck-stand that prevented his hair from being crushed at
night” (Philbrick, 231–232). But Wilkes had other ideas. He decided to
get rid of the symbolism, the “last vestige of his former life,” he thought.
Wilkes thus ordered that Chief Veidovi’s hair be trimmed. “A close crop
was made of his head by our ship’s barber,” Wilkes wrote in his diary, “who
was much elated by the job and retained locks for presentation” (Philbrick,
232). Chief Veidovi, on the other hand, was devastated, and Wilkes seemed
to savor the satisfaction of writing down in his diary: “[I]t was sometime
before he [Veidovi] became reconciled to his new costume, and the mor-
tification he experienced in having his huge head of hair [chopped] off”
(Philbrick, 232).
 3 THE AMERICAN EMPIRE IN THE PACIFIC 47

The significance of the episode just narrated above, involving the US

Navy, on the one hand, and the inhabitants of Fiji, on the other, goes far
beyond the scientific mission which the exploring expedition was tasked to
do, which it accomplished. To any critical observer, there are discernible
and mutually reinforcing implications instructive enough to help under-
stand the pattern and conduct of US colonialism and imperialism during
the remainder of this century and beyond, either in the Pacific or else-
where. First and foremost of these, the US economic system, based on a
state-backed system of private accumulation and profit, was held at a status
of preeminence. In fact, the exploring expedition was based on the premise
that it would produce more reliable charts and maps that would assist US-
based private merchants and whalers perform better, and identify locations
of resources which the United States might covet and, thus, would later
return to. This also assisted, no doubt, Commodore Matthew Perry in his
expedition to forcibly open up Japan for trade with the United States in
1853. Thus, anyone interfering with these activities, such as what Chief
Veidovi was charged as committing, would not be tolerated and, instead,
be dealt with seriously and severely. The second implication grows out of
the first: the application of US law outside the US proper. The capture of
Chief Veidovi to be brought to the US for trial and punishment, based on
US law, signifies an early stage of the internationalization of US law and its
enforcement; it predates and precedes the kind of enforcement of US law
seen especially since the so-called war on terror after 9/11.
Beyond the mere enforcement of US law abroad, however, we also see in
this episode the ad hoc creation and application of new rules or laws appli-
cable abroad and applied on non-US subjects or citizens on the premise
that these enhance and/or protect US interests. As an illustration, in April
1840, a few months before the Malolo massacre, Wilkes paid a call to
English Wesleyan Methodist missionary, John Hunt and his wife, Hannah,
who had arrived at the island of Rewa in December 1838, where they stayed
until July 1839 when they moved to another island, Somosomo, where they
remained until August 1842. The Hunts formed part of a dedicated core
of Wesleyan Methodist missionaries that have established missionary out-
posts in the South Pacific, particularly in Australia, New Zealand, Tonga,
Samoa, and, now, Fiji, since 1815. Under a comity agreement, missionar-
ies affiliated with the London Missionary Society, under the direction of
John Williams, would direct their efforts in Samoa, while the Methodists,
under the banner of the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society, would
concentrate in the Fiji Island Group. The arrival of the Hunts in Fiji was
48 K. E. BAUZON

originally to relieve two missionary couples and their children that have
been nurturing a Methodist congregation and schools there, consisting of
several hundred native converts scattered along several villages. The goal
was eventually to set up at least ten mission stations in this island and in
each of the adjoining great island of Vanua Levu and the greater island of
Viti Levu over the coming years. Their arrival further placed them in an
uncomfortable position of having not only to get acquainted with the native
customs, much of which they found objectionable if not repulsive, but also
learn at least a language to bridge the communication barrier. Above all
these, however, is the challenge to secure their physical safety from any one
of the tribes or members thereof who have been found to be quarrelsome
among each other for one reason or another. These inter-tribal or inter-
island conflicts often became a source of concern to the Hunts especially
so as several of the chiefs forbade their members from becoming Chris-
tians. Hunt expressed this concern when Wilkes paid him a visit in early
August 1840 while in Somosomo during which time Wilkes placed at the
missionaries’ disposal one of his ships should they ever wish to relocate to
another island for greater safety. Wilkes wrote in his diary, as quoted by
James Calvert in his narrative history of the Fijian Christian missions with
which Wilkes was in “great sympathy,” unaware or unconcerned, perhaps,
of the ensuing implications of his entanglement with religious work in Fiji,
as follows:

It is not to be supposed, under this state of things, that the success of the
Missionaries will be satisfactory, or adequate to their exertions, or a sufficient
recompense for the hardships, deprivations, and struggles which they and
their families have to encounter. There are few situations in which so much
physical and moral courage is required, as those in which these devoted and
pious individuals are placed; and nothing but a deep sense of duty, and a
strong determination to perform it, could induce civilized persons to sub-
ject themselves to the sight of such horrid scenes as they are called upon
almost daily to witness. I know of no situation so trying as this for ladies to
live in, particularly when pleasing and well-informed, as we found these at
Somosomo. (Williams and Calvert, 39)

Wilkes’ “great sympathy” for the missionaries, however, went well beyond
his generous offer to them for transportation. It also went into inserting
himself into the inter-tribal/inter-island conflict by issuing the warning,
directed in particular to Somosomo Chief Tui Cakau who, at the time, was
at war with the chief of the island of Vuna, that if any of the tribes harmed
 3 THE AMERICAN EMPIRE IN THE PACIFIC 49

the missionaries or threatened their security in any way, he would unleash

his fury upon them like he did in Malolo Island during the previous month.
As described by church historian Andrew Thornley,

In an audience with Tui Cakau…, Wilkes sought greater care of the mis-
sionaries and protection of their property, warning of reprisals if they were
harmed. With the intent to impress his chiefly audience, Wilkes told of two
clashes between ships of his expedition and Fijians. At Solevu, on Vanualevu,
the village was burnt to the ground, with the loss of at least five Fijians after
one of the squadron’s boats was dragged onto the shore. More seriously,
at Malolo in western Fiji, following the murder of two of the expedition’s
sailors, while on a trading venture, the Americans destroyed all the villages
on the island, canoes and yams; the people resisted and between 70 and
150 were killed. The news of the Malolo massacre had spread through Fiji.
(Thornley, 143)

Thornley concluded in his narration that “[t]he visit of Wilkes, and a subse-
quent one from Captain Ringgold, commander of Porpoise, had its desired
effect” (Thornley, 143). One of the missionaries, Richard Lith, a doctor,
wrote in his diary: “[S]ince the American Squadron was in Feejee and pun-
ished two villages in different parts of Feejee, as well as took away a great
chief [in reference to Chief Veidovi]…, the Feejeean chiefs generally have
been made thoroughly afraid” (Thornley, 144). Indeed, not only did the
rest of the chiefs get the message, Chief Tui Cakau too had a change of
heart from being obstinate in his objection to the Western religion and
to the missionaries’ rejection of what they regarded as detestable native
customs, e.g., cannibalism, polygamy, among others. Despite knowing and
believing that every European sailor that came ashore his island has turned
every Fijian woman into a prostitute, Chief Tui Cakau still placed him-
self at the service of the missionaries assuring them that they were free to
choose a site for their school and church, and a temporary dwelling until a
more suitable time and place were found, after the missionaries explained
rather lamely that they were not in control of, or had any influence over,
the behavior of the sailors or what they did.
To acknowledge that the missionaries were grateful to Wilkes for the
benefits that they derived from his visit would be an understatement. Not
only did Wilkes blur the line between religion and the state, he demon-
strated the symbiotic relationship between colonialism and the missionary
enterprise in which one reinforced the other. Wilkes recognized, even at
50 K. E. BAUZON

the subliminal level, that religion was, in the words of San Juan in an impor-
tant interview with cultural scholar Michael Pozo, an important “means of
exacting consent” useful to the Western civilizing mission. In none of the
accounts by the missionaries was there any expression of moral disapproval
or outrage of the ruthless suppression by Wilkes of the inhabitants of Solevu
and Malolo. To the contrary, the missionaries took comfort in these events
having transpired so that they (these events) would serve as a reminder and
a warning to the inhabitants of the islands, especially to their respective
chiefs, and send quivers through their spine and, thus, make the inhabitants
to be more amenable to the presence of the missionaries and their work.
This was significant in one particular area: the subject of property. When
Wilkes was talking about securing the life and property of the missionaries,
he was, in effect, securing the English conception of property, anchored on
private ownership, as opposed to the native Fijian custom of kerekere, or
common ownership. Without them realizing it, the Fijians were gradually
being introduced to the concepts of individualism and private ownership
of property as their way of life was gradually being subverted. On the other
hand, the rules that Wilkes promulgated, met with enthusiastic approval
and endorsement by Hunt with whom Wilkes privately discussed before
announcing them, were tantamount to state-drawn rules and regulations
“relating to the protection of American whale shipping as well as oversight
of Europeans in general” (Thornley, 36). In effect, the state, represented by
Wilkes, serving as guardian of the flourishing privately based inter-oceanic
trading system consonant with the still Euro-centered global market sys-
tem requiring the institution of rationalized tariff and customs practices
and complementary to the rise of nascent industries both in Europe and in
North America at the time. But more than just securing the freedom for
commercial whaling, Wilkes was ensuring that American whalers were able
to secure and procure what at the time was a most important commod-
ity: whale oil essential to industry and the military of a rising nation-state,
e.g., lubrication for locomotives and ammunition. Thus, having been arbi-
trarily imposed on Somosomo’s Chief Tui Cakau for his ratification under
conditions resembling duress, the rules were interpreted as being for the
benefit and betterment of the Fijians, and that these rules were symbolic of
the benignity and rationality of European civilization which the missionar-
ies felt duty-bound to spread. As Hunt wrote in his diary and quoted by
Thornley in his narrative history:
 3 THE AMERICAN EMPIRE IN THE PACIFIC 51

Law and justice are things which are but little known among the people but
the measures now taken are calculated to give them some idea of both. It is
much more honourable to a Christian Nation to improve the Natives by giv-
ing them regulations of this kind than to colonize their country and destroy
the independence and lives of the natives. I am persuaded the American gov-
ernment has no idea of anything in these regulations but the protection of
their shipping etc., and every nation ought to do this. (Thornley, 137)

It is with no doubt, based on the above-account, that religion facilitated

colonialism particularly on the part of the British Empire that was at the
time consolidating its dominance over the South Pacific region, dominance
which the United States was not ready to challenge at that point but from
which it was eager to benefit commercially.3 In the case of Fiji, the Chris-
tian missionaries sought to transform and subvert the customs, habits, and
beliefs of the natives through their church services, and educational instruc-
tions that they set up, creating ambiguity if not a crisis in identity on the
part of these natives in an effort to get them to adopt a new one despite
their belief that they were safeguarding “the independence and lives of
the natives.” In some parts of the colonized areas of the world, children
of indigenous natives were taken away to boarding schools while in some
parts, those who resisted were driven into banishment, often in flight from
the application of force on them.4 In one sense, this was a form of cultural
genocide common throughout the colonized world despite the belief that
such a practice was for their own good. It is likewise with no doubt that, in
the case of the Fiji episode, the display and application of violence on the
part of the US Navy in the incidents described herein were not an aberra-
tion but were, rather, inherent or, more precisely, pathologically inherent,
in the modern nation-state exemplified by the United States, at the time
just over sixty-years in age following its independence from Britain, and
testing and flexing its masculine prowess in the Pacific.5
While apologists for empire and/or well-meaninged missionaries may
look at their respective roles differently, from the vantage point of cultural
theory, there is no denying that the ventures exemplified by the missionaries
as described herein had contributed to the colonial project by reinforcing
the cultural, political, and economic perceptions and practices that distin-
guished them, as representatives of a colonizing civilization, on the one
hand, and the natives of Fiji as recipient subjects to this colonizing enter-
prise, on the other. In the words of cultural theorist John R. Eperjesi, in his
important book The Imperialist Imaginary: Visions of Asia and the Pacific
52 K. E. BAUZON

in American Culture (2005), the distinctions in perceptions, to a critical

observer, are discernible through

the binary oppositions that separate us from them, same from other, domes-
tic from foreign, civilized from savage, developed from undeveloped, cen-
ter from periphery, West from East, progress from stagnation, science from
superstition, and so on. (Eperjesi, 3)

In this book, Eperjesi introduces the term “imperialist imaginary” as a use-

ful conceptual tool with which to understand how the US empire, through
its representatives, such as Wilkes in the story at hand, help define, rep-
resent or, for that matter, misrepresent and/or misrecognize, geography
not so much in a physical sense but, rather, in a cultural sense as being
potentially if not already an actual part of an integral whole, and which
support or legitimize colonial expansion. As Eperjesi explains: “The impe-
rialist imaginary names those practices of representation that project the
vast, dispersed area of Asia and the Pacific as a unified region” (Eperjesi,
2). Further, these practices of representation are culled from

a wide range of cultural materials – novels, poems, essays, advertisements,

films, business, journals – in terms of the mapping functions that they per-
form. All cultural materials project, either explicitly or implicitly, conceptions
and practices of space. That is, they offer historically specific ways of seeing
distances and proximities, boundaries and limits, centers and peripheries,
insides and outsides, and the big and the small, the symmetrical and the sub-
lime, the open and the closed, origins and destinations, not to mention all of
the ambiguous, uncertain, or unfixed areas in between. We tend to think that
our knowledge of geography comes from maps used in geography class, the
news, or the random copy of National Geographic lying around the waiting
room at the dentist’s office. One assumption that connects the various read-
ings brought together here is that people derive their geographic sensibilities
from all sorts of cultural texts. (Eperjesi, 2)

With this conception of mapping, surely Wilkes was engaged in the process
twice over although he may not have been conscious of it: Once, through
the official “objective” survey that he has been tasked to perform; and,
twice, through the accumulated conceptions constructed in his head, such
as the premise that the whole Pacific region—the American Pacific—would
sooner or later fall, and be more clearly defined, within the United States
realm of responsibility, including China as being already the ultimate goal
 3 THE AMERICAN EMPIRE IN THE PACIFIC 53

or destination articulated by merchants, whalers, and fiction writers like

Melville6 albeit in a contrarian role as well as by the advocates of mani-
fest destiny at the time, and drawn informally from an assortment of cul-
tural, religious, and political artifacts that have formed part of his pool of
knowledge and experience, including from the missionaries he (Wilkes) has
encountered in Fiji and affirmed by his treatment of the Fijian natives who
had the misfortune of crossing paths with him.

The Claim to Exceptionalism, Pretext to Imperialism

In a review of the rise of the modern-state system and its association with
violence, San Juan offers his insight as follows:

Typically described in normative terms, as a vital necessity of modern life,

the modern-state has employed violence to accomplish questionable ends. Its
disciplinary apparatus is indicted for committing unprecedented barbarism.
Examples of disasters brought about by the nation-state are the extermination
of indigenous peoples in colonized territories by “civilizing” nations…. (San
Juan 2001)

San Juan also critiques post-modernist commentators on the Eurocentric

conception of the nation-state by focusing largely on its ideologized nature
and which defines identity as based on secular categories of citizenship as
well as the “positivist logic of representation” presuming to supplant kin-
ship or tribal affiliations but ignore the fact that, as San Juan explains, “the
nation is a creation of the modern capitalist state, that is, a historical artifice
or invention” (San Juan 2001). That commonality in language and culture
may characterize a nation, but that is not a final determining factor. For
while this commonality may be expedient and useful to the administration
of a state, it is the fact of “commodity-centered economy” conditioned
by a class-based distribution of wealth and control of labor that matters
above all. This is what many commentators on the subject either miss or
ignore, particularly among post-colonial scholars. They also miss this fact
as the central and essential basis for understanding the state’s intimate rela-
tionship with violence or state-sanctioned force, employed particularly and
often in the fulfillment of its role in the “extraction of surplus value (profit)”
and in the maintenance of a global “‘free’ exchange of commodities” (San
Juan 2001). But more significantly, they miss the fact of manipulation of
nationalism to suit the interests of the class in control of the state and its
54 K. E. BAUZON

instruments of violence. As San Juan explains, “The doctrine of formal

pluralism underwrites an acquisitive, entrepreneurial individualism that fits
perfectly with mass consumerism and the gospel of unregulated market.…
It is within this framework that we can comprehend how ruling bourgeoisie
of each sovereign state… utilizes nationalist sentiment and the violence of
the state apparatuses to impose their will” (San Juan 2007a, 116).
On the part of the United States, it was not so much the territorial
aggrandizement of the European powers that had led the Americans to
see themselves as morally aloof from the Europeans; it was, rather, their
(i.e., the Europeans’) apparent violence and brutality toward their respec-
tive subject peoples particularly toward those that advocated resistance to
their rule. Specific illustrations of these were the Belgian practice of chop-
ping off of the hands of captured escaped slaves in the so-called Congo
Free State commencing in the 1880s; the British practice of beheadings of
captured slave rebels, with their heads impaled in poles planted alongside
roads in Jamaica during the 1820s and 1830s; the French violence toward
the Tuaregs and other indigenous inhabitants of Algerian Sahara during
the so-called pénétration pacifique (“peaceful conquest”) of north Africa
during much of the second half of the 1800s; the viciousness of Portuguese
colonialism creating what has been described as “a management culture of
violent domination and abuse” over its colonial possessions particularly of
Brazil, Guinea, and Cape Verde, and the violent Dutch “civilizing” expedi-
tions in West Papua during the 1880s, again involving beheadings, among
various examples all throughout the colonial period.
Knowing this, any claim by the United States to exceptionalism falls flat
on its face. There is no difference between it and its European colonial
counterparts. Their respective economic systems, along with the concomi-
tant claim to the monopoly of the use of force, are acquisitive in nature
and inherently expansionist and exploitative. Further, in this context, it is
easy to understand the inter-European wars and brutal pacification cam-
paigns of their native subjects during much of the eighteenth and the nine-
teenth centuries, including the practice of reconcentrado deployed by the
Spaniards against native Cubans prior to the US intervention in 1898,
later to be popularly known as strategic hamleting replicated by the US
military during the Philippine pacification campaign but with dismal con-
sequences during its counterinsurgency operations in Vietnam. These were
recounted in Gillo Pontecorvo’s classic 1969 film, Burn, set in the section
of the Caribbean region known as Lesser Antilles in a fictional Portuguese
island of Quemada during the 1840s.7 In that film, we also see recounted
 3 THE AMERICAN EMPIRE IN THE PACIFIC 55

the British manipulation of domestic politics in Quemada, maneuvering

the second-generation Portuguese elites (or creoles ) to declare their inde-
pendence from Portugal; by instilling the illusion of Western civilization’s
blessings which might someday be theirs to enjoy, Britain—though its agent
Sir William Walker (played by Marlon Brando)—managed to manipulate
the native population, i.e., descendants of African slaves, to rebel against
the Portuguese elites and then, managed to persuade these elites to accept
British assistance to quell this rebellion and, in the end, overthrow the
same Portuguese elites that allowed them into the island to begin with.
The character of Brando, William Walker, who was not so much an agent
of the British Crown (although he felt loyalty to and affinity with it) but,
rather, by the British West Indies Company, chartered by the Crown, that
sought to establish sugar monopoly. Walker’s role is a variant of what may
generally be referred to as an economic jackal, a very important background
feature if one wishes to understand the dark side of contemporary neoliberal
globalization described in John Perkins’ book, Confessions of an Economic
Hitman (2005).
Upon the conclusion of the Spanish–American War, under terms of the
Treaty of Paris of 1898, and the proclamation of the defeat of the Fil-
ipino revolutionary forces in the Philippines on July 4, 1901, the shift
in US colonial administration from military to civilian rule was put into
motion. It should be noted that this fairly expeditious shift to civilian rule
has been one of the bases for exceptionalist claim that distinguished the
United States from its European counterparts. Thus, from the onset of
the Philippine–US War on February 2, 1898, until January 20, 1899, the
US President, under war powers, ruled the new colony through the mili-
tary governor. Beginning January 20, 1899, the colony was ruled through a
succession of so-called Philippine Commissions headed by a Commissioner
appointed by the US President. The First Commission, headed by Jacob
Schurman, issued a report expressing the view that “Should our power by
any fatality be withdrawn, the commission believed that the government
of the Philippines would speedily lapse into anarchy, which would excuse,
if it did not necessitate, the intervention of other powers and the eventual
division of the islands among them.”
On March 16, 1900, McKinley appointed the Second Philippine Com-
mission headed by William Howard Taft. This body practically served as
the colony’s virtual government headed by a Governor-General, later to be
subsumed under the Philippine Organic Act of 1902. The Second Philip-
pine Commission was granted limited executive, legislative, and judicial
56 K. E. BAUZON

powers enabling it to issue laws, draw up a penal code, and establish a judi-
cial system, including a supreme court. It was also under Taft’s governor-
ship that a highly centralized public school system was established, in 1901.
With English as its medium of instruction, the Taft Commission authorized
the recruitment of teachers from the United States.8 Under this program,
some five hundred teachers boarded the US transport vessel Thomas in
what Dinah Roma-Sianturi would later describe as a “pedagogic invasion”
(Roma-Sianturi). After just under two decades of US colonial rule in the
Philippines, Charles Burke Elliott, a former member of the (Second) Philip-
pine Commission, expressed quite unabashedly a gendered and racialized
representation of the US empire, in his 1917 report detailing the accom-
plishments of the Commission and using these with which to compare, with
a sense of pride and confidence, the US empire with the European pow-
ers. Recalling Admiral George Dewey’s victory over the Spanish armada
at the Battle of Manila Bay in May 1898, and using the affectionate and
genderized term “Columbia” to refer to the United States, Elliott wrote
that Columbia “was then full grown, and Dewey’s battle in Manila Bay was
regarded as a sort of national coming out party. Henceforth she was to be
considered in society.” As such, the debutante apparently lost any inhibi-
tions with regard to taking up any responsibility for expansion. In another
breadth, Elliott justified this expansion because “virile nations are and have
always been colonizing nations” (as quoted in Opisso). Elliott also took
pains to elaborate albeit with flair and exaggeration on US exceptionalism,
and why the United States was different from the European powers, in the
following passage:

America has controlled the Philippines for seventeen years, nearly a third
of which were years of war and organization. In the short time, she has
demonstrated not only that her people possess the Englishman’s capacity for
governing dependencies, but that they have a certain quality of enthusiasm
for high ideals which British colonial history has not always disclosed and to
the lack of which friendly foreign critics attribute her present difficulties in
India and Egypt. Law, order, and justice prevail in the Philippines as in all the
British colonies. The Filipinos have their national aspirations, their agitators,
sedition mongers, irresponsible politicos and objectionable newspapers. They
are as eager for self-government as the Indians and the Egyptians, but it is a
noticeable fact that these conquered, irritable, and excitable people have not
thrown a bomb or attempted to murder an American official. America’s policy
has not been repressive; it has not been presented a stone wall of opposition
 3 THE AMERICAN EMPIRE IN THE PACIFIC 57

to native aspirations, and it gives every indication of being successful. (as

quoted in Opisso)

The claim to the exceptional nature of US imperialism, based on patently

less than truthful description of Filipino resistance to US rule, particularly
as distinguished from the European variety, is reinforced—uncritically as it
is—by mainstream scholarship particularly on the part of US-based writers
and academicians imbued with the functionalist framework. San Juan cites
as a matter of example, the 1982 work of David Joel Steinberg, entitled The
Philippines: A Singular and a Plural Place. In this book, San Juan observes
that Steinberg gives credit to Filipinos at “both the elite and peasant lev-
els,” having presumably undergone a growth and maturation process as in
an organism and for behaving in such a manner as to positively influence
US policy and cause US colonialism to be a “self-liquidating” one, a feat
hardly matched by any European colonial counterpart. San Juan goes on
to explain:

The trope of tutelage, the notion of American “exceptionalism,” the evolu-

tionary metaphor of “maturation,” people of color as infantile wards, and so
on-all these inform a whole corpus of texts formulating the legitimacy of U.S.
occupation of the Philippines, from those of LeRoy, Worcester and Forbes to
Hayden, Taylor, Stanley, Friend, May, and Karnow. Hence, Steinberg argues
that mass education leading to functional literacy provided the technocrats,
bureaucrats and functionaries of Taft’s “Filipinization” campaign. This in
turn “diffused the tight control of an interlocked and interrelated class” by
the proliferation of subelites. (San Juan 1998)

San Juan elaborates on the theme of Filipino maturation, particularly

on the part of the oligarchic elites whose appetite for power has apparently
been restrained by education and inculcation of democratic values, for hav-
ing presumably won the confidence of the US colonial administrators to
be worthy enough to be awarded independence, as follows:

Accompanying this apology for U.S. colonization is a view that has become
hegemonic in U.S. scholarship, namely, the Filipino elite’s success in forcing
“the American reformers [such as the Schurman and Taft commissions] to accept
them and their world view.” In short, responsibility for the failure to radically
transform the unequal power and property-relations does not lie with the
American colonial administrators or with U.S. federal policies; it lies with
the Filipino elite. Steinberg invokes the notion of “compadre colonialism,”
58 K. E. BAUZON

the policy of attraction and accommodation in which both sides, rulers and
ruled, recognized the mutual advantages in their collaboration. Steinberg
concludes his summary of the U.S. colonial period: “The Americans surren-
dered to the ilustrados the means to achieve that goal [of making the Philippines
the U.S. “showcase of democracy”]. The result was an odd mixture of theory and
expediency, a perpetual compromise, a modern variant of indirect rule.” (San
Juan 1998)

Another US-based writer whom San Juan trains his critical eye on is
Stanley Karnow, author of the popular book, In Our Image: America’s
Empire in the Philippines (1989). San Juan describes this book as “proba-
bly the most effective tool of persuasion for what I would call the apologetic
mode of Filipinology sustained by the insidious epistemological paradigm
of structural-functionalism of the Cold War era” (San Juan 1998). San
Juan is particularly critical of the deployment by Karnow of the function-
alist mode of analysis used to explain presumed Filipino cultural values as
pakikisama (tendency to get along), utang na loob (debt of gratitude), hiya
(sense of shame), amor propio (self-esteem), and the compadrazgo system
(extended non-blood family ties through baptismal and wedding sponsor-
ships, etc.). These are used as a double-edged sword by self-anointed Filipi-
nologists like Karnow to explain, on the one hand, the apparent resilience of
the Filipinos in the face of colonialism and, on the other, as cultural imped-
iments to progress, leading Karnow to conclude, as San Juan explains, that
the US failure “to transform the Philippines into an authentic democratic
society” was essentially due to these. In Karnow’s words, Filipinos were
“trapped in a tangle of contradictions … History is responsible” leaving
the US policy little or no room but to accommodate “Filipino traditions”,
including the “baffling web of real and ritual kinship ties” (San Juan 1998).
This clever sleight-of-hand on the part of apologists like Karnow to
essentially exculpate the United States from any responsibility for the con-
duct of the military conquest and the brutal conduct of the pacification
campaign throughout the Philippines to the exclusion of material fac-
tors. Further, little do Karnow and his fellow self-appointed Filipinologists
acknowledge the conscious and deliberate design of the architects of colo-
nial rule to utilize the collaborationist local elites or native aristocracy, facil-
itated by the teaching and the imposition of the English language, and the
pensionado program, commencing in 1903, of enticing eager and ambitious
Filipinos to travel to and study in the United States, and learn about the
American culture and inculcate in them individualistic values with which to
 3 THE AMERICAN EMPIRE IN THE PACIFIC 59

gauge success. By the year 1912, more than two hundred young Filipinos
had been sent “stateside’ under this program (Duka). As San Juan writes,
citing the case of writers as point of reference: “While the U.S. imperial
power preserved the tributary order via the institutionalization of patron-
age in all levels of society, the use of English by apprentice writers fostered
individualism through the modality of aesthetic vanguardism. Personal lib-
eration displaced the dream of national sovereignty” (San Juan 2000a).

1898---The Nexus of Global Events: The

Spanish–American War of May 1898, the Philippine
Revolution of June 1898, and the Expansion
of the US Empire
As alluded to above, global events in 1898 seemed to offer the United
States a fortuitous opportunity to demonstrate its exceptionalism from the
Europeans. In February 1898, the US battleship, USS Maine, was on a
visit to and docked at the harbor in Havana, Cuba, then a Spanish colony
exploded killing over two hundred and fifty naval personnel. The following
month, a US Naval Court of Inquiry had concluded that an “underwater
mine” had caused the incident, without saying who planted the mine. It
clearly implied that Spain or its agents were responsible. Under the pretext
of punishing the Spaniards the influential media at that time, led by William
Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, proprietors of the news dailies New
York Journal and the New York World, respectively, had whipped up a
frenzy and inflaming public sentiments against Spain, and at the same time
generating public support for US military intervention in Cuba presumably
in behalf of the Cuban revolutionaries fighting against Spanish colonial rule.
The Cuban revolutionaries had issued an appeal to the US government for
military assistance, consisting of small arms with which to fight. They also
requested US naval blockade of the island to prevent Spanish vessels both
from entering and leaving the island nation. They never asked to be taken
over. The United States did indeed intervene militarily but, as history bears,
for its own purposes, a point well-made by moral philosopher Michael
Walzer in critiquing US humanitarian interventionism in Cuba (Walzer,
101–104). In April 1898, the US Congress declared war on Spain, followed
by the deployment of about seventeen thousand marines that were initially
landed in June in Santiago de Cuba on the east end of the island, quickly
capturing Guantanamo Bay within days; in July, US troops mounted an
60 K. E. BAUZON

assault on San Juan Hill featuring the so-called Rough Riders of which
would-be Secretary of the Navy and President, Theodore Roosevelt, was a
celebrated member.
Meanwhile, in late April, the US Asiatic Squadron, with its six fighting
ships then plying between Hong Kong and Singapore under the command
of Admiral George Dewey, received a direct order from then Secretary
of the Navy, Roosevelt, to sail to Manila Bay with the expressed order
of destroying the Spanish fleet. At Manila Bay, on May 1, the Spanish
armada, officially called the Spanish South Pacific Squadron, was suppos-
edly engaged—to be explained more below—by Dewey’s fleet resulting in
the complete destruction of the Spanish fleet, and the silencing of coastal
defensive batteries, including the siege guns of Corregidor Island at the
entrance to the Bay, while suffering not a single fatality and only eight
wounded, a fact to be explored more below in relation to arrangements
between US and Spanish authorities leading up to this so-called battle.
As is well-known, this brief war ended with Spanish capitulation and the
signing of the Treaty of Paris in December of that year. Under the treaty,
control over the Spanish possessions of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Guam was
transferred to the United States. It was also stipulated that for the sum of
twenty million US dollars, the Philippines would be turned over to and
subsequently be ruled under US sovereignty.
It is well to note that simultaneous to the Cuban revolution against
Spain was also the Philippine revolution against the same European colo-
nial power. By this time, Spain had been the longest reigning European
colonial power in Asia and, for the hundred years or so prior to this point,
other European powers, including the United States, had been gradually
overtaking Spain in terms of technology, economic power, and military
might. Spain had become moribund. Motivated by their own desires for
geographic expansion and appetite for economic gain, they were eager to
challenge Spain’s hegemony. Thus, in this context, it would be naïve to
assume that the United States was motivated simply by altruism in help-
ing the Cuban revolutionaries in their fight against Spain. The Monroe
Doctrine had been in place since 1823 intended to discourage European
powers out of hemispheric affairs, and the United States had been grad-
ually consolidating its military strength, and eyeing eventual control and
influence in the Caribbean region, particularly over the Panama Canal; it
finally gained control and took over its construction from France in 1904
as apparent reward for supporting the secession of Panama from Colombia
in 1903.
 3 THE AMERICAN EMPIRE IN THE PACIFIC 61

As for the Pacific region, the US military presence had been officially
legitimated by a counterpart doctrine to the Monroe Doctrine, which was
designed mainly for the Caribbean region. The Pacific doctrine was called
the Tyler Doctrine named after US President John Tyler who promulgated
it on December 30, 1842—two and half years following the Malolo Mas-
sacre—ostensibly for the so-called protection of the Hawaiian Islands from
anticipated predations by European rivals. Again, for one to assume that
US imperialism was motivated simply by its desire to benefit and protect
the inhabitants of the Hawaiian archipelago would be naïve at best. The
US Navy had for some time coveted the deepwater port which came to be
known as Pearl Harbor. When a private coup plot against the indigenous
Hawaiian monarchy was successfully carried out in January 1893 by descen-
dants of godly American missionaries and their allies with such last names
as Thurston, Dole, Castle, and Cooke, all united by the common desire
to control the Kingdom’s political future under conditions that would
bring them and their respective family businesses economic profits (mainly
from sugar, pineapple, and other tropical fruit production), and organizing
themselves into the treacherous “Committee of Safety,” with the tacit sup-
port of the US Navy and the conspiracy of US diplomat John L. Stevens, it
was a matter of time that the Hawaiian Kingdom would be absorbed to be
part of the burgeoning US empire, as in fact it did when it was annexed as
an appurtenant territory in July 1898, and eventually as the fiftieth state of
the Union in 1959. At the time that the coup plotters were lobbying the
US Congress for annexation, they found an ardent advocate by the name of
Theodore Roosevelt. In 1897, reports historian Thomas Dyer, “Roosevelt
cast the proposed annexation of Hawaii in a sharply racial light. If Hawaii
were not taken, he told Alfred T. Mahan, ‘it will show that we either have
lost, or else wholly lack, the masterful instinct which alone can make a race
great,’ an unthinkable circumstance for an individual who thought of the
great races as possessing vigorous expansionist tendencies” (Dyer). It is not
an unfair statement to say that, under the circumstances in which events
took place, the Hawaiian monarchy was overthrown in an illegal coup, and
the Hawaiian Islands and the resources therein were, in plain language,
stolen, a historic wrong for which the native Hawaiians still have to receive
justice, and a shameful deed which the US government, despite US Pres-
ident Bill Clinton’s signing of Public Law 103–150, popularly referred to
in the media as the “Apology Resolution,” in November 1993, still has to,
at the very least, translate any apology into deed.9
62 K. E. BAUZON

It is worth noting that during much of the second half of the 1800s
leading up to the Spanish–American War of 1898, there has been can-
tankerous agitation for the westward expansion of the so-called American
frontier. Among these agitators was Jane McManus Storm Cazneau (also
known as “Cora Montgomery”) who is claimed to be the first to use the
phrase “Manifest Destiny” particularly in regard to her 1845 advocacy of
the annexation of Texas from Mexico through her numerous newspaper
columns and journal articles. Imperialism in the Pacific later gained more
support particularly from among those with a platform in which to broad-
cast their views. Among these was Alfred Thayer Mahan, a Captain in the
US Navy and President of the US Naval War College. In 1890, Mahan
published his highly influential and widely read book, entitled The Influ-
ence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660–1783. An original copy of this book
sits in a glass case at the Theodore Roosevelt Estate Museum in Sagamore
Hill, Long Island, New York as a testament to the mutual admiration that
Roosevelt and Mahan had for each other, and whose views complemented
each other. Roosevelt believed that victory, augmented by Mahan’s notion
of naval imperialism, over the “aboriginal savages” of the world is foun-
dational to securing the “heritage of the dominant world races” (Morris,
477). In Mahan’s book, taking a cue from the British success in building
an empire with the help of its navy, Mahan urged adoption of a series of
forward-looking, and “vigorous foreign policy” on the part of the United
States by building and procuring: a. merchant fleet to transport US goods
to and from foreign markets; b. a “battleship navy” to secure these markets
and deter potential rivals; and c. a network of naval ports for storing fuel
and supplies, not to mention, as would later be realized, forward basing for
interventionary forces particularly in the western Pacific. These suggestions
are in line with the assessment—in the passage that follows—of the Office
of the Historian of the US Department of State about Mahan’s influential
views at the time, views which were later vindicated:

Mahan believed that the U.S. economy would soon be unable to absorb the
massive amounts of industrial and commercial goods being produced domes-
tically, and he argued that the United States should seek new markets abroad.
What concerned Mahan most was ensuring that the U.S. Government could
guarantee access to these new international markets. (US Department of
State)
 3 THE AMERICAN EMPIRE IN THE PACIFIC 63

On the religious front, thanks to the work of one particular preacher,

Josiah Strong, also a good friend to Roosevelt, who, through his preach-
ings and polemical writings, including one entitled Our Country: Its Pos-
sible Future and Its Present Crisis (Strong 1885), argued for imperialism
unabashedly in behalf of the Anglo-Saxon race based on religion subsumed
under what he called the doctrine of world mission arguing, in his book:
“The Anglo-Saxon is the representative of two great ideas, which are closely
related. One of them is that of civil liberty. Nearly all of the civil liberty of
the world is enjoyed by Anglo-Saxons: the English, the British colonists,
and the people of the United States….The other great idea of which the
Anglo-Saxon is the exponent is that of a pure spiritual Christianity.” He
adds: “It follows, then, that the Anglo-Saxon, as… the depository of these
two greatest blessings, … is divinely commissioned to be, in a peculiar
sense, his brother’s keeper.”
William H. Berge, a scholar on the subject and the period, assesses some
of the implications of Strong’s views in a 1973 academic article as follows,
in part:

Strong said that God was everywhere at war with greed and selfishness. Chris-
tian people should combat selfishness in nations as well as in individuals, and
force should be used if necessary. The motive behind the use of force was the
criterion with which to judge the action. There was little doubt in the minds
of the pro-war clergymen; the war against “Spanish tyranny” was a judicious
use of force. The religious sanction for the war with Spain, which came from
the Protestant clergy, was in part the result of intense anti-Catholic feeling.
(Berge)

Berge also explains that while Strong was not an advocate for imperialism
for commercial reasons, he recognized the conjunction because, as Strong
is quoted, “Whether or not the constitution follows the flag, opportunity
does.” Further, Berge explains of Strong’s views as follows:

The final appeal expressed, from what appeared to be a practical and rational
point of view, was a call for the recognition of imperialism as the climax of a
continuing movement. Strong felt that the United States had been destined
to be the great imperial power. Had not the idea of “empire” been traveling
westward for centuries? Another explanation flavored with Darwinism was
presented in the October 1900 Westminster Review, where the author held
that the imperial tendencies of any country were but one step in a process
that has been in action since the first social organization.
64 K. E. BAUZON

It should be remembered, however, that the motivating force and ide-

ological basis for Strong’s support of expansion did not lie in a desire to
make the United States politically and commercially powerful. It went much
deeper than this. Strong was motivated by an intense sense of mission and
divine destiny. The ideology of this mission and destiny was a combination
of racism, religion, and nationalism. (Berge)

The likes of Strong from evangelical Protestant church denominations

have shared similar views and fervor. As one illustration, Horace B. Sil-
liman, a successful New York-based businessman, reportedly showed up
unexpectedly at the Office of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Mission,
one day in 1899, within months of the news of Dewey’s claimed victory
in Manila Bay, bearing a gift of ten thousand US dollars. According to
author Arthur Carson, Silliman possessed a “strong resolve to help shape
Philippine education” and believed that the Filipinos needed “a new kind
of education” in any case. Because the Board of Foreign Mission itself had
been considering establishing a “mission in the Philippine Islands,” the
Mission Board was not hard to persuade and the fund was accepted to
be used as Silliman had wished, i.e., the founding of a vocational institute
but whose effect, through its extensive network with religious and cul-
tural agents, was the endorsement of and collaboration with colonialism.
This institute evolved to become a full-fledged, church-based institution
of higher learning known as Silliman University, situated in the island of
Negros, today an outpost of unquestioning fealty to neoliberal education,
and offering its constituents, mainly alumni that have fanned across the
globe, with an emotional sedative referred to as “Silliman Spirit” empha-
sizing personal bond with the institution but dulling any criticism of empire
(“History of Silliman”).

Notes
1. San Juan offers further assessment of the implications of the Europe-based
mercantile trading, including the trafficking of slaves, the colonization of
much of the rest of the world, and the crushing of resistance to this colo-
nization, and the phenomenon of diaspora, in the following passage: “After
about four centuries of the worldwide circulation of commodities—includ-
ing the hugely profitable trade in slaves from Africa that inaugurated, for
Marx, the ‘rosy dawn’ of capitalism—the stage was set for more intense cap-
ital accumulation based no longer on commercial exchange and the regional
discrepancies in the price of goods but on the process of production itself.
 3 THE AMERICAN EMPIRE IN THE PACIFIC 65

‘Place’ gave way to space; lived time divided into necessary, surplus, and ‘free’
segments. Linked by relations of exchange governed by the logic of accu-
mulation centered in Europe and later in North America, the trajectories
of peoples of color, the ‘people without history’ in Eric Wolf’s reckoning,
entered the global labor market with the expansion of industrial capitalism,
the commercialization of agriculture, urbanization, and the concomitant dis-
location and displacement of populations from their traditional homelands”
(San Juan 1995).
2. Here, San Juan interjects a point that during much of the 1700s and the 1800s
at least up until the Opium Wars, movement of labor, referring to the so-called
free workers, has been taking place, and that this diaspora of workers—bearers
of labor power, according to San Juan, had been an essential component in
the building of the industrial and commercial bases of modern capitalism. San
Juan describes the process as follows: “In the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, the movement of the bearers of labor power, ‘free workers’, at first
involved mainly peasants pushed toward the industrial enters of the European
peninsula; later, 50 million people left Europe between 1800 and 1924, 32
million of them bound for the factories and mines of the industrializing United
States. (Of the 200 million migrants between 1500 and 1980, 42 million were
from the continent of Asia.)” (San Juan 2000a).
Following the British humiliation of China at the conclusion of the Opium
Wars, which gave Britain possession of Hong Kong as trophy, the United
States became a beneficiary. San Juan explains how the migration of labor
during this period has made a contribution to the consolidation of the US
industrial and commercial base, essential to turning the United States as the
preeminent capitalist bastion in the succeeding century: “Meanwhile, the vic-
tory of imperialism in China with the Opium War of 1839-1842 allowed for-
eign entrepreneurs or brokers to establish the apparatus for the ‘coolie’ trade
that eventually facilitated the transport of 200,000 Chinese to the United
States between 1852 and 1875…. In the 1860s, about 14,000 Chinese labor-
ers were hired to build the transcontinental Central Pacific Railroad. Unlike
the Chinese ‘pariah capitalism’ in other regions…, the Chinese exodus to
North America could only mediate between an exploitative host society and
a moribund tributary formation already subjugated by Western powers” (San
Juan 2000a).
3. The combination of religion and violence has undoubtedly been a potent mix
in achieving Western colonial aims under the guise of a civilizing mission.
The clarity of this mix is contrasted with or compounded by the apparent lack
or absence of official recognition [of this mix], perhaps as means of avoid-
ing culpability and responsibility, among state leaders, on the one hand, and
maintaining the ambiguity indefinitely and preserve a free hand for future
action that might opportunistically be for the benefit of one or the other,
66 K. E. BAUZON

or both (church and state), as in the case of the Malolo massacre, on the
other. In a 2005 article, San Juan cites US Permanent Representative to the
United Nations, Samantha Power, from her 2002 essay, in which she cites
apparent coincidental set of ambiguities confronted supposedly by US offi-
cials with regard to the nature of violence that has characterized recent and
contemporary international relations. Much of this violence, of course, has
been inflicted by the United States itself. However, that is not what matters.
Rather, as Power notes and quoted by San Juan, it is the supposed “genuine”
dilemma of US officials in “distinguishing the deliberate massacre of civilians
from the casualties incurred in conventional conflict” (San Juan 2007b xv).
With the Malolo massacre as a starting reference point, San Juan’s reaction to
the above-quote from Power somewhat apologizing for the ambiguity makes
crystal clear the self-serving nature of this ambiguity, which allows for indefi-
nite serial repetition of violence without accountability to the state or anyone
acting in its name in the future. As in the current so-called war on terror
being waged by the United States, the practical expediency of this deliberate
ambiguity is illustrated by the support for an assortment of terrorist forma-
tions variously defined as “moderate” or “democratic” forces, such as those
fighting in Syria manipulated to serve not so much their respective political
or religious ends but, rather, to pursue broader US agenda in the Middle
East region. As San Juan writes: “It is precisely the blurring of this distinction
in colonial wars through racializing discourses and practices that proves how
genocide cannot be fully grasped without analyzing the way the victimizer
(the colonizing state power) categorizes the victims (target populations) in
totalizing and naturalizing modes unique perhaps to the civilizational drives
of modernity” (San Juan 2007b xv).
4. San Juan again offers an important historical insight on this important subject
tantamount to cultural genocide as follows: “As with the American Indians,
US colonization involved, among other things, the destruction of the spe-
cific character of a persecuted group by forced transfer of children, forced
exile, prohibition of the use of the national language, destruction of books,
documents, monuments, and objects of historical, artistic or religious value.
The goal of all colonialism is the cultural and social death of the conquered
natives, in effect, genocide” (San Juan 2005).
5. In hindsight, the episode described above turned out to be predictive of
the US military demeanor, both domestically and, more so, internationally.
Domestically, it was exemplified by the brutality with which the US Civil War
was fought and won, exemplified by the infamous burning of the City of
Atlanta in July 1864 and the subsequent march to the sea from there ordered
by Union General William T. Sherman, happening during November and
December, same year, wherein the soldiers engaged in a scorch-earth policy
of burning, looting, and destroying civilian property that they could lay their
 3 THE AMERICAN EMPIRE IN THE PACIFIC 67

hands on with the ostensible purpose of terrifying the enemy civilian pop-
ulation throughout the Confederate South into withdrawing their support
for the Confederacy and its army. And, during the American–Indian Wars,
motivated essentially by the desire to eradicate Indian resistance to Federal
forces, two examples come to mind: first, the Battle of Little Big Horn, in June
1876, where the destruction of the US Cavalry, led by Lieutenant Colonel
George A. Custer, was not so much what was important but, rather, the
intention to stamp out the Lakota Indians, including resort to the question-
able tactic of holding noncombatant women and children as hostages, and
second, the Massacre at Wounded Knee, in December 1890, where a band
of Lakota Indians were mercilessly massacred at an encampment, including
several fleeing Indians ritually shot in the back following which surviving
participating officers were later awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor
for “gallantry in action and soldierly qualities.” Internationally, this pattern
would be manifested in several notable cases including: (a) the suppression of
the Philippine Revolution in brutal counterinsurgency campaign by the US
Army from 1899 until 1913 featuring the use of “water cure” and several
instances of massacres, among others; (b) the conduct of the Vietnam War,
commencing with the use of so-called non-combat advisors in 1958 to the
massive deployment of troops by 1968 involving the use of surrogate troops
from South Korea, the Philippines, Australia, and New Zealand, and the shift
to the Vietnamization program from 1971 until the end of this war in April
1975. During this war, we saw the adoption of an assassination program called
Operation Phoenix tasked with eliminating civilians suspected of being part
of the Viet Cong political structure, and the use of tactics such as Operation
Rolling Thunder involving massive carpet bombing of Vietnam’s countryside,
and the use and deployment of prohibited and morally reprehensible weapons
like Agent Orange, a chemical weapon used to defoliate forest vegetation but
also to contaminate rivers, streams, and lakes, not to mention the soil which
eventually gets into human reproductive system causing deformities in new-
born babies, among other side effects; (c) throughout much of the Global
South, support to prop up right-wing authoritarian regimes with all kinds of
assistance including military, police, and para-military training and equipment
geared particularly against domestic armed insurgency as well as for quelling
above-ground non-violent opposition such as those directed against street
protests, and union organizing; (d) likewise, throughout much of the Global
South and the post-Cold War Eastern Europe, and complementary to (c)
above, support for subversive activities, including sponsorship, training, and
management of armed terrorist formations to terrorize civilian population,
destroy civilian infrastructure, outright assassination of undesirable political
leaders, including intervention in the electoral process and coups d’etat, all
designed to subvert the duly established constitutional order and carry out
68 K. E. BAUZON

a regime-change program, and install a regime more compliant to the liking

of the United States; and, (d) in coordination with global financial institu-
tions controlled by the United States, the deployment of “economic hit men”
directed against borrowing countries, most of which are located in the Global
South to ensnare them to accept large sums of low-interest loans collateralized
by the borrowing countries’ natural resources, and the privatization of public
services including vital utilities, all designed to essentially transfer economic
sovereignty to external supranational entities acting in conformity with the US
neoliberal agenda, rejection of which would result in drastic consequences,
including assassinations and coups.
6. While Melville’s classic work Moby Dick is highly popular today especially
among young readers, it was heavily criticized by literary critics of his time
perhaps on account of it being misunderstood, or because in this novel he
crystallized his views on the subjects of imperialism by the US and the Euro-
pean powers more broadly as well as on self-rule or independence on the part
of Polynesian and African subjects. But even outside of this novel, Melville
never tried to conceal his disdain for missionaries and their evangelizing work
such as those he encountered in the Marquesan Islands in 1835 for perpetu-
ating the image of the native islanders as “savage and bloodthirsty cannibals”
(Blumenthal, 2). Also, in the second in a series of three lectures he gave
commencing in 1857, entitled “The South Seas”, Melville “indicts not only
America’s imperialist presumptions in the Pacific Islands, but her own self-
conceived identity as a ‘superior’ and ‘civilized’ country” (Blumenthal, 3).
Interestingly, San Juan offers a passing mention of Melville in the context
of his (San Juan’s) discussion of the radicalization of CLR James’ thinking
on British imperialism and the growth of Caribbean emancipatory conscious-
ness. San Juan writes: “I should qualify this, however, by interpolating here
the subsequent catalyzing role of the militant socialist tradition: it was the
influence of Marxism, particularly American Trotskyism, along with radical
French historiography, Herman Melville’s fiction, and U.S. popular culture
filtered through the mass media, that served as midwife to the anti-imperialist
rebirth of cricket as an allegory of the West Indian quest for national recog-
nition and self-determination” (San Juan 2000b).
7. This is a pertinent point to raise because the period in which this movie was set
was one in which European powers were squabbling over influence and ter-
ritory not only in the Caribbean region but also throughout the New World.
The United States partook in the slave trade and benefited in its growth and
development from the unpaid labor of slaves, a fact that it still has to reconcile
itself with today. But at that period, the issue of slavery was resolved in two
ways, according to San Juan. He writes: “The apparent incongruity of the ‘un-
free’ (slave) inhabiting the terrain of the ‘free’ (laissez-faire market) disappears
if we apply two analytic concepts: social formation and mode of production.
 3 THE AMERICAN EMPIRE IN THE PACIFIC 69

While the U.S. then may be defined as chiefly an emergent capitalist social
formation from the time of its independence to the Civil War, one can dis-
cern in it two discordant modes of production: the slave mode in the South
and the mercantile-industrial one in the North. The triumph of the juridical
framework of capitalism (based on Lockean principles of alienable labor, etc.)
and its state machinery led to the legal abolition of slavery in 1865. This is a
clear sign that New World slavery was not similar to that in Graeco-Roman
societies where slavery was not abolished by a legal act but by a long period
of evolution when it was eventually superseded by another kind of dependent
labor (serfdom) which became dominant, even though chattel slaves contin-
ued to exist up the late Middle Ages. What is clear, however, is that the elite
in the U.S. South was mainly parasitic on coerced labor for its wealth and
reproduction. Reconstruction eliminated the practice of coercion, the aris-
tocratic habitus..., only to replace it with that of the market legitimized by
Constitutional amendments, and (after 1877) by wholesale fraud, Jim Crow
laws, and vigilante violence” (San Juan 2007a).
8. In 2001, San Juan received the prestigious Gustavus Myers Center for Human
Rights Outstanding Book Award for Human Rights, for his book, After
Post-colonialism; Remapping Philippines-United States Confrontations. In this
book, San Juan comments on the “ideological maneuvers” employed by the
United States in carrying out its self-appointed role as tutor to the ignorant
and uneducated Filipinos as part of its “civilizing mission.” He writes: “In
1898, the Philippines then became U.S. territory open for the ‘tutelage’ of
its civilizing mission. Among other ideological maneuvers, the English lan-
guage and American literary texts, as well as the pedagogical agencies for
propagating and teaching them, were mobilized to constitute the natives of
the Philippine archipelago as subjects of the U.S. nation-state. In sum, then,
American English was used by the colonial authorities when the U.S. military
suppressed the Filipino revolutionary forces and its Republic while waging
war against the moribund Spanish Empire. Language became an adjunct of
the imperial machinery of conquest and subjugation…. The ‘otherness’ of
Filipinos comprised of multiple speech genres and semantic worlds eventually
yielded to a unitary medium of communication enforced in government, busi-
ness, media, and the public sphere. American English became the language
of prestige and aspiration” (San Juan 2000a).
9. Both in collective memory and in popular literature today, the history of
Hawaii just narrated here is remarkably blank. In pretty much the entire con-
temporary media and standard texts, Hawaii is presented as an exotic paradise,
a vacation destination, with expensive urban living standards, and a source
of high-value tropical fruits and other agricultural products. The natives are
presented as curiosities welcoming visitors with garlands of beautiful tropical
70 K. E. BAUZON

flowers and relegated to providing entertainment with their dances and cos-
tumes at hotels and other cultural events. Not surprisingly, attempts on the
part of native Hawaiians and their sympathetic supporters to remind visitors—
and the world—about this portion of Hawaii’s history, about the overthrow of
Hawaii’s constitutional monarchy in 1893, and about the current movement
for the restoration of Hawaii’s sovereignty are invariably discouraged, banned,
or outrightly declared illegal by state and US federal authorities. Such is the
case, for example, with the State of the Nation of Hawaii whose members,
invoking the United Nations Charter as well as the US Public Law 103–150
condemning the United States for illegally overthrowing the sovereign gov-
ernment of Hawaii have engaged in acts of resistance including non-payment
of taxes, land occupation, and the establishment of its own militia and security
force to assist in the claim to restore Hawaii’s lost sovereignty.
Other forms of resistance have taken an anti-neoliberal character and tone.
One such movement is represented by the Land Defenders known largely in
Hawaii as the Mauna Kea Hui dedicated to opposing what supporters say is the
desecration of a sacred mountain and its surroundings as a result of the con-
struction of a Canadian-funded eighteen-story telescope, popularly known as
the Thirty Meter Telescope, purportedly the most powerful telescope for use
by astronomers to peek at the solar system particularly the Milky Way and the
galaxies nearby; this facility would also include a large office complex and a
parking lot built over protected conservation land at the mountain’s summit
in addition to the construction of a new road leading to and from the summit.
Another movement of this type is the loose anti-Genetically Modified Organ-
isms (GMO) movement taking the parliamentary route of enacting legislation
through local, county, and state institutions banning—or attempting to ban—
GMO seed and plants from Hawaiian farms. Along these lines, legislators in
the island—and county—of Kauai, in October 2013, enacted a legislation
restricting the use of pesticides and the breeding and planting of GMOs by
such biotech giants as DuPont, Pioneer, Syngenta, Monsanto, and BASF in
the island. The legislation prohibits these companies from using pesticides in
no-spray zones especially around schools, hospitals, homes, roads, and water
systems. Even though the same bill would have included prohibition on the
use of GMOs, the provision on this was removed during deliberations under
threat from these companies that they would leave the island altogether if
the bill passed containing these restrictions. Nonetheless, a group of these
companies sued the island for its legislation and, in August 2014, a federal
judge at the US District Court for the District of Hawaii overturned Kauai’s
law. On another front, on election day in November of 2014, voters in Maui
County, which includes the islands of Maui, Lanai, and Molokai, persisted in
their anti-GMO movement, defied the threats and intimidation by the biotech
 3 THE AMERICAN EMPIRE IN THE PACIFIC 71

industry, and took the decisive step of approving a moratorium on the exper-
imentation and planting of GMO plant products anywhere in the county. If
this law stands, as it is once again being challenged in court by the biotech
industry, one observer opines that this law would have “broken a crucial link
in the biotech business model,” especially so that, as one Monsanto represen-
tative admitted, “The majority of corn seed we sell to farmers in Argentina,
Brazil and the U.S. has originated from Monsanto’s Maui operations” and
that, if the law is allowed to stand, Monsanto and other biotech companies
would have to “scramble” in search of new places wherein to develop these
seeds (Johnson).
The activist-oriented native Hawaiians, including members and supporters
of Mauna Kea Hui, have also affiliated themselves with the Canadian-based
Idle No More (INM) Movement, consisting of mainly Canadian indigenous
groups. In INM’s Web site, it calls on peoples everywhere “to join in a peace-
ful revolution, to honour indigenous sovereignty, and to protect land and
water.” In its Manifesto, the INM recalls the sad and shameful history of
treaty violations on the part of the British Crown, not just the Canadian gov-
ernment. It affirms the sanctity of treaty agreements, asserting that these can
neither be altered nor broken unilaterally. It declares, in part: “The spirit and
intent of the Treaty agreements meant that First Nations peoples would share
the land, but retain their inherent rights to lands and resources. Instead, First
Nations have experienced a history of colonization which has resulted in out-
standing land claims, lack of resource and unequal funding for services such
as education and housing” (Idle No More).
Taking the reviews and commentaries of Kiana Davenport’s novel Shark
Dialogues as a jumping-off board for the reason that, in this case, “[t]he seduc-
tiveness of a hegemonic reading and interpretive approach persists in the insti-
tution of book reviewing,” and taking the opportunity as well to comment on
the significance of this novel on the saga of seven generations of a Hawaiian
family that encompasses the events described here, San Juan, in a remark-
able essay entitled “Cultural Studies Amongst the Sharks: The Struggle Over
Hawaii” (2002), comments on the virtual whitewashing of Hawaii’s past.
San Juan writes: “By force of inertia, the sporadic reviews of Shark Dialogues
veer toward a formalist aestheticism that politically occludes, if not totally
expunges, what Edward Said would call the worldliness or circumstantial res-
onance of the work. The pretext of recuperating or reinstating pleasure that
subtends the putative return to aesthetics affords an ingenuous justification
for reaffirming the way things are: for Hawaiians, the unconscionable colo-
nial domination of their homelands and continued cultural genocide. From
this neo-conservative optic, art (for the formalists) helps us to transcend the
reality of degradation and colonial occupation” (San Juan 2002).
72 K. E. BAUZON

To cite an example, San Juan points to the apparent default assumption

by reviewers, particularly of the book in question, that Hawaii is a multicul-
tural showcase where one can point to the success of assimilation without
so much wondering whether or not the author, Davenport, agrees. San Juan
writes: “[A] reviewer for the Library Journal praises the book as ‘entertain-
ing and educational’, avoiding ‘didacticism’ as Davenport provides us much
information about politics, leprosy and ‘the racial melting pot that is Hawai-
ian society’. On the banal impression of Hawaii as a melting pot, which the
novelist indirectly critiques as another ideology, the reviewer does no better
than an academic scholar like Andrew Lind, author of Hawaii’s People, who
argues that the statistics on intermarriage in Hawaii testify to the advance
of assimilationism. Can a reading of Shark Dialogues correct this misleading
doxa?” San Juan’s answer to this rhetorical question is, of course, obvious.
San Juan takes the opportunity, in this case of Hawaii, as a perfect historical
specimen and the misreading of it as evidenced by the reviews of Davenport’s
novel, to clarify the nature and purpose of cultural studies as a sub-discipline
or a field of study. San Juan advances many thoughtful arguments, but the
following passage is particularly significant: “Cultural Studies is an attempt to
situate these formalist approaches to literary texts—the search for verisimili-
tude, for commonsensical truth—in the sociohistorical context of hegemonic
culture. Its concern is to demonstrate how social divisions pivoting around
the categories of class, gender, race, nationality, location, etc. are invested
with meaning and legitimized. Culture (including literary and critical prac-
tice) becomes the site in which social/political inequalities are represented and
naturalised. Thus Cultural Studies rejects the empiricist fallacy that events and
personalities by themselves embody singular meanings as though they were
natural phenomena, givens that transcend experience and consciousness. Cul-
ture is conceived not as equivalent to the realm of aesthetics replete with tran-
scendent moral values, but as a terrain of struggle for hegemony, a historical
and discursive terrain where dominant and subordinate forces interact.” And,
San Juan adds: “The Cultural Studies project thus engages directly with the
dialectic of social agencies and structures.”
Further, San Juan offers a prescient advice in looking at and integrat-
ing into cultural analysis the sovereignty movement as well as the emergent
indigenous-oriented anti-neoliberal empowerment in Hawaii today such as
the examples cited earlier. San Juan writes: “The emphasis on the local against
the abstract or formalist universalism of mainstream literary study is healthy.
But when the localists stress geography or place as distilling history separate
from the imperial world-system, they lapse into an empiricist fixation that is
no improvement over the Eurocentric pluralism they bewail. What is more
significant is the indigenous motivation of ho’oponopono (the ‘setting to
 3 THE AMERICAN EMPIRE IN THE PACIFIC 73

right of wrongs’) that passionately informs the warring interests and motives
of the various communities in Shark Dialogues.”
Further, San Juan elaborates: “I see Cultural Studies as an intervention
in re-conceptualising culture as the field where literary texts like Shark Dia-
logues can be rescued from the realm of apologetics and appreciated for its
pedagogical and conscientising (to use Freire’s over-used term) qualities. Fol-
lowing Jameson’s suggestions, cultural studies can be more effective when cul-
ture is viewed more as the site par excellence of ideological struggle. In this
arena of discursive practice, group antagonisms are represented and fought
through, with the reading experience itself posing ethical questions to the
reader/audience and, more urgently, political imperatives. Culture dramatises
the idea of the Other, the forms of relations among groups characterised by
envy and loathing. Cultural Studies allows us to interpret prestige as an ema-
nation of group solidarity, the object of collective envy and struggle, which
underlies racism and ethnic conflict.”
With this conception of cultural studies, San Juan believes that the field
is a step closer to reclaiming its “original revolutionary impetus”, and it can
do so “by center-staging the radical project of diverse indigenous forms of
life. It can help preserve these singular forms as long as this field continues to
expose and critique the complicity of disciplinary practices with hegemonic
political power.” As a matter of praxis, San Juan also believes: “With the tide
of globalised capitalism sweeping over national boundaries, partisans of rev-
olutionary hope need to lend support to the indigenous peoples of Hawaii
and elsewhere in their struggle for sovereignty. Reason dictates the priority
of self-determined locations for unique aboriginal cultures to flourish. Their
singular forms of life remain the touchstones for realising visions of pop-
ular, egalitarian democracy sustainable for constructing a global ecumene.
They also provide viable weapons to resist commodification and global busi-
ness’s crusade of ‘civilizing’ rogue nations and subjugating terrorist Others
– IMF/WB (International Monetary Fund/World Bank) deterritorialisation
by transnational violence.”

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———, In the Wake of Terror; Class, Race, Nation, Ethnicity in the Postmodern
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 CHAPTER 4

Denials and Betrayals, Conquest

and Capitulation

Beginning from the rise of merchant capital in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, the messianic impulse to genocide springs from the imperative
of capital accumulation—the imperative to reduce humans to commodified
labor-power, to saleable goods or services. U.S. “primitive accumulation”
began with the early colonies in New England and the slave plantations in
the South. It culminated in the nineteenth century with the conquest and
annexation of Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guam, Hawaii, and the Philippines. With
the historical background of the U.S. extermination drives against the Ameri-
can Indians in particular, and the brutalization of African slaves and Mexicans
in general, there is a need for progressive scholars and researchers to con-
cretize this idea of genocide (immanent in the logic of imperial expansion)
by pedagogical references to the U.S. colonial pillage and plunder of the
Philippines.
San Juan, U.S. Imperialism and Revolution… (2007)

The State of the Philippine Revolution at the Point

of US Intervention
At the time of the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, with the
consequent US entry of the US Navy into Philippine territory, Filipino
revolutionaries had already been, during much of the decade of the
1890s, engaged in organization and propaganda work.1 In July 1892,

© The Author(s) 2019 77

K. E. Bauzon, Capitalism, The American Empire, and Neoliberal
Globalization, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9080-8_4
78 K. E. BAUZON

the secret armed revolutionary movement that called itself Kataas-taasang

Kagalang-galang na Katipunan ng mga Anak ng Bayan (roughly, mean-
ing “Highly Esteemed, Most Respected Association of the Children of the
Nation,” or Katipunan, in short) was founded and led by a self-educated
proletarian and erstwhile warehouse clerk, Andres Bonifacio, who also held
the title Supremo, or otherwise President of Katipunan’s Supreme Coun-
cil.2 In August, that year, the armed rebellion against Spain was officially
proclaimed in the village of Balintawak, a suburb of what is now Manila.3
Independent of any foreign assistance, much less US intervention in their
behalf, Filipino revolutionaries had been scoring important military victo-
ries over Spanish forces and their mercenary Filipino soldiers.
In March 1897, in the town of Tejeros, in the province of Cavite, south
of Manila, local elites sympathetic to the revolution organized themselves
into a faction of the provincial chapter of Katipunan called Magdalo, led by
Emilio Aguinaldo, who came from a local land-owning class, and a general
in the revolutionary army. At what came to be known as the Tejeros Con-
vention, the question of overall leadership of the revolution was at stake,
with Magdalo partisans arguing that Aguinaldo should lead the revolu-
tion because much of the military successes of the revolutionaries thus far
had been attributed to him. Furthermore, the Magdalo partisans wanted to
already transform the Katipunan into a revolutionary government but one
headed by Aguinaldo. On the other hand, Bonifacio’s supporters, identi-
fied with the faction called Magdiwang , insisted that Bonifacio was—and
had been—the legitimate and unwavering leader all along since the time of
Katipunan’s founding, and this was demonstrated once again by his leader-
ship at the time of the official declaration of armed rebellion on August 29,
1896, realizing that any other course of action toward the Spanish author-
ities would be futile. This Convention showed the stark contrast between
the ilustrado (petty land-owning) class wanting to seize control of the rev-
olution, on one hand, and the mass base of this revolution, including Boni-
facio who was clearly the leader and guiding inspiration for the movement,
except that he was not from the ilustrado class. At this Convention, packed
by Aguinaldo supporters, Aguinaldo was elected. Bonifacio was not even
elected Vice President. For the position which he was elected—as Director
of the Interior—his qualifications were questioned by a close Aguinaldo
ally, Daniel Tirona, for the reason that he (Bonifacio) did not supposedly
have the requisite education to hold the office.
 4 DENIALS AND BETRAYALS, CONQUEST AND CAPITULATION 79

The Assassination of Bonifacio, the Pact

of Biak-na-Bato, and Exile
In the end, Aguinaldo’s followers prevailed. Bonifacio and his supporters
left, refusing in the end to recognize Aguinaldo’s leadership. Following a
flawed court-martial proceeding, Bonifacio and his followers were found
guilty and convicted with sedition against the Aguinaldo-led revolutionary
government. Aguinaldo’s men were dispatched to pursue Bonifacio, his
family, and supporters. Following a firefight, one of Bonifacio’s brothers,
Ciriaco, was fatally shot. Bonifacio, his wife, another brother Procopio,
and surviving followers were subsequently captured and taken prisoners.
On May 10, that same year, they were executed in front of a firing squad.4
From this point on, the fate of the Philippine Revolution and its future, or
so it seemed, laid squarely at the hands of Aguinaldo.
The same week as Bonifacio’s execution, the Spanish colonial army
launched operations to search and destroy Aguinaldo’s forces. Aguinaldo
fled Cavite and established temporary headquarters at a redoubt in an iso-
lated location in the town of San Miguel, province of Bulacan north of
Manila. There, between July and October, Aguinaldo consulted with his
advisers following which a general assembly was called to draw up a repub-
lican constitution. The draft that was drawn up was reportedly patterned
after the Cuban Constitution, with the legal advice of Isabelo Artacho
and Felix Ferrer, among others. This Constitution provided for a Supreme
Council consisting of the offices of a President, a Vice President, a Secre-
tary of War, and a Secretary of the Treasury. Aguinaldo retained the office
of President.
Following the assembly, Aguinaldo proclaimed the Constitution of Biak-
na-Bato (literally, split rock), named after his hideout in the province of
Bulacan, just north of Manila. Leaving the issue of Bonifacio’s execution
behind, several revolutionary leaders from around the country threw their
support, albeit reluctantly, behind Aguinaldo’s constitution which, among
others, called for the representation of the Philippines in the Spanish Cortes
(Parliament), press freedom, return of so-called friar lands to Filipinos,
compensation for the peninsular (Spanish-born) and insular (native-born)
civil servants, and equality for all Filipino inhabitants before the law. None
of these would call for the liquidation of Spanish colonial rule. However, in
December of that year, feeling exhausted from an apparently unwinnable
fight, Aguinaldo, the poor and inept military leader and tactician that he
turned out to be, and the ilustrado (native elite) that he was, and, further,
80 K. E. BAUZON

apparently haunted by the memory of his power-driven betrayal of Boni-

facio, accepted the offer from Spanish Governor-General Primo de Rivera,
in behalf of the Spanish colonial government, in a compromise agreement
called the Pact of Biak-na-Bato, negotiated between August and Decem-
ber of the same year. In this agreement, with a Philippine-born Spaniard
named Pedro Paterno serving as the go-between between Aguinaldo, on
one hand, and Spanish Governor Primo de Rivera, on the other, Aguinaldo
would cease hostile acts against the colonial government, lay down their
weapons, and agree to go on exile to Hong Kong. The colonial govern-
ment, on the other, feeling compelled to make momentary peace with—
and ease the military pressure from—the Filipino rebels so Spain could
concentrate on quelling the rebellion in Cuba, agreed to deliver to the
rebels, in incremental amounts, the total sum—tantamount to bribe—of
eight hundred thousand Mexican pesos, half of which would be given,
through the Chartered Bank, a Hong Kong bank, to Aguinaldo, another
two hundred thousand to his officers (including Mariano Trias, Vice Pres-
ident; Antonio Montenegro, Secretary; Baldomero Aguinaldo, Treasurer;
and advisers General Emilio Riego de Dios and Marciano Llanera), and the
remaining two hundred thousand to be remitted at a later but unspecified
time, if they all agreed to go on exile and basically affirm the continuation
of colonial rule, and for Aguinaldo to order the rest of his soldiers to lay
down their arms and cease hostile actions against the colonial government.
There is no record that this final sum was ever delivered. Further, Primo
de Rivera agreed to grant “self-rule” within a period of three years and
to institute reforms that Aguinaldo had demanded. These broad terms,
catering essentially to ilustrado interests, apparently met with agreement
among the principals, and, on December 23, 1897, the Pact was signed
and Aguinaldo and his fellow officers boarded the Spanish steamer Uranus
bound for Hong Kong, arriving there on the thirty-first of December to
commence their residence in exile.
Historians are generally of the consensus that neither side of this agree-
ment intended to fulfill the terms. Aguinaldo had intimated that he
accepted the money so that he could purchase weapons and presumably
resume the fighting. And, in any case, many Filipino revolutionaries in the
provinces never laid down their weapons, skeptical of the sincerity and abil-
ity of Aguinaldo to continue waging the fight, on one hand, and distrusting
of any promises and assurances by the Spaniards, on the other. On the part
of the Spanish colonial government, as is now well-documented, despite
its inability to defeat the Filipino insurgents, it never had any intention
to surrender to them. Following a brief lull in fighting, and by March of
 4 DENIALS AND BETRAYALS, CONQUEST AND CAPITULATION 81

1898, the Filipino revolutionaries resumed their series of attacks on Span-

ish positions. And, in a debunking of the conventional narrative that the
Americans had defeated the Spaniards in the Philippines despite Dewey’s
apparent decisive victory in the Battle of Manila Bay on May the first; at
that point in time, Dewey had no troops to land and take control of ter-
ritory. The first wave of US Expeditionary Force, officially known as the
Eighth Army Corps commanded by Brigadier General Thomas MacArthur
Anderson, was still en route from Guam, after having taken that territory
without firing a shot, arriving in Manila only on the first of June. In late
July, reinforcements numbering 5000 troops under the command of Gen-
eral Wesley Merritt arrived from San Francisco, as did Anderson’s troops
earlier, following which preparations for the siege of Manila by the Ameri-
cans intensified. Manila fell to the Americans on August 15 or so it seemed.
Dewey stuck to his promise to keep the “Injuns ” (referring to the Filipino
insurgents) out of Manila.
The extent of the Filipino insurgents’ control over the Islands was
described as part of Aguinaldo’s subsequent Declaration of Independence,
on June 12. Thus, this so-called victory was, in fact, pre-arranged to give a
pretext for Spanish surrender to the Americans rather than to the “inferior”
subaltern native rebels who had, in any case at that time, essentially defeated
Spanish forces in the provinces and have surrounded the last remaining out-
post of Spanish power—the Intramuros—otherwise known as Old Manila,
with about 15,000 Spanish soldiers still garrisoned inside, for the final siege
until, as fate would have it, the Americans had intervened. The Spaniards
had yielded Manila to the Americans, also without a fight.

The Manipulation and Betrayal of Aguinaldo

The circumstances surrounding Aguinaldo’s return from exile in Hong
Kong back to the Philippines has been subject to disputation and varying
account. A US-based historian, Kenneth E. Hendrickson, in a relatively
recent book, The Spanish-American War (2003), gives the account, with-
out much detail, that while in Hong Kong, Aguinaldo had made initial
contacts with the Americans, with not much results despite the potential
of cooperation with US forces. Hendrickson offers the following narrative:

Aguinaldo later claimed that Colonel Leonard Wood, one of Dewey’s offi-
cers, tried to induce him to return to the Philippines and lead a new revolt with
American aid. There is no evidence to support this claim, but in any event,
82 K. E. BAUZON

Aguinaldo left Hong Kong in April bound not for home but for Europe.
En route he stopped at Singapore, where he met the U.S. consul general,
E. Spencer Pratt, who urged him to return to Hong Kong and discuss mat-
ters with Commodore Dewey. Aguinaldo agreed to go back if Dewey invited
him, and Pratt urged Dewey to do so. Dewey agreed, and Aguinaldo departed
on April 27. He later claimed that he returned to Hong Kong with a clear
understanding that the United States was now committed to Filipino indepen-
dence. E. Spencer Pratt had no authority to make such a guarantee and always
claimed that he had not done so. There is no persuasive evidence upon which
to base a conclusion either way. (Hendrickson) (italics added)

However, as cited in a piece by Bryan Anthony C. Paraiso, Shrine Cura-

tor at the Philippine National Historical Commission, a French journalist,
in a book, Aguinaldo et les Philippines (Paris, 1900), testifies that:

A number of persons found the following role of the Commander of the

Petrel, one of the vessels in the squadron of Admiral Dewey, to solicit the
interview. This interview, followed by many others, was held on March 16:
the Commander of Petrel urged strongly Aguinaldo to return to the Philip-
pines and to resume hostilities against the Spaniards promising the assistance
of the United States if war broke out against Spain. (Plusieurs personnes vin-
rent trouver celui-ci de la part du commandant du Pétrel, un des navires de
l’escadre de l’amiral Dewey, pour solliciter une entrevue. Cette entrevue, suivie
de plusieurs autres, eut lieu le 16 mars: le commandant du Pétrel engagea vive-
ment Aguinaldo à retourner aux Philippines et à reprendre les hostilités contre
les Espagnols, promettant l’assistance des Etats-Unis si la guerre éclatait contre
l’Espagne…) (Paraiso) (italics added)

Another account—by the Philippine History Site of the University of

Hawaii—claims that “[b]ack in Hong Kong, Aguinaldo was told by U.S.
Consul Rounsenville Wildman that Dewey wanted him to return to the
Philippines to resume the Filipino resistance.” According to this same site,
“Aguinaldo claimed that the American officials prodded him to establish a
Philippine government similar to the United States, and that they pledged to
honor and support the Filipino aspirations for independence.” (The Philip-
pine History Site) (italics added).
Nonetheless, Aguinaldo proceeded with his plan to travel to Europe
on April 8, 1898, arriving in Singapore on the twenty-first. While on a
stopover in Singapore, however, fate intervened. Through an interpreter,
an English civil servant who worked in India named “Bray” (no first name
given in the translated insurgent documents in the possession of US Major
 4 DENIALS AND BETRAYALS, CONQUEST AND CAPITULATION 83

J. R. M. Taylor, quoted by Worcester), a meeting was evidently sought by

US Consul to Singapore, E. Spencer Pratt. Based on Pratt’s series of cable
communication with Dewey, it was evident that the Americans were of
the consensus about the utility of Aguinaldo, in behalf of the Americans—
whether Aguinaldo realized it or not—in pursuing the US objective of
conquering the Philippines, and that Aguinaldo could be induced to coop-
erate with the Americans by exploiting his discontent with the Spaniards in
their non-fulfillment of the terms of the Pact of Biak-na-Bato and with the
potential of US arms delivery for use by the insurgents. Following a series
of meetings with Aguinaldo, Pratt reported, in a cable dated April 28, his
delight to the Secretary of State that he was able to persuade Aguinaldo
to return to Hong Kong, that he informed Dewey to the effect, and that
Dewey responded to Pratt to: “Tell Aguinaldo come soon as possible.”
Pratt added:

Just previous to his [Aguinaldo’s] departure, I had a second and last interview
with General Aguinaldo, the particulars of which I shall give you by next mail.
The general impressed me as a man of intelligence, ability, and courage,
and worthy the confidence that had been placed in him.
I think that in arranging for his direct cooperation with the commander
of our forces, I have prevented possible conflict of action and facilitated the
work of occupying and administering the Philippines.
If this course of mine meets with the Government’s approval, as I trust it
may, I shall be fully satisfied; to Mr. Bray, however, I consider there is due
some special recognition for most valuable services rendered.
How that recognition can best be made I leave to you to decide.
(Worcester)

Whatever the veracity of either of the above account, Aguinaldo had

decided to return, leaving Hong Kong on board the vessel USS McCulloch,
courtesy of Dewey, on May sixteen and arriving in his home province of
Cavite, on the nineteenth of May. Aguinaldo’s decision to return was, as
he has always claimed, and just as the above-quoted historian Hendrickson
would concede, based on the firm conviction that “the Americans had
promised to fight for Philippine independence” (Hendrickson). But Dean
C. Worcester, in his own account, claimed that Aguinaldo left Hong Kong
for the Philippines with “eyes wide open” on the knowledge that there was
no commitment in one way or the other from either Dewey or Pratt, to
Philippine independence, and that during a meeting between Aguinaldo
and Dewey at the latter’s flagship, USS Olympia, Philippine independence
84 K. E. BAUZON

was never discussed nor was there a concession on Dewey’s part to offer
the Philippines a disinterested protectorate (Worcester).
Pratt’s observation that Aguinaldo was intelligent, able, and courageous
contradicts any suggestion that Aguinaldo was naïve. It is possible, in
diplospeak, that Aguinaldo was made to understand one thing and Pratt’s
reporting to his superiors another. The same may be said of Aguinaldo’s
conversations with Dewey, from which Aguinaldo went away satisfied with
Dewey’s pronouncements, as he testified in his Reseña Verídica (1900) to
the effect that:

The Admiral received me in a salon, and after greetings of courtesy I asked

him ‘if all the telegrams relative to myself which he had addressed to the
Consul at Singapore, Mr. Pratt, were true.’ He replied in the affirmative,
and added, ‘that the United States had come to the Philippines to protect its
natives and free them from the yoke of Spain.
He said, moreover, that “America was rich in territory and money, and
needed no colonies,” concluding by assuring me, “to have no doubt whatever
about the recognition of Philippine independence by the United States.”
Thereupon he asked me if I could get the people to arise against the Spaniards
and carry on a rapid campaign. (as quoted in Worcester)

Further, Aguinaldo expressed satisfaction at the responses of Dewey to

issues he raised particularly over his concern that the United States might
not recognize Philippine independence after the Spaniards had been
defeated about which Aguinaldo wrote, further:

The Admiral replied that he “was delighted at my sincerity, and believed that
both Filipinos and Americans should treat each other as allies and friends,
clearly explaining all doubts for the better understanding between both par-
ties,” and added that, “so he had been informed, the United States would
recognize the independence of the Filipino people, guaranteed by the word of
honor of the Americans,—more binding than documents which may remain
unfulfilled when it is desired to fail in them as happened with the compacts
signed by the Spaniards, advising me to form at once a Filipino national flag,
offering in virtue thereof to recognize and protect it before the other nations,
which were represented by the various squadrons then in the Bay; although
he said we should conquer the power from the Spaniards before floating said
flag, so that the act should be more honourable in the sight of the whole
world, and, above all, before the United States, in order that when the Fil-
ipino ships with their national flag would pass before the foreign squadrons
they should inspire respect and esteem.” (as quoted in Worcester)
 4 DENIALS AND BETRAYALS, CONQUEST AND CAPITULATION 85

Aguinaldo Returns from Exile, Proclaims

Philippine Independence
News of Aguinaldo’s arrival and the apparent prospect of the resumption of
the struggle to put an end once and for all to over three centuries of Span-
ish colonial rule was greeted with much expression of enthusiasm and sup-
port all throughout the country. The Philippine History Site, cited above,
describes the atmosphere as follows: “The resumption of the revolution
brought an electrifying response throughout the country. From Ilocos in
the north down to Mindanao in the south, there was a simultaneous and
collective struggle to oust the Spaniards.”
After arrival, it took a few days for Aguinaldo to organize (or reorga-
nize as the case may be) his would-be government and team of advisers.
Finally, in the afternoon of the twelfth of June, and despite the sentiment
of his close, trusted adviser, Apolinario Mabini, to delay proclamation until
a fully functional government has been established, Aguinaldo issued the
proclamation of Philippine independence from Spain to an eager crowd
gathered in front of his house in the town of Kawit. The proclamation was
actually read in his behalf by Ambrosio Rianzares Bautista, in his official
designation as War Counselor and Special Delegate, and who is also gener-
ally acknowledged to have composed the document patterned after the US
Declaration of Independence from England. Among its salient provisions
are as follows, based on translation by historian Sulpicio Guevara, herein
quoted at length:

Before me, Ambrosio Rianzares Bautista, War Counsellor and Special Dele-
gate designated to proclaim and solemnize this Declaration of Independence
by the Dictatorial Government of the Philippines, pursuant to, and by virtue
of, a Decree issued by the Engregious [sic] Dictator Don Emilio Aguinaldo
y Famy
Taking into account the fact that the people of this country are already
tired of bearing the ominous yoke of Spanish domination,
Because of arbitrary arrests and abuses of the Civil Guards who cause
deaths in connivance with and even under the express orders of their superior
officers…
Had resolved to start a revolution in August 1896 in order to regain the
independence and sovereignty of which the people had been deprived….
[T]hat by reason of the non-fulfillment of some of the terms, after the
destruction of the plaza of Cavite, Don Emilio Aguinaldo returned in order
to initiate a new revolution and no sooner had he given the order to rise on
86 K. E. BAUZON

the 31st of last month when several towns anticipating the revolution, rose
in revolt on the 28th, such that a Spanish contingent of 178 men, between
Imus Cavite-Viejo, under the command of major of the Marine Infantry
capitulated, the revolutionary movement spreading like wild fire to other
towns of Cavite and the other provinces of Bataan, Pampanga, Batangas,
Bulacan, Laguna, and Morong, some of them with seaports and such was
the success of the victory of our arms, truly marvelous and without equal in
the history of colonial revolutions that in the first mentioned province only
the Detachments in Naic and Indang remained to surrender; in the second all
Detachments had been wiped out; in the third the resistance of the Spanish
forces was localized in the town of San Fernando where the greater part of
them are concentrated, the remainder in Macabebe, Sexmoan, and Guagua;
in the fourth, in the town of Lipa; in the fifth, in the capital and in Calumpit;
and in last two remaining provinces, only in their respective capitals, and the
City of Manila will soon be besieged by our forces as well as the provinces
of Nueva Ecija, Tarlac, Pangasinan, La Union, Zambales, and some others
in the Visayas where the revolution at the time of the pacification and others
even before, so that the independence of our country and the revindication
of our sovereignty is assured.
And having as witness to the rectitude of our intentions the Supreme Judge
of the Universe, and under the protection of our Powerful and Humanitarian
Nation, The United States of America, we do hereby proclaim and declare
solemnly in the name by authority of the people of these Philippine Islands,
That they are and have the right to be free and independent; that they
have ceased to have allegiance to the Crown of Spain; that all political ties
between them are should be completely severed and annulled; and that, like
other free and independent States, they enjoy the full power to make War and
Peace, conclude commercial treaties, enter into alliances, regulate commerce,
and do all other acts and things which an Independent State Has right to do,
We recognize, approve, and ratify, with all the orders emanating from the
same, the Dictatorship established by Don Emilio Aguinaldo…Head of this
Nation, which today begins to have a life of its own, in the conviction that
he has been the instrument chosen by God, inspite of his humble origin,
to effectuate the redemption of this unfortunate country as foretold by Dr.
Don Jose Rizal in his magnificent verses which he composed in his prison cell
prior to his execution, liberating it from the Yoke of Spanish domination, and
in punishment for the impunity with which the Government sanctioned the
commission of abuses by its officials, and for the unjust execution of Rizal
and others who were sacrificed in order to please the insatiable friars….
Moreover, we confer upon our famous Dictator Don Emilio Aguinaldo all
the powers necessary to enable him to discharge the duties of Government,
including the prerogatives of granting pardon and amnesty, … (italics added)
 4 DENIALS AND BETRAYALS, CONQUEST AND CAPITULATION 87

To Aguinaldo and members of his revolutionary government as well as

to the huge crowd in attendance coming from around the country, the
significance of the event could not be emphasized enough. The Philippine
flag, embroidered in Hong Kong by Marcela Agoncillo with the assistance
of Lorenza Agoncillo and Delfina Herboza while still in exile, was hoisted
for the first time. Played also for the first time, by a band, was the Philip-
pine National Anthem. The declaration was signed by ninety-eight persons,
who also served as witnesses including one American, by the name of L. M.
Johnson, supposedly a Colonel of Artillery in the US Army. Standard his-
tory texts by Filipino authors including Agoncillo, Zaide, and Constantino
either do not mention Johnson or, if they do (e.g., Zaide and Constantino),
they do not elaborate on the significance. One American author, however,
makes a special effort to describe Johnson disparagingly which, in the long
term, offers critical readers some needed insight into Aguinaldo’s possible
motives, e.g., as a shred of symbolism, for inviting him, and those of Dewey,
for declining the invitation and snubbing the ceremonies. This author is
Dean C. Worcester, a professional zoologist by training and appointed by
McKinley to serve in both the Schurman and the Taft Commissions, the
only person holding the distinction of serving in both commissions, ironic
because, as a top-level official in the colonial bureaucracy, he helped fash-
ion and normalize policies based on the assumptions that the Filipinos were
“uncivilized” and “savages” which he sought to demonstrate, under the
guise of science, through his so-called ethnographic studies including what
would be regarded today as sexual exploitation. Asian American literature
and cultural studies scholar Nerissa Balce describes this in her series of
studies, and writes that “Worcester even manipulated or coerced his young
female subjects to disrobe their traditional clothes, and pose suggestively
for his ‘ethnographic’ portraits. And these thousands of photographs were,
[and here, Balce quotes US historian and former colonial military officer in
the Philippines, James H. Blount], were widely advertized in America than
anything else connected to the Islands” (Balce 2014). While serving in the
Taft Commission, commencing in 1900, he was concurrently appointed to
the influential position as Secretary of the Interior, where he served until
1913. In his book, The Philippines: Past and Present (1914), he writes of
the event:

Invitations to the ceremony of the declaration of independence were sent

to Admiral Dewey; but neither he nor any of his officers were present. It
was, however, important to Aguinaldo that some American should be there
88 K. E. BAUZON

whom the assembled people would consider a representative of the United

States. “Colonel” Johnson, ex-hotel keeper of Shanghai, who was in the
Philippines exhibiting a cinematograph, kindly consented to appear on this
occasion as Aguinaldo’s Chief of Artillery and the representative of the North
American nation. His name does not appear subsequently among the papers
of Aguinaldo. It is possible that his position as colonel and chief of artillery
was a merely temporary one which enabled him to appear in a uniform which
would befit the character of the representative of a great people upon so
solemn an occasion! (Worcester)

Worcester’s intention in diminishing the significance of an American pres-

ence at Aguinaldo’s inauguration was in conformity with his entire portrayal
of Filipinos as incapable of self-government.

Dewey’s Plausible Deniability

In his testimony before a US congressional inquiry on the Philippines estab-
lished in 1899, Dewey affirmed, and repeatedly so, when questioned by
Tennessee Senator Edward Ward Carmack as to whether he sought the
help of the Filipino insurgents led by Aguinaldo, in the following manner:

Senator Carmack: You did want a man there who could organize and rouse
the people?
Admiral Dewey: I didn’t want anybody. I would like to say now that
Aguinaldo and his people were forced on me by Consul Pratt and Consul
Wildman; I didn’t do anything—
Senator Carmack: Did they have any power to force him upon you?
Admiral Dewey: Yes; they had in a way. They had not the official power, but
one will yield after a while to constant pressure. I did not expect anything
of them; I did not think they would do anything. I would not have taken
them; I did not want them; I did not believe in them; because, when I
left Hongkong, I was led to suppose that the country was in a state of
insurrection, and that at my first gun, as Mr. Williams put it, there would
be a general uprising, and I thought these half dozen or dozen refugees
at Hongkong would play a very small part in it. (as quoted in Worcester)

In other words, based on Dewey’s testimony, Aguinaldo made a fool of

himself for believing what he did about what he thought was the benev-
olence and generosity of the United States. Especially so that he made
special mention, in his declaration of independence, which “followed the
advice of the American consul-general of Hong Kong, Rounsenville Wild-
man, and contained the following statement: ‘….as the great and powerful
 4 DENIALS AND BETRAYALS, CONQUEST AND CAPITULATION 89

North American nation has offered its disinterested protection to secure the
liberty of this country, I again assume command of all the troops in the strug-
gle….’, based on Aguinaldo’s ardent expectation that the word of the US,
or its representatives with whom he has dealt, was worth trusting.” (The
Philippine History Site)
Thus was laid the foundation for US occupation of the Philippines and
its future policy toward this new colony. The US decision to acquire and
keep the Philippines from Spain along with Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Guam
by virtue of the Treaty of Paris of December 1898 and ratified by the US
Senate in February 1899 appeared to confirm America’s belief about its
own “Manifest Destiny”; it also offered an opportunity to showcase the
difference with the America’s European counterparts by enunciating its
policy of benevolent assimilation, at least toward the Filipinos.5 No doubt,
there was abundant evidence that many leading American opinion-makers
and opinion-shapers at the time were convinced of US moral superiority
or, for that matter, the need to assert “manhood.” In retrospect, however,
and in the view of this author, the said Treaty of Paris was based on a lie
and, despite the moralizing about America’s “Manifest Destiny” and its
civilizing mission as a moral duty, this lie could not obfuscate the fact that,
at the end of the day, neither the Cubans nor the Filipinos had asked to be
taken over and be occupied by another foreign power. They had asked (in
the case of Cuba) or hoped (in the case of the Philippines) for assistance,
but not to be taken into bondage. What the Filipinos and the Cubans had
both encountered in common, instead, was a glib and manipulative North
American power which has, at least for decades until then, been gradually
growing and expanding—through stealth or outright theft—to whet its
appetite for resources and power in consonance with the economic needs
and requirements of a system based on capital accumulation and labor
extraction. This is perhaps most candidly and unabashedly articulated by
Halstead, with the previous US annexation of Hawaii in mind and the more
recent victory over Spain particularly in Guam and the Philippines, in the
following words: “With Guam as part of the territory of the United States,
we have a direct line of possessions across the Pacific, in the order of Hawaii,
Guam and the Philippines; while in the northwesterly direction from our
Pacific coast we have the islands forming a part of Alaska. By holding all
these islands we will be prepared to control practically the commerce of
the Pacific, the future great commercial highway of the world” (Halstead).
With Spain as a moribund, spent power and, having lost effective control
over the colony, this author is of the view that it had no right to cede
90 K. E. BAUZON

to the US what it no longer owned.6 The United States, on the other,

had no moral right to purchase the same based on a lie that it helped
spin, both knowingly and deliberately simply because it wanted to own. As
described in a now-standard Philippine history reader, so that the episode
would no longer be dismissed as a mere conspiracy theory, historian and
political scientist Boone D. Schirmer and Stephen Rosskamm Shalom, in
their introduction to the section on the Philippine–American War in their
outstanding anthology, The Philippines Reader: A History of Colonialism,
Neocolonialism, Dictatorship and Resistance (1987), offer the following
summary:

In August 1898 the Spanish command in Manila and U.S. officers represent-
ing Admiral Dewey conferred behind the backs of Aguinaldo and his men in
their positions outside Manila. An agreement was reached that, after a sham
battle, the Spanish would surrender to the U.S. military, on the condition
that the Philippine nationalists be excluded from Manila. To this condition
U.S. officials readily agreed. After the mock battle took place as planned the
U.S. military took over Manila from the Spanish and came into direct con-
frontation with the Filipinos. In February 1899 U.S. troops were ordered
to move through the Philippine lines, and the war began. (Schirmer and
Shalom)

Major General Merritt, Commander-in-Chief of US forces in the Philip-

pines, and who received the prearranged instrument of capitulation from
Fermin Jaudenes, General-in-Chief of the Spanish Army in the Philippines,
admitted as much in the following account, as quoted by journalist Murat
Halstead, embedded among Dewey’s forces, in his chapter on the capture
of Manila, as follows:

For these reasons the preparations for the attack on the city were pressed,
and military operations conducted without reference to the situation of the
insurgent forces. The wisdom of this course was subsequently fully estab-
lished by the fact that when the troops of my command carried the Spanish
intrenchments, extending from the sea to the Pasay road on the extreme Spanish
right, we were under no obligations, by prearranged plan of mutual attack, to
turn to the right and clear the front still held against the insurgents, but were
able to move forward at once and occupy the city and suburbs. (Halstead) (italics
added)
 4 DENIALS AND BETRAYALS, CONQUEST AND CAPITULATION 91

General Merritt also confirmed, in the same account, that the said prear-
ranged plan took no consideration of the wishes of the Filipino revolution-
aries, that they were considered essentially a nuisance, and that he issued
instructions to “brush aside” the Filipino insurgents if they were getting
in the way of the US military operations, even as they (i.e., the Filipino
insurgents) were also ready and waiting in their trenches to assault or enter
Manila, as the case may be, and to plant the Philippine flag atop the Spanish
fortification on the thirteenth of August and upon the Spanish surrender.
On the Filipino revolutionaries, General Merritt added, three days after
the mock battle but before leaving for Paris for the peace negotiations, the
following statement:

Doubtless much dissatisfaction is felt by the rank and file of the insurgents that
they have not been permitted to enjoy the occupancy of Manila, and there is
some ground for trouble with them owing to that fact, but notwithstanding
many rumors to the contrary, I am of the opinion that the leaders will be
able to prevent serious disturbances, as they are sufficiently intelligent and
educated to know that for them to antagonize the United States would be
to destroy their only chance of future political improvement. (Halstead)

Thus, if its purpose was to defeat Spain in the Spanish-American War, it

had done that. The next step—the moral step—would have been to respect
the wishes of the inhabitants to be free of any foreign domination and free
to chart their own course. And, there was no honor for the United States
to connive with Spain over the surrender of Manila. As San Juan explains:
“Dewey held Aguinaldo at bay with false promises of U.S. support. The
Spaniards, after a mock battle already agreed upon, decided to surrender
to General Merritt on August 13” (San Juan 2009), coming in the wake
of what is now revealed as a prior understanding to provide the Spanish
colonial authorities a face-saving device to hand over sovereignty to the
Americans so as not to surrender to the insurgents; this paved the way for
the signing of the Treaty of Paris in December of that year, and ratification
by the US Senate on February 6 of the following year. However, morality
had no binding force at this point, and the consequences of this colonial
takeover have been dire to the Filipinos. As payment for this lie, more than
four thousand American soldiers would die, and more than a million Fil-
ipinos—combatants and civilians alike—would perish. On this sorry and
shameful episode, a Filipino textbook offers his candid assessment as fol-
lows: “Thus, the Philippines formally came under the rule of the United
92 K. E. BAUZON

States just a change from one colonial master to another. In fine, the Amer-
icans through deceit and stealth had stolen the freedom that Filipinos had
fought for with their life, blood, sweat, and tears” (Duka).
It is the study of these consequences that critical scholars like San Juan
wish to explore and want students of history to critically examine as an
antidote to mainstream scholars, historiographers, and popular media that
would otherwise whitewash—wittingly or unwittingly—this sorry episode
in Philippine history or relegate it to the dark recesses of memory. To ensure
this does not happen, San Juan writes:

What I want to call attention to is the resonance of this event in the hermeneu-
tic discourse and historiography of U.S. scholars on Philippine affairs, the way
it established the framework of intelligibility for constructing what became
the accepted knowledge of Philippine society, Filipino character and psy-
chology, and Filipino culture. In short, the interpretations and judgments
expressed about this episode afford us a symptomatic reading of the theo-
retical grid of interests and motives - in short, the ideological apparatus -
through which commonplace truths and received notions about the Philip-
pines and Filipinos have been filtered and shaped. (San Juan 1998)

One could begin, for instance, in critically examining the process and the
presuppositions by which US President William McKinley took in deciding
to annex the Philippines as an appurtenant part of US territory. As San Juan
describes:

McKinley justified the forcible annexation of the Philippines to a delegation

of Methodist Church leaders in 1899 with these words: Since the natives
were “unfit for self-government,” McKinley intoned, “…there was nothing
left for [the United States] to do but to take them all, … and uplift and
civilize and Christianize them.” (San Juan 2013)

But many Americans were not persuaded by expressions of benevolence

by McKinley, particularly on his assurances that that the Americans were not
coming to the Philippines as “invaders” or as “conquerors” but, rather, as
“friends.” Mark Twain, for example, expressing the sentiment of the Anti-
Imperialist League of which he was an ardent supporter, wrote, in a letter
to the New York Herald on October 15, 1900, that “I have seen that we do
not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have
gone to conquer, not to redeem…. and so I am an anti-imperialist. I am
opposed to having the [American] eagle put its talons on any other land.”
 4 DENIALS AND BETRAYALS, CONQUEST AND CAPITULATION 93

In 1901, Twain followed this sentiment up with the publication of a highly

acclaimed satirical essay, entitled “To the Person Sitting in Darkness.” In
this essay, Twain asks, quite rhetorically:

Shall we? That is, shall we go on conferring our Civilization upon the peoples
that sit in darkness, or shall we give those poor things a rest? Shall we bang
right ahead in our old-time, loud, pious way, and commit the new century to
the game; or shall we sober up and sit down and think it over first? Would it
not be prudent to get our Civilization tools together and see how much stock
is left on hand in the way of Glass Beads and Theology, and Maxim Guns and
Hymn Books, and Trade Gin and Torches of Progress and Enlightenment
(patent adjustable ones, good to fire villages with, upon occasion), and bal-
ance the books and arrive at the profit and loss, so that we may intelligently
decide whether to continue the business or sell out the property and start a
new Civilization Scheme on the proceeds? (Twain 1901)

Notes
1. In San Juan’s award-winning book After Postcolonialism (2000), cited ear-
lier, testifies that, by the time the Americans had interrupted the Philippine
Revolution against Spain, “a Filipino nation had already been germinating
with over 200 revolts against Spanish colonialism. Filipino intellectuals of the
Propaganda Movement (1872-1896) had already implanted the Enlighten-
ment principles of rationality, civic humanism, and autonomy (sovereignty
of all citizens) in the program of the revolutionary forces of the Katipunan
and the first Philippine Republic. At the outset, the Propagandistas – Jose
Rizal, Marcelo H. Del Pilar, Graciano Lopez Jaena, and so on – used the
Spanish language to appeal to an enlightened local and European audience in
demanding reforms” (San Juan 2000).
San Juan pays particular attention to the role of Dr. Jose P. Rizal in the Pro-
paganda Movement and in the Revolution overall. Rizal, today, is revered as
the country’s foremost hero. He authored two very important novels, namely
Noli Me Tangere (1887) and El Filibusterismo (1891), works which, accord-
ing to San Juan, “incorporated all the resources of irony, satire, heteroglossia
(inspired by Cervantes and Rabelais), and the conventions of European real-
ism to criticize the abuses of the Church and arouse the spirit of self-reliance
and sense of dignity in the subjugated natives. For his subversive and heretical
imagination, Rizal was executed – a sacrifice that serves as the foundational
event for all Filipino writing” (San Juan 2000).
In another essay, entitled “Jose Rizal: Rediscovering the Filipino Hero in
the Age of Terrorism,” composed as an Afterword to the revised edition of
San Juan’s book, Rizal in Our Time (2011a), San Juan takes the time to
94 K. E. BAUZON

critically review some popular biographical works that had been written on
Rizal. In the process, San Juan takes the opportunity to clarify and locate
Rizal’s position as an individual actor, in particular, his own personal agency,
in light of the social, political, cultural, and economic milieu that he lived
in, and without falling into the tendency of hero worship. Looking over the
biographical works on Rizal by such varied authors as Austin Coates, Rafael
Palma, Leon Ma. Guerrero, and Nick Joaquin, among others, San Juan then
offers the general assessment that these writers have “all attempted to trian-
gulate the ideas of the hero with his varying positions in his family, in the
circle of his friends and colleagues in Europe, and in relation to the colonial
Establishment. Their main concern is to find out the origin of the hero’s
thoughts and their impact on the local environment.” San Juan contends that
these authors are inherently flawed by the very nature of their approach which
suffers from “the twin errors of contemplative objectivism and individualist
bias” permeating their accounts. “They ignored,” San Juan explains, “the
historical-materialist axiom that the changing circumstances and of personal
sensibility/minds, as Marx advised, ‘can be conceived and rationally under-
stood only as revolutionary practice’ – that is, sensuous collective praxis in
material life” (San Juan 2011a).
In this approach that San Juan suggests as a means of avoiding the common
trap to which many historians fall when they merely describe, in a narrative
form, the sequential series of events surrounding a hero’s life, and erroneously
assuming that they have done their job, San Juan invokes what Marx has writ-
ten, one in “Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State,” and the other in The
German Ideology, wherein individual protagonists are considered in the con-
text of the political economy that they inhabit. San Juan explains further that
“[i]n the ‘Theses on Feuerbach,’ Marx posited that the ‘human essence is no
abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensem-
ble of the social relations.’… In the ultimate analysis, the individual subject
may be viewed as a microcosm on the whole social fabric that generates his
potential and his actuality, without which this monadic figure has no meaning
or consequence. Reciprocally, the opaque density of the social background is
illumined and concretely defined by individual acts of intervention, such as
Rizal’s novels, without which society and the physical world remain indiffer-
ent.” San Juan concludes: “We need this dialectical approach to comprehend
in a more all-encompassing way Rizal’s vexed and vexing situation, together
with his painstakingly calculated responses – all cunning ruses of Reason in
history (for Hegel). Such ruses actually register the contradictions of social
forces in real life, reflected in the crises of lives in each generation” (San Juan
2011a).
 4 DENIALS AND BETRAYALS, CONQUEST AND CAPITULATION 95

2. San Juan has paid homage to Bonifacio through various venues and out-
lets. In a recent lecture before the faculty, students, and staff of the Uni-
versity of the Philippines–Visayas, in February 2014, San Juan reiterates his
esteem for Bonifacio the revolutionary and explains through the historical-
materialist perspective, an approach shunned by mainstream historians and
biographers of Bonifacio. San Juan explains: “From a historical-materialist
perspective, Bonifacio is less than an individual than an embodiment of col-
lective forces that were stirred up by the Propagandists, mainly by Rizal’s
novels and his failed Liga. The Katipunan is not just a collection of disgrun-
tled individuals but an organized assemblage of conscious mind mobilized for
directed, planned action. It laid the ground for constructing the counter hege-
monic vision of future national-democratic struggles: the Sakdalista, Huk,
NPA/NDF, etc.” (San Juan 2014b).
San Juan also clarifies the ideological orientation of the Katipunan and
distinguishes it from the dominant orientations of Spain and the United States
and, for that matter, that of Emilio Aguinaldo and his coterie of petty elites.
San Juan writes: “Unlike the hero-worshipping habits imposed by aristocratic
Spain and the utilitarian U.S., the ideology of the Katipunan emphasized
cooperation, mutual aid, and the welfare of the community. National soli-
darity, not individualism. The revolution initiated by Bonifacio’s Katipunan
contradicted the cacique mentality of the Aguinaldo circle, petty holding pro-
prietors, titled ilustrados, the Westernized intelligentsia. While Bonifacio and
his circle were themselves products of the European Enlightenment, espe-
cially the radical philosophes, they also functioned as organic intellectuals of
the workers and peasants. Not the pasyon but the habitus of indyo artisans
and urban workers (Manila then was a collection of neighborhoods) shaped
their everyday conduct, a life-form whose virtue inhered in spontaneous feel-
ings, rituals of sharing, emotive gestures and clandestine agitation rather than
detached inquiry” (San Juan 2014b).
Finally, San Juan reminds us that knowledge and beliefs are not detached
from social consequences, such as any attempt to deny—such as what many
historians have tried to do—the agency of Bonifacio, the Katipunan, and
the collective social forces that sustained both. San Juan writes: “In sum, the
narrative of Philippine modernity based on the rational autonomy of each
individual talent harnessed for the common good begins with Bonifacio and
the Katipunan. Incredulity toward this master-narrative can only sustain the
abuses of dynastic warlord families, proprietors of semi-feudal estates, as well
as their comprador-bureaucratic networks in government. Consumerist indi-
vidualism and lumpen criminality are morbid byproducts of this interregnum
between the old dying system and the new one still convulsed by birth pangs”
(San Juan 2014a).
96 K. E. BAUZON

3. San Juan gives his readers a glimpse of the sociopolitical conditions prevailing
during the generation of, and context to, the revolutionaries, including that of
Rizal, as well as the impact of international events such as the opening of the
Suez Canal in the following passage: “By the time Rizal was born in 1861, the
predominantly feudal/tributary mode of production was already moribund
and an obstacle to further socioeconomic development. Trade and commerce
expanded when the country was opened to foreign shipping in 1834–1865,
especially after the completion of the Suez Canal in 1869 (Arcilla). Vestiges
of courtly love and chivalric ways dissolved in the triumph of the cash-nexus
warranted by merchant and circulation of capital, further validating profitable
marital exchanges to expand or consolidate property. A national market arose.
While the islands for the most part remained tribal and rural under the grip of
the rent-collecting frailocracy and its subaltern principalia, land-tilling fami-
lies such as those of Rizal flourished within the limits of the colonial order.
The family household organization enabled the socially constructed gender
asymmetry based on biological difference to segregate daughters from sons
(women assigned to procreation and child nurturance, men to public affairs)
and adversely affect their potential to develop as creative human beings and
morally responsible citizens.” (San Juan 2011b)
“Political power continued to be monopolized by the peninsulares in the
bureaucracy and military, together with the religious orders. They controlled
large estates and appropriated the social wealth (surplus value or profit) pro-
duced by the majority population of workers and peasants most of whom
were coerced under law (for example, the polo servicios) and reduced to slav-
ish penury. Ruthless pauperization also doomed indigenous folk deprived of
access to public lands, animals, craft tools, and so on. Only a tiny minority
of Creoles and children of mixed marriages (mestizos of Chinese descent)
were allowed to prosper under precarious, serf-like, and often humiliating
conditions that eventually drove them to covert or open rebellion. Rizal was
one of these children sprung from the conjuncture of contradictory modes
of production and reproduction of social relations, a child responding to
the sharpening crisis of the moribund, decadent Spanish empire” (San Juan
2011b).
4. On Bonifacio’s execution and the legacy he left behind, San Juan reflects on
the lessons learned: “Bonifacio’s execution by the Aguinaldo clique reminds
us that unless class divisions, and their attendant ideology of narrow class or
familial interests (both of which are maintained by US hegemony) are over-
come, we cannot progress as an independent nation and a people with dignity
and singular identity. This unity is something to be theorized in consonance
with practical organized movements… Bonifacio is being resurrected everyday
in the numerous efforts of our countrymen to oppose imperialist diktat and
the subserviency to their imperialist patrons of our politicians. Compradors,
 4 DENIALS AND BETRAYALS, CONQUEST AND CAPITULATION 97

and landlords – the oligarchic elite – whose lives have been molded to main-
tain a violent system whose grant of ‘impunity’ for torturers and killers is a
clear sign of its moral and political bankruptcy” (San Juan 2014a).
5. Here, San Juan, along with others, contests this presumed civilizing claim by
the US and that, as also shown in this essay, there is, in fact, no difference
between the US style and ferocity of colonialism, on one hand, and the Euro-
pean style, on the other, in terms of motives, interests, means, and outcome.
To begin with, San Juan regards the victory of the United States over Spain
in their “splendid little war” (a phrase attributed to then US Ambassador to
Great Britain John Hay, in a letter he wrote to then Secretary of the Navy
Theodore Roosevelt) as “[t]he foundational event in the chronicle of the
expansion of U.S. coercive sovereignty…” (San Juan 1996). He recalls Mark
Twain’s famous satirical essay, “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” from
which he quotes: “We have pacified some thousands of the islanders and
burned them, destroyed their fields, burned their villages, and turned their
widows and orphans out-of-doors, furnished heartbreak by exile to some
dozens of disagreeable patriots; subjugating the remaining ten millions by
Benevolent Assimilation, which is the pious new name of the musket; we
have acquired property in the three hundred concubines and other slaves
of our business partner, the Sultan of Sulu and hoisted our protecting flag
over that swag. And so, by these Providences of God – and the phrase is the
government’s, not mine – we are a World Power” (as quoted in San Juan
1996).
6. A nugget of a quote from San Juan’s essay, “Dialectics and History: Power,
Knowledge, Agency in Rizal’s Discourse” (2006) is here helpful to give con-
text to Spain’s weakened status in international politics at this point in time
vis-à-vis other powers, particularly the United States, as follows: “Spain was
unable to remedy the paralysis and lethargy induced by the Empire’s accumu-
lation of loot from the American continent.” In this essay, San Juan was trying
to explain Rizal’s clarification about the subject of indolence being imputed
upon Filipinos as being a product of climate or nature. A central thesis by
Rizal, San Juan explains, is that indolence is universal and that “natural laws
alone cannot account for human behavior within the totality of the social
relations of production.”

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 CHAPTER 5

The Philippine–American War, 1899–1913,

and the US Counterinsurgency
and Pacification Campaign

[War] is thus not an end in itself but an instrument or tool to advance ends
associated with will, purposes, designs beyond individual passions or whims.
In the literary archive, war manifests itself customarily in the conflict of indi-
vidual wills or passions. But, in the process of unfolding, the human telos
becomes perverted by the means, by its instrumentalization.
San Juan, War in the Filipino Imagination… (2011)

Pacification of a People “Sitting in Darkness”

For much of the rest of 1898, Aguinaldo busied himself organizing his pro-
visional government particularly at the local government level. He heeded
the advice of his close advisor, Apolinario Mabini, a lawyer despite his par-
alytic condition, to transform his government from a provisional dictator-
ship to a provisional revolutionary one. Mabini argued that the declaration
of independence that he issued on June 12, 1898, was much too fawn-
ing towards the Americans. Commencing on the 15th of September, that
same year, a constitutional convention called by Aguinaldo convened in the
town of Malolos. After much deliberation particularly over the three drafts
proposed by Pedro Paterno, Apolinario Mabini, and Felipe Calderon, the

© The Author(s) 2019 101

K. E. Bauzon, Capitalism, The American Empire, and Neoliberal
Globalization, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9080-8_5
102 K. E. BAUZON

draft closest to Calderon’s proposal was adopted providing for a republi-

can, representative system of government, with separate branches of gov-
ernment with a judiciary free and independent from either legislative or
executive control. It also provided for freedoms of association, the press,
and of religion, due process and privacy rights, among other liberal ideas.
In December of the same year, Aguinaldo finally gave approval to the draft
submitted to him and, pending ratification by the Malolos Congress, he
issued an order that both its letter and spirit, meanwhile, be complied with
because it represents the “sovereign will of the Filipino people.” On January
20, 1899, the Malolos Congress gave its ratification and, the following day,
Aguinaldo promulgated it. In his inaugural speech, after congratulating the
convenors, Aguinaldo expressed optimism that the Philippines, henceforth,
“will have a fundamental law which will unite our people with the other
nations by the strongest of solidarities, that is the solidarity of justice, of
law and right, eternal truths which were the basis of human dignity.” Of
the conviction that the struggle against Spanish colonial rule was over and
that there would be no need for further struggle, declared:

We are no longer insurgents, we are no longer revolutionists, that is to say armed

men desirous of destroying and annihilating the enemy. We are from now on,
Republicans, that is to say, men of law, able to fraternize with all other nations,
with mutual respect and affection. There is nothing lacking, therefore, in
order for us to be recognized and admitted as a free and independent nation.
(Aguinaldo 1899) (italics added)

Aguinaldo’s new constitution, however, no matter how optimistic he

was, was never implemented. As though paying a eulogy over the demise
of this constitution, George A. Malcolm, former Associate Justice of the
colonial-era Supreme Court of the Philippines, in a 1924 article, wrote:
“[I]n order to do the constitution justice, it should also be recalled that
many provisions which to the American observer seem strange, to the Fil-
ipino were natural and fitting. After all, the constitution did conform to
many of the tests of a good constitution, and it is to be presumed that it did
faithfully portray the aspirations and political ideals of a people” (Malcolm).
As to Aguinaldo’s statement that he and his fellow revolutionaries were
no longer “insurgents,” this turned out to be rather premature. In view
of the changed situation which would see his revolutionary forces collide
with the American forces, the latter would now see themselves as overseers
of a new-found property, and that Aguinaldo and his soldiers were now
 5 THE PHILIPPINE–AMERICAN WAR, 1899–1913 … 103

to be considered as insurgents, in effect, interlopers in their own country.

Although Aguinaldo neither desired nor planned it, the war with the Amer-
icans was imposed upon him by circumstances as when an incident at the
San Juan Bridge temporarily demarcating the line separating the American
forces from the Filipino fighters, on February 4, 1899, an American sen-
try shot and killed a Filipino soldier. The preceding circumstances and the
events that took place are described in a now-standard Philippine history
text quoted at length as follows:

On January 24, 1899, the War Department announced that General Otis
who was then in charge of the American forces in the Philippines could now
conduct hostilities against the Filipinos whom the Americans considered as
mere insurgents and bandits. In line with his new orders, Otis requested
Admiral Dewey to place his ships in a position to give U.S. troops support-
ive fire, which the latter obliged. On February 2, a U.S. officer regimental
commander gave secret orders to their officers and men to bring about a
conflict if possible. On the same day Nebraskan troops, still under orders to
withhold fire, went into the territory beyond Manila’s city limits, on which
the Filipinos held their lines and regarded as their own. After a harsh dispute,
the Philippine troops withdrew under orders from their high command.
On February 4, General Otis took the decisive step. He ordered the
Nebraskans to open fire on further nationalist “intruders.” That evening
Private William Grayson and friend, of the 54th Nebraska Regiment, were
ordered to patrol even further into the territory held by the nationalists. In
language reflecting the racist attitude then found in the US forces from top
to bottom, Private Grayson narrated what happened:
About eight o’clock something rose slowly up not twenty feet in front of
me was a Filipino. I yelled “Halt!”… He immediately shouted “Halto” at me.
Well, I thought the best thing to do was to shoot him. He dropped… Then
two Filipinos sprang out of a gateway about fifteen feet from us. I called
“Halt!,” and Miller fired and got one. I saw that another was left. Well, I
think I got my second Filipino that time. We retreated to where our six other
fellows were, and I said, “Line up, fellows, the niggers are in here all through
these yards.” The Filipinos in the immediate area returned fire and the war
began (Duka). (italics added)

The war that followed—officially lasting about three years up to Aguinal-

do’s capture—with all its gore and violence has been described by numerous
historians. It suffices for now to quote passages from the concise essay by
historian Luzviminda Francisco clarifying to contemporary students that
the Philippine–American War commencing in 1899 was “America’s First
104 K. E. BAUZON

Vietnam.” On this first battle of this war, Francisco reports that thousands
of Filipino soldiers, armed mostly with bolos (long, single-edged native
knife), and Remington rifles and Mausers captured from the Spaniards,
were killed and that hundreds more were later to die from their wounds,
battling US soldiers no less than twenty-one thousand in number armed
with much more superior weaponry and assisted by Dewey’s battleships
that steamed up the Pasig River, lobbing 500-pound shells “with pulveriz-
ing effectiveness” (Francisco).
Having realized that the Filipino revolutionaries could not be success-
ful “by fighting on American terms of fixed position, set-piece battles in
the classical military tradition,” they soon resorted to “mobile warfare”
more suited to their “superior knowledge of the terrain and the universal
support they enjoyed among the people…” (Francisco). They also realized
that they were fighting a new enemy “which gave no quarter and which
was prepared to disregard the fundamental rules of warfare” (Francisco).
Further, they also realized that “[t]he Americans were contemptuous of
Filipinos generally and they had little respect for [their] fighting ability”
(Francisco).
By October of 1899, the Filipino revolutionaries had been scoring vic-
tories, mostly in small skirmishes but also in rare large encounters. One of
these large encounters occurred on June 10, 1899, when a Filipino force of
three thousand men, commanded by Generals Ricarte and Noriel, encoun-
tered in an ambush a division of US forces numbering four thousand in
the province of Laguna, south of Manila that were subsequently “cut to
pieces” (Francisco).
Beginning in November of the same year, the US military command
began establishing garrisons all throughout the country. With this action
came the policy that “Filipino guerrillas were no longer treated as soldiers of
an opposing army but were considered to be bandits and common criminals
(ladrones). When captured they were treated as such” (Francisco).
By early 1900, the garrison network appeared to work in favor of the
Americans, as the occupation of towns appeared to go unimpeded by any
significant guerrilla resistance. However, while the garrison network may
have extended the US military’s reach to much of the country, it also over-
stretched them, at least until further reinforcements arrived. As Francisco
explains that the garrison network:

seriously thinned the U.S. troop strength and the Americans were continually
being counterattacked and ambushed. It was becoming clear that the entire
 5 THE PHILIPPINE–AMERICAN WAR, 1899–1913 … 105

Islands would have to be “pacified.” Moreover, guerrilla activity was both

increasing and becoming increasingly effective. Being incessantly ambushed,
boloed and betrayed was nerve-wracking and the Americans began to exercise
their mounting frustration on the population at large. All the “niggers” were
enemies, whether or not they bore arms. Patrols sent to fight the guerrillas
usually had difficulty locating the enemy and often simply resorted to burning
barrios in their path. Village officials were often forced at bayonet point to
lead American patrols, and non-combatants began to be held responsible for
the actions of the guerrillas. Any form of resistance to American objectives
subjected the perpetrator to a charge of treason. (Francisco)

Nonetheless, the setting up of garrisons all through the country seemed

to favor, overall, the US military’s counterinsurgency campaign, particularly
in its effort to capture the elusive revolutionary leader, Aguinaldo, hoping
that in so doing, the insurgency would finally come to an end. General
Frederick Funston, the officer that, in fact, led in the capture of Aguinaldo
on March 23, 1901, through a combination of ruse and use of informers
and double-agents, including former allies and confidants of Aguinaldo
himself, described in his memoirs such garrisoning policy as follows:

Scattered all over the Philippines we had more than seventy thousand troops,
counting native auxiliaries, and these in detachments varying in size from a
regiment to less than a company garrisoned every town of importance and
many places that were mere villages. Through the country everywhere were
the enemy’s guerrilla bands, made up not only of the survivors of the forces
that had fought us earlier in the war, but of men who had been recruited or
conscripted since. We had almost worn ourselves out chasing these maraud-
ers, and it was only occasionally by effecting a surprise or through some streak
of good fortune that we were able to inflict any punishment on them, and
such successes were only local and had little effect on the general conditions.
These guerrillas persistently violated all the rules that are supposed to govern
the conduct of civilized people engaged in war, while the fact that they passed
rapidly from the status of peaceful non-combatants living in our garrisoned
towns to that of men in arms against us made it especially difficult for us to
deal with them. (Funston)

By the middle of 1900, the Filipino fighters were still undefeated despite
their obvious disadvantages in arms, a fact causing embarrassment to Gen-
eral Otis and to President McKinley who was facing an electoral challenge in
the upcoming November elections. Accordingly, General Otis was replaced
by General Arthur MacArthur as commander of the military expeditionary
106 K. E. BAUZON

forces in the Philippines. Very shortly, he conducted counterinsurgency

operations against the Filipino forces, guided by his extensive experience
combating against the Indians during the Indian wars. Also, by late Septem-
ber, McKinley had sent a federal judge, William Howard Taft, to head the
Second Philippine Commission, succeeding the first one headed by Schur-
man. The Taft Commission, as the Second Commission came to be popu-
larly referred to, was tasked with establishing a civil government. To form
this government, Taft recruited former members of the Aguinaldo gov-
ernment who have since turned-coat including individuals with such last
names as Buencamino, Legarda, Luzuriaga, Paterno, and among others.
These individuals were united by their common background as ilustrados
or petty local, landowning elites who invariably supported some form of
autonomy under, if not outright collaboration with, US rule.
With MacArthur’s designation as the new commander of the US forces
in the Philippines, one may discern a shift both in US military attitude and
in tactics. As explained by Francisco:

Tired of being chronically harassed and boloed by the Filipinos and finding it
difficult to pin the guerrillas down in the kind of conventional firefight they
so urgently desired, the Americans began to resort to revanchist attitudes
and policies. If the American command had ever believed they enjoyed any
popular support in the Philippines (apart from the handful of wealthy puppets
serving in the Taft regime), a year and a half of war certainly dispelled any
continued illusions on the matter. If the people supported the guerrillas then
the people must also be classified as the enemy. (Francisco)

One does not need to think hard to understand the implications of this.
The pacification campaign under MacArthur commenced with the decla-
ration of martial law in December 1900. It further commenced with the
assumption that, because of the popular nature of the resistance to US rule,
the people were to be treated as suspect and, therefore, as enemy. “Ev-
eryone was now considered an active guerrilla or a guerrilla supporter,”
Francisco explained. Under this pretext, coastal villages in the Visayas were
shelled freely by the US Navy before the landing of troops. During the
January–February 1901 period, Francisco writes that the whole island of
Marinduque, with a population of 51,000, were herded into five strategic
hamlets much like the reconcentrados used by Spain in Cuba prior to the
Spanish–American War of 1898. Hamleting was used as well in northern
Luzon. On numerous occasions, this turned into outright depopulation
 5 THE PHILIPPINE–AMERICAN WAR, 1899–1913 … 107

campaigns against populated towns and villages. No distinction was made

between guerrillas, guerrilla sympathizers, or just plain civilians. Francisco
quotes a US Congressman, who preferred to be anonymous, and who can-
didly spoke about this campaign with the following words:

You never hear of any disturbance in northern Luzon because there isn’t
anybody there to rebel…. The good Lord in heaven only knows the number
of Filipinos that were put under the ground. Our soldiers took no prison-
ers, they kept no records, they simply swept the country and wherever and
whenever they could get hold of a Filipino they killed him. (Francisco)

Keeping no record of US military atrocities during the pacification cam-

paign was obviously self-serving. It kept an air of deniability. It also often
freed the soldiers and their officers from any sense of accountability or guilt
that might otherwise hinder or curtail their discretion in pursuing mili-
tary operations. Variably referred to as “scorched earth policy” or, more
euphemistically, “protective retribution,” it gained expressions in the actual
words of officers such as General William Shafter who told the Chicago
News quite candidly and unapologetically, “it may be necessary to kill half
the Filipinos in order that the remaining half of the population may be
advanced to a higher plane of life than their present semi-barbarous state
affords.” Or, those by General “Howlin’ Jake” Smith, a participant in the
Wounded Knee Massacre, who instructed his men, during a pacification
campaign in Samar in late September 1901, to “kill and burn, kill and burn
[anyone above the age of ten]. I want no prisoners. The more you kill and
burn, the more you please me.” About three months later, this atrocity was
replicated in Batangas when, Major General J. Franklin Bell set out to ren-
der the province uninhabitable. Consequent to this scorched-earth policy,
at least a hundred thousand residents of the province had been killed.
Atrocities like the examples cited here were often justified by the assump-
tion or rationalization that the Filipinos were “savages,” uncivilized or, as
Rudyard Kipling described them in his poem, “Half-devil and half-child.”
Elihu Root, Secretary of War under Theodore Roosevelt, thought so too.
William Howard Taft, the new Civil Governor of the Islands, held the opin-
ion that Filipinos were inferior “to the most ignorant negro.” Roosevelt
himself was reported as telling Kipling that “in dealing with the Philippines
I have first [to deal with] the jack-fools who seriously think that any group
of pirates and head-hunters needs nothing but independence in order that
108 K. E. BAUZON

it may be turned forth with into a dark-hued New England town meeting”
(Dyer).
To a discerning observer, one would note that in McKinley’s assimila-
tion proclamation, the true motive of the US takeover of the Philippines
is repeated a number of times within the same declaration, not noticed as
being sinister or malevolent by the general public, or by mainstream histo-
rians for that matter, perhaps because the entire declaration was couched
in benign, benevolent tone but definitely setting the economic path—
decidedly capitalist—from which the colony cannot go astray and which
it must now take. Thus, under this declaration: (a) the authority of the US
government over the Islands was for the “confirmation of all their private
rights and relations” as basic, fundamental pattern of relations guaranteed
to secure capital accumulation and labor extraction for private profit, with
the state committing to be the guarantor; (b) pending legislation paving
the transition to civilian rule, the military, meanwhile, must ensure the
enforcement of “the municipal laws of the territory in respect to private
rights and property” patterned after property laws in the United States;
(c) while government must maintain public services, assets, and property,
“private property, whether belonging to individuals or corporations, is to
be respected,” a provision evidently designed for the benefit of US-based
corporations and the wealthy class and their ilustrado surrogates in the
Philippine colony; and, finally, (d) in what could be interpreted as precur-
sor not only the invocation of eminent domain based on military necessity
but also of what has become common today as the privatization of military
functions through use of contractors: “If private property be taken for mil-
itary use, it shall be paid for…,” as the flexible term “private property” may
also extend to the services provided by whoever or whichever happens to
own this property, e.g., a private mercenary or arms manufacturing corpo-
ration, with which or with whom the government enters into a contractual
obligation.1
The manifestly economic content of McKinley’s Benevolent Assimila-
tion Proclamation confirmed or complemented the material and economic
motives that were concealed behind the aura of benevolence. As San Juan
explains:

Material interests were indubitably paramount in the turn-of-the-century

discourse on progress and civilization. U.S. policy decisions and consequent
practices were framed in a “regime of truth” based on the now-well-known
politics of colonial representation. Roxanne Lynn Doty (1996) describes this
 5 THE PHILIPPINE–AMERICAN WAR, 1899–1913 … 109

discursive economy that has since framed North-South relations, in Fou-

caultian terms, as the denial of the transcendental international signifier,
sovereignty, to Filipinos and other newly conquered indigenes; that is, the
denial of the capacity to exercise agency. Force is justified because the annexed
or colonized are unruly, undisciplined, rebellious, disposed to resist the laws
established by the civilizing missionaries. What stood out in the cry or colo-
nial possession is the need for a naval port and springboard for penetrating the
China market and demonstrating American power in the Asia/Pacific region.
This ideological legitimacy for the occupation was voiced by Senator Alfred
Beveridge, among others. After rehearsing the profits to be gained from trade
and natural resources, he repeated a familiar refrain from past conquests of
the Native Americans, the Mexicans, and other indigenes: “They [natives of
the Philippines] are a barbarous race, modified by three centuries of contact
with a decadent race. The Filipino is the South Sea Malay, put through a
process of three hundred years of superstition in religion, dishonesty in deal-
ing, disorder in habits of industry, and cruelty, caprice, and corruption in
government. It is barely possible that 1,000 men in all the archipelago are
capable of self-government in the Anglo-Saxon sense”. (San Juan 2009, as
quoted from Schirmer and Shalom 1987, 25)

This was echoed by General Arthur McArthur who thought the natives
needed “bayonet treatment for at least a decade,” while Theodore Roo-
sevelt felt that the Filipinos needed a good beating so they could become
“good Injuns” (cited in Ignacio 2004). The “barbarous” natives, however,
resisted for a time longer than anticipated, offering lessons that still have to
be learned, even after Korea and Vietnam, and the quagmires in Iraq and
Afghanistan. Despite neoconservative revisionists that the U.S. “savage war
of peace” in the Philippines was humane, humanitarian, and honorable under
the circumstances, U.S. intervention to annex the Philippines continues to
haunt the conscience of some humanists and historians of international rela-
tions. (San Juan 2009)

With the exception of a small percentage of the population, most Amer-

icans were not aware of the realities on the ground in the Philippines: the
deception and betrayal of the Philippine revolutionaries, the militant resis-
tance to the imposition of American rule, the million-and-a-half Filipino
deaths sacrificed resulting from counterinsurgency campaigns, including
countless massacres perpetrated either in retribution against the insurec-
tos in Luzon and the Visayas, or as part of the pacification campaign
against the Moros in Mindanao and Sulu, e.g., infamous massacres at Bud
Dajo in March 1906, and at Bud Bagsak in June 1913.2 Thankfully, the
110 K. E. BAUZON

late historian Howard Zinn, unique among US-based historians, recalled

these incidents in his classic book, A People’s History of the United States:
1492–Present, not allowing incidents like these to be erased from memory.

Racial Dimension of Pacification

Not much attention has been devoted until recently by mainstream his-
torians to the US pacification campaign’s racial dimension, in particular,
the participation of Black American soldiers, also referred to as “Buffalo
Soldiers,” in what would be a racist war of subjugation against a people
wishing to be free of foreign domination and control. Even the assumption
behind why they were recruited to serve in the US military. According to
the War Department, the Black soldiers were “naturally adapted to survive
the tropical climate” (San Juan 2010). These soldiers were dispatched to
the Philippines following the Battle of Manila, to assist with the capture of
Manila and, subsequently, to quell and defeat the Philippine revolutionary
forces during the Philippine–American War that followed. The attention
focused by San Juan on this dimension is, therefore, a rarity among schol-
ars especially in that it re-focuses critical attention on certain realities: (a)
the relations experienced by the Black American soldiers that fought in
the Philippines reflected their experience in the broader society back in the
United States; (b) the identity between the Philippine revolutionary strug-
gle, on the one hand, and the struggle for black emancipation in the United
States, on the other; and (c) the significance of the common anti-imperialist
solidarity movement.
As a backgrounder, soon after the eruption of the Philippine–American
War in February 1899, four regiments of Black American soldiers were
dispatched to the Philippines. The 24th and the 25th infantry regiments
were sent from San Francisco in February, and the 9th and the 10th Cavalry
were sent as reinforcements by summer of that same year. These Black regi-
ments were sent in the midst of vocal opposition to the war of intervention,
as expressed in numerous newspaper articles and public pronouncements
by Black leaders in opposition to this war. Among these was W. E. B.
DuBois who condemned the war as an “unjust imperialist aggression and
that “the slaughter of Filipinos a ‘needless horror’” (San Juan 2009). The
Anti-Imperialist League, founded in October 1899 and of which DuBois
was a founding member, invoked the sentiment of Frederick Douglass who,
 5 THE PHILIPPINE–AMERICAN WAR, 1899–1913 … 111

some six decades earlier, expressed the view that the struggle of the “Ne-
gro people were identical with that of the struggling colonial peoples” (San
Juan 2009).
Indeed, opposition within the Black American community appeared to
be borne out by the continuing Jim Crow treatment against the blacks
particularly in the American South. With the Supreme Court decision on
the Plessy case in 1896, segregation became law, and racism continued to
symbolize not only absence of social opportunities but also persistent eco-
nomic disparity and inequality. Many Black American soldiers who have
returned from the war in Cuba and who thought that they would be wel-
comed back as heroes, in fact, were welcomed back and praised from many
quarters as heroes even by their superior military officers. This did not
negate the experience of many others, however, who, upon, return, were
hurled with insults, and many white soldiers who also were in Cuba with
them, along with many white residents in their communities, participated
in hurling these insults. Historian Robert B. Edgerton tells of the expe-
rience of a Black resident of Georgia, upon returning from that war, that
the storied valor of Black soldiers “has intensified prejudice against him.”
Black heroism was seen simply too much as a threat to white supremacy.
Roosevelt appeared to stoke the fires of hatred towards the blacks when,
in his memoirs published in Scribner’s Magazine in 1899, famously enti-
tled “The Rough Riders,” he falsely interpreted some black soldiers from
the 10th Cavalry running to the rear as cowards during a raging battle.
After it was clarified later by a black soldier, Sergeant Preston Holliday,
from the same regiment who witnessed the incident, that those soldiers
that Roosevelt saw were, in fact, ordered to get needed supplies, Roosevelt
then acknowledged that his assumption was wrong but that, according to
historian Edgerton, “he refused to repudiate his published accusation of
cowardice” (Edgerton).
But just as many Black American soldiers who returned from Cuba were
being vilified and insulted, ironically, there were also many black voices in
support of the idea that black soldiers should go fight in the Philippines.
An example of this was exemplified by an editorial by the Indianapolis
Freeman which, on July 1, 1899, expressed the following: “It is now said
that colored troops are to be sent to the Philippines. The sooner the better.
The Negroes must be taught that the enemy of the country is a common
enemy and that the color of the face has nothing to do with it.” Yet another
view was expressed, quoted in a book by George P. Marks, III, entitled The
Black Press Views American Imperialism (1898–1900) (1971), in which the
112 K. E. BAUZON

writer expressed the view that should Black American soldiers are sent to
fight in the Philippines, they should not view the conflict in racial terms. “It
pays to be a little thoughtful,” the writer was quoted as saying, “The strife
[against the Philippines] is no race war. It is quite time for the Negroes to
quit claiming kindred with every black face from Hannibal down. Hannibal
was no Negro, nor was Aguinaldo [the Filipino nationalist leader]. We are
to share in the glories or defeats of our country’s war; that is patriotism
pure and simple” (as quoted in “The Philippine War”). A third sample is
not an expressed endorsement of the war but takes a presumably neutral
stance that it was not for the individual soldier to decide whether to oppress
a people or not but it is this soldier’s duty simply to obey. And fulfill one’s
oath. This type of rationalization is expressed in one quoted passage from a
book by Stan Cohen, entitled Images of the Spanish-American War, April-
August, 1898 (1997), as follows: “The sentiments of most Black soldiers in
the Philippines would be summed up by Commissary Sergeant Middleton
W. Saddler of the 25th Infantry, who wrote, “We are now arrayed to meet a
common foe, men of our own hue and color. Whether it is right to reduce
these people to submission is not a question for soldiers to decide. Our
oaths of allegiance know neither race, color, nor nation” (as quoted in
“The Philippine War”).
In an essay by San Juan on the participation of the Black American sol-
diers to which they were thrust, a picture of the war is presented, an impor-
tant context to consider in trying to understand the varying responses by
these soldiers. To recapitulate, the year of 1899 began with the inaugu-
ration of Aguinaldo’s Malolos Republic in January. In February, the very
young republic was forced into a war when it became evident that the Amer-
icans were simply not content with defeating the Spaniards but also in taking
over the country entirely, and preventing Aguinaldo’s republic from ever
coming into fruition. The revolutionary forces of Aguinaldo at first tried
to engage the American forces frontally in traditional formations. Due to a
combination of inferior and inadequate weaponry, the Filipino forces suf-
fered very heavy casualties, numbering in the hundreds of casualties almost
per encounter. Subsequently, the leadership of Aguinaldo decided to resort
to mobile warfare. As San Juan explains: “[The Filipino revolutionaries]
were forced to resort to mobile warfare, utilizing their knowledge of the
countryside and universal support from the populace in the face of vastly
superior US firepower” (San Juan 2010). This was significant in that this
also inaugurated what is later described as anti-colonial “people’s war” as
well as the ruthless response to it, “low-intensity warfare” (San Juan 2010).
 5 THE PHILIPPINE–AMERICAN WAR, 1899–1913 … 113

During the April–May period, there was bickering within the Aguinaldo
revolutionary government resulting in a cabinet shuffle, with Pedro Paterno
replacing Mabini in his post, and Felipe Buencamino appointed as Secretary
of Foreign Affairs, two individuals that would later defect to the Americans.
According to historian Edgerton, four regular army black regiments that
had served in Cuba and been re-deployed to the southwest to guard against
anticipated Mexican incursions, were dispatched to the Philippines during
spring, 1899. These were followed, accordingly, by two additional all-black
volunteer regiments in July to be part of a total (at that point) of a 70,000-
man US contingent to battle with the Philippine revolutionaries.
In the southern Luzon and the Visayan region, Filipino resistance was
meeting with some success, but that the responses by the US military have
also become more brutal if not genocidal. This was true in such provinces
as Panay and Samar. As San Juan notes,

Mobile tactics and eventually guerrilla strategy reduced the US garrisons to

easy targets, with the US troops finding themselves ill-suited and ill-equipped
to confront their enemies who lacked adequate firearms, often fighting with
bolos – long-bladed knives – and spears. The Filipino insurgents resembled
the proverbial fish swimming in the ocean of their sympathizers so that by
subterfuge and hand-to-hand combat, the rebels overcame the odds against
them. After protracted fighting with unconscionable losses, the US army
began to treat all the “niggers” as enemies, whether armed or not; it resorted
to destroying villages and killing civilians. In the second year of fighting,
75,000 troops escalated the war against the Filipino masses, not just the
sporadic guerrillas in the “boondocks” (the term adopted from the Filipino
word bundok, contested mountainous terrain). (San Juan 2010)

The US military forces responded with more gruesome tactics includ-

ing treating all civilians as suspects, and outright torture through such
means as “water boarding” or “water cure,” reconcentrado or hamleting,
and outright depopulation all of which have become notorious with their
inhumanity, exemplified by the violent depopulation of Samar.
In the midst of the gruesome brutality of the US pacification campaign,
the Filipino revolutionaries tried to appeal to the humanity especially of
the Black American soldiers in the hope that not only would they refuse
to fight in behalf of a colonial army but that they would defect to the rev-
olutionary cause. One such appeal was contained in a pamphlet clandes-
tinely distributed by the revolutionaries among the Black soldiers. San Juan
quotes at length from a book by Willard Gatewood Jr., entitled, “Smoked
114 K. E. BAUZON

Yankees” and the Struggle for Empire: Letter from Negro Soldiers, 1898–1902
(University of Arkansas Press, 1987), as follows: one of these handbills as
follows:

It is without honor that you are spilling your costly blood. Your masters have
thrown you into the most iniquitous fight with double purpose – to make
you the instrument of their ambition and also your hard work will soon make
the extinction of your race. Your friends, the Filipinos, give you this good
warning. You must consider your situation and your history; and take charge
that the blood of…Sam Hose proclaims vengeance. (as quoted in San Juan
2010)

With knowledge on the part of the Black American soldiers of many

atrocities committed by the US forces, many of which these soldiers also
participated in, and exposed to the pamphlets from the Filipino revolu-
tionaries appealing to their humanity, many white officers frankly expected
many Black soldiers to defect to the Filipino revolutionaries’ side. Histo-
rian Edgerton describes this initial anxiety on the part of the white officers
and offers as well a brief discussion of the circumstances surrounding the
defection of David Fagen, as follows:

Faced by the evidence of this open racial antagonism, along with a flood of
Filipino insurgent propaganda leaflets urging the black troops to join them
in their fight against white tyranny, many white officers expected black sol-
diers to desert in large numbers. To their surprise, throughout the three-year
campaign, only five black soldiers deserted to the Filipino insurgents, many
fewer than the numbers of white soldiers who deserted. The most notorious
of these by far was Corporal David Fagen who did not desert for political
reasons but because he felt harassed by his sargeant (sic). Fagen fought with
the rebels for two years, rising to the rank of captain before a bounty hunter
brought his head to the Americans to claim the reward that had been offered.
(Edgerton)

Edgerton, here, seems to diminish the number of Black African soldiers,

led by David Fagen, a captain in Company 1 of the US 24th Infantry, that
defected over to the revolutionary cause. He negates as well the political
significance of Fagen’s defection, reducing it to petty personal differences
between Fagen, on the one hand, and his sargeant, on the other. Thus,
Edgerton fails to appreciate the importance of the atmosphere generated
 5 THE PHILIPPINE–AMERICAN WAR, 1899–1913 … 115

by white supremacy; and, he fails to appreciate the significance of the anti-

colonial struggle or, for that matter, any struggle for self-determination on
the part of any colonized people as signified by his clinging on to the term
“insurgent,” a preferred term by the counterinsurgency planners designed
precisely to excise any legitimacy to the revolutionary cause. San Juan offers
a much-needed antidote to the otherwise numbing effect of conventional
scholarships like that of Edgerton’s such as in the following passage on the
critical symbolisms of recognition and denial in history:

Fagen was one among fifteen to thirty deserters from four regiments of “Buf-
falo Soldiers” dispatched to the Philippines in July and August 1899. Seven
thousand African Americans were involved in the war. After fighting the
Native Americans as “Buffalo Soldiers,” these four regiments were mobi-
lized for the Spanish American War. As the New York State Military Museum
reminds us, the use of black soldiers by the War Department conformed to
the belief that black soldiers were “naturally adapted to survive the tropical
climate” (New York State Military Museum 2006). In fact, the 7th, 8th, 9th
and 10th US Volunteer Infantry were later formed in response to the gov-
ernment need for soldiers “immune to tropical diseases.” Incidentally, it was
members of the 10th Cavalry that used their “Indian fighting skills” to save
Theodore Roosevelt and his “Rough Riders” from certain extermination. But
they never received recognition equal to Roosevelt’s. When the Philippine
resistance proved tougher than the officials estimated, the War Department
recruited two regiments of black volunteers, the 48th and 49th Infantry and
sent them to the Philippines in early 1900 to stay until the official end of the
war. (San Juan 2010)

Finally, San Juan discerns the multi-faceted significance of the David

Fagen story in the way that hardly anyone in mainstream scholarship has.
First, San Juan draws attention to the anti-colonial character of the Philip-
pine revolutionary resistance to US occupation and control, although it
was bourgeois (elite-led) rather than socialist, something that might be
understood in the contemporary language of self-determination; second,
San Juan draws attention to the genocidal character of the US military
response, during both the conventional and unconventional stages of the
war, a fact still to be acknowledged because of the conscious and deliberate
policy of not maintaining official record of the atrocities; third, San Juan
draws the significance of this period as the germinal or foundational stage
of the modern development of surveillance and what has been described
116 K. E. BAUZON

in military literature as “low intensity warfare” affirming the violent foun-

dation of the US state; and, fourth, San Juan appreciates the exemplary
nature of Fagen’s story for cross-national solidarity between and among
anti-colonial/anti-imperialist movements, armed or through the essential
complement of propaganda work, as exemplified by expressions of solidar-
ity with contemporary anti-colonial/anti-imperialist struggles in Vietnam,
southern Africa, Central America, and elsewhere.

Pacification of Moroland
Deluding the Sulu Sultanate
Although Mindanao and Sulu had never been under effective Spanish colo-
nial rule, Spanish authorities had nonetheless taken the liberty of including
it in the cession, along with the rest of their Philippine territorial posses-
sions, to the United States following their defeat in the US–Spanish War
of 1898. This cession was sealed in the Treaty of Paris, dated December
10, 1898, which provided, among other provisions, for Spain to receive
the sum of $20 million from the United States for the Philippine territory
alone, and for the relinquishing of Spanish sovereignty over Cuba, Puerto
Rico, and Guam to the United States. This gave the United States the legal
basis to claim sovereignty and impose control over the whole of Mindanao
and Sulu region.
Not long after the Treaty of Paris of 1898 took effect, the United States
took steps to assert its ownership and control over the Mindanao and Sulu
region, traditional home of Muslim Filipinos. In April 1899, overall com-
mander of US forces in the Philippines, Major General Elwell Otis, desig-
nated Brigadier General John C. Bates, a veteran of the Indian wars as well
as in the Cuba campaign, as field commander for Mindanao and Sulu, such
region having just been converted into a distinct Military District. Gen-
eral Bates would be the first of three veterans of the Indian wars to com-
mand this region, the two others being Brigadier General William Kobbe,
appointed March 20, 1900, and Brigadier General George Whitfield Davis,
appointed August 31, 1901.
On May 9, 1899, troops from the US 23rd Infantry Battalion, under
the command of Captain Edward B. Pratt, took over the walled garrison of
Jolo, in the Sulu Archipelago, from the departing Spanish soldiers following
a brief ceremony. Interestingly, the Spaniards had turned over to the Sultan
of Sulu a garrison they had under their control in the island of Siasi rather
 5 THE PHILIPPINE–AMERICAN WAR, 1899–1913 … 117

than to US authorities, with the Sultan having made the trip from his seat
in Maimbung to Siasi to oversee the transfer (Kho).
The following day, the Spanish fort in Zamboanga—named Fort Pilar—
was also evacuated of Spanish troops although it was reported that “no
American troops could be spared to occupy the city and Zamboanga was
abandoned to a well-armed Christian Filipino militia aligned with Aguinal-
do…” (Fulton). A token number of troops were also landed in other parts
of the Visayas, e.g., Palawan, as well as in Cotabato, Polloc, Parang, and
Banganga, all in Mindanao, that same year. Because the US troops were
preoccupied with the suppression of the Filipino resistance in Luzon and
parts of the Visayan region, it was acknowledged that not much more
troops could momentarily be spared towards the effective control of the
entirety of Mindanao and Sulu, especially if there was a sustained popular
resistance. It was in recognition of this fact that General Otis gave a spe-
cific set of tasks for General Bates to accomplish as follows: (a) to dissuade
the Moros from joining the rebellion in other parts of the country; (b) to
prevent a Moro front from developing while pacification of the rest of the
country was in progress; (c) to induce the Moro leadership to acknowl-
edge US sovereignty; and (d) to create the foundation for a more enduring
relationship between the Moros and the United States.
The problem of integrating—and legitimizing—the Mindanao-Sulu
region within the orbit of US control appeared to be daunting from the
outset. To begin with, Spanish authorities, including the colonial admin-
istrators in the Philippines, had committed an arbitrary act by exceeding
their prerogative in including this region in their cession to the United
States. One source of explanation for this action may have been the differ-
ing interpretation of the 1878 treaty that the Sulu Sultan had entered into
with Spain. Historian Madge Kho writes: “Scholars fluent in both Spanish
and Arabic found the treaty to have translation flaws, which would have
implications in the 1898 cession of the Philippine Islands to the United
States The Spanish version states that Spain had sovereignty over Sulu,
whereas the Tausug version describes a protectorate relationship rather
than a dependency of Spain” (Kho). Thus, in the description of the ter-
ritory they were ceding to the United States, as described with technical
precision in Article III of the Treaty of Paris, the Spanish authorities had
acted as though Sulu, and the entirety of Mindanao—was under the effec-
tive sovereignty and legal jurisdiction of Spain, and the US negotiators had
readily assented to this travesty as a matter of expediency and opportunity.
118 K. E. BAUZON

No doubt, Moro leaders were morally, legally, and historically correct,

even to this day, in claiming their independence from Spain at the time
the Treaty of Paris was negotiated and ratified. For one thing, for centuries
the sultanates of Sulu and of Maguindanao have had a series of treaties
of friendship and commerce as well as diplomatic intercourse with foreign
powers including China, the United States, Spain, Britain, Germany, and
the Netherlands.3 A notable example of these was a “most favored nation”
treaty of 1417 between the Ming Dynasty of China and Sultan Paduka
Batara of Sulu. Then, Spain had a series of treaties with Sulu and Maguin-
danao leaders, namely the Sultan Kudarat-Lopez Treaty of 1645 and 1648,
and the Rajah Bungso-Lopez Treaty of 1646 all of which define and demar-
cate “the respective dominions of the sultanates of Maguindanao-Buayan
and Sulu and the colonial possessions of Spain over the Visayas and Luzon.
Even the United States has entered into a treaty of trade and commerce,
entered into in 1842 with then-reigning Sultan of Sulu and Sabah Moham-
mad Jamalul Kiram I.4 Further, on July 22, 1878, Spanish monarch, King
Alfonso XIII, entered into a Treaty of Peace and Amity with the Sulu Sul-
tanate which “allowed Spain to set up a small garrison, covering about 15
acres, in the town of Jolo. Outside the wall, the Sultan still ruled” (Kho).
This was followed by a Treaty of Conciliation, ten years later, with the Sul-
tan of Maguindanao and Rajah Buayan as an attempt to end long-running
hostilities between the two parties. Filipino historian Cesar Adib Majul,
in his classic work Muslims in the Philippines (1973), has described these
treaties as conferring effective recognition of the sovereignty and authority
of the Sulu and Maguindanao sultanates, and in possession of the requisite
elements of what would today be regarded as a nation-state, on the part of
the foreign powers involved even though one or the other had offered a
form of protectorate status to—but not sovereignty over—these sultanates.
Contrary to what some historians may believe, these treaties, which were
honored by Spain until the last days of its colonial rule over the Visayas
and Luzon, never indicated surrender nor capitulation on the part of the
indigenous leaders of Maguindanao and Sulu.
Reinforcing Spain’s recognition of the distinct sovereignty of the sul-
tanates of Sulu and Maguindanao was a series of Royal decrees, pro-
mulgated over a consistent period of time, all of which clearly indicated
the extent of territory to which the Spanish colonial authorities con-
sciously exercised their authority. Historian Musib M. Buat enumerates
and describes these decrees as follows: “The Royal Decree of July 30, 1860
decreed by Queen Isabella II of Spain and the Royal Decree of July 15,
 5 THE PHILIPPINE–AMERICAN WAR, 1899–1913 … 119

1896 and the Maura Law of 1893 that provided organization of munic-
ipal governments excluded the Moro territories of Mindanao, Sulu and
Palawan. The latter Spanish decrees merely proposed for the establishment
of politico-military governments in occupied territories of Mindanao, Sulu
and Palawan, excepting the territorial dominions of the Sultanates of Min-
danao and Sulu” (Buat).
It is interesting to note that even US President William McKinley had
misgivings about the actual extent of Spanish sovereignty and territorial
control in the Philippines. Nonetheless, he accepted the reality brought
about by the US victory over Spain and the emergence of the United States
as an imperial power with designs—ostensibly to keep doors to free trade
open—in East Asia and the Western Pacific, and for which the Philippines
would play an important part. Justifying US conquest of the Philippines,
therefore, was an important task when it had gone out of its way, as integral
to its claim to exceptionalism, in arguing that it differed from its European
counterparts in exploiting lands they had conquered. On December 28,
1898, McKinley issued a statement to the US Congress with that task in
mind, and his statement came to be known as the Benevolent Assimilation
Proclamation. In that Proclamation, he assured the Filipinos and his audi-
ence in the US Congress, that, among others, “the authority of the United
States is to be exerted in securing [their] persons and property,” that the
Americans were coming “not as invaders or conquerors, but as friends,”
and that, further, “the mission of the United States is one of benevolent
assimilation substituting the mild sway of justice and right for arbitrary
rule” (McKinley).
It was in this intellectual frame that McKinley treads carefully when
he instructed General Bates to contact and negotiate with the Sultan of
Sulu based on—if not patterned after—this sultanate’s treaty with Spain
of 1878. Bates wasted no time in contacting and negotiating a treaty with
Sultan Kiram and his advisers. The Sultan was amenable to negotiations
with Bates to whom he presented a 16-point draft treaty which proposed,
among others, a protectorate but not sovereignty over the sultanate on the
part of the United States. The Sultan had envisioned that the flags of the
United States and the sultanate would fly alongside each other and not
one higher than the other. The Sultan’s proposal would forbid the United
States from interfering with the customs and religion of the inhabitants
within the sultanate and would further require the United States to con-
tinue the Spanish practice of remitting specified monthly stipends to the
Sultan and his datus. More significantly, the Sultan would retain sovereignty
120 K. E. BAUZON

and authority over the whole of the sultanate, and the United States was
neither to occupy any part of it without the Sultan’s expressed permission,
nor dispose of, sell or transfer ownership and control of the sultanate or
any part thereof to any third party whatsoever.
Without explicitly expressing his rejection of the Sultan’s proposals,
Bates instead offered a set of counterproposals—15 in total—which con-
tained the essential elements of what he had been instructed to accomplish
at the time of his appointment the most important of which was the accep-
tance (or, rather, the appearance of acceptance) of—and acquiescence to—
US sovereignty by the Sultan in his capacity as the supreme authority of
the sultanate. Appearance is hereby asserted in that, of the two drafts that
were signed, one in Tausug (the predominant dialect among inhabitants
of the Sulu Archipelago including the Sultan, his family, and his cabinet),
and the other, in English, the Tausug version never alluded to the word
“sovereignty” much less implied that the Sultan was acceding to US
sovereignty. As historian Kho writes: “Article I of the Treaty in the Tausug
version states ‘The support, aid, and protection of the Jolo Island and
Archipelago are in the American nation,’ whereas the English version read
‘The sovereignty of the United States over the whole Archipelago of Jolo
and its dependencies is declared and acknowledged.’” Kho further men-
tions that US Army physician of Lebanese descent Najeeb Saleeby, who
was deployed at the time in Mindanao and Sulu, had “caught the transla-
tion flaws and charged Charlie Schuck, son of a German businessman, for
deliberately mistranslating the treaty” (Kho).
This episode has been noted by several historians including the late
eminent theologian and historian Peter Gowing who, in his pioneering
work, Mandate in Moroland: The American Government of Muslim Filipinos
1899–1920 (1983), professes that the word “sovereignty” was nowhere
found in the Tausug version (Gowing, 122). However, a gentleman-
historian (surprisingly not an academic), Robert A. Fulton, offers fresh
insights in his relatively recent and arguably the most important book on
the subject albeit admittedly written with the US perspective in mind, enti-
tled Moroland 1898–1906; America’s First Attempt to Transform an Islamic
Society (2007). Culled from Fulton’s account, (Charlie) Schuck was one of
four sons of a German national, Herman William Frederick Schuck, who
was a merchant ship captain and trader between Singapore and Sulu since
the mid-1860s. While providing scant information about the elder Schuck’s
first wife, Fulton narrates that Schuck married a Tausug woman related to
the Sultan, Jamalul Alam. With his Tausug spouse, Schuck also had an
 5 THE PHILIPPINE–AMERICAN WAR, 1899–1913 … 121

adult son (named Julius) who was, at the time of the arrival of US forces in
Sulu, in North Borneo studying English. Due to family connections and his
competence in the Tausug dialect, Schuck became a trusted advisor to the
Sultan. In fact, one of his accomplishments was his inter-mediation, mainly
as an interpreter and translator, in the negotiation between the Spanish
authorities and the Sulu Sultan of the Treaty of 1878; this treaty appar-
ently gave Spain “nominal” though not necessarily effective authority over
the Sulu Sultanate.
The first batch of US forces from the 23rd Infantry arrived in Jolo, the
capital of the Sultanate, on May 19, 1899. This batch was commanded by
Capt. Edward B. Pratt, and it consisted of two battalions comprising 733
foot soldiers, 19 line officers, 2 surgeons, and a chaplain (Fulton, 20). The
first-ever US soldier to assume a guard’s post at the Jolo fort, which had just
been taken over from the departing Spanish soldiers, was Pvt. Needhom
N. Freeman, who described his impressions and capturing the mood of the
final day, the 22nd of May, that the Spaniards were in Jolo, as follows:

…the Spanish flag on the blockhouse was hauled down by the Spanish sol-
diers and the Americans unfurled to the breeze the Stars and Stripes. The
Spanish seemed to be very much grieved, the officers wept, the Americans
were jubilant. Everything passed into our hands, and the various responsibil-
ities of the place with all its dangers also passed to us. The natives who belong
to the Morro (sic) tribe are treacherous. We know nothing about them and
their intentions. Guards were put on duty at once…. (as quoted in Fulton,
22)

According to Fulton, Capt. Pratt wasted little time in familiarizing him-

self with the terrain, the customs, and the personalities of Sulu at large.
One of his fortunate moments was when he learned about the Schuck
family particularly the first four sons of the elder Schuck, namely Edward
(Eddy), Charles, Herman, and William. All were apparently proficient not
only in German but also in Tausug and Spanish, and all offered to serve
as interpreters and translators on “as needed” basis. Of the four, however,
Eddy stood out for his proficiency in English, Spanish, Tausug, and Samal.
Capt. Pratt, apparently impressed by the language skills of the four children,
decided to put them all on retainership, assuring them of steady income,
and “used their knowledge to collect as much information as possible about
the peoples and the islands. The relationship established with the Schuck
family would prove invaluable to the Americans for the next twenty-one
122 K. E. BAUZON

years” (Fulton, 24). All of them, either singly or collectively, have been par-
ticularly useful to the US military, often accompanying no less than Gen.
Bates himself and other military officials in their jaunts around the Sulu
Archipelago, sanctioned by Dewey under the guise of pursuing pirates and
slave traders, and in their meetings with the Sultan.
The presence of Saleeby as part of the US military structure of Sulu
was soon to make a critical difference in the future of the Sulu Sultanate in
view of his critical voice. Fulton acknowledges that Saleeby, who has studied
Moro culture, language, and history, particularly that of the Tausugs, and
upon careful study of the two versions of the Bates Treaty, had “found
a critical difference between the two [versions]” and had no personal or
political motive to be contrarian in this case. However, he (Fulton) also
acknowledges that the English version was apparently one which Gen. Bates
had “intended to use… to resolve the ambiguous ownership question over
Moroland that had been presented by the Treaty of Paris. By implication,
the Tausug version was not expedient for the same purpose. This sentence
was the bedrock of the legal position Taft had crafted…” (Fulton, 241).
Thus, given the motive revealed by Fulton to align claimed US sovereignty
over the Moroland, on the one hand, and the text of the Treaty of Paris,
on the other, and given the fact that the translator Schuck derived his pay
from the US Government, and with him in possession of both the means
and the motive, it is hardly surprising that the “mistranslation” might have
been deliberate, taking advantage of the ignorance and naivete of the Sultan
and his retinue—despite some disagreement among some members of his
cabinet—on matters of global power politics, a fact which provided another
rationale for the misdeed.
A side effect of this whole matter was that Saleeby, despite his hav-
ing been appointed as a member of the Moro Province Legislative Coun-
cil, became less trusted by some of the most powerful personalities in the
colonial administration not the least of whom was Gen. Leonard Wood,
as Commander of the Philippine Department, who was uncomfortable
towards and irritable with Saleeby. As Fulton notes, as a means of degrad-
ing his importance, Wood wrote disparagingly about Saleeby in his diary
for September 3, 1899; “Saleeby is an unknown quantity, has a good deal
of the Oriental about his way of doing business,” and, further, in a letter to
his wife several months later Wood alluded to Saleeby as “about as poor [a
specimen] as you often run across among presumably decent people” (Ful-
ton, 240–241). Saleeby became even less trusted as he tried to elevate what
he must have regarded as malicious on the part of Schuck for his suspected
 5 THE PHILIPPINE–AMERICAN WAR, 1899–1913 … 123

deliberate mistranslation of the official texts of the Bates Treaty. In a private

letter to Major Hugh L. Scott, who was part of Wood’s entourage in the
Philippines for his experience in ethnographic work among the Crow Indi-
ans in the US upper midwest, learning Indian sign languages and culture
in the process, and heretofore as an associate of Saleeby in learning about
Moro culture, Wood expressed hope that Scott would tell on Saleeby, as
follows: “If you find that Saleeby is mixing up in Jolo intrigue I wish you
would let me know. I regret very much to say that I do not feel entirely
easy about him. I may be exceedingly unjust with him in feeling this way
but it is an uncontrollable antipathy; I am rather inclined to trust intuition
and first impression” (Fulton, 240).
Many US postcolonial scholars on Moro culture and history, including
the present one, have come to regard Saleeby’s scholarly contributions as
generally fair, even sympathetic to the Moros in the Philippines. Because he
was at the employ of the US military, the policies that might have emanated
from his studies might have provided an alternative pathway to the manner
in which the whole of Moroland may eventually have been integrated into
the US colonial architecture of pacification and rule, then under Taft’s care,
which, as it was, was founded much on trickery, opportunism, force, and
violence. Underlying these were racist and racialized assumptions resulting
in antipathy towards the Moros, and the non-Moro Filipino wards as a
whole. These were all evident in the motivations behind negotiations for
the Bates Treaty, which were to buy time until the resistance in central
and northern parts of the colony had been quelled. These motivations
included why Saleeby’s charges against Schuck could not be allowed to
move forward, because of the political embarrassment it would bring, first,
to the McKinley Administration that negotiated the Treaty of Paris and
in accepting the Bates Treaty, then, to the Roosevelt Administration that
came after McKinley’s assassination.
Rationalizations for the abrogation of the Bates Treaty ranged from
legalistic to moralistic. As Fulton explains: “The Taft legal argument for
abrogation, based entirely on the English version, was that upon signing,
the Sultan and datus had clearly ceded their ownership claims to the island,
and the subsequent provisions simply described the new relationships of the
Sultan and datus as subjects of the U.S” (Fulton, 241). Taft was head of
the Philippine Commission originally created by McKinley to serve as the
US President’s surrogate executive in the Philippines. Taft served in that
capacity until December of 1903 when he was appointed Secretary of War
by the Roosevelt Administration. Before Taft departed for Washington,
124 K. E. BAUZON

DC, to assume his new duties, Wood met with Taft earlier that month
to exchange farewells but also to present Taft a document containing his
own recommendations—eight altogether—for the abrogation of the Bates
Treaty. Aside from reinforcing Taft’s legalistic argument cited earlier, Wood
also cited several moralistic and pragmatic reasons including the following:

a. The agreement stands in the way of the establishment of a good govern-

ment, inasmuch as it recognizes the authority of a class of men whose
authority… is exercised not through laws, but through the power of
slavery and peonage.
b. …the oft-repeated offense of sending juramentados into Jolo.
c. The persistent refusal of the Moros to observe the general instructions
given them concerning slavery at the time of the signing of the Bates
agreement and often afterwards…
d. They have frequently stolen properly belonging to the United States.
e. The character of the Sulu laws alone considered is sufficient reason why
we should have no agreement with them. And,
f. …acts of treachery and rebellion… (Fulton, 237–238)

Fulton notes that the Sultan was neither informed ahead of time of
the US intention to abrogate the agreement, nor was there any explana-
tion offered afterwards especially concerning the cessation of the monthly
stipends. Fulton then offers a fair assessment of Wood’s report to Taft,
writing: “Wood took advantage of prevailing myths, exaggerations, and
religious bigotry in demonizing the Moros, emphasizing ‘religious fanati-
cism’ and claiming and ascribing to the datus an ‘oft-repeated offense of
sending juramentados into Jolo’ [even though only one of such offense was
reported by Scott in four years].” On the matter at hand, Fulton concludes
that Wood’s report “was not written as an argument to obtain a decision
from the policy makers up the line, Taft and Roosevelt. They had made
up their minds well in advance, and Taft had been complicit in writing the
document. The real purpose was to justify a unilateral abrogation to the
American public and to posterity. In doing so, Wood indicted the Moros,
their culture, and Islam” (Fulton, 238–239).
On March 2, 1904, the US finally unilaterally abrogated the Bates Treaty.
Two years later, the Massacre of Bud Dajo happened, and in 1913, the
Massacre at Bud Bagsak, marking the final collapse of the Sulu Sultanate
both as a political community and as basis for organized resistance. For all
practical purposes, the Sulu Archipelago has become an integral part of the
Philippine colony.
 5 THE PHILIPPINE–AMERICAN WAR, 1899–1913 … 125

Dividing and Conquering the Maguindanao and Lanao Sultanates

The conquest and pacification of Maguindanao and the Lanao Lake region
took a different path. Even though the arrival of US forces in Mindanao
and Sulu were near-simultaneous following the defeat of Spain and the
signing of the Treaty of Paris, the pattern of the early US attempts at
establishing its authority in the Maguindanao and Lanao region has been
somewhat different from that employed in the Sulu region. For one thing,
the nature of Moro social and political organization Lanao has been of a
markedly different nature. The sultanate system here, unlike the Sulu Sul-
tanate and, to a certain extent, the Maguindanao Sultanate, has been decen-
tralized into four distinct but confederated principalities, namely Unayan,
Masiu, Bayabao, and Baloi. The decentralization of power, shared among
royal houses—numbering sixteen—is almost as old as its founding by Sharif
Kabungsuwan of the Maguindanao Sultanate in 1520 and whose influence
was later adopted by the Lanao royal houses following Kabungsuwan’s mis-
sionary visits to the Lanao Lake region, located some 70 kilometers from
the settlement where he (Kabungsuwan) had originally landed and settled
in following his journey from Johore, in present-day Malaysia. That settle-
ment came to be known as Malabang, facing what is today as the Ilana Bay,
and traces its name from the Maranao word “mala” (big) and “bang” (call
to prayer), reminiscent of Kabungsuwan’s distinctively loud call to prayer.
Interestingly, Malabang also became the headquarters of the great warrior
Sultan Kudarat during much of his resistance fight against the Spaniards
and where he was buried upon his death. Each of the aforementioned prin-
cipalities, whose confederation dates back to 1640, was tasked with the
responsibility of securing not only the territory that has been recognized
within the confederation falling within its jurisdiction, but also to serve as
guardian of their respective cultural and religious traditions.
When the US occupation forces began arriving in the Philippines in
June 1898 following Spain’s surrender, President McKinley, in line with
his policy of benevolent assimilation, issued a general set of instructions
to Major General Wesley Merritt, commander of the US Expeditionary
Force, that included the following: (1) “to respect local customs, laws, and
governmental routines as far as possible…; (2) “to impress on the inhabitant
of the islands that the United States Army had not come to make war on
the Philippine people but to protect them…; (3) “Private property was to
be strictly respected…; and, (4) “the U.S. occupation was to be as free from
severity as possible” (Beede, 332). Further, pertaining to dealing with the
126 K. E. BAUZON

Moros, McKinley crafted an Executive Order, with the advice and assistance
of his Secretary of War Elihu Root, issued on September 7, 1900, which
served as basis for policy guideline for the Philippine Commission which
served as his surrogate executive in the Philippines under the leadership of
William Howard Taft as its Commissioner. The Executive Order stated, in
part:

In dealing with the uncivilized tribes of the Islands the Commission should
adopt the same course followed by Congress in permitting the tribes of our
North American Indians to maintain their tribal organization and govern-
ment, and under which many of those tribes are now living in peace and
contentment, surrounded by a civilization to which they are unable or unwill-
ing to conform. Such tribal governments should, however, be subjected to
wise and firm regulation, and without undue or petty interference constant
and active effort should be exercised to prevent barbarous practices and to
introduce civilized customs. (Fulton, 111)

Behind these seemingly benign intentions, however, the underlying

goal of the US occupation forces was to engage in a “civilizing mission”
whose very nature entailed the ultimate imposition of US authority and
sovereignty over the newly-acquired Philippine colony, as spelled out in
the Treaty of Paris.5 As one might expect, this would inevitably subordi-
nate Merritt’s instructions the practical implementation of which, through
a military government, would rest on the shoulder of Merritt’s successor,
Maj. Gen. Otis, commencing in August 1898. Thus, the nature of policies,
tactics, and practices employed at various times, geographic conditions, and
prevailing local customs and political practices, both by military and civil-
ian officials, necessarily have to be measured by this yardstick. Accounting
for variations in specific conditions among the Moros of Sulu from those
of Maguindanao and the Lake Lanao regions, McKinley designated Brig.
Gen. George Whitfield Davis, a veteran of the Indian Wars and up to that
point Provost Martial for Manila, as field commander for the Mindanao
and Sulu Military District. Within six weeks of his assumption of duties on
October 24, 1901, Davis submitted a set of recommendations addressed to
his immediate superior, Maj. Gen. Adna R. Chaffee, commanding general
and military governor of Mindanao and Sulu, with copy furnished to Taft.
The recommendations, contained in a 12-page document entitled “Gen-
eral Davis’ Report on Moro Affairs,” were undoubtedly meant to represent
 5 THE PHILIPPINE–AMERICAN WAR, 1899–1913 … 127

Davis’ views on how to resolve the “Moro Problem” as he saw it. In his
prefatory statement, Davis wrote:

The student of history knows that the transition from patriarchal forms and
medieval feudalism to a government of law, was slow in the extreme even
with the Caucasian race… [T]he worst misfortune that could befall a Moro
community and the nation responsible for good order among the Moros,
would be to upset and destroy the patriarchal despotism of their chiefs, for it
is all they have and all they are capable of misunderstanding. (Fulton, 106)

Near the end of his report, in which he compared the Moros to the Indi-
ans in the US Great Plains, including the military solution required to
subdue them, Davis laid down five specific recommendations, namely (1)
the setting aside of the Bates Treaty which he believed should never have
been negotiated to begin with; (2) the bypassing of sultans in favor of
the local datus; (3) recognition of hereditary datus as paid public servants;
(4) establishment of a military, not civilian, government in all of Moroland;
and, (5) free trade for up to ten years between the Moroland and the rest of
the country (Fulton, 109). With all its presuppositions about Anglo-Saxon
supremacy, the backward character of Moro society, and primary role of
the military in the civilizing process, the report was accepted by Gov. Taft
and who, with Gen. Chaffee’s concurrence, endorsed it to Sec. Root and
President Roosevelt for adoption, and laying the basis for much of what is
to come.
It is in this context that one might begin to see a different approach by
the colonial authorities in the Maguindanao and Lanao regions from that
which was concurrently employed in the Sulu region. In Maguindanao, par-
ticularly in the Rio Grande and Pulangi River in the central and northern
sections of Cotabato, the presence of the US military since the departure
of token number of Spanish troops in June of 1898 has been rather unchal-
lenged until 1903 when the so-called Ali rebellion erupted. Datu Ali, son of
Datu Uttu of Buayan, had sought to emulate his father’s heroic successful
resistance against the Spaniards in forming his own resistance movement
against the US occupation forces. The US military quelled this rebellion
through a combination of diplomacy and force or, as it was, divide and
conquer. The US military had successfully sought to coopt Datu Piang,
Datu Ali’s father-in-law, thereby weakening Datu Ali’s base of support. At
that time, Datu Piang was reputed to be the most influential among colo-
nial datus of Cotabato even though he did not descend from royal blood.
128 K. E. BAUZON

Born in 1850 to a Chinese trader from Amoy named Tuya Tan and one
of the unnamed concubines of Datu Uttu, the Sultan of Buayan, Piang
nonetheless grew up as a protege of Datu Uttu who conferred on him
the title “Minister of Lands.” When Datu Uttu fell out of grace with the
Spaniards, Datu Piang stepped in to fill the void, built an alliance with
Datu Uttu’s former allies, and sought the goodwill and friendship of the
Spaniards. It was this political agility, though others may see as verging on
opportunism and susceptible to cooptation, which made him useful to the
US occupation forces at the time when they needed someone like him to
help them suppress other recalcitrant members of the native population.
By the time the Spaniards had abandoned Cotabato in 1899, he was the
recognized Sultan of Mindanao among the natives not out of royal lineage
but out of effective control. He relished that title just for a few months,
however, when the US forces arrived later that same year, taking away any
semblance of power that he had. With his subservience to the new foreign
masters, along with his willingness to collaborate with them in the suppres-
sion of his competitors in the interest of “law and order,” his reputation
has come to be known as “America’s Great Friend” (McKenna, 91–93).
The US military planners had sought to employ a similar approach for
the Lanao Lake region, not wanting to take what would appear as a direct
heavy-handed military approach to pacification. Perhaps as an unintended
beneficiary to the Bates Treaty, though intended for the Sulu Archipelago,
both the Maguindanao and the Lanao Lake regions saw relative peace dur-
ing the brief life of that treaty in a sense that there was no (or, not yet
any) active, organized resistance to the US military presence there. As in
Maguindanao, US military operations were few and focused mainly on
enforcing laws against banditry, cattle-rustling, or interceding in quarrels
among clans (Beede, 346). Fulton explains this particular period of relative
calm in the following fashion: “The capture of Emilio Aguinaldo in April
[1901] and the surrender of many of the commanders on the island of
Luzon had led to the mistaken belief among the Americans, including the
army, that the long and violent insurgency in the north was almost over.
Moroland had been among the most pacified and ‘peaceful’ regions of the
Philippines in the sense that no one had been shooting at American soldiers
nor in open rebellion against the United States. In two-and-a-half years,
fewer than a dozen soldiers had been killed or wounded in all of Mindanao
and Sulu, and those incidents were considered isolated and criminal acts”
(Fulton, 103).
 5 THE PHILIPPINE–AMERICAN WAR, 1899–1913 … 129

But as things would turn out, it was precisely from the posture of law
and order enforcement that the nature of US involvement would gradually
evolve from police action to military operations in the Lanao Lake region.
It would also feature the kind of inter-clan conflict that the US military
inevitably found itself drawn to. The most serious of these is described by
historian Benjamin Beede as follows:

In April 1900, Datu Udasan of Malabang raided the town of Callalanuan and
carried away captives and loot. A detachment of 25 troopers from Parang
[Cotabato] under Lt. Col. Lloyd M. Brett, aided by Datu Piang’s 100 men
was sent to look into the incident. The result was an armed clash between
Piang’s men and Udasan’s followers, two Moro groups traditionally in con-
flict. The death of Datu Amirul Umbra and fourteen of Udasan’s men intensi-
fied the feud between the Malabang Maranaos and the Maguindanaos. U.S.
officials were blamed by the Maranaos for taking sides with the Maguin-
danaos, a violation of the terms of the Bates Agreement even though it was
primarily for the Sulu region. The Maranao attacks on a U.S. exploring party
in 1902 and the killing of a U.S. soldier in Parang [Cotabato] were traced
to Maranao resentment for the killing of Datu Umbra and two kinsmen of
Datu Dacula, Umbra’s father. (Beede, 346)

But a fact not mentioned by Beede in his account is the fact that a month
earlier, in March, Gen. Davis had ordered Lt. William D. Forsyth to lead
some of his cavalry soldiers of the 15th Cavalry to blaze a trail from Parang
to the Lanao Lake region, unmistakably a move in behalf of the United
States to assert control and impose US authority over this recalcitrant
and yet uncontrolled region. But sensing that the foreign invaders were
unduly intruding into their territory, the Maranaos reacted by engaging
in a harassing move against the intruders resulting in the death of two
soldiers on two separate occasions, three weeks apart in March and April,
namely Pvt. Lewis and Pvt. Mooris, both of the 27th Infantry Regiment,
then encamped in Malabang at an old Spanish fort named Corcuera, com-
manded by Col. Frank D. Baldwin. Aside from the killing of Pvts. Lewis
and Mooris, the Moros had reportedly ridden away with some 18 cav-
alry horses along with the krag rifles belonging to the dead soldiers. The
Maranao raiders then retreated to Buldon but not before suffering five casu-
alties among themselves. It was later determined that the Maranao bandits
as they were referred to, belonged to the clan of the Sultan of Bayang to
whom they were believed to be loyal followers.
130 K. E. BAUZON

To the US military authorities, this act on the part of the Moros was not
simply an act of banditry; it was an act of brazen defiance to US authority
which could not be allowed to go unpunished. No less than Gen. Chaffee
himself realized the importance of impressing upon the Moros the gravity
of the situation that he decided to personally visit the town of Malabang,
in the southeastern corner of the Lanao province, in early April [1902],
“inviting the Sultans and Datos of the Lake region to come in and hold
a ‘friendly’ conference with him,” assuring them that he did not come as
an occupying force (Allen and Reidy, 15). He also conveyed the demand
that the killers of the soldiers be surrendered to US authorities, and was
stern in giving April 27 as the deadline for such surrender. The Moro
leaders, however, spurned the call to this meeting and, instead, “defied
the Americans to come and fight” following which Chaffee realized the
futility of any further peaceful means. Consequently, he cabled Washington
and requested permission, “reluctantly” granted, “to proceed to the Lake
region and administer a lesson to the recalcitrant Sultans and Dattos,” but
not after Col. Baldwin took a precipitate action that seemed intended to
limit his options (Allen and Reidy, 16). By the third week of April but
before Chaffee’s ultimatum to the datus arrived, Col. Baldwin decided to
“force the issue” and, without seeking the approval of his superiors Gen.
Davis and Gen. Chaffee, decided to form an punitive expeditionary force
henceforth to be known as the Lake Lanao Expedition, and began marching
on April 17. Despite the apparent show of insubordination, which should
have been punishable under the military code of discipline, both Gen. Davis
and Gen. Chaffee instead reluctantly decided to go along with Baldwin’s
bold move, who claimed to know the names of the accused murderers of the
US soldiers, and from which rancherias (settlements) these and their fellow
ambushers came; these rancherias, accordingly, included Bacolod, Bayang,
Butig, Maciu, and Taraca. Gen. Davis, in particular, assured Sec. Root, who
had demanded that Baldwin return to the fort in Malabang, arguing that
a withdrawal by Col. Baldwin’s forces at this time “would weaken tenuous
U.S. authority on the island” (Maggioni). Faced with an apparent fait
accompli, Gen. Chaffee instructed Gen. Davis, Commander of the Seventh
Separate Brigade, to personally accompany Col. Baldwin. In more ways
than one, Gen. Davis appeared more than eager to comply as he saw an
opportunity to actualize the recommendations he had outlined in his report
as discussed previously. The expedition also gave him a chance to personally
encounter the Moros for whom he had envisioned a benign, civilized future
 5 THE PHILIPPINE–AMERICAN WAR, 1899–1913 … 131

not unlike the reservations for the Native Americans intended ostensibly
to preserve Native American culture and way of life.
Based on the account of Allen, an embedded journalist, and Reidy, a
participant-soldier, the expeditionary force consisted of 6 companies of the
27th Infantry, 2 troops of the 15th Cavalry, and the 25th Battery of Field
Artillery. On the 17th of April, the expedition began its trek into the interior
of Mindanao “which had, as yet, never been explored by white men” (Allen
and Reidy, 17). For several days the column passed through a mountain
range which ran parallel to the coast, engaging in minor skirmishes on
at least a couple of occasions with small Moro bands, then progressed
deeper inland and closer to the seemingly more impregnable complex of
fortifications, four in total, which consisted the settlement of Bayang (or
Bayan), the expedition’s main objective, arriving there on the 1st of May.
Upon settling at a temporary encampment some distance from Bayan, Gen.
Davis then proceeded to compose a message, reportedly in Arabic script,
for immediate delivery to the Sultan of Bayan. The message contained a
demand for the Sultan’s surrender by noon of the following day, May 2,
or “suffer the consequences” for failure to comply. In their account, Allen
and Reidy testify that the message had been delivered and received but that
it was not responded to. What was taken as an indirect response, instead,
were the number of shots presumably by the Moros that night directed at
the expedition’s encampment but that a decision was made not to return
fire until the noon deadline of the following day, May 2. By daylight of
May 2, the camp broke and the expeditionary force moved closer to Bayan
and, in fact, about a thousand yards from the entrance to the first of four
forts, called the Binidayan fort, Allen and Reidy wrote that “several natives
appeared there, firing a few shots and flourishing their weapons, all the time
yelling like mad. It was now plainly seen that the Moros were determined
to have war” (Allen and Reidy, 21). But as it was not yet twelve noon, the
artillery was positioned and trained on Fort Binidayan situated on a crest
but well within reach of the artillery shells. As the twelve o’clock deadline
came, Gen Davis stepped forward and “took one long, lingering look in
the direction of Fort Binidayan, and then, not seeing any signs of a peace
envoy, but, on the contrary, every indication of hostility, he turned slowly
to Captain W.S. McNair, of the 25th Battery, and gave the signal to ‘let it
go’” (Allen and Reidy, 22). Thus began the Battle of Bayan!
As the artillery bombardment continued, the infantry swung into action.
Allen and Reidy described this moment as follows: “The work of demol-
ishing the Binidayan Fort had now begun in earnest, companies ‘F’ and
132 K. E. BAUZON

‘G’ of the 27th Infantry advanced in line of skirmishes, while the Artillery
continued a slow fire on the Fort, company ‘H’ and ‘F’, and crossed the
intervening ridge and then through the little valley, while ‘G’ went off to
the right, to flank Binidayan and at the same time to make a demonstration
against Fort Pandapatan, which was to the right and rear of Binidayan”
(Allen and Reidy, 23–24).
As if to stress the discipline and professional training of the infantry
soldiers, Allen and Reidy wrote that as the soldiers started to assault the
fort, with “determination written on their faces,” and with “every head…
erect, [and with] every man in his place…. There was not a bit of confusion,
simply and orderly line of men counting up to do battle…. They laid down
prone on the ground then and poured a withering fire into the fort and
trenches, which quickly routed the enemy” (Allen and Reidy, 24–25).
At that point, the Moro warriors holding Fort Binidayan decided to give
it up and fled to the momentary safety of Fort Pandapatan, situated “to
the right and rear of Binidayan.” Infantry soldiers quickly took control of
Binidayan and unfurled “Old glory” to the breeze atop Binidayan’s shat-
tered walls, signifying victory with no losses to the US forces at this stage
of the fight. But the Moros were not so fortunate because “here and there
a mangled body of a dusky warrior dotted nature’s carpet, some already
dead, others breathing their last, but stubbornly defying the Americans to
do their worst” (Allen and Reidy, 26).
A brief lull ensued during which the artillery was re-positioned and
trained on Fort Pandapatan, where everyone anticipated would be where
the real battle would be fought. The infantry from Companies “E”, “F”,
“B” had moved down Binidayan Hill and closer to the Fort. From their new
position, they could see no less than 20 red flags flying atop Pandapatan’s
walls which signified to them Moro defiance. The time was 2 o’clock, and
without waiting much longer, the artillery opened up “and the big fight
was on” (Allen and Reidy, 28). The infantrymen advanced “smothering
other unseen trenches on their way, until by nightfall there was not a rifle
but could shove its muzzle into the very face of the trench behind which
the Moro warriors laid in waiting, peering down the slope between the
explosions for something they feared more than the whistling fragments
of Krupp shells—the blue-shirted form of the silent American soldier, with
whom the Moros knew the ultimate issue rested” (Allen and Reidy, 28–29).
As the soldiers continued their assault on the fort’s walls, “the mountain
guns howled and roared over them, the walls grew troubles and shaky,
falling in and falling out, dimly seen between the curtain of smoke and
 5 THE PHILIPPINE–AMERICAN WAR, 1899–1913 … 133

sheet of flame whirling about the leaping stones” (Allen and Reidy, 29).
The Moro warriors, however, showed some stubborn, if not ultimately vain,
resistance because as the “[a]rtillery roared in anger and anguish…, long
streams of fire continued to pour from the fort with regular intervals, and
more blue-shirted figures went tumbling down the hill” (Allen and Reidy,
30). However, this show of Moro resistance was answered by even more
vigorous bombardment as the “[a]rtillery turned loose all its little dogs
of war and they barked fiercely and hurled death projectiles into the fort
and trenches with renewed vigor” (Allen and Reidy, 30–31). But still the
Moro fighters refused to surrender. Allen and Reidy described this heroic
moment of the Moros that even they could not help but admire, as follows:
“But the fanatical Moros would not give up; there they stood in the very
midst of that hurricane of death, calm, immovable, and indifferent to it all.
Their resistance could not help but be admired as they stood there calm and
defiant, against that advancing, enveloping thunderstorm of musketry. But
it must not be imagined that they were idle; far from it. If one can imagine
taking a handful of pebbles and hurling them with a strong force against a
pane of glass, then, and then only, can one imagine the whirlwind of bullets
which the Moros were pouring into that little army of Americans out there
in the open” (Allen and Reidy, 31–32). Allen and Reidy admit that nothing
like the fierceness of this battle currently being waged “had ever been seen
before and nothing like it will be seen again” (Allen and Reidy, 32). As the
infantry drew closer to the walls, “they were very near the dangerous zone
of the exploding shrapnel and were compelled to halt to keep from being
struck by their own men…. [T]he air was filled with flying projectiles which
went screaming and screeching across the open and striking the walls of
the fort with a mighty impact…” (Allen and Reidy, 33–34). In describing
the approaching climax of the day’s battle, Allen and Reidy made sure to
highlight the dramatic role the artillery played as it “let itself go” again
and again in support of the unrelenting advance of the infantry. “‘Boom’,
‘boom’, ‘boom’, in quick succession, and then the wall crumbled, vanished
in parts, and lo! Behold! The flags were down! The crimson colors were
dangling in mid air for an instant, then were caught in the shower of burst-
ing shrapnel and hurled to the ground” (Allen and Reidy, 35–36). The
Moros fought with “fanatical frenzy” but all in vain. As the troops reached
the top but just outside the walls, the artillery stopped, the Moros fell back
and their position seemed practically abandoned, although not quite really.
Sporadic shooting came from the direction of the fort throughout much
of the night as torrential rain fell. Col. Baldwin’s men tended the wounded
134 K. E. BAUZON

and accounted for any dead, and he readied his men for a renewed assault
by daybreak the following day.
But as the awaited daybreak came, to the soldiers’ surprise, the fighting
they were anticipating to resume did not materialize. They saw white flags
fluttering above the fort’s walls signifying surrender and fall of the fort.
Allen and Reidy explained this moment as follows: “At last the big fight
was over. After nearly twenty-four hours of continual firing the Americans
had conquered. It had been a splendid battle, and what manner of death the
vanquished had suffered only those who looked into the fort and trenches
after the battle, can say” (Allen and Reidy, 39). Allen and Reidy describe
the sight of the fallen Moro warriors in gruesome detail, as follows: “The
mangled bodies of the Moro dead were piled up eight and ten deep in
places, and only those acquainted with the technicalities of a slaughter
house can imagine the sight as it appeared the next morning after the
battle. But these people would have war, and war they got, in all its glory.
Just eighty-three survivors remained out of the hundreds that resisted the
Americans” (Allen and Reidy, 39–40). Among the notable dead on the
Moro side were the Sultan of Pandapatan, the Sultan of Bayan, and his heir,
Rajah Muda (Fulton, 133). As for casualties on the US side, while providing
no precise figure, Allen and Reidy wrote: “But it must not be imagined that
this great victory had been achieved without loss to the Americans. Their
casualties were far greater than those of an ordinary battle, numbering close
to a hundred” (Allen and Reidy, 40).
News of this victory prompted profuse messages of congratulations from
the highest officials of the US government to the officers and men of the
Lanao Expeditionary Force. From Gen. Chaffee to Gen. Davis came the fol-
lowing message, dated May 4, 1902: “Please accept my congratulations for
yourself, and express to Col. Baldwin and all the officers and men engaged
in the Battle of May 2, my high appreciation of their bravery, gallantry and
soldiery conduct. My congratulations to both officers and men. I sincerely
regret the death of some and the wounding of others. Let no comfort be
withheld from the latter that can be supplied them” (Allen and Reidy, 44).
And, from Pres. Roosevelt to Gen. Chaffee, dated May 5, is the follow-
ing: “Accept for the Army under your command, and express to General
Davis and Colonel Baldwin especially, my congratulations and thanks for
the splendid courage and fidelity which has again carried our flag to victory.
Your fellow countrymen at home will ever reverence the memory of the
fallen, and be faithful to the survivors, who have themselves been faith-
ful unto death for their country’s sake” (Allen and Reidy, 43–44). Finally,
 5 THE PHILIPPINE–AMERICAN WAR, 1899–1913 … 135

an excerpt from the message of Gen. Davis to his soldiers, reflecting his
civilizing impulse and paternalism towards the Moros, as follows:

Soldiers: Words at my command fail to convey an adequate expression of

admiration for the gallantry and self-sacrifice which I saw displayed by the
assaulting lines and investing cordon on the 2nd of May. The memory of this
sanguinary action will be treasured by all participants and observers as long
as they live…. At this moment of exaltation and triumph do not forget the
vanquished foe, whose persistent gallantry commanded the admiration of all
who saw the magnificent defense of their stronghold. A race of men who
have been able to make such a fight, and who have turned this wilderness
into a garden, have many qualities which if guided right will make them and
their posterity valuable citizens. None can doubt who have seen what they
have accomplished without the aid which civilized people enjoy. Let no word
or act be brought home to the American soldier that discredits or disparages
these Moros. Let it be the unremitting effort of every officer and soldier to
assist and elevate them, a sacred duty which is devolved upon the Army, an
added burden which must be borne; and every American relies upon their
troops to execute this sacred trust…. Our flag is an emblem of freedom and
honor, and it remains with you that it shall become such an emblem to the
Moros, and ever so remain. (Allen and Reidy, 45)

Worth citing are no less than some personal thoughts of Allen and Reidy
themselves. In the Preface of their book, Allen and Reidy wrote: “It has
been the aim of the authors to give an unbiased description of the Battles,
just as they occurred, and it is expressly desired that the public as well may
derive some satisfaction from a perusal of the following pages” (Allen and
Reidy, 9) (italics added). Reidy too wrote an ode to the fallen soldier in a
nine-stanza poem excerpts of which are as follows:

The battle commences, loud crashes the bolos

And the gleam of the bayonets shine forth like the stars of the sea,
Colonel Baldwin’s command is now heard by the brave and the bold,
As onward they charge like lions leaping mad at a fold.

The meet in hot conflict, they bleed in the midst of the strife,
For their country’s freedom, for their glory, their honor and life,
The battle is over amid cheers from the victors of war,
But alas, one brave hero has fallen with many a scar. (Allen and Reidy, 8)
(italics added)
136 K. E. BAUZON

It is not known whether Reidy referred to any specific soldier or to those

killed in general, metaphorically in this poem. But one casualty on the US
side, Lieutenant Thomas A. Vicars, who led Company F, was killed “when
a cannon [lantaca, or small brass cannon used by the Moros] literally blew
off his head” (Fulton, 132) was notable enough for a new camp, set up the
next day on the same site where the demolished Bayan forts once stood,
to be named Camp Vicars, with Captain John J. Pershing designated as its
commander. Another noteworthy piece of document is a sermon delivered
by the Chaplain of the 27th Infantry, the Rev. George D. Rice, on the
Sunday following the battle. The sermon was rather lengthy but suffice it
to excerpt his commendation of the troops, and his thoughts as to which
side God was on, and comparing the courage displayed by the US soldiers
and by those of the Moros, as follows:

I am going to speak to you to-day on courage, and how I saw it displayed on

May 2d, while you were engaged in open combat with the Moros. There was
a time when I thought that true courage was the absence of fear. But after
witnessing the battle of this week I have seen that which has caused me to
think differently now, because you demonstrated to me on that day that true
courage was not the absence of fear, but the conquest of it. Surely, yours was
the highest order of courage…. It was surely a high order of courage that
caused Sgt. Graves to swing himself over the out stockade of Binidayan when
the fanatic Moro and his knife could be seen above. It was courage of the
most godly type that took Corporal McGovern down into the trenches to
prop up the hands of wounded men and give them water…. It was courage of
the Christian soldier that inspired Sergt. Major Ingold and Sergt. McCarthy,
both wounded, to speak words of hope to their comrades”. (Allen and Reidy,
51–52)

Then, Rev. Rice takes time to talk of the kind of Moro courage that he
saw, as follows: “The courage displayed by the Moros is very different. The
Moros were caught in a trap. They knew it, and they fought the desperate
fight of their lives. You can drive a mouse into a corner like this, and he, too,
will turn. Bravery through necessity is not the true courage which comes
of Christ” (Allen and Reidy, 52).
The messages of praise and congratulations sampled above may signify
the climax to this story, but there is a denouement consisting of a series
of further conflicts. These episodes, although not as dramatic as the Battle
of Bayan, nonetheless, showed lingering signs of resistance which impelled
the US authorities to take further suppressive actions combined with some
 5 THE PHILIPPINE–AMERICAN WAR, 1899–1913 … 137

tact and diplomacy in the pacification of the rest of the region surrounding
Lake Lanao, an approach that would be associated—rather prematurely or
erroneously—with Capt. Pershing.
Within about a week of the Battle of Bayan, Gen. Chaffee arrived in
Bayan to inspect the troops and hear accounts from the officers and men
about their experiences in the expedition thus far. One of the accounts he
heard was from Capt. Pershing who, for weeks prior to the commencement
of the Lake Lanao Expedition led by Col. Baldwin, had been on his own
trying to get to know some datus whom he had met during his weekly
discreet intelligence gathering venture at a marketplace, which met once a
week, in Iligan, at that time considered a Muslim enclave in a predominantly
Christianized northern Mindanao. Accessible to Lake Lanao’s entrypoint
at Marawui (now, Marawi) through an old trail used by the Spaniards,
Capt. Pershing had appreciated the geographic significance of Iligan just
as it could serve as a preferable alternative to Malabang for purposes of
bringing in supply from Manila.
The valuable personal contacts Capt. Pershing has made paved his visit
with these datus, coming mainly from the eastern side of the lake, often
unarmed to show trust and earn the confidence of his hosts with whom he
also exchange gifts. One of these datus was the former Sultan of Madaya,
Ahmai-Manabilang, who has abdicated his nominal position in favor of his
nephew, whom he had sent as an intermediary with Capt. Pershing. Histo-
rian Fulton describes Capt. Pershing’s approach to Manabilang as follows:
“Pershing took pains to accord all the honors to Manabilang, putting him
and his retinue up for the night in the officers’ quarters and giving special
instructions to his men on showing respect” (Fulton, 121). In his numer-
ous visits with Manabilang, Capt. Pershing, who had attained a level of
conversational proficiency in the Maranao dialect, had endeavored to “ex-
plain at length the principles of American policy, stressing the respect of
Islam and its customs that had been accorded elsewhere, and American
good intentions” (Fulton, 121).
On account of the friendship that he has been able to build that he
could later claim that the formation of a potential coalition of datus was
averted from joining the fight in Bayan on May 2, suggesting that the
victory was not necessary all due to the leadership of Col. Baldwin who
was viewed by his superior, including Gens. Davis and Chaffee, as having
a rather impetuous tendency. It was because of Capt. Pershing’s approach
that earned him the confidence of Gens. Davis and Chaffee when he was
designated commander of Camp Vicars, bypassing Col. Baldwin, who was
138 K. E. BAUZON

nonetheless promoted to Brigadier General, then soon reassigned to com-

mand the Visayan Department. Gen. Davis himself would be promoted to
Major General and designated to replace Gen. Chaffee who would shortly
be promoted to Lieutenant General and, later, appointed as Second Army
Chief of Staff in Washington. In line to fill Gen. Davis’ soon-to-be-vacant
position was Brig. Gen. Samuel S. Sumner, a veteran of the Indian cam-
paigns, then assigned as commander of the District of Southern Luzon
during which time he notably was not in good terms with Gen. Chaffee
for refusing the latter’s order to implement a “population concentration
program” reminiscent of the infamous practice of reconcentrado employed
in Cuba by the Spaniards to suppress the Cuban insurgency. Gen. Sumner
would be Capt. Pershing’s immediate superior.
Another characteristic strategy associated with Capt. Pershing, which
some historians have described as “divide and conquer” was his focus on
finding who among the datus were susceptible to friendship and who,
among them, tended to be hostile, realizing that “the Moros, by the very
nature of their societal institutions, were already divided” (Fulton, 145).
Fulton explains: “[Pershing] sensed that at some point he would have to
fight some of the most recalcitrant datus, but unlike Baldwin, he knew he
could not fight everyone, and it would be most unwise to fight someone he
did not have to and unnecessarily add more enemies as a result” (Fulton,
145).
The opportunity would come before too long for Capt. Pershing to
demonstrate in practice his patented brand of what would today be called
counterinsurgency. As mentioned earlier, when Gen. Chaffee arrived at
Camp Vicars after the Battle of Bayan, he issued an invitation, in the words
of Allen and Reidy, “to the principal sultans and datos, who were then
commanding tribes of savage bolomen along the most impassable regions
of the lake shores. The subject matter of his messages were authoritative
invitations to come into the camp and hold a friendly conference with
him” (Allen and Reidy, 60–61). Many responded affirmatively, and terms
for peace had been agreed upon but, unfortunately, not for long. Allen
and Reidy explain why, as follows: “Their terms of peace were, to say the
least, short lived, for in the early part of the month of July a detachment
of men was brutally and unexpectedly attacked by a band of bolomen on
the trail. They were outnumbered by the enemy, and consequently many
of the Americans were wounded and some three or four killed outright”
(Allen and Reidy, 61–62). A further evidence to the deteriorating peace
conditions and spirit of rebellion in the lake region was when the Sultan of
 5 THE PHILIPPINE–AMERICAN WAR, 1899–1913 … 139

Bacolod sent a defiant message to Capt. Pershing a translation of which is

as follows:

We ask you to return to the sea because you should not be here among
civilized Moros, for you are not religious. If you stay here we will fight you
this month, and in no event will be your friends, because you eat pork. We
say to you that if you do not leave this region, come here and the sultan will
sacrifice you, and if you do not wish to come, we will come to you and fight.
(Allen and Reidy, 63)

Within a few days, the Sultan of Maciu also sent Capt. Pershing a similarly
toned defiant message. Allen and Reidy described the resulting mood at
Camp Vicars as follows: “Circumstances now began to look grave at Camp
Vicars. The Americans had endeavored by every means in their power to
prevent further hostilities and trouble, but had failed in all their efforts to
bring about peace between themselves and the dark-skinned natives of the
trackless plains of Mindanao” (Allen and Reidy, 63).
Actual acts of violent resistance against the Americans by the Moros did
not resume until the evening of August 12 when, as narrated by Allen and
Reidy, “the most appalling and most ghastly murder that has ever been
witnessed took place about two hundred yards from the camp. The moon
had disappeared temporarily behind a dark cloud, the men had all retired
for the night, and everything seemed tranquil, when suddenly the camp
was aroused by the firing of shots in rapid succession by the members of
the outpost” (Allen and Reidy, 64). As it turned out, the sentries assigned
to guard outpost No. 4 had been attacked by about 20 Moro raiders, and
the soldiers soon found themselves “fighting desperately for their lives.”
Reinforcement arrived but to no avail as it arrived

too late to prevent the massacre and death of their fallen comrades, for the
savages had by this time made well their escape, after performing one of
the most savage, most treacherous and most blood-curdling deeds, that has
ever hitherto been recorded in the pages of bloody history. Not content with
killing their victims, they had cut them with their bolos and long spears, until
their bodies were beyond recognition”. (Allen and Reidy, 65)

This attack was followed two nights later by another raid by a party of about
30 Moro warriors who fired wildly at the camp.
140 K. E. BAUZON

Following a brief investigation, it was determined that the attackers

belonged to the tribes loyal to the sultans of Bacolod and Maciu, respec-
tively. It was decided that an attempt be made to send messages to the
datus of the lake region, particularly to the sultans of Bacolod and Maciu,
“demanding, rigidly, an explanation regarding the recent attacks… as well
as the immediate surrender of the murderers in their tribes who were guilty
of committing various acts of injustice and cruelty since the historical bat-
tle of May 2” (Allen and Reidy, 67). There being no response other than
the usual “defiant, insolent, and sullen nature” (Allen and Reidy, 67) and
seeing that no “restoration of peace in the island of Mindanao could not be
brought about by fair and honourable means,” it was decided that a lesson
needed to be administered, one that “they would not very readily forget”
(Allen and Reidy, 67–68). Such action would mollify the soldiers who were
craving for revenge at the same time it would satisfy the suggestion of some
friendly datus that the Americans had to do something if they “were not
to lose their credibility” (Fulton, 147).
Historian Fulton gives the account that, at this juncture, Capt. Pershing
went to Gen. Sumner who, in turn, went to Gen. Chaffee who, for his part,
sent a cable to the War Department detailing the incidents and suggesting
that something forceful needed to be taken. The War Department sent
back a reply essentially giving a green light to a military action, but with
some caution, in the following words: “The President hopes every effort
will be made to keep peace with the Moros but leaves decision as to what
is necessary to military authorities on the ground.” (Fulton, 147).
Shortly thereafter, Gen. Chaffee ordered Gen. Sumner to organize an
expedition specifically directed against Sultan Uali of Butig, and Sultan
Cabugatan of Maciu, settlements which were situated a few miles apart on
the eastern side of the lake (Fulton, 147). Gen. Sumner wasted no time
putting together a combined force from Malabang and Vicars, consisting
of about 1800 soldiers, and to simultaneously attack Maciu, Butig, and
Bacolod, settlements considered to be the most bothersome, compara-
tively speaking. However, this was disapproved by Gen. Chaffee in favor of
a smaller but cautious attacking party to be organized and commanded by
Capt. Pershing, who ended up planning and executing a series of punitive
campaigns around the lake region in the form of an expedition that would
bear his name, the Pershing Lake Lanao Expedition. The objectives of the
expedition, as explained by Fulton, are as follows: (1) “to demonstrate
that Americans could capture and destroy the cottas, which the Moros still
believed to be impregnable, and that it could be done swiftly, efficiently,
 5 THE PHILIPPINE–AMERICAN WAR, 1899–1913 … 141

and with minimal damage to the Americans”; and, (2) “to demonstrate
restraint, killing no more Moros than was absolutely necessary and rigor-
ously avoiding damage to their civilian, as opposed to their ‘war’ property”
(Fulton, 148). These objectives were consistent with Capt. Pershing’s over-
all counterinsurgency doctrine, in modern parlance, aimed towards pacifi-
cation of the restive Moroland, at least at this very early stage of his cam-
paign. Based on his perusal of transcripts of Capt. Pershing’s voluminous
papers, historian Fulton was able to cull his (Capt. Pershing’s) approach
towards pacification in the following description:

He [Pershing] demonstrated intimate knowledge of correct Maranao pro-

tocol, but was blunt in the messages he conveyed. He made plain what was
open for discussion or negotiation and what lines could not be crossed, such
as theft or the killing of a soldier, he would first give an opportunity for
redress, holding the datu of the offending party responsible. If redress did
not occur, Pershing would arrest the datu and hold him, albeit with dignity
and without privation (sometimes even in his own quarters), while rigorously
avoiding any insult or humiliation. (Fulton, 145)

The first stage of Capt. Pershing’s campaign is sometimes referred to as

the Butig-Maciu expedition in that it called for dealing with the incidents
in early August, as described above, whose perpetrators were suspected as
followers of the sultans of these settlements and were to be arrested. But in
view of the inclement weather and the outbreak of cholera, the expedition
to the settlement of Bacolod was postponed until the spring of the following
year in what would be the third of four stages. The plan originally included
Bacolod whose defiant datu threatened war instead in response to Gen.
Sumner’s written message that “the chance was now given to him and his
people to make friends with the Americans before it was too late” (Fulton,
154). As quoted by Fulton, the Sultan (of Bacolod) “declares war at once
as we wish to retain the religion of Mohammed. Cease sending us letters”
(Fulton, 154).
The Butig-Maciu expedition, according to Fulton, consisted of “one
troop of the 15th Cavalry, four companies of the 27th Infantry, the 25th
Artillery Battery with two small Maxim-Nordenfeldt mountain guns and
one 3.6-inch field mortar (all transportable by pack mule), a surgeon and
small detachment of the Hospital Corps, an officer of the engineers, and a
142 K. E. BAUZON

quartermaster. Some 643 officers and men would be supplied by a sixty-

mule pack train. While quite adequate for the mission, it did not by any
stretch constitute overwhelming force” (Fulton, 148).
The expedition left Camp Vicars on the 18th of September, encamped at
Pantauan, a small town on the approach to a secondary objective: the small
settlement of Gauan along Lake Butig, a small satellite lake to Lake Lanao
about four miles away. The following day, the party advanced towards
Gauan, guarded by a complex of three fortifications. The operation against
Gauan and its defenders proved to be relatively easy. A combination of
mountain guns and sniper shots carried much of the day, showing Capt.
Pershing’s patient but deliberate tactic that set the pattern for the succeed-
ing objectives. Fulton explains:

Unlike Bayan, there would be no direct assaults or attempts to storm the

forts until the defensive works had been greatly reduced. Small assaulting
parties might rush the walls, but only to set fires and quickly retreat. Reckless
heroics were discouraged. The advance against the cotta’s defenses was slow
and paced, keeping up continual, but well-aimed, rifle and artillery fire, with
the intention of pressuring the Moro defenders to abandon the cottas. There
was no attempt to cut off escapes. The only prisoners Pershing wanted were
those who surrendered voluntarily, not because they were trapped. (Fulton,
149)

After this successful foray into Gauan, the expedition would have pro-
ceeded to Maciu as planned had it not been for unanticipated impassable
swamps brought about by the rainy season. Without much choice, Capt.
Pershing decided that the expedition return to Camp Vicars and have the
troops rest for a few days. On September 28, the expedition resumed its
journey, marching across a semi-reconstructed trail to Maciu, thanks to the
hard work over two days by the engineers and their crew. On the 30th,
Maciu was within sight, most especially the red flags of defiance that flut-
tered above its forts. But because it was dusk, the expedition encamped for
the night giving the soldiers a much needed rest.
At this juncture, Allen and Reidy described the defiant mood they found
at Maciu and acknowledged that it was unsurprisingly characteristic of the
Sultan Cabugatan of Maciu whom they described as “defiant, haughty, and
semi-savage” (Allen and Reidy, 82), and one “who had hitherto held his
stronghold and expansive territories with creditable success for centuries
against even the haughty Spanish soldiers. But his day of gloom was fast
 5 THE PHILIPPINE–AMERICAN WAR, 1899–1913 … 143

approaching, when he and his clan of bolomen would be compelled to

submit to the sons of America…” (Allen and Reidy, 75).
As dawn broke the next day, the soldiers shared a “hurried breakfast”
then on they marched against “Maciu’s tribe.” At the summit of a nearby
hill, they positioned the Battery about 400 yards in distance from a fort,
formidable in appearance, that stood in the way to Maciu. Allen and Reidy
related what happened next:

As soon as the first shot from the Artillery was fired the Moros began to
abandon the fort…. The Infantry had formed a semi-circular skirmish line
around the stronghold and now, the Battery having ceased firing, they began
to move forward, closing around the fort. At last they reached it and after
scaling its high walls, they found that the greater part of its inmates had fled
in the direction of Maciu, taking their arms with them. The soldiers soon
began to destroy the fort, and in a very few moments, it was reduced to
ashes. (Allen and Reidy, 89–90)

Then, after having destroyed the fort, the soldiers, followed a trail in the
direction of the lake “destroying, as they went, everything in the shape of
forts or strongholds which they encountered, and from which they had
been fired upon” (Allen and Reidy, 90). This seemed reminiscent of a
scorched earth practiced by the US military in other parts of the coun-
try against the insurrectos, but Allen, the primary author, addressed the
question with an air of authority as to whether or not this was of a “cruel
nature,” in the following words: “To this I can only state that having been
amongst them since the origin of hostilities in the island of Mindanao, up
to the present date, and having become rather familiar with their treach-
ery and cruelties to American soldiers, wherever they could get a chance,
I think as far as my judgment is concerned that they have been given a
lesson which, to say the least, they richly deserve” (Allen and Reidy, 91).
However, the main objective—Maciu—still laid ahead.
The next day, the camp broke and shortly after 7:00 in the morning,
the march began realizing that that day was “designated for the capture
of Maciu” (Allen and Reidy, 92). As the troops drew closer to Maciu’s
fort, the troops deployed in skirmish lines as they advanced towards the
fort and “prevent, if possible, the escape of any of the blood-thirsty Moros
whose wild cries we could now hear within” (Allen and Reidy, 93). The
Battery, having been positioned infront of the fort, immediately went into
action. Allen and Reidy narrate: “The Artillery had opened up on the left.
144 K. E. BAUZON

‘Boom!, Boom!!’ went the cannons, and a rain of solid shot and shrapnel
was hurled at the fort, and for a space of a moment nothing could be
seen but the flying fragments, and splinters of bamboo and debris high in
the air” (Allen and Reidy, 93). The Moros responded with their lantacas,
followed by a volley from their rifles. But then the Artillery, now aimed to
the right of the fort, responded with a steady volley. By 2:00 p.m., however,
it seemed as though the Maciu fort was impregnable. Consequently, the
artillery was moved closer to the fort, some 50 yards away which Allen
and Reidy note that “it never has been known in the history of battles
where Artillery has engaged an enemy at so short a range” (Allen and
Reidy, 96). Despite this, “the Moros remained obstinate to the last singing
wildly their religious songs to their God ‘Allah’ in the very midst of the
struggle” (Allen and Reidy, 96). However, by around midnight, when the
Moros had realized that the Americans were determined to take the fort,
including the use of scaling ladders when needed, it appeared that the
Moro fighters tried to escape from the fort and make a dash to freedom,
which was anticipated. But Allen and Reidy attest to something contrary to
Capt. Pershing’s principle of allowing for escape for those who wished to
escape, as follows “In an instant every soldier was on the alert. They kept
on coming, however, seemingly regardless of death or the rain of bullets.
But few of them escaped or even lived to tell the tale, for as fast as they
left the fort they were being shot down by a constant stream of fire from
the Infantry, and when the morning dawned it was found that the Sultan
of Maciu, with another leader and tribesman, had fallen, never to breath
again” (Allen and Reidy, 98–99). No fatalities on the American side during
the assault on Maciu were recorded, although two soldiers were severely
wounded. To these wounded soldiers, Allen offered consoling words for,
in any case, “their sufferings were doubly avenged, for many a hitherto
unconquerable Moro has fallen upon the green and now deserted territories
of the Sultan of Maciu, with the bones of his mortal composition bleeding
on the green sward, under the tropical sun of his native skies” (Allen and
Reidy, 100). For his part, soldier-poet Reidy composed a couple of stanzas
to memorialize Maciu’s now-deceased sultan not so much to honor him
but, rather, to put him (the Sultan) where Reidy thought he belonged, and
to elevate in esteem the soldiers he fought against and the civilization they
represented:

Where once in triumph on his trackless plains

The haughty Moro sultan loved to reign,
 5 THE PHILIPPINE–AMERICAN WAR, 1899–1913 … 145

With shacks proportioned to his native sky,

strength in his arm, and lightning in his eye,
He roamed with uncovered feet, his sun-illumined zone.

The dirk, the bolo, and the spear his own;

Or lead the combat wild without a plan
An artless savage, but a fearless man.
But his “sun” of triumph, has set to rise no more
O’er the quiet waters of Lake Lanao’s shores. (Allen and Reidy, 101)

Allen and Reidy end their eyewitness narrative of the history of the US
conquest of the Lake Lanao region by also paying tribute to the 27th
Infantry established in Plattsburgh, New York, only in the early part of
1901 and then shipped to Mindanao via Manila in December of that year.
To the soldiers of this infantry, who have served with gallantry a gender-
ized (or, rather, sexualized) reference to their country (“Fair Columbia”),
Allen and Reidy wrote: “It is with feelings of pride and national patrio-
tism we have watched through many a stormy year the steady growth and
accomplishments of our immortal Army, whose splendid display of true
valor and military discipline has attracted the attention and well-deserved
admiration of all nations through the universe, whether exhibited on the
expansive parade ground…, on the far away ‘Eastern Isles,’ under the warm
rays of the tropical sun, where many a true and stout-hearted son of ‘Fair
Columbia’ has sacrificed his young life for his country’s cause” (Allen and
Reidy, 103). And, not to be ignored was the 25th Battery of Field Artillery,
a mountain battery organized in the Philippines only in September 1901
from out of what used to be the Light Battery “C” of the 7th Artillery.
To this Battery, Allen also tried his hand in poetry and composed a poem
entitled “The Mountain Battery” to honor its members but specifically its
commander, Capt. W. B. MacNair, excerpts of which are as follows:

The stout-hearted warriors who have fallen in battle

In defence of their country, its freedom to save,
Whose memory shall live and will ne’er be forgotten
Though long have they mouldered to dust in their graves,

Could they but look back from their graves of cold slumber,
Where in silence they are sleeping long ages away,
And see their successors, brave, bold, and undaunted,
146 K. E. BAUZON

Who have fought the proud Moros on Mindanao’s plains.

For foremost in the ranks of victorious honor,

Are the heroes who founded the illustrious name

Of the 25th Battery, and one may well ponder,

On the name of the Commander, with world renown fame. (Allen and Reidy,
113)

Allen and Reidy note that Capt. Pershing’s Moro campaign successfully
concluded on January 1, 1903, in which “‘Old Glory’ of fair ‘Columbia’
is now unfurled to the gentle touch of the oriental zephyrs on the hill-tops
of Mindanao, for all times to come” (Allen and Reidy, 101). The reference
to “Columbia” is a reflection of the popularized notion, common since the
second half of the 1700s, of a goddess of virtue and progress—and then
of democracy—seen to represent the United States, famously depicted in
John Gast’s 1872 painting in which Columbia is seen floating in mid-air,
dressed immaculately in white, holding a school book and telegraph wire,
a clear attempt at linkage with the Enlightenment, guiding settlers in their
westward expansion, and offering protection ostensibly including potential
harm from the “savage” Indians.
In context, it is important to understand that Capt. Pershing’s punitive
expedition throughout the entire 1902–1903 period actually consisted of
four distinct phases—two in the second half of 1902, and two in the first half
of 1903—in which the phase described by Allen and Reidy involving the
campaigns against the sultans of Gauan, Butig, and then Maciu, constituted
just the first and the second of these, respectively. The conquest of Bacolod
would have been included in the late 1902 campaign had it not been for
the prevalence of cholera among its population. When the epidemic was
deemed to have subsided by March of 1903, the campaign resumed on
April 5, reaching the vicinity of Bacolod on the 7th. The following day, a
frontal assault on the fort was made, after the sultan turned down an offer to
surrender unconditionally. When the battle was over, over a hundred Moro
warriors were dead, including the sultan, and the fort was razed completely
to the ground. The next campaign began just two days after the Bacolod
campaign. This involved the capture of the fort at Calahui, about three
miles away from Bacolod, this time, however, easy by comparison. The
night of the 9th, soldiers fired several rounds in the general direction of
the fort with “the intent of impressing the Moros that their position was
 5 THE PHILIPPINE–AMERICAN WAR, 1899–1913 … 147

untenable,” their fort being surrounded on three sides by water leaving no

room for escape. The joint victory over Bacolod and Calahui came to be
known by the combined name as the Battle of Bacolod. The next and final
stage of the campaign, commencing on May 2, involved the capture of the
cottas at Gata and Taraca, respectively. The first of these, happening on May
4, involved heavy firefight featuring prominently the artillery and vicious
hand-to-hand combat between the infantrymen and the Moro defenders.
The next day, the expedition proceeded to Taraca. Upon arrival, however,
Capt. Pershing and his soldiers were pleasantly surprised to find white flags
of surrender flying above the fort. Its leader, Datu Ampuan-Agaus, and his
retinue of officers, came out to surrender and were taken prisoners. But
while the fort was taken without any firefight, an escape attempt was made
that night in which the escapees were fired upon, killing four of them. Datu
Ampuan-Agaus managed to escape, and he remained a fugitive for the next
twenty years (Fulton, 161).
The completion of the campaigns finally brought about the pacification
of the entire Lanao Lake region. But Capt. Pershing’s expeditions also had
the combined task of mapping this region and circumnavigating it in the
process. Following the campaign at Gata an Taraca, the expedition pro-
ceeded to Marahui at the north end of the lake and where Agus River,
supplied with water from the lake, begins its turbulent flow to Iligan Bay
via the majestic Maria Cristina falls. Upon reaching Marahui, on the 8th
of May, Capt. Pershing and his party were met by Gen. Sumner. During
their brief stay in Marahui, a reception was had wherein friendly datus from
around the lake were invited, along with the Pandita of Nuzca who was,
at that time, the “acknowledged religious leader of the Islamic faith for all
of Lake Lanao” (Fulton, 161). Fulton assessed Capt. Pershing’s feelings
about the significance of the Pandita’s visit, and wrote: “To Pershing, the
visit of this particular holy man was of ‘signal importance; it was more than
evidence, it was an announcement of that at last the outpost stronghold
of Islam in the east of Asia had capitulated’”.6 On the 10th of May, Capt.
Pershing’s expedition began its march back to Camp Vicars but, this time,
on the other side of the lake so as to lay claim not only to the circumnavi-
gation of the lake but also to serve as an announcement of the completion
of the lake region’s mapping and pacification and, more than a symbol, the
unchallenged US sovereignty.
Touted by students of counterinsurgency today as a model for success-
ful counterinsurgency operations, Capt. Pershing’s campaigns involved a
148 K. E. BAUZON

combination of patient intelligence-gathering, personal diplomacy, famil-

iarity with the sociocultural terrain, recruitment of native allies, controlled
and measured application of force, and clarity of objective—a model for
current-day counterinsurgency requiring employment of experts from such
disciplines as anthropology, sociology, and political science. While historian
Fulton diverges from many historians in classifying Capt. Pershing’s tactic
as one of “divide and conquer” among the local chiefs, Fulton takes Capt.
Pershing’s word at face value and concludes: “But the Moros, by the very
nature of their societal institutions, were already divided. Rather, Pershing
focused on sorting out who were his friends, who were his enemies, and
who were in between” (Fulton, 145). To this writer, however, it mattered
less what approach or tactic Capt. Pershing used and that, further, he was
being given credit more than he deserves for the above-mentioned com-
ponents of his approach. To this writer, whether or not Moro society was
“divided,” an assumed—and much validated—approach always involves the
transformation of the conquered society, either sooner or later, into some-
thing compliant or acquiescent to the wishes of the conqueror. Education
is a fine example of this, and Gen. (Elwell). Otis realized the counterinsur-
gency significance of setting up schools, in fact, throughout the country
in drawing the Filipino youth away from any insurrectionary thoughts or
activities. But while persuasive elements to the approach are never taken for
granted, so are the coercive ones. This involves search for friendly allies use-
ful for intelligence-gathering purposes, as Capt. Pershing has done, but this
also involves search for potential traitors by offering rewards or incentives
to weaken the enemy, using natives against natives as was the intention in
the case of the Moro Constabulary’s establishment, followed, eventually
by relentless pursuit through military means as he was widely recognized
for doing around the Lanao lake region, but also, ignominiously, at Bud
Bagsak in Sulu.
In his third campaign in April 1903, in what came to be known as
the Battle of Bacolod, Capt. Pershing did allow his soldiers to employ a
“scorched earth” policy in razing to the ground all structures that “seemed
like a fort” (ostensibly a euphemism for huts or houses) and to shoot at will,
even in the air, just to induce terror among the population as they marched
to the lakeshore. This was hinted at in so many words by Allen and Reidy in
their text in a manner reminiscent of Gen. William T. Sherman’s “March
to the Sea” after burning Atlanta during the US Civil War, albeit it in a
much smaller scale. Capt. Pershing himself appear to have lost his charm
when he commanded, now as a Brigadier General, having been promoted
 5 THE PHILIPPINE–AMERICAN WAR, 1899–1913 … 149

in 1906, over one of the most celebrated atrocities committed against the
Moros at Bud Bagsak in the island of Jolo, in the Sulu Archipelago, in June
1913. This happened during his second tour of duty in the Philippines
that lasted from November 1909 until December 1913 during which time
he also served a Governor of the Moro Province. In his memoirs, Capt.
Pershing rationalized the policies and actions of his office, e.g., “disarming
and taming the Moros” (phrase taken from the title of Chapter 19 of his
memoirs), that inevitably led to the massacre in the following words:

It was in the possession of arms by the criminal elements that nullified the
most earnest efforts toward civil rule and left the peaceably inclined inhabi-
tants at their mercy. To my mind, although many Americans opposed it, there
was but one solution – the disarming of the Moros and other non-Christians.
The problem had been left to the discretion of the provincial governors and
hitherto none had considered it wise to make such an attempt…. I did not
decide to undertake it until convinced that there would be a continuance
of the disorders until disarmament was accomplished and that it should be
done even though the most drastic means might be necessary. I anticipated
comparatively little trouble dealing with the scattered wild tribes but consid-
erable with the Moros – who, though not fully united, had a bond of union
in their religion. There were predictions made by both Americans and Moros
that the attempt would bring about a Holy War – Muhammedan against the
‘unbeliever’ – a bloody thing to contemplate, but I did not believe it would
have this effect. In fact many of the dattos and sultans themselves favored the
project provided all, good and bad alike, could be disarmed…. We entered
into it fully realizing that here and there force would have to be employed
from the beginning but with the firm conviction that it was the only solution
to the problem. (Pershing, 285–286)

Thus, here, Capt. Pershing ignored the counsel of previous governors

against the project, but listened only to the words of friendly datus who
had something to gain from their adversary or rival datus being disarmed
or vanquished. Finally, he believed that there was no other solution except
to use maximum force, and that, further, this would ignite some kind of a
holy war in the minds of the Moros. Contrary to his own advice to respect
the religious sensibilities of the Moros during his Lanao campaigns, here he
was not reticent about igniting some kind of a religious warfare. Sadly, on
both counts, his judgment proved erroneous although from the military
standpoint, the subjugation was complete.7 In his memoirs, he recounts
the Batttle of Bud Bagsak as “the last and also the greatest battle against the
150 K. E. BAUZON

Moros,” offers ritualistic and patronizing admiration to the Moros for mak-
ing “a stand worthy of the best traditions of a warrior race” and describes
the casualties on both sides as follows:

Our total casualties in the five-day battle were one officer and fourteen men
killed and twenty-five wounded. On the other hand the Moro loses, while
not actually known, were probably between two and three hundred, as many
had fled before the final assault was launched. With [the Moro leader] Amil’s
death and this defeat the opposition of the Jolo Moros en masse came finally
to an end. (Pershing, 302)

What mattered in the end was that Capt. Pershing was laying the ground-
work for the integration of Moroland into the colonial Philippine body
politic, based on apparent paternalistic principles which, in fact, served to
conceal aggressive system of private property and labor relations that would
be integrated into—and foundational to—what would be more popularly
referred to in the post-World War II era as neoliberal globalization. That
the United States has been successful in establishing this global order, and
seizing the initiative from the European colonial powers, has been due in
large part to exhaustion of the latter from their wars with each other over
colonies and, in part, from their wars against national liberation movements
in their far-flung colonies. In point of fact, Capt. Pershing’s pacification
campaign around Lake Lanao may serve as a metaphor for—or certainly a
precursor to—how the United States has, throughout much of the twenti-
eth century to this day, gone around the world pacifying or, in some cases,
disciplining peoples that were reticent to US leadership or its vision of the
future characterized by a borderless world governed by neoliberal rules,
e.g., privatization, deregulation, liberalization, the fundamental purpose
of which is to commodify, monetize, and privatize chunks of the global
commons for the gain of a few. Paving the way for these rules to be applied
in Asia was the US foreign policy of “Open Door” enunciated in a series of
notes sent from the office of US Secretary of State John Hay, commencing
with the first of these dated September 6, 1899, and distributed to the
diplomatic missions of Britain, France, Russia, and Japan, countries that
seemed to the United States to be fast-carving up parts of China as their
own respective spheres of influence, and corralling the Chinese market that
has, up to that point, worked to the trading and investment detriment of
the United States. The gist of this policy, which served as a cornerstone of
US policy in East Asia up until the beginning of World War II in which
 5 THE PHILIPPINE–AMERICAN WAR, 1899–1913 … 151

the Philippines would play a key role as a stepping stone to China, was
the preservation of the principle of free trade and equal privileges, partic-
ularly in investment opportunities and access to port facilities, among all
countries that had trading interests in China.

Laying the Foundation for Racialized State

Violence
Despite current efforts by revisionist, neoconservative-oriented US-based
historians to whitewash US atrocities in the turn-of-the-last-century annex-
ation of the Philippines, some even referring to it as the “savage war of
peace,” that US intervention, as San Juan observes, continues “to haunt
the conscience of some humanist and historians of international relations,”
particularly over the question of Filipino casualties as a consequence of that
war (San Juan 2009). San Juan explains:

Current controversy among scholars surrounds the tally of Filipino victims

of U.S. pacification. Journalist Bernard Fall cited the killing three million
Filipinos in “the bloodiest colonial war (in proportion to population) ever
fought by a white power in Asia,” comparable to the carnage in Vietnam.
Describing it as “among the cruelest conflicts in the annals of Western impe-
rialism,” Stanley Karnow, author of the award-winning In Our Image, counts
200,000 civilians and 20,000 soldiers …., while others give 600,000. Filipina
historian Luzviminda Francisco arrives at the figure of 1.4 million Filipinos
sacrificed for Uplift and Christianization – in a country ruled by Christian
Spain for three hundred years. Even Kipling at the outbreak of the war urged
the U.S. to “take up the White Man’s burden” and tame the “new-caught
sullen peoples, half-devil and half-child,” Mark Twain wrote some of his
fiery pieces denouncing “Benevolent Assimilation” as the “new name of the
musket” and acidly harped on the “collateral damage” of the U.S. “civiliz-
ing mission”: “Thirty thousand [U.S. soldiers] killed a million [Filipinos]. It
seems a pity that the historian let that get out; it is really a most embarrassing
circumstance…” (San Juan 2009)

Alongside the fashioning of a compliant, elite-based political system that

was expected to carry out the wishes and the interests of the US empire
following an eventual granting of formal independence, the US colonial
authorities created a Philippine army, a national police force, and an internal
security apparatus the primary functions of which would not so much be
for the protection of the country from external aggression but, rather, for
152 K. E. BAUZON

counterinsurgency-related social control and the suppression of internal

opposition to the US occupation and to the client regime. Recruitment
of members for elements of the US colonial military and intelligence was
inspired by the recruitment of so-called Macabebes of Pampanga Province,
hailed as “instant success” as models of native collaborators, followed later
by recruits from other regions like the Tagalogs, Ilokanos, Bisayans. The
concept of recruiting native collaborationists is traceable to the Spanish
period the legacy of which persists to this day under the neocolonial regime
and with the disciplinary supervision of the US empire (Pobre, 75–76).
During US colonial rule, many of these were used to supplement the US
Army as members of the Philippine Scouts as tools of suppression, many of
whose officers were trained at the Philippine Military Academy, authorized
and established in 1908 so that, by 1912 Philippine Scouts, later to form the
core of what would be the Philippine Army, numbered by as much as 5485
out of a total of 12462 US troops (Pobre, 78–79). This US occupation,
after all, stood in opposition to the Filipinos’ right to self-determination,
being in violation of the wishes of the Filipino people to be left alone,
having just successfully waged a war of independence against the Spanish
colonial regime.
Much of the success of the US colonial regime in laying the institutional
framework for state violence rested on the recruitment of natives to perform
various functions, including serving as spies, scouts, police, or mercenary
soldiers. In this context, the use of “water cure,” a torture and interrogation
technique that was a precursor to “water boarding” that gained notoriety at
Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo especially during the early stages of George
Bush’s so-called war on terror declared following 9/11, became a normal
component of the US counterinsurgency. Much of the practices used in
the Philippine campaign were carried over, in any case, from the American
Indian Wars, along with the racialized attitudes towards the natives.
Further, the 1935 Philippine Constitution had to be amended in 1947
to grant “parity” to Americans citizens (and corporations) enjoyed by Fil-
ipino citizens in the exploitation and development of Philippine natural
resources, as demanded by the Bell Trade Act passed by the US Congress
in 1946 and ratified by the Philippine Legislature as condition for inde-
pendence, on July 2, precisely two days prior to the official independence
proclamation, on July 4. This was followed by a series of spurious, one-sided
so-called treaties, e.g., the Mutual Defense Treaty and the Military Bases
Agreement, plus provisions for direct military-to-military collaboration and
coordination through the Joint United States Military Advisory Group
 5 THE PHILIPPINE–AMERICAN WAR, 1899–1913 … 153

(JUSMAG), misleading in that the term “joint” refers to the involvement

of all the US armed services, and not to United States-Philippine consulta-
tions as equal partners, the US empire has continued to secure important
basing facilities in the country and, therefore, to project its power and
might in the East Asia-Pacific region for decades to come.

Laying the Foundation for Colonial Education

One of the greatest challenges that the US colonial administration faced
was reorienting the Filipino mind from any nationalist tendency, including
the erasure of any memory or support for the successful Philippine Revo-
lution against Spain, or of the rude interruption of this revolution by US
intervention, or the brief insurrection against the US occupation, and the
defeat of this insurrection, followed by the process of cultivating support if
not adoration for the colonial order under the United States and its promise
for eventual “freedom” and “independence”.8 As it turned out, this was
not much of a challenge at all as its educational program, including free
public education especially at the grade level, was designed not so much to
educate the Filipinos and prepare them for a sustainable economic life upon
independence but, rather, to augment the counterinsurgency program of
the US Army and to cultivate loyalty to the US flag, ensuring the Filipinos’
disorientation as to their true identity (Bauzon 1992; Veric 2003). This was
confirmed by one of the leading nationalist intellectuals and educators of
his time, Renato Constantino, who wrote, in a highly praised and influential
essay, entitled “The Miseducation of the Filipino,” the following:

The moulding of men’s minds is the best means of conquest. Education,

therefore, serves as a weapon in wars of colonial conquest. This singular fact
was well appreciated by the American military commander in the Philip-
pines during the Filipino-American War. According to the census of 1903:
“….General Otis urged and furthered the reopening of schools, himself
selecting and ordering the textbooks. Many officers, among them chaplains,
were detailed as superintendent of schools, and many enlisted men, as teach-
ers…”
The American military authorities had a job to do. They had to employ
all means to pacify a people whose hopes for independence were being frus-
trated by the presence of another conqueror. The primary reason for the
rapid introduction, on a large scale, of the American public school system
in the Philippines was the conviction of the military leaders that no measure
154 K. E. BAUZON

could so quickly promote the pacification of the islands as education. Gen-

eral Arthur MacArthur, in recommending a large appropriation for school
purposes, said: “…This appropriation is recommended primarily and exclu-
sively as an adjunct to military operations calculated to pacify the people
and to procure and expedite the restoration of tranquility throughout the
archipelago…” (Constantino)

Further, in this essay, Constantino criticized previous and the current gen-
erations of students and educators for having been uncritical to the colonial
education that they have received. “They seem oblivious,” he wrote, “to
the fact that the educational system and philosophy of which they are proud
inheritors were valid only within the framework of American colonialism.
The educational system introduced by the Americans had to correspond
and was designed to correspond to the economic and political reality of
American conquest” (Constantino).
It is this education, inadequate and inappropriate as foundation for even
an aspirant medium-sized prosperous industrial economy, that Filipinos
would take with them in a diaspora as they join the ranks of Overseas
Filipino Workers (OFWs) that would fan out into the four corners of the
globe in search of jobs from whose remittances their loved ones back home
hoped to benefit but, in fact, the parasitic Philippine oligarchs that control
the country’s political system also expect to share through the revenue they
siphon off to their friends and families.9 And the stories that a good many of
them tell upon their return are quite different from the success stories one
might expect otherwise. San Juan poignantly offers a summary narration of
this story in his chapter on history, representation, and the advent of what
San Juan refers to as “feminist praxis in Filipino writing” of and about the
Filipino diasporic experience in his 1995 book, Hegemony and Strategies of
Transgressions, as follows:

The advent of a feminist praxis in Filipino writing … in the 1970s and 1980s
may be explained by the phenomenon of millions of Filipino contract labor-
ers, mostly women, sojourning in the Middle East, Europe, Japan, Hong
Kong, Singapore, and elsewhere. When these migrant workers return home,
they construct stories of their heterogeneous experiences that assume a nar-
rative form conflating the quest motif with the seduction/ordeal motif – a
plot that violates all probabilities found in the schemas of semiotic narra-
tology. When the female subaltern returns, the mimesis of her struggle for
survival almost always implicates the diegesis of the world system as a meta-
narrative of the global circulation of commodified bodies and phallocentric
 5 THE PHILIPPINE–AMERICAN WAR, 1899–1913 … 155

energies. Exchange of her labor power shortcircuits the time/space compres-

sion of the postmodern economy. Whether as a household servant in Kuwait
or “hospitality girl” in Tokyo, she narrates the lived experience of victimage
as a reversal of the “civilizing mission”. She thus repeats the whole epic of
colonization – but with a difference: her gendered subject-position or agency
yields not surplus value but the hallucination of commodity fetishism when
consumer goods and traumas become cargo myths for native consumption
in the Philippines. In this sense, the migrant worker as ‘speaking subject’
destabilizes the regularities of the “New World Order” and the “free mar-
ket” discourse of individual self-fulfillment. Her fabula decenters the sjuzhet
of technocratic modernization. Overall, this new genre of migrant narra-
tive explodes the traditional definitions of the gendered subject provided
by the Symbolic Order of dependent capitalism while its transgressive alle-
gory destroys the conventional plots of immigrant success and postcolonial
hybridity. (San Juan 1995)

As an essential complement to the colonial educational process, colonial

administrators also made sure that Filipino cultural habits and tastes are
shaped in a manner that suited US colonial aims. This included the coop-
tation of the Masonic Movement, conduit of liberal ideas held among lead-
ing Filipino nationalist leaders—among whom were Andres Bonifacio and
Jose Rizal—that fought against Spanish colonial rule, and influencing the
structure and ritual of the anti-colonial resistance movement, Katipunan.
Under US rule, however, the Masonic movement was reformed inevitably
to suit the aims of the US occupation, turning it into a reactionary move-
ment commencing with the establishment of the first lodge, a movable
one, by members of volunteer regiment from North Dakota of the Third
Expeditionary Force in July 1898. Subsequently, Filipino masons Ambro-
sio Flores and Gracio Gonzaga endeavored to restore Filipino-led Masonry
leading to the establishment of Logia Modestia in 1899. Its leaders then
sent an appeal, in November 1900, to Masonic lodges in the US beseeching
their masonic brothers there “to use all your moral and material influence
with the government at Washington to bring this dreadful war to an end.”
This comes in the wake of the arrival earlier that year of US-based masons
led by one Manly B. Curry who then set up the first fraternal organiza-
tion called the Sojourner’s Club, in April 1900 (“History of Masonry…”).
Attracting both Filipino and Americans, especially those at the employ of
the colonial regime, organizations like the masonry—along with their sub-
sequent respective youth affiliates, e.g., the Order of De Molay for boys
156 K. E. BAUZON

(1930/1946), and the Order of Job’s Daughters for girls, along with var-
ious other civic-oriented organizations with headquarters in the United
States, e.g., the Rotary and Lions clubs, with Philippine branches founded
in 1919 and 1949, respectively, became ladders for social acceptance and
upward status; and, under the guise of fraternity and sorority, these orga-
nizations became training grounds for moulding personal character, civic
engagement, respect for authority, compliance with laws, and good citi-
zenship, lending significant degree of legitimacy to the US colonial regime
as the common motto “Service to God, country, and fellowmen” became
tacitly understood to be within and in support of—and not in resistance
to—the colonial or, for that matter, the neo-colonial framework.
On another front and in a pioneering series of outstanding works includ-
ing Body Parts of Empire: Abjection, Filipino Images and the American
Archive (University of Michigan Press), Nerissa Balce calls attention to
the portrayal by the European powers of non-European, non-white female
bodies as means of justifying the superiority of the European civilization.
In one essay, Balce writes:

The black female body has long been part of the imperial archive of Europe
informed by the politics of colonization, slavery, prostitution, and pornog-
raphy. The sexualization of the black female body can be mapped in the
canonical writings of nineteenth-century French writers such as [Honore
de] Balzac, [Emile] Zola, [Charles Pierre] Baudelaire, and others. The fig-
ures of the mulatta, the prostitute, or the slave woman in nineteenth-century
French novels and essays were what T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting refers to
as icons of the ‘Black Venus’ or ‘sexualized savages’. The lubricious images
of black women, as sexual and dangerous bodies, are constructions of ‘femi-
nized darkness’ and representations of French imperial power. (Balce 2006)
(Brackets added)

Even before the Americans took possession of the Philippines from

Spain, they have already gained significant experience in the portrayal of
non-white, non-European women that they have encountered in the pro-
cess of expanding the American frontier. Balce, in her account, explains:

Drawings and photographs of breast-baring brown women from indigenous

cultures… have long been part of American porno-tropic tradition. Island
women…of the Pacific, have been part of an American Pacific fetish even
before the arrival of Admiral George Dewey to Manila in 1898. (Balce 2006)
 5 THE PHILIPPINE–AMERICAN WAR, 1899–1913 … 157

Balce adds that as far back as the last decade of the 1700s, American authors
and artists have visualized the so-called South Seas as a place “inhabited by
dark-skinned, cannibalistic savages or as a space for an interior voyage of
the self-facilitated facilitated by the white author’s or narrator’s encounter
with primitive cultures” (Balce 2006). Also playing role in the propagation
of the Pacific Islanders as somewhat exotic but otherwise backward and
uncivilized were traders, adventurers, and politicians creating the body of
works, beliefs, attitudes, and policies that came to be what literary and
cultural studies scholar Paul Lyon—and which Balce quotes—as “American
Pacific Orientalism.”
Once in possession of the Philippines, this Orientalist mindset became
the template with which colonial policies were forged. As Balce explains,
“Thus the histories of European conquest and American imperial expan-
sion are the contexts of the representation of the Filipina savage. As sexual
bodies.., the representations of native women in general are artifacts of
empire” (Balce 2006).
More significantly, this orientalist template was not without military
implications. As Balce notes: “At the turn of the twentieth century, photog-
raphy made possible a recasting of imperial violence. By visualizing empire
through the lens of domesticity, the bloodier and more disturbing aspects
of U.S. imperial expansion were excised from the American nation’s myths”
(Balce 2006). Balce borrows a term from sociologist, Lanny Thompson,
“imperial archipelago” or islands territories—including the Philippines—
which have fallen under US domination, wherein one finds “a visual and
textual archive created by writers, artists, journalists, soldiers, schoolteach-
ers, academics, and politicians who wrote about the culture and peoples of
the new ‘U.S. colonies’” (Balce 2006).
During the early colonial era in the Philippines, the dissemination of
popular images had the function of justifying not only the “civilizing mis-
sion” but also the harsh military treatment verging on genocide inflicted
upon the fighters during the Filipino-American War and the subsequent
counterinsurgency lasting for another decade or so. Singled out by Balce
in her study is a highly popular book, entitled Our Islands and their People,
as Seen with Camera and Pencil (1899), by journalist Jose de Olivares. In
this book, Olivares writes, and Balce quotes, in part:

they are a dark people – some are diminutively black – and our soldiers have
fallen into the habit of calling them “niggers”… Many of the people resemble
the negro in appearance, but that is as far as the similarity goes. For all the
158 K. E. BAUZON

practical purposes of civilization, the mirthful, easy-going African is superior

to these treacherous and blood-thirsty hybrid Malays…. (as quoted in Balce
2006)

A critical discussion of the “American Pacific orientalism,” as cited ear-

lier, in the Philippines would be lacking if the contributions by one man
were not discussed: Worcester, briefly mentioned earlier in reference to
his disparagement of the Aguinaldo’s inauguration on June 12, 1898. As
mentioned earlier, Worcester served in both the First (Schurman) and the
Second (Taft) Commissions. In 1900, he also served as Secretary of the
Interior, a position which enabled him to shape policies impacting affairs
outside of Manila, a position he held until 1913. One of his favorite hangout
was Dumaguete, home to the colonial-era Silliman Institute (now Silliman
University) which not only provided him an academic environment that
legitimized his ethnographic work but also his counterinsurgency planning,
illustrating the symbiosis between religious missionary work and colonial
administration. Zoologist by training, Worcester had been referred to by
historian Blount as a “reptile finder” although he found much more than
reptiles. In his preoccupation as head of the intelligence section of the US
military during the early phase of the Philippine–American War, recruited
by General Otis for the position, he managed to build an extensive network
of nationwide spies targeting insurgents. According to Balce, Worcester was

a pioneer of counterinsurgency. A zoologist by training, he used his scientific

skills and photography to gather data and classify information about the
Philippine Islands and the Filipino people for the purpose less of science,
however, than that of military surveillance, war, and the maintenance of U.S.
military rule in the islands. (Balce 2014)

Balce describes further Worcester’s modus operandi in the following words:

Every morning Worcester would go over the local newspapers and type his
notes on Filipinos (and some Americans) of interest to the American colonial
government, such as Filipino nationalists, collaborators, elite Filipino fami-
lies, etc. His data gathering became the foundation for an effective system of
counter-intelligence that would prove helpful to counterinsurgency efforts
once guerrilla war by Filipinos began. (Balce 2014)

If Worcester was not as well-known in his role as an intelligence officer,

perhaps by the very nature of this function, he has certainly made a name,
 5 THE PHILIPPINE–AMERICAN WAR, 1899–1913 … 159

if not a notoriety, for himself in his other preoccupation: as a cultural agent

of sort. As a zoologist, Balce notes that Worcester had a simplistic racial
theory, i.e., that Filipinos that have not been Christianized were simply
“savages,” and that those that have been Christianized, whom he referred
to as semi-civilized—were more often than not corrupt. It is in this con-
text that we may understand his disparagement of the Aguinaldo regime,
and the belief that Filipinos were simply incapable of self-government. It
may also be said that much of his racial beliefs were an emanation from
late nineteenth century thinking traceable to Social Darwinism. But it was
because of the air of intellectualism that he projected that he was able to
gain the confidence of McKinley, who appointed him to position in the
two presidential commissions.
One of the tools of the trade that Worcester employed to much suc-
cess was a relatively new piece of technology: the hand-held still camera.
With this device, he went around the country taking photographs, e.g.,
of mountain-dwelling Igorots in their g-strings, of dog-eating villagers,
and, according to historian and cultural studies scholar Mark Rice, whom
Balce cites, Worcester even managed on various occasions to manipulate or
coerce “his young female subjects to disrobe their traditional clothes, and
pose suggestively for his ‘ethnographic’ portraits,” all for the purpose of
demonstrating the primitivism, the backwardness of the way of life of Fil-
ipinos justifying US colonialism (Balce 2014). Many of these photographs
found their way into newspapers, magazines, and travelogues, particularly
in the United States with the consequent effect that the civilizing spirit has
been strengthened and, more significantly, displacing the images of other-
wise brutal war against and pacification of the Filipinos. Balce’s sobering
assessment is worth quoting at length as follows:

With the violence of the Philippine-American War in mind, it thus becomes

possible to “picture the invisible,” to imaginatively reconstruct the violence
of American rule in the Philippines. The photographs of Filipinas… display
docile bodies under imperial control. The notion of “docility”… was indeed
an objective of U.S. colonial rule…. Filipinos needed to become meek and
useful to be considered educated and civilized. Thus it was not enough to jail,
deport, execute, or hang [them]. The next generation of Filipinos had to be
disciplined through a U.S. system of education…. Travel cultures supported
the project of docility….Echoing earlier travel texts…, many of the texts
would emphasize how far removed the Philippine Islands were from the
modern and civilized cultures of the West. (Balce 2006)
160 K. E. BAUZON

In retrospect, the foundation laid by Worcester and his associates has been
indispensable to the US colonial rule, contributing to the conversion of a
self-determined Filipino nationhood to one under colonial tutelage. This
was not because of an unconscious, guiltless historical accident but because
of a deliberate, conscious series of human decisions made by individuals
claiming to represent an exceptional civilization and empowered by a mili-
tary machine but which, by the nature of their acquisitive and expansionist
economic system, were bound to subdue others to their will.
A feature of the US colonial regime, to which Worcester has contributed,
has been the establishment of the most elaborate surveillance system as
described by Alfred McCoy in his Policing America’s Empire; The United
States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (2009). As con-
text to the massive surveillance exposed by whistleblower Edward Snow-
den, McCoy’s work is praised in the book’s dust cover as follows: “Armed
with cutting-edge technology from America’s first information revolution,
the U.S. colonial regime created the most modern police and intelligence
units…. In Policing America’s Empire, Alfred W. McCoy shows how this
imperial panopticon slowly crushed the Filipino revolutionary movement
with a lethal mix of firepower, surveillance, and incriminating informa-
tion.…. In trying to create a democracy in the Philippines, the United
States unleashed profoundly undemocratic forces that persist to the present
day”.10

Notes
1. San Juan provides important context to US economic motives in gaining
control over the Philippines with much-documented violence of genoci-
dal proportions, despite invocation of moral duties implied in McKinley’s
proclamation. In another one of San Juan’s highly-praised books U.S. Impe-
rialism and Revolution in the Philippines (2007b), he explains: “Beginning
from the rise of merchant capital in the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
turies, the messianic impulse to genocide springs from the imperative of
capital accumulation—the imperative to reduce humans to commodified
labor-power, to salable goods and services. U.S. ‘primitive accumulation’
began with the early colonies in New England and the slave plantations in
the South. It culminated in the nineteenth century with the conquest and
annexation of Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guam, Hawaii, and the Philippines,” all
of which has occurred in the historical backdrop of “the U.S. extermina-
tion drives against the American Indians in particular, and the brutalization
of African slaves and Mexicans in general, events which San Juan rightfully
 5 THE PHILIPPINE–AMERICAN WAR, 1899–1913 … 161

encourages progressive scholars and researchers to use as “pedagogical ref-

erences [toward the concretization] of the U.S. colonial pillage and plunder
in the Philippines”.
2. The tradition of resistance has continued even after the granting of formal
independence by the United States to its client government, the Govern-
ment of the Republic of the Philippines (GRP) in July 1946. Immediately
following World War II, this resistance was carried out under the banner
of the Hukbalahap (acronym for Hukbo ng Bayan Laban sa Hapon, or
People’s Anti-Japanese Army, Huk for short) Movement. Clashes in per-
sonal styles of leadership, ideological differences, and disagreements over
tactics among its leadership, combined with counterinsurgency campaign
waged by the US-backed government through its US Army-trained and
CIA-guided Philippine army and police, eventually led to the decline of
this movement. In December 1969, the spirit of resistance was rekindled
with the re-establishment of the Communist Party of the Philippines,
along with its military arm, the New People’s Army, under the intellectual
inspiration of Jose Maria Sison. With this movement seen as the only active
militant movement in resistance to the neocolonial order, San Juan offers
his thoughts in a 2015 piece, entitled “Hypothesis Toward Synthesizing a
Radical Critique on the Neocolonial Order in the Philippines (in Filipino),”
with the view in mind of impressing upon the resistance movement the
importance of acquiring the proper intellectual and historical tool with
which to carry out this resistance. The article is summarized in its Abstract
(translated into English) as follows: “In studying Philippine history, the
tradition of anti-imperialist revolution (whether visible or deliberately
erased) is what informs the analysis of every social occurrence. No telos
or linear outline is posited because each event is determined by complex
contradictions between social relations and material production whose
effects cannot be precisely calculated. By virtue of attempts to comprehend
the meaning of events and intervene at opportune moments, we can
change the direction and tempo of historical transformations. We can
elucidate neoliberal hegemony by analyzing the ideology that motivates
acts, sentiments, and aspirations of mass consumers. We need to diagnose
the norms of commodity fetishism and possessive individualism. In the
process of critique, one can discern the dialectics of objective circumstances
and subjective forces operative in class struggle. Thus the masses acquire
a space of freedom to change institutions, modes of conduct, structures
of personal interaction, etc. Philippine history and culture are fashioned
by the collective effort of citizens to win sovereignty, authentic indepen-
dence, and liberation from the dictates of global capitalism, in particular
U.S. imperialism, foreign corporations, and the local oligarchy conniving
with them.” See https://www.academia.edu/12297524/HYPOTHESIS_
162 K. E. BAUZON

TOWARD_SYNTHESIZING_A_RADICAL_CRITIQUE_OF_THE_
NEOCOLONIAL_ORDER_IN_THE_PHILIPPINES_in_Filipino_.
3. At this point, San Juan interjects and explains the sociohistorical background
of the Moro community as follows: “From the middle of the 15th century up
to the military conquest of Mindanao and Sulu by American forces, the Moro
sultanate (Sulu, Maguindanao) evolved as segmentary states, more precisely
tributary formations in which lineage or kinship interfaced with more elab-
orate and partly centralized organizations for production and defense. By
‘tributary formation’ (following Samir Amin) is meant a stage of social devel-
opment whose mode of production is characterized by extraction of the sur-
plus product by the exploiting class by non-economic means, through the
agency of the superstructure (religious ideology), and where the essential
organization of production is based on use-value, not exchange value. With
an economy comprised of primitive agriculture using slaves and other servile
hands, minimal gathering and hunting/fishing activities, and a flourishing
commerce, the datus (local chieftains) enforced their rule through the super-
structure (kinship, personal attributes, religious ritual), and through violence
operating within the parameters of consent” (San Juan 1986, 71).
4. The US representative in this diplomacy was no less than Commander
Charles Wilkes of the US Navy Pacific Exploration Expedition, passing
through the Sulu Archipelago following his blood-soaked mission in the
Pacific on his return to the Norfolk Naval Base in the United States. This
agreement, referred to by many historians as the Wilkes Treaty, turned out
to be the first of many more treaties to come between the United States
and the Philippines, this one through the Sulu Sultanate. For full text of
this treaty, please see “Today in Philippine History, February 5, 1842, the
Wilkes treaty was signed at Soung, Island of Sulu,” Kahimyang, posted
January 16, 2013, in https://kahimyang.com/kauswagan/articles/1421/
today-in-philippine-history-february-5-1842-the-wilkes-treaty-was-signed-
at-soung-island-of-sulu.
5. At this point, San Juan makes an important qualification about the presup-
positions behind the US colonial pacification and subsequent administration
of Moroland as context for explaining the current conflict in the southern
Philippines. He writes: “While antagonism between Muslims and Christians
dates back to the Spanish colonization from 1565 to 1898, and U.S. colo-
nial domination from 1898 to 1946, the present conflict is not religious as
usually construed, but fundamentally political and economic in terms of the
division of social labor and its satisfaction of developing human needs. It was
the Spaniards who, trying to establish theocratic rule over the islands by con-
quering and converting the indigenous communities, established the bound-
ary between the ‘infidels’ (Muslims) and the ‘civilized’ (Christians). Ethnic
 5 THE PHILIPPINE–AMERICAN WAR, 1899–1913 … 163

difference, of course, legitimated the violent exploitation of the natives and

the theft of their lands and resources” (San Juan 2007b, 95).
6. Amidst the adulation following Capt. Pershing’s success in pacifying the
Lanao region, paving the way for the integration of the Moroland into
the entire Philippine body politic under US rule, San Juan offers the fol-
lowing reflection: “There is no doubt the U.S. policy of integration and
assimilation through mass education, jurisprudence, and ‘free enterprise led
to the obsolescence of the datu power and sultanate authority. But it was
the government-sponsored migration of Christians, Chinese, and other set-
tlers—accelerated by President Ramon Magsaysay’s resettlement of former
Huk rebels in the 1950s—that exacerbated the land disputes raging through-
out the entire period of U.S. colonial rule. Unknown to most Moros, the
Torrens land title registration system nullified the traditional communal land
system, resulting in numerous protests, among them the 1926 Alangkat
uprising led by Datu Maporo and the 1950 Kamlon insurrection in Jolo”
(San Juan 2007b, 96).
7. On the brutalization of the Moros under the hands of the Americans, San
Juan adds the following sobering rejoinder: “Arguably, the Moros have been
one of the most brutalized victims of colonial domination and religious chau-
vinism in world history (Ahmad 1982). When the United States annexed the
Philippines in 1898, it had to suppress open and covert native opposition
up to 1915, at the cost of 1.4 million lives. The historians’ consensus is that
the fiercest resistance (or at least forty-one organized rebellions from 1900
to 1941) were mounted by the Moros in the battle of Mt. Bagsak, Jolo,
on June 13, 1913, during which three thousand Moro men, women, and
children were killed, and at Mt. Dajo, Jolo, on March 9, 1906, where U.S.
troops ruthlessly massacred over six hundred men, women, and children
(Tan 1987). Unable to subdue the Moros by violence alone, the United
States negotiated tactical compromises with the local datus, coaxing their
support with ‘education trips’ and other concessions (Majul 1988a). The
U.S. ‘policy of attraction‘ tied to coercive pacification accounts for the careers
of Moro chieftains like Hadji Butu, Datu Piang, and others who preferred
American tutelage over ‘Filipinization’ through the Philippine Common-
wealth and the Republic (Asani 1980)” (San Juan 2007b, 97).
8. This period of American colonial rule was both challenging and stimulating
enough to inspire San Juan to compose one of many of his outstanding and
highly praised books, The Philippine Temptation; Dialectics of Philippine-
U.S. Literary Relations (1996). That the violent and coercive nature of
the US occupation and the subsequent imposition of civil—but still colo-
nial—administration over the Philippines until 1946 were quite apparent.
San Juan wrote: “Violence was… the midwife of Philippine dependency and
underdevelopment.” What disturbed San Juan was the apparent silence if
164 K. E. BAUZON

not complicity of United States, and US-based, literary personalities, partic-

ularly those of note, of “humane letters” towards the US colonial project
in the Philippines, silence and complicity that would provide the condi-
tion toward “the erasure of its imperial history” and to the perpetuation of
its hegemony. San Juan narrates his own personal account of applying for
institutional support from prominent foundations and research institutions
one of whose avowed functions is to grant support for precisely the kind of
research project that San Juan had proposed. But, lo and behold, most were
non-takers, which should not be much a surprise given the fact the questions
he sought to investigate were designed to question the basic assumptions
behind the imperial project to begin with, and to uncover the nature and
role of literature (and those that wrote it) in validating such imperial enter-
prise and its outcomes. Among such essential questions that San Juan had
proposed to investigate were as follows: (a) “How did U.S. canonical test
propagate certain beliefs, attitudes, and dispositions that reconciled Filipinos
to their subordination?”; (b) “How did Filipinos respond to subjectifying
modes of U.S. ideological apparatuses, particularly schooling, and various
instrumentalities that affected family life, sexuality, religious practices, and
so on?”; (c) “How and why did U.S. literary values and ideals continue to
exert a powerful influence on the Filipino intelligentsia throughout half a
century, producing in some an acquiescent or adaptive response, yet in oth-
ers a critical reaction?”; and (d) “After the grant of formal independence
in 1946, what elements in U.S. cultural theory and practice continued to
extract consent (backed by coercive suasion such as jobs, public recognition,
and so forth) and collaboration from Filipino intellectual circles?” (San Juan
1996).
9. On the issue of Filipino diaspora, San Juan has a veritable library of contri-
butions exploring various dimensions and aspects of the issue. Seen within
the context of the international division of labor under the neoliberal order,
the Filipino diaspora is seen as an outcome of the extractive nature of this
system. He writes: “Within the framework of the global division of labor
between metropolitan center and colonized periphery, a Marxist program
of national liberation is meant to take into account the extraction of surplus
value from colonized peoples through unequal exchange as well as through
direct colonial exploitation in “Free Trade Zones,” illegal traffic in prosti-
tution, mail-order brides, and contractual domestics (the Philippines today
supplies the bulk of the latter, about ten million). National oppression has
a concrete reality not reducible totally to class exploitation; but it cannot
be fully understood without the domination of the racialized peoples in
the dependent formations by the colonizing/imperialist power” (San Juan
2007a).
 5 THE PHILIPPINE–AMERICAN WAR, 1899–1913 … 165

In terms of the economic benefits of OFW remittances, San Juan sum-

marizes them as follows: “OFW earnings suffice to keep the Philippine econ-
omy afloat and support the luxury and privileges of less than 1 percent of
the people, the Filipino oligarchy. They heighten household consumerism,
disintegrate families, and subsidize the wasteful spending of the corrupt pat-
rimonial elite. They are not invested in industrial or agricultural development
(IBON 2008). Clearly the Philippine bureaucracy has earned the distinction
of being the most migrant- and remittance-dependent ruling apparatus in
the world, by virtue of denying its citizens the right to decent employment
at home. OFW remittances thus help reproduce a system of class inequality,
sexism, racism, and national chauvinism across the international hierarchy
of core and peripheral nation-states” (San Juan 2011).
Here, San Juan describes briefly the domestic factors, including poli-
cies, compelling citizens to work overseas: “Neoliberal policies known (the
“Washington Consensus”) maintained the cycle of crisis and systemic under-
development, rooted in the iniquitous class structure and the historical
legacy of political, economic and military dependence on the U.S. These
provide the framework for the increased foreign penetration and control
over the national economy, the unremitting dependence on raw material
exports and (since 1970s) of human resources (Fast 1973; IPE 2006), cou-
pled with the deteriorating manufacturing and agricultural sectors caused by
ruinous trade and investment policies. ‘Free market‘ development schemes
packaged with “trickle-down” reformist gimmicks implemented by succes-
sive regimes after Marcos have precipitated mass hunger (Lichauco 2005). As
Pauline Eadie (2005) has cogently demonstrated, the role of the Philippine
state in perpetuating poverty and aggravating the exploitation of Filipino cit-
izens cannot be discounted, no matter how weak or ‘failed’ in its function as
a mediator/receiver of supposedly neutral global market compulsion” (San
Juan 2011).
San Juan also assesses the broader implications of the labor export policy
of Global South countries like the Philippines on existing power relations
between the rich countries of the Global North, on one hand, and the poor
countries of the Global South, on the other. San Juan writes: “ In effect,
the Filipina domestic is what enables European/North American bourgeois
society and, by extension, the relatively prosperous societies of the Middle
East and Asia, to reproduce themselves within their nation-state domains
and thus sustain capital accumulation with its horrendous consequences”
(San Juan 2011).
Finally, as to what Filipinos can do as a step towards amelioration of their
poor economic condition, San Juan offers some insight from his concluding
reflections in this essay as follows: “This process of engagement would be
166 K. E. BAUZON

historically contingent on the fluctuating crisis of global capitalism. Essen-

tially, Filipino dislocation on both levels — as a people colonized by US
imperial power, and as a quasi-nation subordinated to global capital, in the
process of uneven development (Mandel 1983) — constitutes the horizon
of its project of affirming its identity as a historic bloc of multisectoral pro-
gressive forces. This bloc will play its role as a revolutionary protagonist in
the political terrain of a united front against disciplinary neoliberalism (Gill
2009), in an era when US hegemony (political + military) is yielding to a
multipolar global arrangement. Filipino nationalism thereby acquires critical
universality as part of a universal anti-capitalist trend with a long internation-
alist record of struggle (Lowy 1998). Perhaps the Filipino people, claiming
their sovereign right to a historically specific position in the civilizational
arena, would then become equal, active participants in a worldwide coali-
tion of forces against monopoly finance capital and its local agents, be they
labor recruiters, neocolonized bureaucratic states, financial consortiums, or
transnational institutions like the IMF/WB, WTO, or even a supra-national
entity like the UN controlled by wealthy industrialized elites. Only in this
process of active solidarity with other subordinated or excluded peoples will
OFWs, given their creative integrity and commitment to self-determination,
be able to transcend their deterritorialized fate in a truly borderless world
without classes, races, or nationalities. We envisage germinating from the
combined ideas and practices of OFW struggles an alternative, feasible world
without the blight of class exploitation and gendered racialized oppression—
the concrete totality of an emancipated, commonly shared planet satisfying
human needs and wants” (San Juan 2011).
10. San Juan provides an apt and concise summary of the fifty-years or so of
direct US colonial rule over the Philippines, and its implication for the
future, in one of his recent books, Between Empire and Insurgency; The Philip-
pines in the New Millennium (2015), which also affirms McCoy’s account,
as follows: “One can summarize the fifty years of direct US colonial rule
as an illustration of hegemony won initially through military power and
stabilized through the twin methods of bureaucratic coercion and coopta-
tion. When the Philippines was granted formal-nominal independence in
1946, the United States had set in place an Americanized privileged minor-
ity, an oligarchy of landlords, bureaucrat-capitalists, and compradors that
would fulfill US economic needs and global foreign policy. Consensus on
elite democracy and the formal trappings of representative government was
obtained through decades of violence, cooptation, moral persuasion, and a
whole range of pedagogical-disciplinary methods, with the active collabo-
ration of the religious institutions (both Catholic and Protestant). Hence,
the Philippines today is a nation, basically agricultural and dependent on
foreign investments…, devoid of the full exercise of its sovereignty (the
 5 THE PHILIPPINE–AMERICAN WAR, 1899–1913 … 167

United States has veto power over its military and foreign policy). Its polit-
ical system is characterized by the presence of formalistic liberal-democratic
institutions administered by a tiny group of oligarchic families, reinforced
by the Church, and a vast military-police apparatus chiefly dependent on
US aid… rationalized by the US-led ‘war on terror’ …. There is at present
no national-popular will, only a subalternized elite whose ascendancy and
survival depend on direct or mediated (via World Bank-IMF) US military
and political patronage” (San Juan 2015, 16–17). Admittedly, this quote
indicates the overall thrust of this book, which is the continuation of a crit-
ical interrogation of the nature of colonialism and neocolonialism, and the
role of popular revolutionary movements and intellectuals in bringing about
a radical democratic transformation in the Philippines and beyond.

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 CHAPTER 6

The Cold War and the Post-Cold War

Hegemony

Citizenship in a liberal democratic order is necessarily premised on differ-

ence. The citizen is an abstraction, a formal product of a “thoroughgoing
transubstantiation” of all the particular qualities, elements, and processes that
are symbolized in the constitution of the modern liberal state. But this con-
stitution is nothing else but the exaltation of private property, in short, the
sanctification and legitimation of the basis of the disintegration of the state.
Everything is turned upside down: the ideal of equality is praised in order
to defend the cause of inequality, private property, as fundamental and abso-
lute. Ultimately, the source of its permanent crisis, cannot be resolved except
through a socialist/communist revolutionary transformation.
E. San Juan, Spinoza and the War on Racial Terrorism (2004)

Electronic supplementary material The online version of this chapter

(https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9080-8_6) contains supplementary
material, which is available to authorized users.

© The Author(s) 2019 171

K. E. Bauzon, Capitalism, The American Empire, and Neoliberal
Globalization, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9080-8_6
172 K. E. BAUZON

Hegemony Based on Capital Accumulation

and Labor Extraction
The United States emerged from World War II with barely a scratch. The
European powers emerged exhausted, much of their colonial possessions
stripped from them or have become independent, some through political
negotiation while many, through revolution. The United States used its
diplomatic influence to lay down the institutional framework for a post-
war political, economic, and financial order with the establishment of the
United Nations, the establishment of the Marshall Plan calling for the mas-
sive infusion of funds to ensure the economic and industrial recovery of
Western Europe along capitalist lines, a similar funding scheme called the
Colombo Plan supposedly to assist Third World countries develop along
the “modernization model,” and the establishment of the Bretton Woods
institutions (i.e., the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary
Fund (IMF)) to ensure a financial order closely supervised or coordinated
by the US Department of the Treasury.
The ensuing Cold War with the former Soviet Union further gave pre-
texts for the United States to intervene on numerous occasions in the inter-
nal affairs of countries around the globe. The Truman Doctrine, following
the enactment of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1947, became the basis for
US interventions in Greece and in Italy, respectively, preempting popular
will by waging counterinsurgency against the Democratic Army of Greece,
which fought to drive away and defeat the German Nazi and Italian fas-
cist occupation forces, and installing a Nazi-sympathizing, British-imposed
government in Greece following the end of the Civil War in 1948, culmi-
nating in the establishment of a right-wing military junta in 1967; whereas,
in Italy, US intervention guaranteed the victory of the right-wing Chris-
tian Democrats, and preempting victory by the progressive coalition, in the
much-compromised Italian elections in 1948.
In the Third World, US intervention is legion including support for the
French in maintaining its colonial possession in Indochina; sponsorship
of coups d’etat by military and security elements in such places as Iran,
Guatemala, Indonesia, Chile, Pakistan, and the Philippines; sponsorship of
assassination campaigns, through surrogate organizations, of leaders the
United States considered “undesirable”; sponsorship of death squads and
paramilitary organizations, along with the arming and funding of police,
security, and intelligence agencies in countries where there are active left-
oriented resistance to US-imposed/US-backed authoritarian governments,
 6 THE COLD WAR AND THE POST-COLD WAR HEGEMONY 173

e.g., countries in Central America during the 1980s; long-standing support

for despotic Arab monarchs throughout the Middle East; support for the
apartheid regime in South Africa; and, support for right-wing guerrilla
groups in rivalry to other guerrilla but anti-colonial organizations in Africa,
e.g., in Angola, the Congo, Zimbabwe, and much more.
To contend that the United States has been a habitual or serial intervenor
in the affairs of countries around the world throughout much of the Cold
War, and driving the engines of the neoliberal brand of globalization, might
not make much sense unless one makes the broader relationship with the
very essence of the US capitalist system and its logic of accumulation and
expansion. Here, San Juan makes a succinct statement, as follows:

Founded on the logic of capital accumulation, globalization is a late-modern

phenomenon of profit-centered industrialization. For the first time, finance
capital is able to cross national boundaries and control erstwhile sovereign
domains, facilitated by rapid leaps in the technology of electronic communi-
cation and transportation. Despite the sophisticated and insidious mode of
extracting surplus value derived from the labor-power of millions, it is still
centrally dependent on its ownership or control of the means of production,
together with the forces of production needed to generate value: the masses
of workers, including peasants and intelligentsia or middle strata of society in
charge of the state and the ideological bureaucratic machinery of governance.
Without the exploitation of labor-power and the private expropriation of
surplus wealth, global capital would cease to exist. Class division and class
inequality are necessary for profit accumulation, without which globalization
powered by finance capital would be unthinkable. (San Juan 2007a)

Furthermore, just as class divisions were being obviated, racial hierarchiza-

tion was intensifying as an organizing principle domestically under the
theme of multiculturalism, on the one hand, and internationally as a basis
for foreign policy, on the other, as recorded in the texts of emergent disci-
plinary tendencies subsumed under postmodernism. As San Juan explains,
this was particularly evident during the decades of the 1970s and the 1980s,
as he writes:

Before the ascendancy of the global village of multinational corporations and

its administered pluralist ethos in the 1970s, the US elite under Nixon rein-
forced the racial hierarchy through its attacks on radical trends among people
of color; soon, covert and open repression encouraged religious separatism,
national chauvinism, and the consolidation of the underclass (chiefly, African
174 K. E. BAUZON

Americans). At this conjuncture, East Asians on the West Coast in particular

were instrumentalised to breathe new life into the assimilationist syndrome.
Later on, with the return of finance capitalism in the Reagan-Bush years and
the influx of Irish and Mexican immigrants after 1965, modernism as an ideo-
logical disciplinary complex and structuring habitus [As quoted in Bourdieu
1993] is displaced by postmodernist tendencies—subaltern studies, decon-
struction, post-colonialism, Foucaultian modalities of suspicion, etc. Asian
American cultural production, with its scholastic authorities and texts, finds
its niche in this new tri-polar world (US, Europe, Japan as leaders in the G7
bloc) characterised by the rise of Japan as a peer partner in global hegemony,
with Asians as “no longer ‘second class citizens’” [As quoted in Gills 1993:
212]. (San Juan 2010)

Keen on developments particularly in foreign policy and international rela-

tions, San Juan is able to reflect on the reciprocating impact between the
production of social knowledge, on the one hand, and the influence of
society on how this knowledge is produced, on the other. Thus, it is not
entirely a mere coincidence that the US entente with China and the rise of
Japan as a US surrogate power in northeast Asia also happens to be the same
period as the intensification of US propaganda against the “evil empire,”
as Reagan described the former Soviet Union. And as pressure is mounted
the predominantly Black-led civil rights movement in the United States,
the political class and the mainstream media anointed Asian Americans as
the “model minority” to conveniently serve, as San Juan describes, as the
“buffer race,” holding them up as an example of a successful minority that
the blacks might someday want to become!

State of Permanent Warfare

The rise of the United States as a superpower following the World War II
and as a hyper-power following the end of the Cold War has also meant, in
one respect, an unparalleled ability to impose its will and pursue its interests
on pretty much the rest of the globe. In military terms, this means pursuit
of “full spectrum dominance,” a term described in the US Department
of Defense document, “Joint Vision 2020,” released in May 2015 and an
updated version of the Joint Vision 2010, which serves as the blueprint
for any military operations, current or future, in fighting America’s wars
of varying intensity, e.g., high, medium, and low, either in collaboration
with surrogate allies or not, in order “to defeat any adversary and control
the situation across the range of military operations” (Garamone). Any
 6 THE COLD WAR AND THE POST-COLD WAR HEGEMONY 175

casual observer of US military operations and engagements since 9/11

need not look far and hard to find examples as the United States has inter-
nationalized its domestic law and declared a so-called war on terror that
has served as a pretext for encroaching into every nook and cranny in the
globe in search of the elusive terrorist, exacting an unprecedented number
of deaths and casualties either directly by the United States or by its sur-
rogate allies, e.g., the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and
warming the cockles of even the most lukewarm neoconservative advocate
of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) for permanent war-
fare toward unquestioned US global hegemony in the name of “national
security”.1 This is affirmed in the latest in a series of official documents con-
taining military doctrines including the 2015 National Military Strategy, a
mere twenty-four page document which essentially states US commitment
to global domination by force through the invocation of so-called security
challenges that have to be met in order to “protect the homeland” and to
“advance our national interests” (Whitney). This document further lists six
objectives among which is “the security of the global economic system,”
making it clear that the US military is poised not merely for the defense of
the homeland from any potential external aggression but also for the pros-
ecution of resource wars. The division of the world into different military
commands, the establishment of a string of military bases around the world,
the covert if not blatant destabilization campaigns against independent-
minded governments are just a few among many, many other devices that
the United States has employed—and will employ—consistent with this
objective. One thing certain, it will secure maintenance of the global order
which it dominates by insisting on compliance on the part of countries
around the globe (at least among signatories to neoliberal-oriented inter-
national treaties) much like what the British did during the mid-1800s in
enforcing free trade on China through the Opium Wars. The implications
of this on legitimate revolutionary, secessionist, and political movements
all across the globe, are not hard to apprehend just as these implications
are also foreboding on self-determining and self-respecting but non-ally
sovereign states and nations around the globe that refuse to submit to the
US imperial diktat, or which have not yet succumbed to thinly disguised
“democracy programs” that often come under various color revolutions
(Bauzon 2014).
176 K. E. BAUZON

Principles and Institutional Structures

of Neoliberal Globalization
That the militarization of US foreign policy and neoliberal globalization
have gone hand in hand—and will continue to be hand in hand in the
foreseeable future—should not surprise anyone. For one thing, militariza-
tion is encoded in the Charter of the World Trade Organization (WTO),
under the so-called security exceptions clauses in Chapter XXI. Despite for-
mal prohibitions on state subsidies on domestic companies, these clauses
provide an official loophole wherein states may subsidize domestic com-
panies engaged in producing or providing security-related products and
services. The obvious intent of these clauses has been—and continues to
be—to allow the big arms-producing countries, rather than small, poor
countries, to continue manufacturing and distributing their arms prod-
ucts, or to provide these products to their preferred destinations particu-
larly in conflict zones around the globe, fueling these conflicts even more,
allowing the arms manufacturers to make their profits, while enabling the
arms-exporting country to gain military advantage or enhance its political
influence over the outcome of the conflict2 (WTO; Staples).
However, with or without sanction from the WTO, the United States has
simply used its ability to defy common rules of the neoliberalism if it suits its
purpose while preaching to others to obey the same. Under the principle of
protectionism, the United States has codified these violations into domes-
tic law, thus making them legal. Again, as in the security exception clauses
pertaining to arms subsidies, the United States has provided—and contin-
ues to provide—subsidies to domestic-based corporations, turning them
into virtual missionaries of US-led globalization and economic hegemony,
through the mechanism of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation
(OPIC) which serves, in practice, as a conduit for public funds to provide
subsidized, low-premium insurance to US-based companies for purposes
of insuring their assets in case of destruction or damage owing to politi-
cal unrest, or even protection from unanticipated taxation demanded by
the host-country and problems associated with convertibility of currency,
among other potential problems. Created by the US Congress in 1969 at
the behest of then US President Richard Nixon, the OPIC’s functions and
authority are derived from the Foreign Assistance Act of that same year.
According to this law, the OPIC’s overall purpose was “to mobilize and
facilitate the participation of US private capital and skills in the economic
and social progress of less developed friendly countries and areas, thereby
 6 THE COLD WAR AND THE POST-COLD WAR HEGEMONY 177

complementing the development assistance objectives of the United States”

(Bauzon 2000).
It is common among commentators to attribute the principles of pri-
vatization, trade liberalization, and deregulation as being at the core of
the neoliberal ideology, but something they omit, either purposely or
inadvertently, is right under their noses as a daily reality, as already high-
lighted earlier in this section: militarization. Famed New York Times and
Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Thomas L. Friedman, an avid proponent
of neoliberal globalization and cheerleader for regime change in such places
as Iraq and Ukraine, once wrote quite confidently and with hubris: “The
hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist – McDon-
ald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15.
And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technolo-
gies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps”
(Friedman, a). In a later work, entitled The World Is Flat—A Brief History
of the Twenty-First Century (2005), in its introductory pages, Friedman
explains what it means to think of the world as “flat”: “When you think of
the world as flat, a lot of things make sense in ways they did not before.
But I was also excited personally, because what the flattening of the world
means is that we are now connecting all the knowledge centers on the
planet together into a single global network, which – if politics and terror-
ism do not get in the way – could usher in an amazing era of prosperity
and innovation”3 (Friedman, b).
What Friedman chose to ignore is the fact that politics and terrorism
are an integral part, or essential ingredients of, the neoliberal globalization
that he wishes to miseducate his readers about. Through politics, institu-
tional mechanisms and policies appropriate for their desires and interests
have been put in place by the dominant forces, subverting the democratic
institutions in their own respective countries. Notorious among these insti-
tutions, with a long, documented record of dragging hapless countries into
a state of debt servitude are the WB and the IMF. During the 1960s and
1970s, when money was cheap, they made loans available to just about any
country that expressed a desire to borrow, so long as they were ideologi-
cally vetted (in the way that Chile, before 1973, was not), and so long as
they agreed with the conditionalities that were attached with the loan(s)
which meant, in other words, agreeing with the prescriptions for structural
adjustments in their domestic economy and economic decision-making,
and allowing external, supranational organizations, like a Trojan Horse, to
predetermine domestic policies.
178 K. E. BAUZON

Many of the countries that borrowed from these institutions were either
civilian authoritarian governments or were outright military dictatorships.
Within their respective societies, these governments served the interests of
various constituencies variously described as plutocrats, oligarchs, or simply
the wealthy class that maintained close ties with the government and the
military and who, understandably, maintained influence in law- or policy-
making even though all shared the common traits as being unelected, self-
selected, and self-perpetuating, having succeeded in establishing an affinity
of interests—through their dominant sway over cultural, educational, and
informational institutions—between their interests and much of the rest of
society. And, consequently, many of these government adopted repressive
policies, deploying internal security agencies of various types and allowing
the same to use intimidation or torture, toward any group or individual
that appeared to oppose government and its policies, especially those with
neoliberal orientation that facilitated the transfer of public assets and ser-
vices to the private, profit-making sector often under highly dubious or
questionable circumstances.4
Thus, to Friedman, “globalization” is normal; no need to prefix it with
“neoliberal” because it is automatically assumed to be such. No alternative
is considered, echoing one of the phrases made famous by former British
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher when she declared: “TINA, there is no
alternative!” But Friedman’s assumption about “knowledge centers” being
now “flattened” implying shared equality in a sense that the planet is now
being held technologically “together into a single global network,” ignores
the basic fact of contemporarily existing uneven development between the
Global North and the Global South, and within each. It does not ask who
owns the technology, what motivates the owners, what this technology is
used for, who benefits from it, and what power relations results from this
unevenness.
Further, Friedman ignores the growing global resistance to neoliberal
globalization, e.g., the success of the non-Marxist Ejercito Zapatista Lib-
eracion Nacional (EZLN) which has been at the forefront of militant
resistance to land privatization in southern Mexico; the resistance by the
indigenous community in Bolivia against water privatization particularly in
the City of Cochabamba; the formation of farmers’ cooperatives through
South and Southeast Asia to store their own seeds and to conserve their
own water table against the predatory practices of companies like Mon-
santo and Coca Cola; the success of the landless peasants and workers
in Brazil, organizing themselves into Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais
 6 THE COLD WAR AND THE POST-COLD WAR HEGEMONY 179

Sem Terra (MST) against agrarian injustices; the ongoing street protests
at ministerial conferences of such supranational neoliberal-oriented orga-
nizations as the WB and the IMF, the WTO, and the World Economic
Forum (WEF) usually held in various cities around the globe such as
those held in Seattle, Washington State, United States; Montreal, Que-
bec, Canada; Rome, Italy; Davos, Switzerland, among others. Equally
if not more significantly, there are also the militant protracted anti-
imperialist/anti-colonial as well as indigenous-based struggles for self-
determination and which may or may not be guided by Marxist-Leninist
revolutionary principles aimed at the root of global exploitation—capital-
ism itself in the form of armed resistance. These forms of resistance may
manifest themselves in various ways and under various conditions and sym-
bolisms, and that these varying conditions and particularities have to be
taken into account when assessing them. As San Juan counsels:

What remains to be carefully considered, above all, is the historical speci-

ficity or singularity of each of these projects of national liberation, their class
composition, historical roots, programs, ideological tendencies, and political
agendas within the context of colonial/imperial domination. It is not possi-
ble to pronounce summary judgments on the character and fate of nationalist
movements in the peripheral formations without focusing on the complex
manifold relations between colonizer and colonized, the dialectical interac-
tion between their forces as well as others caught in the conflict. Otherwise,
the result would be a disingenuous ethical utopianism such as that found in
U.S. postnationalist and postcolonialist discourse which, in the final analysis,
functions as an apology for the ascendancy of the transnational corporate
powers embedded in the nation-states of the North, and for the hegemonic
rule of the only remaining superpower claiming to act in the name of freedom
and democracy. (San Juan 2003)

What these anti-imperialist and anti-neoliberal globalization movements

teach people like Friedman and Thatcher (if she were still alive) is that, yes,
there is an alternative to the existing system, that another world is possible,
and that ordinary folks at various levels and in every corner of the globe are
indeed rising up, taking matters into their own hands, and exerting their
own agency in fashioning their future.
180 K. E. BAUZON

Uneven Development and Neoliberal Globalization

Despite Friedman’s pretense about writing a sweeping history of the
twenty-first century, in the same book cited above, he makes little or no crit-
ical note of uneven development between the metropolitan powers, on the
one hand, and the peripheries, on the other, that was directly attributable
to colonialism; no reference to Walter Rodney’s brilliant book on how
Europe underdeveloped Africa, and not even any reference to—indicating
knowledge of or familiarity with—the variety of dynamic alternative propo-
sitions offered by dependency theory, the world systems theory, and the
Marxist/neo-Marxist theory about the exploitative, acquisitive, and expan-
sionist nature of capitalism; the international division of labor; the liberal-
ized international trading rules that maintain and perpetuate dependency
and inequality; and the institutional enforcement mechanisms that apply
these rules.5 No, he does not admit to the proposition that the neolib-
eral principles, as enumerated above, are a mere rationalization for the
shrinking of the global commons represented by what amounts to as the
corporate theft and exploitation of the globe’s resources as in the days of
classical colonialism, and that it represents a denial of the same from those
that truly own them, through privatization schemes, causing the state to
divest itself of its public service functions, and prying open the economies
of so-called emerging markets through mandatory trade liberalization and
deregulation that put corporate profits above people’s welfare, the envi-
ronment’s well-being, public health, and workers’ rights, and subverting
democracy in the process. Indeed, these principles of neoliberalism are rou-
tinely incorporated in any trading organization be it the WTO or any of its
regional counterparts be they in North America, around the Pacific rim,
the North Atlantic region, or Western Europe, and Friedman thinks these
are just fine!6
Thus, Friedman and many more like him, assuming they have the interest
and the inclination, would do well to learn from those who have a deeper
understanding of history, including from those that Friedman may not
agree with, such as San Juan who explains that one of the most valuable
insights one can discern from Marxist historiography is that “capitalism as
a world system has developed unevenly, with the operations of the ‘free
market’ determined by unplanned but (after analysis) ‘lawful’ tendencies
of accumulation of surplus value” (San Juan 1998). As San Juan elaborates:

With the rise of merchant capitalism, diverse modes of production with vary-
ing temporalities and “superstructural” effects have since then reconfigured
 6 THE COLD WAR AND THE POST-COLD WAR HEGEMONY 181

the planet. In a new cartography, we find metropolitan centers subordinating

peripheral territories and peoples. Colonialism and later finance-capitalism
(imperialism) compressed time and space, sharply juxtaposing a variety of
cultures linked to discrepant economies and polities, with the colonizing
center dictating the measure of modernity. (San Juan 1998)

From the above-quote, any fair-minded, history-conscious, reasonably

informed learner would know that San Juan confirms what many other
historians have already written about, with much more ample documenta-
tion, and could discern, further, that history has not been kind to those in
far-flung corners of the globe that have been ravaged by European colo-
nialism even though the Europeans themselves may rest content of their
virtues and accomplishments.
Those that bask in the glory of European colonialism and, now, the
might of the US empire, should be reminded, nonetheless, that colonial-
ism has left a painful if not ugly legacy that causes the descendants of old
colonialism’s victims to suffer indignities today when colonialism is said
to be a thing of the past. These indignities are manifested in a variety
of ways including the perpetuation of uneven development between what
has been described as the metaphorical center, in reference to the devel-
oped economies of Western Europe and North America, on the one hand,
and the poor, largely agrarian countries in what has also been referred to
metaphorically as the peripheries, sharing the common experience of having
been stripped and exploited of their natural wealth by foreigners, a process
that continues to this day under the guise of neoliberal globalization. San
Juan adds:

After World War II, the accelerated migration of former colonial subjects into
the metropoles, together with the refinement of technologies of communi-
cation and foreign investment, heightened the spectacle of heterogeneous
languages and mixed practices coexisting with the homogenizing scenarios
of everyday life in both center and margin. (San Juan 1998)

The growth and rise of the US empire—a point emphasized in this work—
did not happen by chance. Neither did its economic system based on private
property, capital accumulation, and labor extraction, happen naturally in
accordance with the guidance of the “Invisible Hand.” Otherwise, the
system of slavery, the genocidal policy toward the native Americans, and the
continuing wars against nations of color across the globe under the pretext
of the war on terror, contemporary versions of the pacification campaigns
waged in the olden days of Indian Wars and the wars of subjugation in
182 K. E. BAUZON

the Cuba and the Philippines, all of these would have meant nothing, and
nothing at all. The next section intends to shed more light as to the racial
nature of this empire and why it has been so difficult, for so long, to admit
such particularly among members of the political class and the intelligentsia.

Notes
1. Here, San Juan reveals a paradox about the contemporary “state”: On the one
hand, it is argued that under (neoliberal) globalization, it is becoming—if it
has not already become—obsolete because national borders are presumably
coming down, giving way to (a) “borderless” world; and, (b) the conver-
gence between the “state” and the “nation” has been seen as a “malignant
paradox” because of their association and linkage with malevolent phenom-
ena as World War II-era genocide perpetrated by the Nazis against the Jews,
the “ethnic cleansing” seen in the Balkan region in the wake of the end of
the Cold War, and the kind of “terrorism” inflicted on the United States on
9/11. In response, the US “nation-state,” seeing itself besieged especially
since 9/11, has felt justified and necessary in invoking “national security”
to protect itself and to wage its “war on terror.” Among those adhering to
this line of argument, San Juan singles out proponents of postmodernism
who see the ideological nature of the modern state, particularly as identity-
conferring, as essentially “evil,” and generating the kind of nationalism that
led to the kinds of destructiveness cited but do not see that this identity
may precisely be articulated and manipulated by the dominant class in order
to “reinforce the prevailing ownership/allocation of economic and symbolic
capital.” San Juan chastises these postmodernist critiques of the nation-state
for missing the point. He writes: “But these critiques seem to forget that the
nation is chiefly a creation of the modern capitalist state, that is, a historical
artifice or invention.” San Juan quotes an Italian scholar, Giovanni Arrighi
who observed that the Treaty of Westphalia, which settled the Thirty Years
War, signified the “‘reorganization of political space in the interest of capi-
tal accumulation’ and signalled ‘the birth, not just of the modern inter-state
system but also of capitalism as a world-system’” (1993, 162). Under this
prevailing world system characterized by inter-imperialist rivalry, San Juan
likewise quotes Russian revolutionary, Nikolai Bukharin, who wrote: “[T]he
state power sucks in almost all branches of production; it not only maintains
the general conditions of the exploitative process; the state more and more
becomes a direct exploiter, organizing and directing production as a collective
capitalist. (Callinicos, 1982, 205)” (San Juan 2007a).
San Juan pursues further the subject of the state and its relationship with
violence, or the use of force, and the dynamics of conferring legitimacy to
state violence, or violence sanctioned by it. This is key to understanding—in
 6 THE COLD WAR AND THE POST-COLD WAR HEGEMONY 183

order to “demystify” if not condemn—the extraordinary claim to and exercise

of force that the United States has exhibited to this day thus far. As a step in
this direction, San Juan recalls and endorses the work of French writer Pierre
Bourdieu who reformulated the Weberian thesis that the state was a juridical
entity with the monopoly to the use of legitimate force. Thus, Bourdieu is
quoted as follows: “The state is the culmination of a process of concentration of
different species of capital; capital of physical force or instrument of coercion
(army, police), economic capital, cultural or (better) informational capital, and
symbolic capital. It is this concentration as such which constitutes the state as
the holder of a sort of metacapital granting power over other species of capital
and over their holders… It follows that the construction of the state proceeds
apace with the construction of a field of power, defined as the space of play
within which the holders of capital (of different species) struggle in particular
for power over the state, that is, over the statist capital granting power over the
different species of capital and over their reproduction (particularly through
the school system). (1998, 41-42)” (San Juan 2007a).
The state that Bourdieu speaks of may very well be that of the US nation-
state. Contrary to the experience of most other countries around the globe to
the effect that their respective claims to sovereignty are disappearing, being
undermined by forces of neoliberal globalization, San Juan allays any uncer-
tainties. He writes: “Contemporary cultural studies posit the demise of the
nation as an unquestioned assumption, almost a doctrinal point of departure
for speculations on the nature of the globalization process. Are concepts such
as the nation-state, national sovereignty, or nationalities, and their referents
obsolete and useless? Whatever the rumors about the demise of the nation-
state, or the obsolescence of nationalism in the wake of September 11, 2001,
agencies that assume its healthy existence are busy: not only the members of
the United Nations, but also the metropolitan powers, with the United States
as its military spearhead, have all reaffirmed their civilizing nationalism with
a vengeance…. With WTO and finance capital in the saddle, the buying and
selling of labor-power moves center stage once more” (San Juan 2012).
2. US support to the government of the Republic of the Philippines (GRP), to
the tune of millions of dollars in the form of direct military assistance, military
arms sales, and line of credit over several decades, offers one such example by
which the United States has tried to influence the outcome of the ongoing
counterinsurgency campaign being waged against the Marxist-oriented Com-
munist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and its military arm, the New People’s
Army (NPA). The NPA has been waging a legitimate, politically motivated
insurgency campaign, has claimed a belligerent status under international law,
and has proclaimed adherence to existing humanitarian law in areas of con-
flict. Due to its belligerent status, it has been recognized by the GRP for
purposes of negotiating ceasefires, exchange of prisoners, and transport of
184 K. E. BAUZON

humanitarian supplies and personnel across territories. However, according

to San Juan, “The U.S. government and the European Council have thus
criminalized and repressed the revolutionary movement in the Philippines.
Opposed to thousands of individuals and organizations in the Philippines
calling for the resumption of peace talks, the Powell doctrine [named after for-
mer US Secretary of Defense Colin Powell, serving under then US President
George W. Bush] effectively dismantled the ongoing negotiations between
the National Democratic Front (which includes the CPP and NPA) and the
Philippine government (GRP) that have been occurring since 1990. under
the sponsorship of Holland, Belgium, and Norway, with the endorsement
of the European Parliament in the 1997 and 1999 resolutions. … It appears
that the U.S. and European states, by classifying the CPP, NPA, and Sison
[i.e., Jose Maria Sison, founder of the CPP in exile in the Netherlands] as
terrorists, have rejected any logical or semantic criteria as well as international
norms for distinguishing between terrorists who employ violence with crimi-
nal intent and organizations or individuals waging armed struggle for openly
declared political goals, especially those involving national liberation, radical
social reforms, and political democratization. Ignoring universally applied cri-
teria and norms, the GRP demonizes political organizations and individuals
critical of its policies and programs that serve narrow class interests and betray
national sovereignty to imperialist powers” (San Juan 2007b).
3. San Juan responds to Friedman, albeit indirectly, by calling his apparent igno-
rance on the barbarity of the conditions that has been visited upon those at
the receiving end of the labor exploitation attendant to the brand of global-
ization that he endorses, particularly caregivers and domestic workers from
the Global South. San Juan writes: “Amid the tide of barbarization attendant
on the putative benefits of global capitalism – celebrated by such pundits
as Thomas Friedman and other neoconservative defenders of privatization,
deregulation, and cutting of social services, we have witnessed a paradigm
shift among scholars studying the phenomenon of the Filipino diaspora. Crit-
ical intelligence has been hijacked to serve vulgar apologetics. For example,
the employment of Filipina women as domestics or nannies to care for chil-
dren, old people, the chronically infirm or disabled, and so on, has been lauded
as altruistic” (San Juan 2015, 138).
San Juan offers a very critical and important elaboration on the racial-
ized global economic system, as exemplified in the export of women workers
as “caregivers” and integrates research performed by other scholars on the
subject, in the following extended passage: “Race, national, and class forces
operate together in determining the exchange value (the price) of migrant
labor. The reproduction of a homogeneous race (in Europe, North America,
Japan, etc.) integral to the perpetuation of the unjust social order is con-
nected with the historical development of nation-states, whether as imagined
 6 THE COLD WAR AND THE POST-COLD WAR HEGEMONY 185

or as geopolitically defined locus. Historically, membership in the community

was determined by race in its various modalities, a circumscription that is con-
stantly being negotiated. It is in this racialized setting that European women’s
positioning as citizen acquires crucial significance. This is the site where Third
World domestics play a major role, as Anderson acutely underscores: ‘The fact
that they are migrants is important: in order to participate like men; [white
European] women must have workers who will provide the same flexibility as
wives, in particular working long hours and combining caring and domestic
chores.’ (2000, 190) The distinction is fundamental and necessary in elucidat-
ing the axis of social reproduction rooted in socially productive praxis. Such a
vital distinction speaks volumes about migrant domestic labor/care as the key
sociopolitical factor that sustains the existing oppressive international division
of labor. This key distinction undermines all claims that globalized capitalism
has brought, and is bringing freedom, prosperity, and egalitarian democracy to
everyone” (San Juan 2015, 140) (italics added).
4. At this point, San Juan recalls the work of writer Jean Franco who, in her
essay entitled “Killing Priests, Nuns, Women, Children” (1985), created a
postmodern nightmare characteristic of the so-called postmodern times. The
article’s title alludes to numerous acts of atrocious terrorism committed by
US-backed, -trained, -funded, -directed paramilitary groups and death squads
throughout Central America during the 1980s that invaded what should have
been sacred or democratic spaces occupied by church workers, children, and
the old and the infirm but which/who were nonetheless not spared in the
name of counterinsurgency, such as the assassination of Archbishop Oscar
Romero, the massacre at El Mozote, and the kidnapping and murder of four
Maryknoll sisters perpetrated by cadets and officers trained at and gradu-
ated from the US Army’s infamous School of the Americas, then located in
Panama, subsequently relocated to Fort Benning, Georgia, United States. San
Juan writes: “Jean Franco observes that with the rise of the internal security
state funded by the West (IMF-World Bank), all hitherto immune spaces in
the underdeveloped countries – Church, family as refuge and shelter – are
gone, just as affect and depth have vanished in simulations and spectacles.
She notes the unprecedented sacrilege committed by U.S.-sponsored ‘low-
intensity warfare‘ in the destruction of utopian space, specifically that asso-
ciated with nuns, priests, women, and children. The ‘disappeared’ no longer
occupy a space that can be put ‘under erasure’: ‘the smell of the cadaver will
not be dispelled by the commodity culture, a debt-ridden economy and the
forms of restored political democracy’” (San Juan 1995).
On the current state of postmodernity, San Juan also recalls the work of
Geographer David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (1989) wherein
Harvey offers the following describes postmodernism and what it all means,
in this brief passage: “From what I think is the best account so far of this
186 K. E. BAUZON

transition, David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity, we learn that post-

modernism is a historical response to the recent crisis of accumulation, a crisis
that manifests itself in the disorienting compressions of time-space which have
periodically occurred since the decline of the Middle Ages. The symptoms of
this crisis include inter alia: the disintegration of the sovereign subject; the
loss of the referent; the collapse of the linkage between moral and scientific
judgment; the predominance of images over narratives, aesthetic over ethics.
Ephemerality and fragmentation have displaced eternal truths and unified,
organic experience” (San Juan 1995).
5. In an earlier essay, entitled “Dependency: History, Theory, and a Reappraisal”
(with colleague Charles Frederick Abel) (1986), I distinguished between the
early and the late types of dependency theses, citing respective proponents
of each. I wrote: “[V[ariations are discernible among scholars indigenous
to Latin America and those to the West and among early and late. Early
structuralists – bearing some ECLA-influenced ideas – held that the size of
the country’s market determined industrialization. In other words, structural
dependence is traceable to the constraints imposed by the size of the economy.
These constraints could be overcome, not through preferential treatment, for-
eign aid, and protection – as these would tend toward capital-intensive indus-
tries unable to compete in the world market – but rather through regional
integration, of which the Latin America Free Trade Area (LAFTA) was an
expression. Later structuralists have argued that integration would not solve
but, on the contrary, would aggravate the problem of dependence. In their
analyses, they have adopted a broader historical approach and have become
more sophisticated in their investigation of the various dimensions of depen-
dency” (Bauzon 1986).
6. The position of San Juan on the issue of uneven development has been clear,
articulate, and well-publicized in various of his essays, in contra-distinction
from the position of apologists for neoliberalism like Friedman. In a chapter to
a compendium on development and democratization, entitled “Afterword:
From Development to Liberation – The Third World in the ‘New World
Order,’” San Juan writes, in part: “We know from any historical standpoint
that the uneven development of the Third World is the logical consequence
of the international division of labor and the accumulation of capital by the
colonial powers of the West and North from the sixteenth century to the
present. But since then, the patterns of imperialist exploitation of the world’s
labor and resources have undergone a series of mutations. When the prescrip-
tion of import substitution carried out in the post-war years failed to usher
sustained, independent growth, the elite of the dependent countries resorted
to export-oriented industrialization in the 1950s and 1960s. The result? A
rich harvest of massive human rights violations by U.S. backed authoritar-
ian regimes, systematic corruption of cultures, degradation of work through
 6 THE COLD WAR AND THE POST-COLD WAR HEGEMONY 187

‘warm body exports’ (migrant labor), and unrelenting pauperization of the

masses. In the free trade zones where global assembly line generates superprof-
its out of cheap labor, total surveillance and draconian prohibitions prevail.
Both empirical evidence and substantial testimony demonstrate that the cult
of the gross national product (GNP) as institutionalized by the disciples of W.
W. Rostow’s The Stages of Economic Growth, among others, has brought with
it only rampant unemployment, widespread poverty, cycles of repression and
stagnation, cultures and environment destroyed for peoples of color whose
underemployment is reproduced daily by such development formulas” (San
Juan 1992).
San Juan has treated the subject of uneven development more thoroughly
elsewhere, such as in: “Postcolonialism, Uneven Development, & Imperial-
ism: The Example of Amilcar Cabral” (2002a); and Chapter 7, “Postcolonial
Criticism and the Vicissitudes of Uneven Development.” In: Racism and
Cultural Studies: Critiques of Multiculturalist Ideology and the Politics of Dif-
ference (2002b), the simple point being that anyone claiming that we are now
in a “postcolonial” stage in history is living in a different planet!

References
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Greenwood Press, 1986), 270pp. In: https://www.academia.edu/3382095/
Dependency_History_Theory_and_a_Reappraisal.
———, “Political Forecasting and the Third World Economies: A Critical Assess-
ment”, Kasarinlan: Philippine Journal of Third World Studies, 15, 1 (2000):
23–64. In: https://www.academia.edu/3382032/Political_forecasting_and_
the_Third_World_economies_a_critical_assessment.
———, “Secession in the Formal-Legalist Paradigm: Implications for Con-
temporary Revolutionary and Popular Movements in the Age of Neoliberal
Globalization”. Posted September 2014. In: https://www.academia.edu/
8370651/Secession_in_the_Formal-Legalist_Paradigm_Implications_for_
Contemporary_Revolutionary_and_Popular_Movements_in_the_Age_of_
Neoliberal_Globalization.
Franco, Jean, “Killing Priests, Nuns, Women, Children”, in On Signs, edited by
Marshall Blonsky (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985).
Friedman, Thomas L., The World Is Flat—A Brief History of the Twenty-First Cen-
tury (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 488pp.
San Juan, E., Jr., “Afterword: From Development to Liberation—The Third World
in the ‘New World Order’”, in Development and Democratization in the Third
188 K. E. BAUZON

World: Myths, Hopes and Realities, edited by Kenneth E. Bauzon (Washington,

DC: Crane Russak/Taylor & Francis, 1992), pp. 297–310.
———, Between Empire and Insurgency—The Philippines in the New Millenium:
Essays in History, Comparative Literature, and Cultural Politics (Quezon City,
Philippines: University of the Philippines Press, 2015), 318pp.
———, Beyond Postcolonial Theory (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 325pp.
Print.
———, “Filipino OFWs Versus the Neoliberal Ideology of Transnationalism:
Interrogating Transnationalism: The Case of the Filipino Diaspora in the
Age of Globalized Capitalism”. Posted July 20, 2012. In: https://philcsc.
wordpress.com/2012/07/20/filipino-ofws-versus-the-neoliberal-ideology-
of-transnationalism/.
———, “From Genealogy to Inventory: The Situation of Asian American Studies
in the Age of the Crisis of Global Finance Capital”, International Journal of
Asia Pacific Studies, 6, 1 (January 2010): 47–75. In: http://ijaps.usm.my/wp-
content/uploads/2012/06/Genealogy.pdf.
———, Hegemony and Strategies of Transgression: Essays in Cultural Studies and
Comparative Literature (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995),
286pp.
———, “Imperial Terror, Neo-Colonialism, and the Filipino Diaspora”. A Lecture
Delivered at the 2003 English Department Lecture Series at St. John’s Uni-
versity. St. John’s University Humanities Review, 2, 1 (Fall 2003). In: http://
facpub.stjohns.edu/~ganterg/sjureview/vol2-1/diaspora.html.
———, In the Wake of Terror; Class, Race, Nation, Ethnicity in the Postmodern
World (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007a), 232pp.
———, “Postcolonialism, Uneven Development, and Imperialism: The Exam-
ple of Amilcar Cabral”, in Marxism, Modernity, and Postcolonial Studies,
edited by Crystal Bartolovich and Neil Lazarus (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 2002a), pp. 221–239. In: https://www.academia.edu/
10130036/POSTCOLONIALISM_UNEVEN_DEVELOPMENT_and_
IMPERIALISM_The_Example_of_Amicar_Cabral—by_E_San_Juan_Jr.
———, Racial Formations/Critical Transformations: Articulations of Power in
Ethnic and Racial Studies in the United States (Amherst, NY: Humanity
Books/Prometheus Books, 1992c), 163pp. Recipient, 1993 National Book
Award in Cultural Studies from the Association for Asian American Studies.
Recipient, the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights in the
United States Outstanding Book on Human Rights for 1992.
———, Racism and Cultural Studies: Critiques of Multiculturalist Ideology and the
Politics of Difference (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002b), 428pp. In:
https://www.dukeupress.edu/Racism-and-Cultural-Studies/.
 6 THE COLD WAR AND THE POST-COLD WAR HEGEMONY 189

———, “Spinoza and the War of Racial Terrorism”, Originally published in

Left Curve, No. 27, and as Chapter in Working Through the Contradic-
tions: From Cultural Theory to Critical Practice (Lewisburg, PA: Buck-
nell University Press, 2004). In: http://www.leftcurve.org/LC27WebPages/
Spinoza.html. Also available in: https://philcsc.wordpress.com/2014/11/
17/spinozas-philosophy-the-body-race-freedom-by-e-san-juan-jr/.
———, U.S. Imperialism and Revolution in the Philippines (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007b), 265pp. Print.
 CHAPTER 7

The Racialized State

A review of the geopolitical formation of the United States demonstrates

a clear racial, not simply ethnic, pattern of constituting the national iden-
tity and the commonality it invokes. As oppositional historians have shown,
the U.S. racial order sprang from a politics of exploitation and containment
encompassing inter alia colonialism, apartheid, racial segregation, xenopho-
bia, exploitation, marginalization, and genocide….
This racial genealogy of the empire followed the logic of capital accu-
mulation by expanding the market for industrial goods and securing sources
of raw materials and, in particular, the prime commodity for exchange and
maximizing of surplus value: cheap labor power.
E. San Juan, “Post-9/11 Reflections…” (2004)

Knowledge Production and the Cold War

in the United States
The onset and prevalence of the Cold War mood, for good or bad, depend-
ing on one’s perspective, had an inevitable conditioning effect on the pro-
duction of knowledge. Those justifying belief in the verity of the Western
model of political and social organization, with their respective assump-
tions about Weberian-inspired rationality and the inevitability of progress
modeled after the Darwinian proposition about biological growth or, alter-
nately, the Newtonian presumption about the machine-like ordering of

© The Author(s) 2019 191

K. E. Bauzon, Capitalism, The American Empire, and Neoliberal
Globalization, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9080-8_7
192 K. E. BAUZON

the universe, found themselves in preeminent positions in academic and

research institutions setting the agenda for research, teaching, and devel-
opment planning. The impact of the Cold War on the production of social
knowledge may alternately be described as rather crass, crude, numbing
as will be detailed below. San Juan has been candid with his own colorful
description, elucidating in particular on the Cold War’s displacement of
class as an explanatory variable as follows:

The implacably zombifying domination of the Cold War for almost half a
century has made almost everyone allergic to the Marxian notion of class as a
social category that can explain inequalities of power and wealth in the “free
world.” One symptom is the mantra of “class reductionism” or “economism”
as a weapon to silence anyone who calls attention to the value of one’s labor
power, or one’s capacity to work in order to survive, if not to become human.
Another way of nullifying the concept of class as an epistemological tool for
understanding the dynamics of capitalist society is to equate it with status,
life-style, even an entire “habitus” or pattern of behavior removed from the
totality of the social relations of production in any given historical forma-
tion. Often, class is reduced to income, or to voting preference within the
strict limits of the bourgeois (that is, capitalist) electoral order. Some sociol-
ogists even play at being agnostic or nominalist by claiming that class displays
countless meanings and designations relative to the ideological persuasion of
the theorist/researcher, hence its general uselessness as an analytic tool. This
has become the orthodox view of “class” in mainstream academic discourse.
(San Juan 2003b)

The displacement of class saw the corresponding rise of non-threatening,

even outrightly conservative, heuristic and/or explanatory paradigms.
These include structural-functionalist and systems theory approaches,
exhibiting traces of organismic and mechanistic principles drawn from Dar-
win and Newton, respectively, became dominant paradigms, with their sta-
tus quo-affirming and conservative predispositions. These are exemplified
by dominant functionalist theorists like Talcott Parsons and Bronislav Mali-
nowski and their disciples in the disciplines of sociology and anthropology,
respectively, who postulated that essentially society consists of different
albeit unequal parts but with mutually reinforcing functions. Thus, a mod-
ern society like the United States is seen as consisting of a plurality of
groups which, although they may have varying if not competing interests,
all assume the basic validity and legitimacy of the social order within which
 7 THE RACIALIZED STATE 193

they operate and, hence, contribute consciously or otherwise to its persis-

tence. This view has, in fact, evolved into a coherent theory of society and
politics of which Robert Dahl, with his series of works, e.g., A Preface to
Democratic Theory (1956), Who Governs? (1961), and Pluralist Democracy
in the United States (1967), became the gold standard of pluralist analy-
sis among mainstream US-based sociologists and political scientists during
much of the Cold War, and Dahl’s influence persists to this day. Alternately
and deriving in part from the assumptions of cybernetics, David Easton also
popularized a mechanistic analysis of the US political system, and modern
polities in general, with the publication of his series of studies including
The Political System: An Inquiry into the State of Political Science (1953),
and A Systems Analysis of Political Life (1965). These works, too, were
part of the standard reading especially for graduate students—including
this writer—during the 1970s and subsequent years.
While Dahl, Easton, and virtually the entirety of the social science estab-
lishment have proudly proclaimed their behavioral credentials, professing
adherence to the tenets of empirical analysis, little acknowledgment is
offered about the influence that society, in fact, exerts, through various
sources including ideological, cultural, religious, and political, among oth-
ers, in the process of producing social knowledge. In an earlier work, I
pointed this out (Bauzon 1991), but in another work, I quoted a critic,
Alvin W. Gouldner, emerging from the conflict theory sub-school of func-
tionalism (otherwise known as neofunctionalism), who acknowledged that,
among social scientists, there are (a) “world hypotheses,” and (b) “domain
assumptions” both of which provide needed assumptions and orientations
that enable social scientists to navigate and render meaningful various types
of circumstances which, in the end, serve the function of linking them with
society. These are ingrained in the social scientists’ private mood which ulti-
mately bears on his public and political conduct. Domain assumptions in
particular, according to Gouldner, “have implications about what is possi-
ble to do, to change in the world; the value they entail indicate what course
of action are desirable and thus shape the conduct. In this sense, every theory
and every theorist ideologizes social reality” (Bauzon 2014, italics added).
Even while rejecting Marx, neofunctionalists, cited above, have man-
aged to co-opt the concept of conflict from its class context and assigned
to it the label of “conflict theory”; this theory was then applied to the anal-
ysis of groups and turned it into something benign and non-threatening
thus disarming and pacifying the Cold Warriors and ideological guardians
194 K. E. BAUZON

of the state who might otherwise come knocking at their door. It is under-
standable that conflict theory had a great appeal to mainstream social scien-
tists, particularly in the departments of sociology and political science, who
wanted to bolster their progressive or maybe even radical credentials but
who, in fact, were devoid of any solid grounding on class analysis much
less any familiarity with the dynamic diversity that has accompanied the
intellectual ferment taking place within the Marxist tradition during much
of the last century. This ignorance is even more apparent since the end of
World War II, during the Cold War period, with the advent of vigorous
anti-imperialist liberation struggles taking place in the peripheral regions
of the European and North American empires, and the guile and amoral
nature by which these liberation struggles were being suppressed often
with the blessing of and endorsement by mainstream academics in these
metropolitan continents.1

Rise of the Neoliberal Pedagogy

To help make sense of the point being made here, i.e., producers and pur-
veyors of supposedly value-free knowledge, in fact, promote their own pre-
ferred ideological presuppositions. No better illustration of this point could
be found than Irving Louis Horowitz’s pedagogical lament about what he
refers to as The Decomposition of Sociology, which is the phrase he used to
title his 1993 book. In this book, Horowitz complains that “much con-
temporary sociological theory has degenerated into pure critique, strongly
influenced by Marxist dogmatism,” a charge which, as shown in the above-
discussion, has no basis in fact, in apparent reference to the de-fanged and
de-Marxified conflict theory. Horowitz nonetheless takes the occasion to
“nationalize” the discipline by accusing these imaginary Marxist sociol-
ogists—and social scientists in general—for being “anti-American.” The
jacket reads: “Such thinking has a strong element of anti-American and
anti-Western bias, in which all questions have one answer – the evil of capi-
talism – and all problems one solution – the good of socialism…. Indeed, in
one area after another, Horowitz shows how this same formulaic thinking
dominates the field, resulting in a crude reductionist view of contemporary
social life.” And to assure the readers of his presumed ideologically free-
stance, the book jacket adds: “At a time when the world is moving closer
to the free market and democratic norms…, such reductionist tendencies
and ideological posturings are outmoded,” here reflecting a triumphalist
attitude in the wake of the end of the Cold War.
 7 THE RACIALIZED STATE 195

This period in history is apparently an opportune time for Horowitz

to offer his vision of what social science ought to be. As the book jacket
explains further:

Horowitz offers an alternative, positive view of social research. He urges a

larger vision of the social sciences, one in which universities, granting agen-
cies, and research institutes provide an environment in which research may
be untainted by partisan agendas – where policy choices will not be hindered
by the prevailing cultural climate. He counsels sociologists to move away
from blind advocacy, to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century by
utilizing the knowledge of other times and places, and to take into account
the shrinking globe – in short, to develop and maintain a new set of universal
standards in this era of a world culture.2 (Horowitz)

The case of Horowitz, discussed above, illustrates precisely the point

being made here, i.e., advocates for neoliberalism assume a kind of hubris
in assuming that their way of thinking is the normal way to which all others
should conform. As in the case of Horowitz, there is the default assumption
that liberal democracy and free trade are the standards to which the rest
of the world should emulate, and that advocating for these is not being
biased; only those that are critical of them or are against them are (biased).
There is the further assumption that the principles of liberal democracy, as
a political ideology, are compatible with the principles of free trade, as an
economic system. The assumed normality of these systems of thought is
reflected, for instance, in the teaching of “economics” as a course in any
standard college curriculum. This course is assumed to be of the capitalist
variety without so much admitting that there are other economic systems
other than—if not better than—capitalism itself.
This system of thought ultimately oriented around lending credence to
neoliberalism has caught the interest of progressive, non-Marxist public
intellectual and educator, Henry A. Giroux who, among his voluminous
works, interrogated the issue further in an essay entitled “Neoliberalism as
a Form of Public Pedagogy: Making Political More Pedagogical” (2011).
Setting aside momentarily the present author’s difference with Giroux over
the issues of multiculturalism and the value of historical materialism as an
approach, Giroux, nonetheless, in this essay, makes an important suggestion
that academic-based producers of knowledge, far from being objective and
dispassionate, have, in fact, become—and remain—part of a much larger
set of pedagogical forces whose main purpose is to reinforce the existing
196 K. E. BAUZON

sociopolitical order—in the current case, neoliberalism—with which they

maintain an opportunistic if not parasitic symbiotic relationship. He writes:
“Within neoliberalism’s market-driven discourse, corporate power marks
the space of a new kind of public pedagogy, one in which the production,
dissemination, and circulation of ideas emerges from the educational force
of the larger culture. Public pedagogy in this sense refers to a powerful
ensemble of ideological and institutional forces whose aim is to produce
competitive, self-interested individuals vying for their own material and
ideological gain” (Giroux 2011). Giroux further assesses the impact of
this type of pedagogy on other issues or, for that matter, on alternative
pedagogies. He writes:

Corporate public pedagogy culture largely cancels out or devalues gender,

class-specific, and racial injustices of the existing social order by absorbing the
democratic impulses and practices of civil society within narrow economic
relations. Corporate public pedagogy has become an all-encompassing cul-
tural horizon for producing market identities, values, and practices. (Giroux
2011)

In no other contentious issue do we find the verity of Giroux’s point—

shared by many other committed scholars and public intellectuals of
like mind sampled here—than over the racialization of the neoliberal
state/empire, and the inequality that inheres in it. For example, legal
scholar and professor of law, F. Michael Higginbotham, in a recent book,
Ghosts of Jim Crow: Ending Racism in Post-racial America (2013), recounts
how racism persists in the United States despite the election of Barack
Obama to the highest political office in the land. Higginbotham recounts
how, upon Obama’s election, highly placed public figures let out a deluge
of racist and derogatory remarks, including Congressman Doug Lambon
who complained that being linked at all to Obama was “like touching a
tar baby,” or former Congressman Newt Gingrich characterizing Obama
disparagingly as the “food stamp president,” or, further, a federal judge,
Richard Cebull, sending an e-mail chain designed to denigrate Obama’s
mother “by comparing blacks to animals in analogizing interracial mar-
riage and sexuality to bestiality” (Higginbotham). Higginbotham reflects
on the causes of this persistent racism in his book, which he synthesizes in
the following passage:
 7 THE RACIALIZED STATE 197

I submit that there is a vicious cycle. The false notion of white superior-
ity/black inferiority ingrained through slavery led to whites separating them-
selves from blacks through Jim Crow practices. This racial isolation permit-
ted the false notion to reinforce itself and continue, thus making it easier for
blacks to be victimized by race-based and race-neutral policies, and further
contributing to false notions of a racial hierarchy today; and there is also the
impact of black self-victimization. This process has existed for centuries and
continues to benefit whites and disadvantage blacks. (Higginbotham)

On a more concrete level, Higginbotham cites a number of US Supreme

Court (henceforth, High Court) decisions since the 1954 Brown v. Board of
Education decision reinforcing the institutional and legal basis for racism.
These include, among others: (a) Milliken v. Bradley (1974), invalidating
a desegregation plan in Detroit, Michigan; (b) Gratz v. Bollinger (2003),
invalidating an affirmative action admissions program by the University of
Michigan taking into consideration race as a factor; and (c) Parents Involved
in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 (2007), invalidating as
well the City of Seattle’s desegregation plan. Several other High Court
decisions rendered especially during the successive chief justiceships of
Warren Burger (1969–1986), William Rehnquist (1986–2005); and John
Roberts (2005–present) left no doubt about the rightward drift of the
High Court in areas beyond school desegregation, particularly in the areas
of due process, allowing more authority to law enforcement over Miranda
rights protections; privacy rights, allowing little or no oversight over intel-
ligence and security agencies of the government over privacy rights of citi-
zens; and executive prerogative, allowing the executive branch to claim and
extend executive powers with regard to the use of force overseas including
outright invasion and occupation of sovereign countries, detention and
enhanced interrogation (euphemism for what amounts to as torture) of
so-called enemy combatants; and extra-judicial execution—without court
approval—of suspected individuals through the use of unmanned aerial
vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones, authorization of the fund-
ing of so-called pro-democracy groups, through such agencies as the US
Agency for International Development (USAID), among various other
conduits, for the purpose of influencing or predetermining the electoral
and policy-making processes in certain target countries (Bauzon 2005),
or otherwise influencing public opinion there in a direction favorable to
US interests; and authorization of the funding, training, and arming, of
terrorist groups and paramilitary formations for the purpose of engaging,
198 K. E. BAUZON

either clandestinely or covertly, in terrorist acts designed to carry out regime

change of undesirable regimes in target countries, or to get rid of certain
officials associated with these regimes with “extreme prejudice,” meaning
arbitrarily, without any lawful basis, and through violence.
On issues that would have far-reaching implications both on the politi-
cal economy and the political process of the country, the High Court has
handed down such decisions as would grant corporations the right to patent
life, to tear down neighborhoods to make way for real estate development
through eminent domain, to now contribute unlimited and undisclosed
campaign contributions as a matter of free speech, giving rise to the phe-
nomenon of “Dark Money”, and confer upon corporations the status of
corporate personhood to enable them to enjoy the First Amenment right
of free speech as “persons”, among others. In overwhelming number of
these decisions, which collectively consolidate neoliberalism from the con-
stitutional standpoint, the US Congress has either been an acquiescent
bystander and not getting in the way through exercise of its constitutional
mandate of oversight to at least show a semblance of checks-and-balances
among the branches of government, or, finally, has actively collaborated
with the executive branch’s overreaching activities with continued fund-
ing.
Another notable legal scholar whose work could not be ignored when
discussing the racist nature of the US state is Michelle Alexander. In her
much-praised 2011 book, entitled The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration
in the Age of Colorblindness, Alexander notes the rise in prison population
in the United States in the past three decades and compares it to that of
earlier periods as context to the structural basis of what she refers to as New
Jim Crow as a form of caste. She writes:

What has changed since the collapse of Jim Crow has less to do with the basic
structure of our society than the by language we use to justify it. In the era
of color blindness it is no longer socially permissible to use race explicitly as a
justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don’t.
Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color
criminals and then engage in all the practices that we supposedly left behind.
Today, it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the
ways in which it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans.
Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination— employment
discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, exclusion
from jury service—are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more
rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the
 7 THE RACIALIZED STATE 199

height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America, we have merely
redesigned it. (Alexander, italics added)

And the whole point of this? Alexander comes to this sobering conclusion:

Quite belatedly, I came to see that mass incarceration in the United States had,
in fact, emerged as a stunningly comprehensive and well-disguised system of
racialized social control that functions in a manner strikingly similar to Jim
Crow. (Alexander)

The Fetish of Multiculturalism

Both Higginbotham and Alexander express the sentiment of many well-
meaninged reformers of liberal orientation, who express the view that
racism and inequality may somehow be eradicated through incremental
reforms, say, of the criminal justice system accompanied by civil society
movement much like the previous civil rights movement. Further, through
the dissemination of a unifying civic culture anchored on adherence to
the secular and secularizing principles of the US Constitution, admonish-
ing political leaders to perform their duties and safeguarding the pluralist
nature of US society, the rest of the members of society would be inspired
to both tolerate and appreciate each other group’s cultural, ethnic, reli-
gious, and social status and background.3 Further, the assumed pluralist
nature of US politics presupposed that competing groups would eventually
balance themselves out, with the government playing the role of a referee,
that there is not one group that monopolizes power, that power changes
hands periodically from one group to another, and that this is the best
means by which the interests of the members of participating groups could
be secured through such means as competitive elections, bargaining, and
negotiations. This pluralist notion of US politics is an integral component
of the broader approach to the problem of integration or assimilation in a
society consisting of a multiplicity of ethnic and racial groups with all kinds
of traditions. This has been called the multicultural approach or paradigm
or, in short, multiculturalism.
One of the problems with the multiculturalist paradigm is shown in the
irony noted by Ajamu Baraka with President Obama eulogizing, in May
2015, before a predominantly black audience the victims of Dylann Roof, a
white supremacist who gunned down in cold blood nine black members of
200 K. E. BAUZON

a predominantly black congregation in Charleston, South Carolina known

for its tradition of opposing slavery. Baraka writes, in part:

However, it was at the funeral of Rev Pinckney, the pastor of the Emanuel
African Methodist Episcopal Church murdered by Dylann Roof, where the
concluding act of the governments’ obscene efforts to co-opt and deflect the
pain of the attack played to a world-wide audience. President Obama turned
in one of his best performances of a life-time of performances for white supremacy.
His eulogy was a masterful example of his special talent to embody an instru-
mentalist “blackness” while delivering up that blackness to the white supremacist,
U.S. settler project. In his eulogy, he couched his narrative of “American excep-
tionalism” in the language of Christian religiosity that was indistinguishable
from the proclamations of the religious right that sees the U.S. as a state bestowed
with the grace of their God.
Obama sang “Amazing Grace” [a hymn composed by a white slave trader]
and lulled into a stupefying silence black voices that should have demanded
answers as to why the Charleston attack was not considered a terrorist
attack, even though it fit the definition of domestic terrorism, or why the
Obama Administration collaborated with suppressing the 2009 report from
the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which identified violent white
supremacist groups as a threat to national security more lethal than the threat
from Islamic “fundamentalists”. (Baraka 2015b, italics added)

Thus, despite apparent efforts at promoting the fetish of multicultural-

ism, to borrow San Juan’s phrase, one is at the same time presented with
the paradox of being expected to adhere to a presumed “common cul-
ture,” also expressed alternately as “civic culture,” “general education,”
“civic nationalism,” and “republicanism,” among others. This paradox is
expressed in a way that is either deceptive or sinister through the presumed
respect which this fetish of multiculturalism is supposed to elicit from every-
one. In the end, however, the opposite becomes true. Commenting on the
slogan “One in many” engraved in US dollar coins symbolizing the pre-
sumed unity of many in a supposedly multicultural United States, San Juan
writes that, the slogan, first of all, is misleading because it merely con-
ceals a hegemonic ideology. “Officially,” San Juan writes, “the consensual
ideology of the U.S. is neoliberal ‘democracy’ founded on the normative
utilitarian individualism with a neo-Social Darwinist orientation.” San Juan
adds:
 7 THE RACIALIZED STATE 201

It is within this framework that we can comprehend how the ruling bour-
geoisie of each sovereign state utilizes nationalist sentiment and the violence
of the state apparatuses to impose their will. Consequently, the belief that
the nation-state simultaneously prohibits economic freedom and promotes
multinational companies actually occludes the source of political and judi-
cial violence…. One can then assert that the most likely source of political
violence… is the competitive drive for accumulation in the world market
system where the propertied class of each nation-state is the key actor mobi-
lizing its symbolic capital made up primarily of ethnic loyalties and national
imaginaries. (San Juan 2007)

In another essay, San Juan explains: “The multiculturalist respect for the
Other’s specificity, within the existing framework, is the very form of assert-
ing one’s own superiority. According to Slavoj Zizek, this paradox underlies
multiculturalism as, in fact, the authentic ‘cultural logic of multinational’
or globalized capitalism” (San Juan 1999). As what San Juan regards as
a “theoretical wedge” between and among various ethnic groups, already
potentially conflictual among themselves as they are, the ideology of mul-
ticulturalism in actuality has the effect of displacing “the organising cate-
gory of class, founded on the unequal division of social labour and there-
fore unequal power, as the ordering principle of US capitalism” (San Juan
2010a). In another essay, San Juan elaborates on the implication of multi-
culturalism within the existing framework with the following conclusion:

The conclusion to be drawn is thus that the problematic of multiculturalism-

the hybrid coexistence of diverse cultural life-worlds-which imposes itself
today is the form of appearance of its opposite, of the massive presence of
capitalism as universal world system: it bears witness to the unprecedented
homogenization of the contemporary world. It is effectively as if, since the
horizon of social imagination no longer allows us to entertain the idea of an
eventual demise of capitalism-since, as we might put it, everybody silently
accepts that capitalism is here to stay-critical energy has found a substitute
outlet in fighting for cultural differences which leave the basic homogeneity
of the capitalist world-system intact. (San Juan 2004)

This is precisely an important rationale—and context—to consider in

weighing the comment by Baraka, cited earlier, in his criticism of Obama
with regard to white supremacy and his role in promoting US imperialism
abroad. In assessing the prevailing atmosphere under the Obama Adminis-
tration, Baraka comments further as follows: “This is the mindset and the
202 K. E. BAUZON

politics of this Administration and the political culture in the U.S., where
the differential value placed on black life allows black life to be reduced to
an instrumental calculation when considering issues of international pub-
lic relations and domestic politics” (Baraka 2015b). This is what explains
Obama’s role, despite having been subjected himself to vile expressions of
racism, could still stand before a multitude not as someone who pledges
to meaningfully end racism during his presidency but as someone who will
continue to legitimize and consolidate, in Baraka’s estimation, the exist-
ing structure—particularly its violent component—of the white-led settler
state, which is what the United States is. As Baraka explains in a separate
piece, he writes, in part:

No rational person exalts violence and the loss of life. But violence is struc-
tured into the everyday institutional practices of all oppressive societies. It is
the deliberate de-humanization of the person in order to turn them into a
‘thing’ — a process Dr. King called “thing-afication.” It is a necessary process
for the oppressor in order to more effectively control and exploit. Resistance,
informed by the conscious understanding of the equal humanity of all peo-
ple, reverses this process of de-humanization. Struggle and resistance are
the highest expressions of the collective demand for people-centered human
rights – human rights defined and in the service of the people and not gov-
ernments and middle-class lawyers. (Baraka 2015a)

In concurrence with Baraka, San Juan elaborates on the white supremacy

theme extrapolated from Obama’ eulogy by extending the analysis to
America’s claim to exceptionalism and the consequent displacement of the
“Others” through their subsumption to a homogenizing ideology of the
“liberal nation-state.”4 San Juan writes, in part:

With this figure of subsumption or synecdochic linkage, America reasserts a

privileged role in the world— all the margins, the absent Others, are redeemed in
an inclusive, homogenized space where cultural differences dissolve or are sorted
out into their proper niches in the ranking of national values and priorities.
We thus have plural cultures or ethnicities coexisting peacefully, in a free play
of monads in the best of all possible worlds — no longer the melting pot
of earlier theory but now a salad bowl, a smorgasbord of cultures, the mass
consumption of variegated and heterogeneous lifestyles.
There is in this picture, of course, a core or consensual culture to which
we add any number of diverse particulars, thus proving that our principles of
 7 THE RACIALIZED STATE 203

liberty and tolerance can accommodate those formerly excluded or ignored.

In short, your particular is not as valuable or significant as mine.
On closer scrutiny, this liberal mechanism of inclusion—what Herbert Mar-
cuse once called “repressive desublimation” — is a mode of appropriation: It
fetishizes and commodifies Others.
The universal swallows the particulars. And the immigrant, or border-
crosser like Guillermo Gomez Pena or Coco Fusco, our most provocative
performance-artists, is always reminded that to gain full citizenship, unam-
biguous rules must be obeyed: Proficiency in English is mandatory, assimi-
lation of certain procedures and rituals are assumed, and so on and so forth.
(San Juan 1999, italics added)

Denial of Historical Materialism

and the Postcolonial Retreat
To wrap-up of this subject of racialization in this segment of the work, this
author wishes at this juncture to highlight insights from a scholar and pub-
lic intellectual with a lifelong commitment beyond issues of social justice
and toward the broader struggle for human emancipation from all forms
of exploitation and oppression in the truest tradition of Marxist scholar-
ship, E. San Juan Jr., referred to throughout this work as “San Juan.” In
this author’s estimation, San Juan has distinguished himself for his dexter-
ity in using his pen as weapon in the struggle against injustice particularly
in the form of colonial and neocolonial exploitation in much of the Third
World. Among his outstanding works have also been an eloquent statement
against the scourge of racism and the inequality it breeds in the United
States and elsewhere. As a scholar-activist described by cultural critic and
philosopher Fredric Jameson as “a scholar of remarkable range and varied
talents,” accorded by political scientist Bertell Ollman his “[h]ighest rec-
ommendation,” and lauded by the late historian Manning Marable for his
“challenging perspective” and whose “analysis is absolutely vital for both
scholars and activists,” San Juan stands out among academicians from the
Third World who, through the power of his intellect, the integrity of his
position, and his command of the language of criticism, has been relent-
less and uncompromising in his challenge to conventional wisdom which,
in the end, serves not only to accommodate itself with the hegemonic and
exploitative imperial order but also serves to validate it. He has likewise been
critical of disciplines of thought, e.g., cultural studies, which, while initially
204 K. E. BAUZON

presuming to be progressive, has, in fact, “subverted the early promise of

the field as a radical transformative force” (San Juan 2003a).
Such also is the case with postcolonialism, a sub-school of thought in
literary and cultural studies emergent in the last thirty years much of it
centering on the works of its presumed set of “founding fathers” including
Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Spivak. These writers have, in fact,
provided much of the basis for postcolonialism evolving into a paradigm
in its own right but whose presuppositions are even attributable, at least
in large part, to the earlier works of Michel Foucault. The kernel of the
postcolonialism’s problematization of its task is summed up by San Juan as
follows:

[P]ostcolonial theory seeks to explain the ambivalent and hybrid nature of

subjects, their thinking and behavior, in the former colonies of the West-
ern imperial powers, mainly the British Commonwealth societies. It seeks to
prove that the colonial enterprise was not just a one-way affair of oppression
and exploitation, but a reciprocal or mutual co- or inter-determination of
both metropolitan master and “third world” subaltern. Whatever the subtle
differences among postcolonial critics, they all agree that colonialism, for all
its terror and barbarism, presents a rhetorical and philosophical anomaly: the
postcolonial subject as identical and different from the history textbook’s
portrayal of the submissive and silent victim of imperial conquest. It claims
to be more sophisticated or “profound” than the usual left or even liberal
explanation of colonialism. (Pozo)

Despite its purported sympathy for the dehumanized victims of imperialism

and colonialism, postcolonialism as it evolved as a paradigm eventually
revealed distinct tendencies which betrayed its purported original vision.
San Juan identifies three reasons why, namely:

[F]irst, post colonialists obscure or erase historical determination in favor of

rhetorical and linguistic idealization of the colonial experience; second, the
post colonialist mind refuses to be self-critical and assumes a self-righteous
dogmatism that it is infallible and cannot be refuted; and third, the practi-
cal effect of post colonialist prejudice is the unwitting justification of, if not
apology for, the continued neo-colonialist – ‘globalizing’ is the trendy epi-
thet – depredation of non-Western peoples, in particular indigenous groups,
women, and urban poor in Latin America, Asia and Africa.5 (San Juan 2003a)
 7 THE RACIALIZED STATE 205

Having expressed as much about the basic contours of postcolonialism

as reflected in the works of Bhabha and Spivak, noted mainly for their
unreserved hostility to historical materialism as an approach to explaining
the persistence of racism, poverty, violence, war, particularly the Zionist
State’s aggression in Palestine, and the very nature of capitalism as a system
of capital accumulation and labor exploitation. Exemplifying postcolonial-
ism’s rejection of historical materialism is Bhabha’s egregious attempt to
“obscure or erase historical determination” through some “rhetorical” as
well as “linguistic idealization” alluded to in the quote above. San Juan
takes one of Bhabha’s essays, “Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche, and the
Colonial Condition” and subjects it to deconstruction. In Bhabha’s mind,
perhaps, there could not be a more appropriate target for a makeover than
Fanon himself, known universally for his uncompromising analysis of racism
as essential feature of European colonialism (and now, American imperial-
ism), the convergence between colonialism and the exploitative character
of capitalism, the violent nature of colonialism (and imperialism), and the
“cleansing” effect of counter-violence used—without apology—by the vic-
tims of colonialism and imperialism as an instrument of emancipation.
San Juan uses the title “Immobilizing Fanon” in the subsection cri-
tiquing Bhabha for, indeed, that is what Bhabha has ended up doing
through a series of steps including: (a) “[situating] Fanon in the topos
of ambivalence” in the “uncertain interstices of historical change”; (b)
Denial of a “master narrative or realist perspective that provides a back-
ground of social and historical facts against which emerge the problem of
the individual or collective psyche”; and (c) the relegation of the psyche
“as a sociohistorical construction inserted into a web of cultural artifices
and artificial boundaries [thus making Fanon] reject the Hegelian ‘dream
for a human reality in-itself-for-itself’ for a nondialectical Manicheanism.”
To San Juan, Bhabha, on this last point, culminates his (Bhabha’s) reifica-
tion of the “Manichean colonial world that Fanon poignantly delineated
in his [Frantz Fanon’s] classic work, The Wretched of the Earth for the sake
of freezing Fanon in that twilight zone of difference, the in-between of
displacement, dispossession, and dislocation that Bhabha hypostatizes as
the ineluctable essence of postcoloniality.” Then, San Juan concludes: the
“[r]eductive closure of Fanon is complete” (San Juan, Beyond Postcolonial
Theory, Chapter 1, pp. 27–28).
206 K. E. BAUZON

Of Said’s exceptional status among the originators of postcolonialism,

San Juan offers exception to Said whose postcolonial approach is distin-
guished from the “scholastic and verbal magic” of Bhabha and Spivak. San
Juan pays homage to Said by recognizing his body of works for

its clarity of historical reference and political thrust. Its resonance is clear. Its
critique of U.S. imperialist hegemony, especially in the Middle East, cannot
be doubted…. It has provided weapons for oppositional “minority” intellec-
tuals. It has been useful in “conscienticizing” (Paulo Freire’s term) a larger
audience than those addressed by [Jacques] Derrida or [Michel] Foucault.
(Pozo, brackets added)

San Juan elaborates on his homage to Said in a 2003 interview with Michael
Pozo, Editor of the St. John’s University Humanities Review: “Although I
have criticized his inadequate views on Marxism, I consider Edward Said’s
commitment on behalf of Palestinian self-determination – a ‘nationalism’
different from Arafat and the bourgeois elements – as a progressive one that
should be supported in the face of Israeli state terrorism. (Said’s situation,
of course, is very complex and cannot be discussed here in depth.) In this
context, Said’s status as a diasporic intellectual is very much defined by
his actual political and ethical activities” (Pozo 2003). Further, San Juan
reinforces his estimation of Said in a 2006 essay, entitled, “Edward Said’s
Affiliations: Secular Humanism and Marxism.” In this piece, San Juan offers
most eloquently his highest esteem and admiration, if only belatedly, of Said
which should be seen as a culmination of a gradual evolution of regard from
hard criticism6 to acceptance and reconciliation, as signified in this essay’s
Abstract, as follows:

Overall, Said, despite a resort to a militant species of liberal humanism, pro-

vides a critical perspective on the complicity of academic discourse with preda-
tory neocolonial attacks on people of color everywhere, and on the value of
popular-democratic ideals of democratic sovereignty and egalitarian commu-
nity that can reconcile Europe and the Atlantic world with the revolutionary
movements of “postcolonial” subalterns around the globalized planet. As a
democratic, secular humanist, Said is an ally of the popular masses against
the terror of corporate globalization. (San Juan 2006)

With the above-caveat concerning Said, it is well to keep in mind that

many within the fields of the humanities and the social sciences still remain
enamored with what is referred to here as neoliberal pedagogy, described
 7 THE RACIALIZED STATE 207

above, and who also remain dismissive, often quite casually, of historical
materialism as “class reductionist,” “economistic,” “deterministic,” or “eu-
rocentric,” among other epithets as though it were worthless. Any of these
epithets assumes that the standard, prevailing approaches associated, say,
with the neoliberal pedagogy is the normal mode, in the Kuhnian sense, in
explaining social reality, and that any other approach is heresy.

The Problematization of Race Without Class

in the United States
Perhaps the most prescient current criticism of postcolonialism’s failure to
relate the problem of imperialism and popular resistance to it, on one level,
with the problem of racism and resistance to it in the United States, on
another level, is articulated most cogently by scholar-activist, Cornel West.
In response to the publication of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book, Between the World
and Me (2015) and the accolade it has received particularly among many
mainstream black intellectuals, West takes to task Coates’ failure—despite
his uniquely prominent position as a black writer in a profession (particu-
larly as a national correspondent for the liberal-oriented The Atlantic mag-
azine) dominated by whites—to level criticism against a black president
who has used his power to wage war by drones abroad, who has supported
the Zionist State of Israel in its slaughter of Palestinians, especially chil-
dren, and, while the trend did not commence with his presidency, one who
has nonetheless presided over the intensification of police militarization
and who has sought to deflect the killing of black lives—either by white
supremacists or by law enforcement agents—from the domestic terrorist
label and redefining it as a gun control issue.7 West likewise observes that
many of those that have offered high praises to Coates’ book, including
Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, have failed to do the same particularly in
the appropriation of renowned and beloved black writer and activist, James
Baldwin, with whom Coates has been compared. On July 16, 2015, West,
believing that the comparison is unwarranted, posts the following message
on his Facebook wall:

In Defense of James Baldwin – Why Toni Morrison (a literary genius) is

Wrong about Ta-Nehisi Coates. Baldwin was a great writer of profound
courage who spoke truth to power. Coates is a clever wordsmith with journal-
istic talent who avoids any critique of the Black president in power. Baldwin’s
208 K. E. BAUZON

painful self-examination led to collective action and a focus on social move-

ments. He reveled in the examples of Medgar, Martin, Malcolm, Fannie Lou
Hamer and Angela Davis. Coates’s fear-driven self-absorption leads to indi-
vidual escape and flight to safety – he is cowardly silent on the marvelous
new militancy in Ferguson, Baltimore, New York, Oakland, Cleveland and
other places. Coates can grow and mature, but without an analysis of capitalist
wealth inequality, gender domination, homophobic degradation, imperial occu-
pation (all concrete forms of plunder) and collective fightback (not just personal
struggle) Coates will remain a mere darling of White and Black Neo-liberals,
paralyzed by their Obama worship and hence a distraction from the necessary
courage and vision we need in our catastrophic times. (italics added)

And, in clarification of his earlier comment, responding to criticisms that

he may have been too harsh on Coates, West writes again on his Facebook
page, four days later, excerpted as follows:

My response to Brother Ta-Nehisi’s new book should not be misunderstood.

I simply tried to honestly evaluate the book at the level of Truth, Goodness
and Beauty. Since I believe there will never be another Baldwin – just as there
will never be another Coltrane, Morrison, Du Bois, Simone [as in Nina],
Robeson or Rakim – the coronation of Coates as our Baldwin is wrong.
His immense talents and gifts lie elsewhere and lead to different priorities.
He indeed tells crucial truths about the vicious legacy of white supremacy as
plunder on a visceral level, yet he fails to focus on our collective fightback, social
movements or political hope. Even his fine essays downplay people’s insurgency and
resistance. The full truth of white supremacy must include our historic struggles
against it. His critical comments in his essays about the respectability politics or
paternalistic speeches of the black president in power (absent in his book) do not
constitute a critique of the presidency – pro-Wall Street policy as capitalist wealth
inequality, drone policy as U.S. war crimes, massive surveillance as violation
of rights, or defense of ugly Israeli occupation as immoral domination. For
example, none of the black or white neo-liberals who coronate Coates say
that 500 Palestinian babies killed by U.S. supported Israeli forces in 50 days
or U.S. drones killing over 200 babies are crimes against humanity. Yet they
cry crocodile tears when black folk are murdered by U.S. police. Unlike
Baldwin, Coates gives them this hypocritical way out – with no cost to pay,
risk to take, or threat to their privilege because of his political silence on these
issues.8 (Italics added)

In fairness, Coates was interviewed by journalists Amy Goodman and

Juan Gonzalez on the program, Democracy Now!, on July 22, 2015, and
 7 THE RACIALIZED STATE 209

Coates was able to, first, provide context to his work, and, second, to
respond to some of the specific criticisms he has received for his new book,
in his own words. First, in response to the query about his experience
growing up in West Baltimore as a son of a former member of the Black
Panther Party, and influence, if any, of the Civil Rights Movement on him,
Coates responded:

I am in some ways outside of the African-American tradition. The African-

American tradition, in the main, is very, very church-based, very, very Chris-
tian. It accepts, you know, certain narratives about the world. I didn’t really
have that present in my house. As you said, my dad was in the Black Panther
Party. The mainstream sort of presentation of the civil rights movement was
not something that I directly inherited.
And beyond that, you know, I have to say, that just as a young man
and as a boy going out and navigating the world, the ways in which the
previous generation’s struggle was presented to me did not particularly make
sense. And so, notions of nonviolence, for instance, when I walked out into
the streets of West Baltimore, seemed to have very, very little applicability.
Violence was essential to one’s life there. It was everywhere. It was all around
us. And then, when one looked out to the broader country, as I became more
politically conscious, it was quite obvious that violence was essential to America
— to its past, to its present and to its future. And so, there was some degree
of distance for me between how — my politics and how I viewed the world
at that time and what was presented as my political heritage. (Coates 2015,
italics added)

And, on the broader issues of white supremacy, structural racism in the

United States, and US imperialism, Coates offers further thoughts. Corre-
lated to his experience as a student at Howard University, he commented:

Well, one of the things that — you know, this theme of the book of living under
a system of plunder and about surviving and how you deal with that and how you
struggle against it, within that are the beautiful things that black people have
forged, you know, even under really, really perilous conditions. For me, Howard
University is one of the most loveliest [sic], for me personally. (Coates 2015,
italics added)

On his meetings with and criticisms toward Obama, Coates explained:

The first one [of a few meetings with Obama] was after I levied quite a bit
of critique of his [Obama’s] Morehouse speech, which I was not a fan of
210 K. E. BAUZON

and am not a fan of now. I think that the president—I thought then, and
I think now, that the president has a tendency, when it’s convenient for him,
to emphasize that he is the president of all America, and then, when it comes
to issues of morality, to deliver a message that the president of all America has
no right to deliver. The president of all America, the bearer of the heritage of
America, the bearer of policy of America, which has — you know, for the vast,
vast majority of its history has been a policy of plunder towards black people, has
no right to lecture black people on morality. That’s my position. You know, I
understand an African-American man wanting to have a conversation with
young people. But as the president of America, as far as I’m concerned, you
give up that right. You know, if there cannot be direct policy towards black
people, then there should be no direct criticism towards black people either.
(Coates 2015, italics added)

And when asked about “What would James Baldwin do [presumably today,
if he were alive]?”, after having been reminded that Baldwin gave John F.
Kennedy “hell” (before his assassination) by presumably bringing up class
issues, Coates offered something quite revealing, about his own particular
“water’s edge,” metaphorically, where he would stop. Coates responded,
with an apparent bit of agitation toward progressivism, much less socialism
thus revealing a conservative if not reactionary streak, as follows: “But, you
know,… I was deeply concerned about the liberal and the progressive notion
that one should pursue policy based on class and not really deal with race.”9
(Coates 2015, italics added)
Coates’ orientation as reflected in this final quote indicates not an iso-
lated case but, rather, a general pattern of thinking and attitudes among
members of the black community, particularly those who have arrived at
the mainstream status and have assumed presumably responsible leader-
ship positions—those whom Glen Ford of the Black Agenda Report has
frequently referred to as the “Black misleadership class”—to conform to
standards of civility and personal responsibility for the consequences of their
actions, standards which are assumed to be requisites for them to be accept-
able as responsible negotiating partners, and powerbrokers in behalf of the
black community, at the table with representatives of the corporate elites
that have been—and remain—at the helm of political power in this coun-
try. Ford describes this demand for civility and its rationale in the context
of the non-indictment of the police that shot dead a black youth—Michael
Brown—and the ensuing protests as follows:
 7 THE RACIALIZED STATE 211

The corporate media, reflecting their owners’ anxiety at the failure of Black
people to revert to a state of passivity in Ferguson, Missouri, have arrived at a
general consensus on two counts: the need to “demilitarize” the police (fewer
bullets, smaller armored vehicles?) and, more immediately, to re-establish
some semblance of “calm” (as in comatose) in the neighborhood and beyond.
Corporate-attuned Black powerbrokers and politicians deliver essentially
the same message, counseling (quiet) introspection and a search for “so-
lutions” (diversions) to the historical oppression in which they are deeply
complicit.
But first, tensions must be reduced, to diffuse the confrontation – which,
we are told, serves no one’s interests but the “agitators and instigators”
(who, apparently, have millions of dollars in derivatives wagers riding on
urban chaos). (Ford)

The protests in Ferguson lent impetus to the emergence of an incipient,

principally youth-led movement—known for its Twitter hashtag #Black-
LivesMatter—against police brutality, a malignant social disease that reveals
not only the violence that inheres in the state through the police but also
its racial nature that continues to brutalize communities of color. Thus,
calls for civility simply fall flat on their faces; they are regarded as mere calls
intended to defang the protests and to blunt the anger of those that are
being victimized. Further, calls for personal responsibility and self-reliance,
such as that which the discredited comedian and presumably clean-cut
television “Dad” Bill Cosby has made himself apparently acceptable and
respectable to the white audience, are intended to shift the onus of failure
on to victims of this long-standing social oppression and exploitation of
blacks and communities of color in general, the assumption being that if
they obey or play by the rules, educate themselves, and work hard, they
will find success.
Giroux, in another essay, offers the following incisive assessment of the
implications of the ethos of “personal responsibility” and “self-reliance”
inculcated through various institutions, and serving as a complement to
the work ethic used to persuade countless generations about the presumed
worth of one’s personal efforts and the promise of success, only to serve,
in the end, as a handmaiden of neoliberal-oriented corporate power, in the
following passages:

Four decades of neoliberal policies have resulted in an economic Darwinism

that promotes privatization, commodification, free trade, and deregulation.
It privileges personal responsibility over larger social forces, reinforces the gap
212 K. E. BAUZON

between the rich and poor by redistributing wealth to the most powerful and
wealthy individuals and groups, and it fosters a mode of public pedagogy that
privileges the entrepreneurial subject while encouraging a value system that
promotes self-interest, if not an unchecked selfishness.
…..
With its theater of cruelty and mode of public pedagogy, neoliberalism as
a form of economic Darwinism attempts to undermine all forms of solidarity
capable of challenging market-driven values and social relations, promoting
the virtues of an unbridled individualism almost pathological in its disdain for
community, social responsibility, public values, and the public good.
…..
One consequence is that social problems are increasingly criminalized while
social protections are either eliminated or fatally weakened. Not only are public
servants described as the new “welfare queens” and degenerate freeloaders
but young people are also increasingly subjected to harsh disciplinary mea-
sures both in and out of schools, often as a result of a violation of the most
trivial rules.4 Another characteristic of this crushing form of economic Dar-
winism is that it thrives on a kind of social amnesia that erases critical thought,
historical analysis, and any understanding of broader systemic relations. In
this regard, it does the opposite of critical memory work by eliminating those
public spheres where people learn to translate private troubles into public issues.
(Giroux 2014, italics added)

In the final analysis, this author is of the opinion that West’s criticism of
Coates, as quoted above, was not unwarranted. The criticisms leveled by
Coates toward Obama and the degree of racist violence that he (Coates)
has narrated may no doubt be genuinely felt; but his statement that he
was “deeply concerned about the liberal and the progressive notion” may,
in fact, reveal that he is an activist of the reactionary sort, reflecting the
kind of phobic, irrational ideology that rejects historical materialism rem-
iniscent during the Cold War era. Further, Coates’ criticisms predictably
fall short of what is needed to confront the racial state, failing essentially
to relate this state with the material, social, and economic conditions—
such as the inevitable link between race and class—spawned by the very
nature of the capitalist system and the worldwide imperialist violence that
it promotes, e.g., assault on the Palestinians through surrogate US ally,
the Zionist State of Israel; Obama’s authorization of additional lethal aid
to the Zionist State as Israel’s medieval-inspired assault and siege on Gaza
was ongoing during the summer of 2014, to this day, and his (Obama’s)
signing of a new law placating the Jewish lobby and the Zionist State of
Israel designed to render illegal participation by US-based corporations
 7 THE RACIALIZED STATE 213

of the highly effective Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions

(BDS) Movement against Israeli policies in the Occupied Palestinian Ter-
ritories; or countless coups, assassinations, and destabilization campaigns
against so-called undesirable regimes and leaders that the United States
has sponsored throughout much of the Cold War period to this day. There
is nothing civil about this imperialist behavior, and there is nothing civil
either about police brutality and countless unlawful killings of innocent
persons, often from communities of color, thus, implicating—and justifi-
ably rendering suspect—the entire criminal justice system, often revealing
its class nature and its politically inspired prosecutions against labor unions
as well as against progressive and left-oriented cause organizations. Calls
for civility and invocation of personal responsibility and self-reliance, as
discussed above, are, therefore, regarded as bearing no moral weight, but
serving merely as mask to disguise the racial and violent nature of the state
and doing nothing to allay fears or suspicions of the traditionally oppressed
communities, much less alter or upset the present arrangement based on
capital accumulation and labor exploitation.
This is the same arrangement currently being rejected by emergent new
voices coming from perches not as comfortable as the ones being occupied
by Coates, Morrison, Cosby, the corporate-backed Rev. Al Sharpton, or
even by television talk show personality Oprah Winfrey. These new voices
have a sharply critical tone to them and are not coming from the traditional
black leadership class either, described above by Ford. The Rev. Osagyefo
Uhuru Sekou, youthful activist-pastor of the Friendly Temple Missionary
Baptist Church that hosted Michael Brown’s funeral in August 2014, in
a lecture at the Warner Pacific College in Portland, Oregon, offered the
following candid description:

Martin Luther King ain’t coming back. Get over it. It won’t look like the civil
rights movement. It’s angry. It’s profane. If you’re more concerned about
young people using profanity than about the profane conditions they live in,
there’s something wrong with you. (van Gelder)

Rev. Sekou followed up on the above-comments during an interview,

and further offered, among other insights, the following passages providing
both the context and the nature of the emergent movement represented
by these voices, as follows:
214 K. E. BAUZON

In the last decade, particularly in the age of Obama, the vast majority of the
black leadership has been the punditry class—those of us, and I am guilty of
this, who are on television, who write books, who give lectures, but don’t
necessarily experience on-the-ground direct confrontation with the state.
Now the leadership that is emerging are the folks who have been in the street,
who have been tear-gassed. The leadership is black, poor, queer, women. It presents
in a different way. It’s a revolutionary aesthetic. It’s black women, queer women,
single mothers, poor black boys with records, kids with tattoos on their faces who
sag their pants.
These folks embody intersectionality. Particularly in Ferguson, solidarity
with Palestine was never a question. More than 250 Palestinians marched
with us, and the local Palestinian solidarity committee was with us from day
one.
And there is a suspicion of the state. As a result of that suspicion, a lot of
folks have turned to cooperative models —talking about buying land, forms of
entrepreneurship, a lot of discourse about self-healing — because there is such a
disdain and distrust for the state. (van Gelder, italics added)

The Recovery of Class, and the Class Basis of Racism

San Juan’s interventions in debates pertaining to race and racism such as the
one presently at hand have been numerous, vigorous, and profound. Per-
haps the most significant of these interventions in its generation, in which
San Juan demonstrates his erudition and mastery of historical-materialist
critique, is his 2002 book, entitled Racism and Cultural Studies: Critiques
of Multiculturalist Ideology and the Politics of Difference (Duke Univer-
sity Press). One reviewer, Neferti Tadiar of Columbia University’s Barnard
College, writes of this book, included as blurb in the book’s jacket, the
following comment: “An important, stringent critique of the hegemonic
versions of multiculturalism touted in both popular and academic spheres.
San Juan provides a new reality to contend with – a new version of the
present, one in which erased histories of racism, oppression, exploitation,
and the struggle of marginalized groups are restored.” Another reviewer,
Jeffrey Cabusao, Professor of English and Cultural Studies at Bryant Uni-
versity, comments:

Boldly pushing against the historical limitations of fashionable theoretical

trends of the academy, San Juan urgently asks us to reclaim the rich and
dynamic Marxist traditions (both Western and Third World Marxisms) of
 7 THE RACIALIZED STATE 215

theorizing the connection between cultural production and the struggle for
radical social transformation (the twin tasks of ideological and material strug-
gle). In Racism and Cultural Studies (RCS), San Juan offers a rigorous his-
torical materialist method for regrounding the dominant “new times=new
politics” post-al model of contemporary Cultural Studies. This alternative
methodology, in RCS, shifts us from reified notions of difference to a dialec-
tical regrounding in which difference is conceived as, in the words of Red
Feminist Teresa Ebert, “difference within a material system of exploitation.”4
This shifting of grounds enables San Juan to bring to the fore the importance
of analyzing the complex ways in which difference – race, gender, sexuality
– is historically produced and reproduced within class society. A leitmotif
of this book is the advancement of Marx’s challenge to idealism. It is not
enough to interpret the world. We must collectively and creatively strug-
gle for a radically transformed society in which difference will no longer be
produced by racialized and gendered divisions of labor (exploitative social
relations of production). Instead, genuine differences would emerge: each
lives “according to her/his abilities and needs.” (Cabusao 2005)

In this book, San Juan elaborates on several interrelated premises aspects

of which he has previously began to develop at varying lengths through var-
ious media outlets. One of these premises, regarded as cardinal, as explained
by reviewer Cabusao, is

the notion that the U.S. nation-state is a racial polity, a thesis which philoso-
pher Charles Mills proposed in The Racial Contract (1997).9 Within the
U.S. racial polity, racism -- alongside its ideological twin, white supremacy
-- functions as the organizing principle of the division of labor and unequal
distribution of resources and wealth. This “racial divide constitutes ‘a form
of stratification built into the structure of U.S. society’ as a Herrenvolk
democracy.”10 By returning us to the basics of understanding the centrality
of white supremacy/racism in the development of U.S. capitalism, RCS [San
Juan’s Racism and Cultural Studies ] offers an inventory and an advancement
of dialectical methodological approaches that can be utilized to critique how
the U.S. racial polity came to be, so that we can radically transform it. Given
the expansive reach of U.S. Empire, one can no longer ignore how racism
organizes global capitalism (international racialized and gendered divisions
of labor, asymmetrical power relations between the global North and South)
and sustains U.S. imperial hegemony around the globe. (Cabusao 2005)

It is worth it to recall at this juncture an article by Barbara Jeanne Fields,

published in 1990, entitled “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United
216 K. E. BAUZON

States of America.” In that piece, Fields tried to explain that race was—and
is—more than just a matter of race relations. In other words, inequality
among races is a symptom of and traceable to the very nature of economic
inequality. In the United States, this economic inequality has direct corre-
lation with matters already brought up above, e.g., generations of slavery,
colonial plunder, and the system of mass incarceration prevalent today.
Fields laments those who persist in thinking of race as a mere matter race
relations scholarship, or reducible to attitude. She writes:

Probably a majority of American historians think of slavery in the United

States as primarily a system of race relations — as though the chief business
of slavery were the production of white supremacy rather than the produc-
tion of cotton, sugar, rice and tobacco. One historian has gone so far as to
call slavery ‘the ultimate segregator’. He does not ask why Europeans seek-
ing the ‘ultimate’ method of segregating Africans would go to the trouble
and expense of transporting them across the ocean for that purpose, when
they could have achieved the same end so much more simply by leaving the
Africans in Africa. (Fields)

Fields then goes on to assess the implications of this hair-splitting process

of isolating race from its historical, social, and economic context by citing
comparable cases in history wherein connecting race to this proper context
is absolutely essential. She writes:

No one dreams of analyzing the struggle of the English against the Irish
as a problem in race relations, even though the rationale that the English
developed for suppressing the ‘barbarous’ Irish later served nearly word for
word as a rationale for suppressing Africans and indigenous American Indians.
Nor does anyone dream of analyzing serfdom in Russia as primarily a problem
of race relations, even though the Russian nobility invented fictions of their
innate, natural superiority over the serfs as preposterous as any devised by
American racists. (Fields)

The essence of doing so would allow assignment of responsibility and

accountability for what happened, e.g., the consequences of slavery and
colonial plunder, just as what the Black Reparations Movement in the
United States or, for that matter, what the reparatory justice movement
in the Caribbean and similar such movements elsewhere across the former
colonized areas of the globe, are all calling for, at minimum. The response
of the United States and such former colonial powers as Great Britain,
 7 THE RACIALIZED STATE 217

France, and Belgium thus far has been less than noble; they have endeav-
ored at great lengths to ignore these movements and to trivialize them,
based on their notion that slavery and colonialism belong to the past; that
blacks in the United States, having been long-freed from slavery, should
be responsible for themselves; and that former colonies, having been freed
from colonial control for at least a generation, should also now take respon-
sibility for their own future. At the same time, they have also engaged in
co-optative efforts designed to placate segments of the black community
or the elite leadership class in the former colonies to blunt any demands for
reparations, avoid any admission of wrong-doing, and evade any form of
responsibility and accountability altogether, be it legal, moral, or ethical.
This pattern of evasion of responsibility on the part of the former colonial
powers of Europe and, presently, the United States as an empire, is sadly
replicated by continuing evasion of responsibility for horrendous conse-
quences with genocidal implications of the US conduct of the war in Viet-
nam; in support of the 1965 military coup in Indonesia resulting in deaths
of at least a million people; in the backing of the Indonesian military’s inva-
sion of East Timor, resulting in death and displacement of at least a third
of that hapless island-country’s population; the funding and training of
death squads, paramilitary formations, and security agencies of oppressive
regimes all throughout South and Central America throughout most of the
Cold War period. In the botched but still ongoing so-called war on terror,
several innocent persons have been swept up, summarily labeled terrorist or
enemy combatants and subsequently inserted into US-maintained prison
facilities such as at Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo10 where they were then
subjected to inhumane, and degrading treatment, or unspeakable treat-
ment for a number of years, even decades. Many, nay, an overwhelming
number of these have never been charged with any crime or wrong-doing,
as illustrated in the specific case of Tariq Ba Odah, a young Pakistani man
of twenty-three when he was ensnared by what his lawyer describes as a
“bounty-based dragnet” for being at the wrong place at the wrong time
following the illegal US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 (Farah). Human
rights organizations, like the Center for Constitutional Rights, have time
and again called for them to be charged so they can defend themselves in
a court of law or, otherwise, be released to freedom. The US government
administrations since the presidency of George W. Bush to the present day,
under 2009 Nobel Peace Prize awardee Barack Obama, have either refused
to deal with this issue invariably arguing that there is bureaucratic red tape,
or congressional opposition, or public outcry, or otherwise fear for that
218 K. E. BAUZON

the innocent prisoners might do against the United States in an imagined

retaliation for the injustice done to them while under detention!
Thankfully, we have 2005 Nobel laureate in Literature, Harold Pinter,
in his Nobel lecture, entitled “Art, Truth, & Politics,” courageously called
at the highest profile possible the world’s attention to these atrocities that
might otherwise be forgotten. In contradistinguishing the record of the
former Soviet Union, harshly recorded in the Western mainstream media,
with that of the United States during the same post-World War II period,
he declared, in part:

But my contention here is that the US crimes in the same period have only
been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged,
let alone recognised as crimes at all. I believe this must be addressed and that
the truth has considerable bearing on where the world stands now. Although
constrained, to a certain extent, by the existence of the Soviet Union, the
United States’ actions throughout the world made it clear that it had con-
cluded it had carte blanche to do what it liked. (Pinter)

Pinter continued on discussing common methods the United States used,

saying:

Direct invasion of a sovereign state has never in fact been America’s favoured
method. In the main, it has preferred what it has described as ‘low intensity
conflict’. Low intensity conflict means that thousands of people die but slower
than if you dropped a bomb on them in one fell swoop. It means that you
infect the heart of the country, that you establish a malignant growth and
watch the gangrene bloom. When the populace has been subdued - or beaten
to death - the same thing - and your own friends, the military and the great
corporations, sit comfortably in power, you go before the camera and say
that democracy has prevailed. This was a commonplace in US foreign policy
in the years to which I refer. (Pinter)

Then, citing specific examples, Pinter goes on:

The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing
military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War.
I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the
Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the
United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never
be forgiven.
 7 THE RACIALIZED STATE 219

Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries.

Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy?
The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American
foreign policy. But you wouldn’t know it. (Pinter)

Characterizing US imperial demeanor in these and other instances, Pinter

suggested that:

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening

it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of
the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but
very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to
America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide
while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty,
highly successful act of hypnosis. (Pinter)

And, lastly, Pinter credits the United States for being a show in itself, saying:

I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on
the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very
clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity
is self-love. It’s a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say
the words, ‘the American people’, as in the sentence, ‘I say to the American
people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and
I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about
to take on behalf of the American people.’ (Pinter)

San Juan himself affirms the above-quoted passages. More importantly, he

recovers the significance of class, long ignored by mainstream scholars of
race who have sought to demonstrate its irrelevance by trivializing it to
mean largely lifestyle or status. They have also sterilized the subject of race
by assigning it under the benign rubric of “race relations” or “multicul-
tural/intercultural relations,” divorced from issues of capital accumulation
and labor exploitation as well as the possibility that race may be used or
manipulated as an instrument of these, all especially within the context of
contemporary neoliberal globalization. San Juan articulates this essential
point in a 2010 essay addressed to the Asian-American academic commu-
nity, writing:
220 K. E. BAUZON

The gospel of neo-liberal globalisation, also known as “the Washington Con-

sensus,” took off with a retooling of methodological individualism in “ra-
tional choice theory“ and officially sanctioned Establishment multicultural-
ism. To maintain the hegemonic common sense of a racial hierarchy, the US
dominant bloc requires a “buffer race” to split up the toiling majority, keeping
blacks visible but subordinate, and thus deflect class conflict by preserving the
civil-society consensus of white colour privilege (Gran 1999). To preserve the
status quo, the identity of the white working class needs to be defined by race, not
by class consciousness. (San Juan 2010b, italics added)

Further, San Juan recovers, nay, insists on, the importance of history in
terms of appreciating the unique origins and particularities of the current
situation as well as the agency of the oppressed actors themselves in shaping
their destiny, keeping in mind the forces arrayed against them, neither con-
ceding that their history has been rewritten or erased by their oppressors,
nor accommodating to any hybridity or decentering as a matter of compro-
mise as postcolonialists are wont to do. In so doing, San Juan negates the
validity to any critique that Marxism is deterministic or eurocentric when
it comes to history and affirms the agency of its actors in responding to
their unique and particular circumstances. This is exemplified in his crit-
ical re-reading of the past, preventing it from erasure or distortion, and
contradistinguishing it from the current conventional interpretation of the
system of slavery, an interpretation that would, almost as a jerk reaction
or a default position, relegate slavery as a mere matter of social relations
divorced from its economic roots that gave rise to inequality or, for that
matter, political oppression. In the following passage from a 2005 essay in
support of the black reparations movement, invoking reflections from black
intellectuals and activists W.E.B. Du Bois, George Jackson, and Mumia
Abu-Jamal on the black transition from slavery to bourgeois democracy,
and drawing from insights from historical materialism, San Juan insists on
an essential recalibration of the way justice for slavery’s victims and their
descendants may, nay, should, be properly conceived:

How can restitution be made for past wrongs so as to undo what has been
done to an entire people? What is problematic is the paradox of the solu-
tion: justice conceptualized as a fair exchange of values, the compensation
for labor-power expropriated from the slave, follows of course from a liberal
understanding of value as a product of free labor. However, it reveals in its
fold the real inequality of the parties involved: the slave’s labor was coerced,
her/his freedom alienated from her/him. As everyone admits, this inequality
 7 THE RACIALIZED STATE 221

(impervious to market calculation) includes not only the deep psychologi-

cal trauma of free persons being enslaved but also the disastrous social and
political structures that have damaged the lives of the survivors—something
“non-reparable or “incompensational” (Martin and Yaquinto 2004, 22). Can
deprivation of freedom be repaired or rectified by an attempt at “equal”
exchange? Can disparity of life chances be remedied by equality before the
law of the market? (San Juan 2007, 41–42)

Prognosis
This chapter began with a discussion of the Cold War and the conditions it
created in justifying and perpetuating US imperial hegemony in the global
stage, the racial state, and its economic system based on accumulation.
Academic disciplines not only were enjoined, many practitioners among
them in their prominent positions, status, and access to and influence in
mainstream journals, textbook writing, classrooms, and professional orga-
nizations, became Cold Warriors and apologists for the state. Playing one
role or another and at varying degrees, these practitioners formed the core,
throughout much of the Cold War and the post-Cold War periods, of what
is referred to here as neoliberal pedagogy. This pedagogy predetermined
the narratives in historical writing, and defined the broad parameters and
purposes of research including the problems to be defined and the tools
with which to solve them. Academic disciplines adjusted to and accommo-
dated the demands of the state for ideological conformity which, in turn,
imposed its definition of subversion for those who dared go beyond these
parameters. To deny that there were no firings, demotions, non-hirings,
and other forms of academic banishments against those who dared or oth-
erwise thought prohibited thoughts would be disingenuous if not outright
dishonest.
This conformity has been most evident in the social sciences as practi-
tioners embraced a supposedly value-free approach to their respective disci-
plines, while regarding any alternate approach as value-laden, unscholarly,
and most likely political, and therefore, to be rejected or proscribed. This is
the fate that befell historical materialism, an approach avoided like plague
having been associated with what was deemed as the worst features of
orthodox Marxism including its presumed economic determinism, euro-
centrism, and historicism precluding the agency of actors other than work-
ers in a mature capitalist stage in bringing about their own emancipation.
222 K. E. BAUZON

The end of the Cold War and the concomitant collapse of actually existing
socialist experiments in the former Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe
brought about a sense of unabashed triumphalism in Western capitals—the
end of history as one wrote—that seemed to validate their belief in the supe-
riority of capitalism and its complementary political ideology of liberalism,
both anchored on the belief in the primacy of the individual over society,
against any competing ideology, in which presumably self-interested pri-
vate individuals would compete to conserve and advance their gains over
others and wherein the state, shedding its role in providing social services
and upholding public interest, assumes its role as a protector of private gain
and interests.
Within the US body politic, founded as it is on the blood and labor
of slaves and the plunder of global resources through the institutions and
mechanisms of the US-led neoliberal globalization, an elaborate web of
market-oriented academic discourse evolved to dissimulate the racial nature
of the state, the supremacist thinking that underlies it, and the persistence
of a politico-economic system controlled by the Top One Percent of its
households. As shown in an earlier discussion, this goes by the name of
multiculturalism, a term with popular appeal but whose function in vali-
dating the power structure and in concealing the racial nature of the state
is little understood. As understood by most, it has been taken as the basis
of the policy of diversity, the acceptance of others, or the toleration of all
kinds of differences. By its nature, therefore, it is insidious especially to
those who have faith in it but who fail to recognize it as the mere exer-
cise—to borrow San Juan’s term—of the state’s “plenary power” wherein
the state forbids, on a formal-legal level, members of society to use force
and violence against each other but which, in fact, reserves the preroga-
tive to inflict the same on everybody and on any group at will and with
the ultimate effect of maintaining, rather than challenging, the existing
socioeconomic power structure favoring the aforesaid Top One Percent.
Insidious too is the promotion of the concept of personal responsibility
as a correlate to the multicultural approach to interpersonal and interra-
cial relations. An assumption of this concept is that the lot of each and
every individual depends essentially on that person’s determination to move
beyond his/her current condition toward self-fulfillment. Rooted in the
Protestant work ethic, it has been ingrained in popular consciousness but
hammered particularly into the minds of minorities, particularly among
blacks, by such popular television situation-comedy shows as “All in the
Family” (1971–1979), and “The Cosby Show” (1984–1992), with the
 7 THE RACIALIZED STATE 223

main characters of Archie Bunker and Mr. Huxtable, respectively, empha-

sizing the significance of traditional roles and values and, in the case of Dr.
Huxtable, preaching the importance of fitting in on the part of an upper-
middle-class Black family into US society. In real life, this has been the
approach of such leading Black personalities like Bill Cosby, who played
Dr. Huxtable, and Oprah Winfrey, who hosted a long-running Chicago-
based television talk show, The Oprah Winfrey Show. The essence of the
message of these programs places the onus for success or failure on the
individual minority person and deflects any criticism from or attention to
structural factors, conditioned by enduring sentiments of racism pervading
interracial relations, all contributing to what mainstream sociologists have
conveniently referred to as the culture of poverty. It is no surprise that this
type of message also deflects proper attention to the role that the state has
played in perpetuating this apparent sense of helplessness among members
of minority communities, particularly among blacks. Through the enact-
ment of a series of laws and policies that all but affirm the state’s neoliberal
character, it has presided over deregulatory programs that proved a boon to
corporations enabling them to transfer wealth, much of which was derived
from public funds, to private coffers with the government serving as a con-
duit, without as much requiring the corporate executives to earn their due
by sweating it out under the hot sun, or rolling up their sleeves, and dirty-
ing their fingernails like how the rest of average citizenry is made to believe
to be the way to prosperity. This, in turn, becomes the justification for
the enactment of mean-spirited austerity measures entailing curtailment of
social programs on the argument that the government is not in the busi-
ness of providing these services which, to begin with, should accrue to the
individual, at least in the abstract, only if he/she goes out and find work
and earns a wage to be able to afford these amenities.
This inculcation of personal responsibility, and the weight placed on it
upon the individual, is sadly contrasted to the absence of acknowledgment
of any official responsibility, much less accountability, for the legacy of the
Atlantic slave trade and of the socioeconomic system of slavery especially
in the American South upon which much of the early economic prosperity
of this country rested and continues to rest; or, for the genocide against
the indigenous population of the New World upon which much of their
dispossession allowed the territorial expansion—along with the exploitation
of resources therein—of what we know today as the United States; or, for
the continuing plunder of much of the globe’s resources, unprecedented in
224 K. E. BAUZON

human history, under the guise of neoliberal globalization based, in reality,

on a state-sanctioned economic system of private accumulation and profit.
If the boycott by the United States of the 2001 UN-sponsored World
Conference Against Racism, held in Durban, South Africa, during the presi-
dency of George W. Bush Jr., is any indication, any official acknowledgment
is not forthcoming anytime soon, anticipating that the conference would
take up the issue of reparations. This boycott was repeated in 2009 under
the Obama Administration, partly in solidarity with the Zionist State of
Israel, when a conference to review progress since the 2001 Durban Con-
ference was held in Geneva, Switzerland in April 2009. In the case of the
Zionist State, the boycott was an expression of displeasure over the antic-
ipated discussion associating Zionism as a racist ideology.11 The US boy-
cott was criticized by Stan E. Willis, Director of the Chicago-based National
Conference of Black Lawyers, who commented: “More than anything else,
the symbolism of an African-American president rejecting a world gather-
ing called to help wipe out racism is just stunning” (Muwakil).
From the legislative side, efforts at extracting any acknowledgment
much less an apology fell apart when, in 2008 and 2009, respectively, the
House and the Senate each but separately voted for an apology of its own
but could not reconcile any common language that could be forwarded to
the White House for the President’s signature. But even then, there was
not any assurance that the president would sign it into law.
The reparations movement, nonetheless, has gained momentum of its
own in the spate of police killings and extra-judicial executions against
unarmed black citizens and subsequent protests in Staten Island, New York,
Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland, among other cities across
the country during the 2015–2016 period alone. These events led to the
birth of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) Movement, discussed earlier, cred-
ited with having been instrumental, along with prominent members of
the Black community, in persuading the United Nations (UN) to send a
fact-finding mission to assess the human rights conditions in this country
particularly as they pertain to Blacks. Thereafter, the UN Working Group
of Experts on People of African Descent, notably chaired by Mireille Fanon
Mende-France, daughter of author-activist Frantz Fanon, issued a prelim-
inary report singling out slavery and its onerous legacy for the continuing
sorry plight of citizens of African-American descent. It also urged the gov-
ernment of the United States to deliver on the demand for reparations as
has been articulated by the reparations movement. Alongside this proposal,
the report also urged the US Congress to enact the proposed legislation,
 7 THE RACIALIZED STATE 225

entitled Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African-Americans

Act, and to set up a national human rights commission in a renewed effort
to prod the government to acknowledge the Atlantic slave trade as a “crime
against humanity” (UN Committee). In issuing the report, Mendes-France
explained, in part: “Contemporary police killings and the trauma it cre-
ates are reminiscent of the racial terror lynchings in the past. Impunity for
state violence has resulted in the current human rights crisis and must be
addressed as a matter of urgency” (UN Committee). Further, the report
addressed the “structural” origins of the continuing discrimination and
oppression of the black community in this country. It reads, in part: “De-
spite substantial changes since the end of the enforcement of Jim Crow and
the fight for civil rights, ideology ensuring the domination of one group
over another continues to negatively impact the civil, political, economic,
social and cultural rights of African-Americans today.” It continues: “The
persistent gap in almost all the human development indicators such as life
expectancy, income and wealth level of education and even food security…
reflects the level of structural discrimination that creates de facto barriers
for people of African descent to fully exercise their human rights” (UN
Committee).
Interestingly, President Obama, in his “Farewell Address to the Nation,”
delivered on January 10, 2017 in his hometown of Chicago before a recep-
tive crowd, painted a somber picture about his accomplishments while in
office. Aside from affirming the exceptionalism of the United States espe-
cially in international affairs, in domestic matters, he acknowledged that
modest goals had been attained, declaring: “Today, the economy is grow-
ing again; wages, incomes, home values, and retirement accounts are rising
again; poverty is falling again” (Obama, “Farewell Address”). Despite this,
Obama recognized that “stark inequality” exists and is “corrosive to our
democratic principles.” He added: “While the top 1% has amassed a bigger
share of wealth and income, too many families, in inner cities and rural
counties, have been left behind – the laid-off factory worker, the waitress
and healthcare worker who struggle to pay bills – convinced that the game
is fixed against them, that their government only serves the interests of
the powerful – a recipe for more cynicism and polarization in our politics”
(Obama, “Farewell Address”).
Addressing the issue of race relations in particular, he distanced him-
self from what he referred to as a well-intended but unrealistic view of the
United States as being in a “post-racial” stage following his election. This
was largely because race, he asserted, “remains a potent and divisive force in
226 K. E. BAUZON

our society,” and that “we’re not where we need to be” (Obama, “Farewell
Address”). Ironically, he offered in this address support for that one pol-
icy that he could not enact—or against which he acted—as president: the
matter of acknowledgment of slavery and its legacy albeit at the personal
level. He further acknowledged that, for white Americans, this is particu-
larly challenging because this would mean “acknowledging that the effects
of slavery and Jim Crow didn’t suddenly vanish in the ’60s,” especially
when poll after poll shows that majority of white American respondents
indicate no sense of racism or have no experience with racism, at least in
the way that black Americans have.
Here, one gets the sense that while racism is a daunting and a persistent
problem in race relations in this country, not all the immediate problems
related to the inferior socioeconomic status being suffered by the black
community may be attributed to racism. Indeed, many popular mainstream
publications have offered their own respective assessments of the Obama
years, much of which, negative, as a random albeit unscientific search on
Google would reveal using the simple phrase “Black lives under Obama”
in the searchline. Topping the list is a piece from The Atlantic, a centrist
liberal-leaning magazine, entitled “How Barack Obama Failed Black Amer-
icans,” by William A. Darity Jr., in its December 22, 2016 issue. Focusing,
among others, on comparative incomes among black households and their
white counterparts, Darity, who turns out to be Samuel DuBois Cook Pro-
fessor of Public Policy at Duke University, writes:

Estimates generated from the 2013 round of the Federal Reserve’s Survey
of Consumer Finances indicate that black households have one-thirteenth of
the wealth of white households at the median. We have concluded that the
average black household would have to save 100 percent of its income for
three consecutive years to close the wealth gap. The key source of the black-
white wealth gap is the intergenerational effects of transfers of resources.
White parents have far greater resources to give to their children via gifts
and inheritances, so that the typical white young adult starts their working
lives with a much greater initial net worth than the typical black young adult.
These intergenerational effects are blatantly non-meritocratic. (Darity)

Darity assesses further that

Indeed, the history of black wealth deprivation, from the failure to provide
ex-slaves with 40 acres and a mule to the violent destruction of black prop-
erty in white riots to the seizure and expropriation of black-owned land to
 7 THE RACIALIZED STATE 227

the impact of racially restrictive covenants on homeownership to the dis-

criminatory application of policies like the GI Bill and the FHA, created the
foundation for a perpetual racial wealth gap. (Darity)

Another notable observation is one by Reginald Clark, in a piece entitled

“The Expansion of Black American Misery under Barack Obama’s Watch.”
Written for the Black Agenda Report, in its February 19, 2013 issue, Clark
identifies two basic facts that have characterized race relations and, in par-
ticular, Black experience, in the United States under Obama, namely:

1. Black misery has been growing since 2009 under President Obama’s eco-
nomic and job creation policies. Black folks participation in the labor market
has been steadily moving DOWNWARD during the Obama presidency—
since 2009 when he was first inaugurated.
2. ALL other major racial groups have moved up albeit moderately since
2009! Blacks are the only group that has taken a definitive step BACKWARDS
since then. Why? This article will argue that it is because for the past four
years, until last week, Obama has declined to even put forth the idea that
‘low income Black people need targeted help too!!! Needless to say, has not
designed any job creation strategies or policies that would do something for
the Blacks who supported him the most. (Clark)

Clark contends that President Obama’s inability or unwillingness to design

employment programs targeted at “stimulating the hiring practices in busi-
nesses that are located in geographic areas where Blacks mostly reside” has
been the single most important factor contributing to Black underemploy-
ment, one that raised the rate of 16% in 2009 to 20% in 2012, representing
a worsening by 25% overall of Black underemployment during Obama’s
first term. If one factors in, according to Clark, the at least 2 million Blacks
currently incarcerated and without jobs, half of whom have been sentenced
for non-violent offenses, the Black underemployment would be a stagger-
ing 30%. Thus, Clark concludes, “Black misery as a whole has increased in
at least 10 other quality-of-life and socioeconomic areas as well: employ-
ment, family wages, home ownership, health care access, median net worth,
poverty rate, college education attendance, college financial and retirement
savings accounts and benefits and consumer debt” (Clark).
The above observations by Clark perfectly dovetail with those of Darity
cited earlier. Darity adds that beyond the numbers indicating the peren-
nial socioeconomic inferiority of Blacks in this country is the persistence of
228 K. E. BAUZON

what he regards as a general perspective that “argues that an important fac-

tor explaining racial economic disparities is self-defeating or dysfunctional
behavior on the part of blacks themselves” (Darity). Recalling President
Obama’s inability to bring meaningful relief to the Black community dur-
ing his eight years in office, Darity is not coy about asserting that Obama
himself has “trafficked” in this kind of perspective. He says:

Of course there are some black folk who engage in habits that undermine
their potential accomplishments, but there are some white folk who engage
in habits that undermine their potential accomplishments as well. And there
is no evidence to demonstrate that are (sic) proportionately more blacks
who believe in ways that undercut achievement, especially since it is clear
that blacks do more with less. Nevertheless, Obama consistently has trafficked
heavily in the tropes of black dysfunction. Either he is unfamiliar with or
uninterested in the evidence that undercuts the black behavioral deficiency
narrative. (Darity)

Amplifying this author’s concern expressed earlier about personal responsi-

bility, Darity fears that the same message being conveyed by a black person
like Obama, speaking from a position of authority, might be more damag-
ing than helpful. Darity adds:

I worried that it was possible for the symbolic and inspirational aspects of hav-
ing a black president would be more than offset by the damage that could
be done by the messages delivered by a black president. And it has been
damaging to have Barack Obama, a black man speaking from the authori-
tative platform of the presidency, reinforce the widely held belief that racial
inequality in the United States is, in large measure, the direct responsibility
of the black folk. This has been the deal breaker for me: not merely is silence
on white physical and emotional violence directed against black Americans,
but the denial of the centrality of American racism in explaining sustained
black-white disparity. (Darity, italics added)

Notes
1. In the Introduction to his aptly titled book, Hegemony and Strategies of
Transgressions (SUNY Press, 1995, pp. 9–10), San Juan asks a series of ques-
tions addressed to practitioners in cultural studies, particularly to those in the
postcolonial community, who may have been ambivalent about the moral
efficacy of endorsing—tacitly or actively—the US empire’s suppression of
dissent at home and counterinsurgency against anti-imperialist movements
 7 THE RACIALIZED STATE 229

abroad; the same set of questions may be directed at liberal-oriented social

science practitioners, particularly among those in the disciplines of politi-
cal science and sociology, who have adapted or endorsed such approaches
as conflict theory, pluralism, and functionalism, among others, and who
have consciously stayed away from—if not outrightly rejected—the histori-
cal materialist frame of analysis. These questions are as follows: “Can a lib-
eral democratic dispensation still claim moral legitimacy when its complicity
with transnational corporate exploitation is witnessed daily? Is nationalism
no longer valid, no longer a viable project for subalterns only now emerging
(as flexible labor, traffic of exported bodies) into the arena of world his-
tory? Are ‘peoples without history’ forever condemned to ‘postness’ and the
Nachtraglichkeit of the unrelenting forces of Western finance/knowledge
capital? Is writing at the border/margin—always at the mercy of ‘Carte-
sian imperialism‘ (‘I invade you, therefore you exist’)—a mode of collective
resistance to reification and the religion of free trade? Or is it a symptom
and effect of postmodern avantgardism, of ‘the incredulity toward meta-
narratives’? In the world of nearly universal commodity fetishism, is the
vernacular speech of people of color (not yet postmodernized by e-mail)
an alter/native idiom that can catalyze the ‘political unconscious’ of the
silent majority in the metropolitan centers? Can the ideals of pluralism and
individualistic liberty in industrialized civil society suffice to empower the
victims of racist/sexist power? Should we (‘natives’ of internal/external
colonies, Fanon’s ‘wretched of the earth’) repudiate both the Enlighten-
ment paradigm and its antithesis, the ludic play of cyborgs and nomads, in
favor of autochthonous programs enacted by ‘specific intellectuals’ and the
testimonios of indigenous survivors?” (ibid.) Here, San Juan has specifically
in mind Quiche Indian Rigoberta Menchu whose powerful testimonio as a
survivor of the infamous US-sponsored El Mozote massacre, happening in
December 1981, as part of a complex of atrocities waged by government-led
and US-trained and -armed military and paramilitary forces suppressing the
peasant-based rebellion in El Salvador, and spilling over into Guatemala,
throughout much of the 1980s. San Juan later devotes a full section on
Menchu’s testimonio in Chapter One, “Interrogations and Interventions:
Who Speaks for Whom?”, in his Beyond Postcolonial Theory (St. Martin’s
Press 1998, pp. 33–39), wherein San Juan asks: “Since the genre of testi-
monio mediates the documentary sociohistorical context and authorial ego,
reference and intentionality…, does Menchu’s intertextual performance, her
‘speaking truth to power’, overcome the disengenousness (sic) of postmod-
ernist aesthetics?” San Juan then assesses the value of Menchu’s testimony—
and the language used—as a valorous act of self-representation, as follows:
“One can say that Menchu’s testimonio evokes a reality-effect homologous
to what she experienced. Whether the actual events occurred or not, what
230 K. E. BAUZON

is certain is that the transcription of acts of barbarism tests the limit or

ordinary language and the genre of classical expressive realism” (San Juan,
Beyond Postcolonial Theory, p. 34).
Back to the subject of anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist revolutionary
resistance in the Third World, all subject to comprehensive US suppressive
program that includes, at one point or another, depending on circumstances,
counterinsurgency, pro-insurgency, and low-intensity warfare, San Juan sees
the conditions that gave rise to them, particularly the “uneven global arena”
and the challenge of transforming it, as an opportunity to define and/or
redefine, the telos not just of the individual practitioner but of whole disci-
plines themselves. San Juan had in mind Cultural Studies, and this author
has in mind the social sciences. San Juan reasons that “[w]hat is at stake
here is not just the discourse but the value of practical reason (employed by
Third World activists) in questioning its limits and potential in relation to the
agenda of progressive social transformation in the uneven global arena….
Here, I introduce the qualification that in the intractable and recalcitrant hin-
terlands…, the struggle is chiefly for bread, land, and shelter – for the integral
and organic conditions of possibility for rational communicative actions free
from the violence of capital, and more – for a significant measure of dig-
nity appropriate for love and the needs of the species-being….I envisage the
transition from Western ‘hegemony‘ to the transformative and oppositional
practices of all those ‘others’ inhabiting margins, pariah zones, quarantines,
detention and deportation centers, internal colonies in North America and in
Europe…. In this practice of conflating outside and inside…, what occupies
center-stage are the creative and critical powers of people of color who have
been victimized by transnational capital while producing/reproducing social
wealth. Irrecusably, the future of over two-thirds of the planet’s inhabitants
is indivisible from their unremitting struggle for democratic empowerment,
national self-determination, popular justice, and dignity. Their variegated,
tortuous modes of combating class exploitation and national oppression
comprise heterogeneous projects of resistance that ultimately reproduce the
‘Third World’ as a permanent political-cultural agency of local as well as
intercultural transformation. Whenever there is imperial domination in any
form, historical experience teaches us that there will always be a ‘Third World’
subject of resistance and dialectical transcendence” (San Juan, Hegemony and
Strategies of Transgressions, pp. 8–9, italics added).
2. Here, while Horowitz apparently celebrates the “shrinking of the globe,”
the “universalization of culture,” and the globalization of free trade, San
Juan sees through Horowitz’s rhetoric as “a mode of appropriation” which
“fetishizes and commodifies others.” “The self-arrogating universal,” San
Juan adds, “swallows the unsuspecting particulars in a grand hegemonic
compromise. Indeed, retrograde versions of multiculturalism celebrate in
 7 THE RACIALIZED STATE 231

order to fossilize differences and thus assimilate ‘others’ into a fictive

gathering which flattens contradictions pivoting around the axis of class.
rationalization for the imposition of US imperial hegemony” (San Juan
2004). Indirectly, San Juan critiques Horowitz’s assumption of a “univer-
salized/universalizing culture” as a mere happenstance, or a “condition of
human existence” that just happened to be when, in fact, as San Juan points
out, it is “the effect of an enunciation of difference that constitutes hierar-
chies and asymmetries of power” (San Juan 2004).
3. San Juan notes a parallel reform-oriented approach on the part of Asian-
Pacific Islander civil society activists and intellectuals in behalf of their
respective Asian-Pacific Islander constituents. The assumption among these
activists and intellectuals is that, by clamoring for expanded political and
civil rights—rather than economic and social justice—the problem of eco-
nomic inequality could somehow be vanquished. A pertinent quote from
San Juan from a 2010 essay composed for the Asian-American audience,
is as follows: “Takaki locates the problem in the linkage of ‘democracy to
national identity’ [1994: 299], not to capitalism. Consequently, his solution
to economic and racial inequality, including the intensifying exploitation of
ethnicised or racialised workers, is the extension of rights and citizenship to
everyone. There is a rich, flourishing archive of scholarly texts and discourses
by Asian American lawyers [especially those engaged in ‘critical race theo-
ry’] and activists devoted to this reform-minded approach, none of which
has prevented the worsening inequality and anomic decay among Chinese,
Filipinos, Vietnamese, Laotians, Kampucheans and Hmongs since the lib-
eralisation of entry in 1965 [Hing 1998]. The prophylaxis of citizenship
rights offered by Lowe, Takaki, Okihiro and others should be laid to rest by
Natsu Taylor Saito’s [2002; 2003] cogent argument that such belief in citi-
zenship as the cure can only reinforce the state’s systematic ‘plenary power’
over the others, especially in cases of immigrant persecution, dating back to
the 1882 Exclusion Law. So we return to the analysis of the capitalist mode
of production and reproduction as the enabling principle and legitimising
guarantee of the racial polity [Meyerson 2000]” (San Juan 2010b).
4. Due to lack of space, San Juan’s concluding sentiments on multiculturalism
in response to an interview question by Michael Pozo on what students and
professors in the field of cultural studies should think about on the subject,
are worth noting, as follows:

As I have argued in my earlier book, Hegemony and Strategies of Trans-

gression (SUNY Press), multiculturalism has been appropriated to vin-
dicate neo-liberal policies and instrumentalities. In short, the U.S.
ruling class takes pride in the world hegemony of the United States
because it is multicultural, diverse, open, sensitive to differences – dif-
ference as a guarantee of uniformity and democratic oneness. This
232 K. E. BAUZON

multiculturalism is an alibi for predatory globalization, which is the

euphemism for the further extension of corporate exploitation every-
where. If this is multiculturalism, then we can all stop reading [Michel]
Foucault and [Jacques] Lacan and instead go shopping and marvel at
the infinite variety of multicultural goods – not just food but ideas,
fashions, styles, images, simulacra, etc. [Jean] Baudrillard may still be
right about the terrorism of the marketplace.
However, if multiculturalism signifies a sensitivity and openness to
the Other so that the notion of identity is itself problematized – I
am thinking here of Alain Badiou’s critique of identity politics and
alterity – I have no quarrel with such a program of genuine, creative
multiculturalism.
Finally, I would like to reiterate that in all my works I try to apply a
historical-materialist approach that considers human labor (both men-
tal and physical) as the key to the critical transformation of society.
It is a point of departure, not the answer to every question. In this I
join other socialists and radicals working within the intellectual tradi-
tion of Benedict de Spinoza, Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Rosa
Luxemburg, Walter Benjamin, C.L.R. James, and others in advancing
the cause of all those throughout the world who continue to be vic-
timized by the “free market”. Is there any other feasible alternative?
(Pozo 2003, brackets added)

5. Through personal correspondence with this author, San Juan further clar-
ifies and elaborates on his critique of postcolonialism and its practition-
ers, particularly with regard to their limitations with the historical mate-
rialist approach. San Juan writes: “Postcolonial studies” has been linked
with Bhabha, Spivak and esp. the Australians Bill Ashcroft, etc. who exclude
the Philippines and Latin American countries (except the Commonwealth
Caribbean) from their research. So it is impossible to join Marxist critiques
of imperialist/neocolonialist ideology and postcolonial views that the col-
onized peoples gained something from the colonizer, that is, they became
mimicries or ‘mimic men,’ and thus were able to subvert the colonizer, or
re-articulated the imperial discourse into something radical.
Postcolonial studies rejects the dialectic between modes of production
and the cultural superstructures/ideology. They claim that culture either has
nothing to do with modes of production; it has an autonomy that exceeds
what they call economics or labor. In fact, Negri and Hardt (who echo
some postcolonial dogmas) emphasize “immaterial labor” in the period of
globalization, which means that “immaterial labor” refers to the realm of
ideas, tastes, and attitudes. But what explains the changes in ideas, tastes,
and attitudes? They avoid mentioning disparity of wealth, exploitation of
 7 THE RACIALIZED STATE 233

the 99%, neocolonial interventions, etc. They might gesture to those, but
they don’t really integrate them as part of a structural or systematic explana-
tion of historical changes. Their concept of historical change follows Fou-
cault/Nietszche—change just drops from somewhere, irrational and myste-
rious.
My feeling is that while postcolonial studies, like women’s studies, has
become a safe comfortable domain of academic studies, it has lost relevance
in understanding what’s happening in the real world. Even Said rejected
postcolonial studies because it cannot explain the US-Israeli destruction of
Palestinian homeland and peoples.
“Some postcolonialists appeal to Fanon, C.L.R. James, even Cabral. But
those guys rely on a strong Marxist framework, and are anchored to solid
popular struggles in the colonies. While some Filipinos ape and echo Spivak
and Bhabha, they cannot explain the severe impoverishment back home,
and the continued domination of US ideas, values and tastes on the masses,
through consumerism, mass media, fashions and styles, including of course
academic modes of discourse and intellectual analysis.” (San Juan 2015).
6. In a 1998 piece, entitled “The Limits of Postcolonial Criticism: The Dis-
course of Edward Said,” San Juan suggested that Edward Said maintained
a pretense to being a Marxist who has gone so far as to co-opt Marxists like
Antonio Gramsci and C.L.R. James “to give an aura of leftism” but not for
the purpose of “revitalizing historical materialism for revolutionary socialist
goals.” San Juan explains further: “The anti-Marxism of postcolonial theory
may be attributed partly to Said’s eclecticism, his belief that American left
criticism is marginal, and his distorted if not wholly false understanding of
Marxism based on doctrinaire anticommunism and the model of ‘actually
existing socialism‘ during the Cold War” (San Juan 1998).
7. Along these lines, noted public intellectual Henry Giroux notes: “State vio-
lence fueled by the merging of the war on terror, the militarization of all
aspects of society, and a deep-seated and increasingly ruthless and unapolo-
getic racism is now ubiquitous and should be labeled as a form of domestic
terrorism. Terrorism, torture, and state violence are no longer simply part of
our history; they have become the nervous system of an increasingly authoritar-
ian state” (Giroux 2015, italics added).
8. Here, San Juan intervenes to clarify and provide context for James Baldwin’s
apparent conflicting positions on various situations and circumstances, cre-
ating an enigma that led some of his fellow contemporary Black leaders to
criticize him including activists Eldridge Cleaver and Harold Cruse, while he
himself felt critical of others, such as Aime Cesaire and his Negritude move-
ment, and author Richard Wright. In a chapter on Baldwin in a 1995 book
and by way of resolving this apparent enigma, San Juan explains: “Baldwin’s
predicament involves not a death-wish but the obsession with a dialectic of
exchange where whites and blacks are positions imbricated in each other that
234 K. E. BAUZON

need to be sublated, not conflated, if racial conflict is to be resolved.” Later

in the chapter, San Juan acknowledges Baldwin’s deep concern over the fate
of his people, and elaborates as follows: “Baldwin now configures his peo-
ple’s situation in the context of the Cold War and the African anticolonial
struggle. He identifies with the African desire for freedom, but refuses an
Afrocentric transference. Here is where for Baldwin the American dream has
turned into a nightmare ‘on the private, domestic, and international levels,’
where the United States has become the vindictive god of the Old Testament
suppressing revolutions everywhere. Baldwin’s belief in the United States as
a possible utopian force is unshaken – but it is overturned by an existentialist
faith that life is tragic. And this reality is for him what the black community
represents. Whatever the ambiguities of Baldwin’s formulations, his central
argument is the fused or indivisible fate of all those caught in Du Bois’ color
boundary: ‘The price of the liberation of the white people is the liberation
of the blacks – the total liberation, in the cities, in the towns, before the
law, and in the mind’… In this Imaginary register of the Double, Baldwin
affirms the right of self-determination for all people of color as an organic
part of a society-in-the-making, the New Jerusalem he envisioned arising
from everyone taking responsibility for what’s going on in the world. This
was his utopian wager” (San Juan 1995).
9. Here is a sampling of James Baldwin’s own words, transcribed by this author
from an audio version of a speech delivered at the Claremont High School in
Oakland, California in June 1963: “[I]n this country, every black man born
in this country, until this present moment, is born into a country which
assures him, in as many ways as it can find, that he is not worth the dirt
he walks on. Every Negro boy and every Negro girl born in this country
until this present moment undergoes the agony of trying to find in the body
politic, in the body social, outside himself/herself, some image of himself or
herself which is not demeaning. Now, many, indeed, have survived, and at an
incalculable cost, and many more have perished and are perishing every day.
If you tell a child and do your best to prove to the child that he is not worth
life, it is entirely possible that sooner or later the child begins to believe it”
(James Baldwin 20th Anniversary Commemoration….).
10. San Juan notes, in another 2009 essay, one of the revealing ironies in the
convergence between the globalization of labor, particularly Filipino labor,
the internationalization of US law, and the universalization of the so-called
war on terror, and the ideology represented in the construction and main-
tenance of Guantanamo as a detention, prison, and torture facility. San Juan
reacts to the impending visit to Guantanamo of Eric Holder, the top lawyer
as Secretary of the Justice Department under much of the Obama Adminis-
tration, in the following passage: “More revealing is Holder’s planned visit
to Guantanamo to inspect the facility for torturing ‘unlawful combatants,’
 7 THE RACIALIZED STATE 235

which incidentally was partly built by cheap Filipino labor (Filipino contract
labor also built US military barracks in Iraq. Guantanamo remains a symbol
of what the U.S. stands for many “third world” countries or peoples who
are considered enemies of democracy, the free market, and Samuel Hunt-
ington/Arthur Schlesinger’s ‘Western Civilization’” (San Juan 2009). The
connections between Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib are palpable. Filipino
contract workers—part of the global Filipino labor diaspora—have served
in US military installations in Iraq and, in most probability including Abu
Ghraib, as cooks, truck drivers, and maintenance workers. Also, as borne out
by human rights lawyer Marjorie Cohn, torture, euphemistically referred to
as enhanced interrogation methods developed at Guantanamo, have “mi-
grated” to Abu Ghraib, as revealed by scandalous photos that leaked—and
eventually partially released with official sanction by the Bush Administration
in 2004. Subsequently, the first official internal investigation of human rights
abuses at Abu Ghraib, as shown in these photographs, was led by US Army
Major General Antonio Mario Taguba, of Filipino descent and a product of
US military socialization in the Philippines. Taguba’s findings, contained in
a report that bore his name, i.e., the Taguba Report, implicated the Bush
Administration in the same year with grave human rights abuses. In 2008, in
the preface to the 2008 annual report by the Physicians for Human Rights,
entitled Broken Laws, Broken Lives, Taguba expressed no doubt that the Bush
Administration was guilty of committing, or has authorized the commission
of, war crimes in the following passage: “[T]here is no longer any doubt as
to whether the [Bush] Administration has committed war crimes. The only
question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use
of torture will be held to account” (Physicians for Human Rights).
A caveat needs to be inserted at this juncture lest it be misinterpreted
that Taguba’s ascendancy and rise to one of the highest ranks in the US mil-
itary would mean anything other than symbolic. The presence of Taguba, of
course, would be promoted as a success of multiculturalism even though he
was merely a token. San Juan has something so say on situations like this from
a 2010 essay already quoted earlier but which is worth quoting from once
more, as follows: “The fallacy of equating exploiter and exploited in order to
ascribe agency/humanity to the subjugated but emotionally appealing vic-
tim vitiates many empirical studies of Filipino overseas migrant workers….
Supposedly novel in inventing agency for the colonised, this new epistemol-
ogy in the disciplines of history and sociology interprets colonial domination
as consensual negotiation between rulers and the ruled, reducing hegemony
into an exercise in Habermasianesque rational communication. Polycultur-
alism thus becomes the alibi of imperialism that is suddenly capable of ‘bad
faith’” (San Juan 2010b).
236 K. E. BAUZON

The subject of state-sanctioned complex of torture, terror, and violence,

including slavery obviously as a variant, and the justification thereof and
resistance thereto, has, of course, been a recurrent theme in San Juan’s writ-
ings including but not limited to, quite notably, his interrogation of the
pathology and economic roots of torture and terror in Franz Kafka’s out-
standing body of works in a 2014 essay, entitled “Kafka & Torture: Decon-
structing the Writing Apparatus of ‘In the Penal Colony.’” In here, San Juan
quotes Kafka as follows: “Capitalism is a system of dependencies, which run
from within to without, from without to within, from above to below, from
below to above. All is dependent, all stands in chains. Capitalism is a condi-
tion of the soul of the world.” San Juan then stitches the essential threads
connecting Kafka, Guantanamo, and Abu Ghraib in the following snippet:
“Kafka’s classic fable dramatizing corporeal hermeneutics might be salu-
tary both to the victims and practitioners of torture (as Lundberg recently
suggested [2013]), a heuristic baedeker to the ecology of a planet where
prisons/penal institutions function as model internal colonies of which
the Guantanamo Bay maximum-security cells comprise but one obsessive
mirror-image. More instructive, the chief protagonist of Kafka’s story, the
explorer or traveler, is symptomatic of the vacillating if self-righteous mind-
set of liberals (should we say neoliberals?) whose weapon of methodological
individualism becomes an apology for Abu Ghraib outrage, philanthropic
rescue of veiled women, and mass drone killings. But let us first inquire into
the contentious status of Kafka as the unrivaled icon of twentieth-century
existentialist, apocalyptic modernism as well as fragmented, aleatory post-
modernism” (San Juan 2014).
11. This US boycott, taken in sympathy with and effective support for the Zion-
ist State’s apartheid-like policies not only within the Zionist State itself, i.e.,
towards its own citizens of Palestinian descent with over sixty discrimina-
tory statutes stacked against them, but also towards the Palestinians in the
occupied territories under dispute which it continues to rule—or to besiege
in the case of Gaza—militarily, enforcing, in the process, two sets of justice
system—one for Jews preferentially and another for Palestinians discrimina-
torily—despite there being no war to fight and there being no army to fight
against, except unarmed Palestinian civilians. With US support, the Zionist
State has also successfully conflated anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism (exem-
plified by the introduction in 2017 in the US Senate of S.720, entitled
Israel Anti-Lobby Act, as a means of deflecting criticisms against its expul-
sion and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and theft of their land and the
resources therein, all in violation of existing international law. In a chapter
examining the literary texts of FawazTurki, described by San Juan as “one of
the most charismatic Third World intellectuals,” San Juan sees hope in the
“Palestinian courage and determination” that someday, the Palestinians will
 7 THE RACIALIZED STATE 237

“Return” to the land from which they have been rudely displaced beginning
with the nakba (or al-nakba, catastrophe) brought about by the insertion
of the Zionist State into Palestine in 1948 by largely European settlers aided
by former colonial powers in the region, mainly Britain but also France. The
“Return” has been and remains the theme of the largely peaceful weekly
Palestinian Great March of Return which commenced in April 2018 that
continues to this day. According to San Juan, Turki’s “obsession with ‘the
Return’ expressed itself in a seething anguish defined by communal rituals
and shared familial memories.” San Juan explains further the essence of this
exile as follows: “The exile of the Palestinians embodies global contradic-
tions that propel them forward, together with the entire Third World. Their
hopes and dreams thus sprout from, and are rooted in, the concrete socio-
historical base of the Palestinian homeland” (San Juan 1994, pp. 63–64).
Of Turki’s poem, “Palestinians in Exile,” San Juan’s favorite among
Turki’s many poems, San Juan sees in it “the agony of desire for the Return
metamorphoses into a craving for the beloved – a powerful erotic cry for a
tryst long overdue, the unquenchable anguish ‘between dream and noth-
ingness’ when chains and barbed wires will snap: ‘Like lovers from Pales-
tine,/agonizing over who is really in exile./they or their homeland” (San
Juan 1994, p. 66).

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Gonzalez on July 22, 2015. In: http://www.democracynow.org/2015/7/22/
between_the_world_and_me_ta.
Giroux, Henry A., “Neoliberalism as Public Pedagogy”, Academia.edu. Posted on
March 31, 2011. In: https://www.academia.edu/12795711/Neoliberalism_
as_public_pedagogy.
———, “Neoliberalism’s War on Democracy”, Truthout, April 26, 2014.
In: http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/23306-neoliberalisms-war-on-
democracy#a6.
———, “The Racist Killing Fields in America: The Death of Sandra Bland”,
Academia.edu. Posted on July 19, 2015. In: https://www.academia.edu/
14196417/The_Racist_Killing_Fields_in_America_The_Death_of_Sandra_
Bland.
Pozo, Michael, “A Conversation with E. San Juan Jr.”. With Introduction and
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lution (Minneapolis, MN: MEP Publications/University of Minnesota, 1994),
197pp. Print.
———, Hegemony and Strategies of Transgression: Essays in Cultural Studies and
Comparative Literature (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995),
286pp.
———, Beyond Postcolonial Theory (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 325pp.
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———, “Race from the 20th to the 21st Century: Multiculturalism or Emancipa-
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———, “Imperial Terror, Neo-Colonialism, and the Filipino Diaspora”. A Lecture
Delivered at the 2003 English Department Lecture series at St. John’s Uni-
versity. St. John’s University Humanities Review, 2, 1 (Fall 2003a). In: http://
facpub.stjohns.edu/~ganterg/sjureview/vol2-1/diaspora.html.
———, “Marxism and the Race/Class Problematic”. Originally published in Cul-
tural Logic (2003b). In: http://clogic.eserver.org/2003/sanjuan.html.
———, “Post-9/11 Reflections on Multiculturalism and Racism”, Axis of Logic:
Finding Clarity in the 21st Century Mediaplex (November 13, 2004). In:
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 7 THE RACIALIZED STATE 239

———, “Edward Said’s Affiliations: Secular Humanism and Marxism”, Atlantic

Studies: Global Currents, 3, 1 (2006): 43–61. In: http://www.tandfonline.
com/doi/abs/10.1080/14788810500525481?journalCode=rjas20.
———, In the Wake of Terror; Class, Race, Nation, Ethnicity in the Postmodern
World (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), 232pp.
———, “Race and Class in Post-9/11 U.S. Empire”, Rizal Archive Blogspot, April
30, 2009. In: http://rizalarchive.blogspot.com/2009/04/race-and-class-in-
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———, “African American Internationalism and Solidarity with the Philippine Rev-
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tandfonline.com/eprint/Jqxa3MbH6e8pXFCcAHb9/full#.VcjchPlUWUF.
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ered at the University of the Philippines, Visaya, on February 4, 2014
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———, Personal Email Correspondence with Kenneth E. Bauzon, June 29, 2015.
 CHAPTER 8

Teleology in History and Intellectual

Responsibility

Contrary to some pundits of deconstruction, I believe that the subaltern…

can perform the role of witnesses to “speak truth to power.” For indigenous,
oppressed peoples anywhere, the purpose of speech is not just for universally
accepted cultural reasons – affirming their identities and their right to self-
determination – but, more crucially, for their physical survival. Such speech
entails responsibility, hence the need to respond to criticisms or questions
about “truth” and its grounding. A warning by Walter Benjamin (1968)
may be useful to clarify the notion of “truth” in lived situations where “facts”
intermesh with feeling and conviction. In his famous “Theses on the Philoso-
phy of History,” Benjamin expressed reservations about orthodox historians
such as Leopold von Ranke, whom Marx considered “a little root-grubber”
who reduced history to “facile anecdote-mongering and the attribution of all
great events to petty and mean causes.” Benjamin speculated that the “truth”
of the past can be seized only as an image, as a memory “as it flashes up at the
moment of danger.” I believe that this moment of danger is always with us
when, in a time of settling accounts in the name of justice, we see the Mays
[Note: In reference to US-based historian Glenn May and his ilk belittling
the role of Andres Bonifacio in the Philippine Revolution, in his 1996 book
Inventing a Hero: The Posthumous Re-Creation of Andres Bonifacio.] and
their ilk suddenly come up with their credentials and entitlements in order
to put the “upstart” natives in their proper place.
E. San Juan, After Postcolonialism… (2000)

© The Author(s) 2019 241

K. E. Bauzon, Capitalism, The American Empire, and Neoliberal
Globalization, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9080-8_8
242 K. E. BAUZON

The Contemporary State of the World

After over five-hundred years of capitalist growth and expansion, over a
hundred years of the United States as a global empire, over half a century
of accelerated, post-World War II neoliberal hegemony, over two decades
since the end of the Cold War, and over a decade since 9/11 and the
declaration of the so-called war on terror, what are some of the identifiable
markers that characterize the period in which we live, and the state of the
planet we inhabit at this point in time, having been proclaimed supposedly
as the endpoint of history? In plain language, what do we have to show
for the much-vaunted progress anticipated as a result of Enlightenment-
inspired Western-led science- and technology-based civilization?

Unprecedented Global Inequality

To find some answers, one may start with a recent publication from the
United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), entitled Humanity
Divided; Confronting Inequality in Developing Countries (2013). In its
overview, the UNDP notes an interesting paradox in global development
in that, while during the last few decades “the world witnessed impressive
average gains against multiple indicators of material prosperity…, more
than 1.2 billion people still live in extreme poverty. The richest 1 percent
of the world population owns more than 40 percent of the world’s assets,
while the bottom half owns no more than 1 percent” (UNDP). The UNDP
study goes on to offer the following sobering assessment:

Nor are recent trends very encouraging. Over the last two decades, income
inequality has been growing on average within and across countries. As a
result, a significant majority of the world’s population lives in societies that
are more unequal today than 20 years ago. Remarkably, in many parts of the
world, income gaps have deepened—and, with them, the gulf in quality of life
between the rich and the poor—despite the immense wealth created through
impressive growth performances. In fact, the sharpest increases in income
inequality have occurred in those developing countries that were especially
successful in pursuing vigorous growth and managed, as a result, to graduate
into higher income brackets. Economic progress in these countries has not
alleviated disparities, but rather exacerbated them. (UNDP)

Further, the UNDP study links inequality to the failure to enjoy—or, rather,
the absence of—ancillary services which society needs to maintain a decent
 8 TELEOLOGY IN HISTORY AND INTELLECTUAL RESPONSIBILITY 243

and meaningful existence. It also implicates it as a major factor in the per-

petuation of conflict which, in turn, contributes to social disintegration. As
the study reads, in part:

The world is more unequal today than at any point since World War II.
However, there are clear signs that this situation cannot be sustained for
much longer. Inequality has been jeopardizing economic growth and poverty
reduction. It has been stalling progress in education, health and nutrition for
large swathes of the population, thus undermining the very human capabili-
ties necessary for achieving a good life. It has been limiting opportunities and
access to economic, social and political resources. Furthermore, inequality has
been driving conflict and destabilizing society. When incomes and opportuni-
ties rise for only a few, when inequalities persist over time and space and across
generations, then those at the margins, who remain so consistently excluded
from the gains of development, will at some point contest the “progress” that
has bypassed them. Growing deprivations in the midst of plenty and extreme
differences between households are almost certain to unravel the fabric that
keeps society together. This is especially problematic when we consider that,
often, it is precisely those at the margins who tend to pay the biggest price
for social unrest. But perhaps most important, extreme inequality contradicts
the most fundamental principles of social justice, starting from the notion,
enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that “all human
beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights”. (UNDP)

Lest the UNDP is mistrusted as a United Nations agency, reports

from various other quarters during recent years and months have actu-
ally been echoing or complementing the same concern. One such report is
by OXFAM International which, at the end of 2014, issued a timely report
entitled Even It Up; Time to End Extreme Inequality. A press release issued
in January 2015 headlined “Richest 1% will own more than the rest by
2016” (OXFAM 2014). The press release reads, in part:

…the richest 1 percent have seen their share of global wealth increase from
44 percent in 2009 to 48 percent in 2014 and at this rate will be more than
50 percent in 2016. Members of this global elite had an average wealth of
$2.7 million per adult in 2014.
Of the remaining 52 percent of global wealth, almost all (46 percent) is
owned by the rest of the richest fifth of the world’s population. The other 80
percent share just 5.5 percent and had an average wealth of $3.851 per adult
– that’s1/7000th of the average wealth of the 1 percent. (OXFAM 2014)
244 K. E. BAUZON

And, in the Executive Summary of the report itself, OXFAM emphasizes

the inevitable link between economic inequality, on the one hand, and
global poverty, on the other; further, it makes reference to the all-important
“rules and systems” that have resulted to these conditions, indicating that
these are a man-made set of phenomena and not a result of some sort of
“Invisible Hand.” The summary reads, in part, as follows:

Crucially, the rapid rise of extreme economic inequality is standing in the

way of eliminating global poverty. Today, hundreds of millions of people are
living without access to clean drinking water and without enough food to
feed their families, many are working themselves into the ground just to get
by. …
[P]overty and inequality are not inevitable or accidental, but the result
of deliberate policy choices. Inequality can be reversed. The world needs
concerted action to build a fairer economic and political system that values
everyone. The rules and systems that have led to today’s inequality explosion
much change. (OXFAM 2014)

Five years since the above-cited OXFAM report was issued, OXFAM
issued another study, entitled Public Good or Private Wealth (2019) wherein
it states:

The number of billionaires has doubled since the financial crisis and their
fortunes grow by $2.5bn a day, yet the super-rich and corporations are paying
lower rates of tax than they have in decades. The human costs – children
without teachers, clinics without medicines – are huge. Piecemeal private
services punish poor people and privilege elites. Women suffer the most, and
are left to fill the gaps in public services with many hours of unpaid care”.
(OXFAM 2019)

Again, if one looks at and collates readily available data, including those
presented above, it is not hard to confirm that, in fact, since the early 1980s,
we have seen the income of the bottom 90% of the globe’s population
decline steadily, and that this decline continues, while that of the top 1%
has accelerated at an obscene rate, and continues to grow.
 8 TELEOLOGY IN HISTORY AND INTELLECTUAL RESPONSIBILITY 245

The Environmental Crisis

Perhaps a problem of greater magnitude and urgency than inequality and
poverty is the one concerning the environment. The term “global envi-
ronmental problem” is a comprehensive, catch-all phrase that encompasses
all ancillary problems related to human-induced destruction, degradation,
abuse, misuse, and benign neglect of the environmental commons, and
how these problems constitute a large part of what has been termed the
post-industrial or, sometimes by others, the post-capitalist age.
However, although the problem of global warming has been mentioned
as a major concern—attributed largely to the use of fossil fuel whose
unchecked carbon emission into the atmosphere has been identified by
scientists as a major factor in such phenomena as atmospheric temperature
rise; unprecedented rise in sea level threatening coastal areas and island-
nations; melting of the Arctic ice cap, and the onset of extreme weather
patterns affecting parts or regions of the globe unaccustomed to these new
weather patterns, e.g., unseasonable extreme heat or extreme cold, thus
contributing, further, to the onset of diseases, acidification of oceans, the
destruction of crops, unseasonal migration of wildlife, food riots, and of
the emergence of what has been labeled as climate refugees, among others,
there are, in fact, various other areas of concern, much of which are likewise
human-induced. These would include the clearcutting of forests, moun-
taintop removal, monoculture agricultural practices, chemical-dependent
industrial agriculture, commercial deep-sea trawling, pollution/depletion
of freshwater supply, soil erosion, deforestation, desertification, population
pressure on food sources, proliferation of landfills, rise of slum cities, and
many, many others all of which cumulatively and ultimately contribute to
the imbalance of the ecosystem or compromise biodiversity or impair the
economic viability especially of the poorer members of the community to
survive, or rise in violence in presumably safe communities.
Canadian journalist and activist Naomi Klein has called attention to
much of these concerns in her recent book, This Changes Everything: Cap-
italism vs. the Climate (2014). Klein elaborates on much of the problems
identified above, and she also raises a number of very important points
regarding the factors giving rise to them. One of these is what she refers to
as the extractivist model of economic development, a version of capitalism
in which, Klein argues, the profit-motive is dependent on “the large-scale
removal (or ‘extraction’) of natural resources for the purposes of exporting
raw materials.” By its very nature, extractivism is “nonreciprocal dominance
246 K. E. BAUZON

based on relationship with the earth. It is the opposite of stewardship, which

involves taking but also taking care that regeneration and future life con-
tinue” (Klein). Klein’s assertion on the role of extractivism as an approach
that privileges private profit over environmental sustainability in explaining
the despoliation of the environment, unfortunately, is merely the frontal
manifestation of a philosophy, ingrained at the heart of capitalism’s con-
temporary morphed manifestation, neoliberalism, which essentially elevates
the commodification and exploitation of the commons to a new level, i.e.,
through a full-court press using as instruments a set of integrated neolib-
eral global institutions—trading, financial, media, legal, private economic,
and/or foreign policy (such as the World Economic Forum, the Trilat-
eral Commission, and the Bilderberg Group), and including use of such
covert agents as economic hit-men, including outright sanctions and/or
force, on recalcitrant countries, as described earlier, among others; and
legitimized and validated, further, by a set of governing principles, rules,
and practices—all to facilitate and accelerate private gain and, by extension,
the global hegemony of the industrial and military powers of North Amer-
ica, Western Europe, and Japan. Unfortunately, those who adhere to this
system, representing largely the corporate community and governments
under its sway, have been dominant particularly in asserting the primacy
of this system. Their domination and control over the media have made it
possible for their own narrative—that this system redounds to the benefit
of all in society—to suffuse to the rest of society with hardly any challenge.
Giving recognition to this travail has not just been Klein or the thou-
sands of environmentalists who participated in the mammoth march for
the environment—dubbed as the People’s Climate March—in New York
City in September 2014. In fact, no less than Pope Francis himself has
taken notice of this, in his courageous encyclical, entitled Laudato Si’ (in
medieval Italian, meaning “Praise be to you!”), with the subtitle “On care
of the Common Home,” issued in May 2015. With the assistance of the
pontifical academies and a significant number honorary experts and climate
scientists from around the globe invited into help formulate the final draft,
Pope Francis notes the plunder that has taken in the air, the soil, and the
water, in paragraph 2 of this encyclical as follows:

We have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder
her at will. The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin, is also reflected
in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and
in all forms of life. This is why the earth herself, burdened and laid waste,
 8 TELEOLOGY IN HISTORY AND INTELLECTUAL RESPONSIBILITY 247

is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor; she “groans in
travail” [Rom 8:22]. (Pope Francis)

On the particular issue of climate change, Pope Francis notes that this is
one of the most important challenges facing mankind today. He notes that
its worst impact is felt in developing countries where “many of the poor
live in areas particularly affected by phenomena related to warming, and
their means of subsistence are largely dependent on natural reserves and
ecosystemic services such as agriculture, fishing and forestry.” He also notes
the rise in human migration, referred to in the mainstream media as climate
refugees, “from the growing poverty caused by environmental degradation
[but which] are not recognized by international conventions as refugees
[and] bear the loss of the lives they have left behind.”
On a number of references, Pope Francis leaves no doubt about the
culpability of the dominant economic system—capitalism and its neolib-
eral manifestation, along with its concomitant principles and policies—in
creating and exacerbating much of the environmental problems mankind
faces today. Several particular passages are herewith quoted to illustrate this
point. In paragraph 32, Pope Francis notes that “[t]he earth’s resources are
also being plundered because of short-sighted approaches to the economy,
commerce, and production.” In paragraph 45, he refers in particular to
class divisions signified by the rise of gated communities and declares: “In
some places, rural and urban alike, the privatization of certain spaces has
restricted people’s access to places of particular beauty. In others, ‘ecolog-
ical’ neighbourhoods have been created which are closed to outsiders in
order to ensure an artificial tranquility. Frequently, we find beautiful and
carefully manicured green spaces in so-called ‘safer’ areas of cities, but not
in the more hidden areas where the disposable of society live.” In paragraph
52, he acknowledges what many victims of structural adjustment programs
imposed by the World Bank and the IMF have already known for years,
and that is that “[t]he foreign debt of poor countries has become a way
of controlling them..,” complemented by another phrase, from paragraph
56 in which he states that “economic powers continue to justify the cur-
rent global system wherein priority tends to be given to speculation and
the pursuit of financial gain, which fail to take the context into account,
let alone the effects on human dignity and the natural environment.” And,
finally, in defense of the commons, described earlier in this essay as under
steady assault toward commodification on the part of the free marketeers,
248 K. E. BAUZON

Pope Francis makes the important affirmation in, paragraph 93, quoted in
part below, that:

Whether believers or not, we are agreed today that the earth is essentially a
shared inheritance, whose fruits are meant to benefit everyone. For believers,
this becomes a question of fidelity to the Creator, since God created the world
for everyone. Hence every ecological approach needs to incorporate a social
perspective which takes into account the fundamental rights of the poor and
the underprivileged. The principle of the subordination of private property
to the universal destination of goods, and thus the right of everyone to their
use, is a golden rule of social conduct and “the first principle of the whole
ethical and social order”.[71] The Christian tradition has never recognized
the right to private property as absolute or inviolable, and has stressed the
social purpose of all forms of private property. Saint John Paul II forcefully
reaffirmed this teaching, stating that “God gave the earth to the whole human
race for the sustenance of all its members, without excluding or favouring
anyone”. (Pope Francis)

It should be pointed out here that Pope Francis is not disavowing capi-
talism per se. He has received sustained criticisms from various quarters for
his stance on specific ancillary issues, e.g., population control; source and
degree of carbon emission particularly on the respective roles of humans;
of science; of theology; and of government; among others. Vocal criticisms
have come particularly from climate change deniers, free market advocates,
and politicians and pundits who assert that Pope Francis should not get
involved in matters of public policy. Again, in paragraph 93, he affirms—
in agreement with Pope John Paul II before him—that “the Church does
indeed defend the legitimate right to private property,” but that this defense
of private property is premised on the idea—as a matter of “first princi-
ple”—and here, directly referring to the inequitable distribution of the
world’s income favoring the globe’s Top 1%—that “there is always a social
mortgage on all private property, in order that goods may serve the general
purpose that God gave them” (As noted in Note [74] of Laudato Si). Con-
sequently, he maintained, “it is not in accord with God’s plan that this gift
be used in such a way that its benefits favour only a few.” The issues that
he touched upon in his encyclical are issues for mankind as a whole to deal
with on an urgent basis, that these are moral issues, and that governments
alone would be unable, nay, helpless, to tackle these issues by themselves
without them (a) deriving support and legitimacy from society at large,
and, (b) reorienting their direction and priorities.
 8 TELEOLOGY IN HISTORY AND INTELLECTUAL RESPONSIBILITY 249

Unfortunately, even as the Pope rallies the global community to sup-

port his environmental initiative, corporate interests are cashing in on the
growing popularity of this movement by inserting themselves, for exam-
ple, in the UN decision-making process in the pursuit of the UN’s Sus-
tainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly concerning such critical
issues as poverty, hunger, and climate change, appearing progressive but, in
fact, setting back the process by coopting it. To observers like this writer,
the Pope’s encyclical is an essential complement to international initia-
tives such as those being taken by intergovernmental organizations like the
UN. However, Insurge Intelligence, a crowd-funded, grassroots-oriented
independent media project, reports of a concerning—or disconcerting—
development, as follows:

But records from the SDG process reveal that insiders at the heart of the UN’s
intergovernment engagement negotiations have criticised the international
body for pandering to the interests of big business and ignoring recommen-
dations from grassroots stakeholders representing the world’s poor.
Formal statements issued earlier this year as part of the UN’s Post-2015
Intergovernmental Negotiations on the SDGs, and published by the UN Sus-
tainable Development Division, show that UN ‘Major Groups’ representing
indigenous people, civil society, workers, young people and women remain
deeply concerned by the general direction of the SDG process — whereas
corporate interests from the rich, industrialised world have viewed the process
favourably.
Among the ‘Major Groups’ engaged in the UN’s SDG process is ‘Business
and Industry.’ Members of this group include fossil fuel companies like Sta-
toil USA and Tullow Oil, multinational auto parts manufacturer Bridgestone
Corporation, global power management firm Eaton Corporation, agribusi-
ness conglomerate Monsanto, insurance giant Thamesbank, financial services
major Bank of America, and hundreds of others from Coca Cola to Walt Dis-
ney to Dow Chemical.
These interests have showered the UN’s SDG agenda with glowing praise
— calling only for the need for further engagement with business and
industry.
In its 24th July statement before one UN SDG review meeting, the Global
Business Alliance — set-up by corporations to represent their mutual com-
mitment to “market-based solutions” — proudly told delegates that the pro-
cess “amplifies our traditional role in economic growth and innovation” and
commended the SDG draft:
“An important role for business is recognized throughout”. (Ahmed)
250 K. E. BAUZON

Thus, it seems evident that even the best intentions by leading person-
alities and institutions like Pope Francis and the UN, respectively, are not
immune from subversion or cooptation by the “few” whom he criticized
in his encyclical as being intent on preserving their control over the levers
of economic power and, by extension, political power. It is this seemingly
incorrigible profit-orientation of the capitalist system that has led Pope
Francis to make the following statement, made in Bolivia during a visit
there in July 2015, highly critical of this economic system and, in so doing,
associated himself with an important characterization made by an impor-
tant figure of the Church, Basil of Caesarea:

Time, my brothers and sisters, seems to be running out; we are not yet tear-
ing one another apart, but we are tearing apart our common home. Today,
the scientific community realizes what the poor have long told us: harm,
perhaps irreversible harm, is being done to the ecosystem. The earth, entire
peoples and individual persons are being brutally punished. And behind all
this pain, death and destruction there is the stench of what Basil of Caesarea
called “the dung of the devil”. An unfettered pursuit of money rules. The
service of the common good is left behind. Once capital becomes an idol
and guides people’s decisions, once greed for money presides over the entire
socioeconomic system, it ruins society, it condemns and enslaves men and
women, it destroys human fraternity, it sets people against one another and,
as we clearly see, it even puts at risk our common home. (Plis; “Unbridled
capitalism…”)

This is particularly true over the issue of migration which Pope Fran-
cis has referred to with particular concern in his encyclical. While part of
this “few” may be directly implicated in the devastation of the environ-
ment, another part of this same group may also be held responsible for
creating and sustaining the conditions that allowed for global migration—
and exploitation—of labor at various stages in the evolution of the global
economic system. San Juan describes this pattern as follows:

After about four centuries of the worldwide circulation of commodities

- including the hugely profitable trade in slaves from Africa that inaugu-
rated, for Marx, the “rosy dawn” of capitalism - the stage was set for more
intense capital accumulation based no longer on commercial exchange and
the regional discrepancies in the price of goods but on the process of pro-
duction itself. “Place” gave way to space; lived time divided into necessary,
surplus, and “free” segments. Linked by relations of exchange governed by
 8 TELEOLOGY IN HISTORY AND INTELLECTUAL RESPONSIBILITY 251

the logic of accumulation centered in Europe and later in North America, the
trajectories of peoples of color, the “people without history” in Eric Wolfs
reckoning, entered the global labor market with the expansion of industrial
capitalism, the commercialization of agriculture, urbanization, and the con-
comitant dislocation and displacement of populations from their traditional
homelands. (San Juan 1997)

San Juan explains that the demand for the global labor market has not
abated. If at all, it has intensified but that the problems attendant to it, as
shall be explained below, have also exacerbated. San Juan adds:

We are still in the epoch of transnational migrations and the traffic in bodies.
The breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, plus the exacerbated eth-
nic/racial conflicts in their wake, promise mutations less tractable than the
configurations of earlier boundary shifts. (San Juan 1997)

Recapping Neoliberalism’s Rules, and Implications

Neither time nor space would allow at this time to rehearse fully the rules
and systems alluded to in the OXFAM study. These have been discussed, to
an extent, in a preceding chapter above. Suffice it to highlight at this point
the following features of contemporary neoliberal globalization as hav-
ing played, in this author’s view, the most significant role in creating this
inequality and, hence, the endemic global poverty that we see all around.
The principles of neoliberal globalization include: (a) privatization; (b)
deregulation; (c) trade liberalization; and, (d) militarization. Very simply,
these principles favor the rich and the powerful, either as persons or as
artificial, man-made, fictional entities, e.g., corporations. The principle of
privatization is designed to divest public, service-delivery institutions, e.g.,
government and/or any of its public service delivery organs (health care,
housing, education, etc.) of their functions and transfer the same to private,
profit-oriented entities that claim to deliver these services under the guise
of efficiency but for a fee. It fulfills the function of commodifying the com-
mons for the profit of the few and at the expense of the many. Additionally,
these entities, in claiming to provide these services, more often than not also
claim the privilege of receiving subsidies from the government presumably
to aid them in providing these services.
The principle of deregulation, on the other hand, is designed to eliminate
rules and regulations, which may have been originally put in place, through
252 K. E. BAUZON

the democratic process, in order to safeguard public health, public safety,

public welfare, including that of the natural environment, but which the
business/corporate community has complained against as being too oner-
ous to enforce, or that they cut into their profits, or, otherwise provide, in
their view, undue encumbrance to their competitiveness. Deregulation also
comes in two other guises: (a) one, as simply non-enforcement of an exist-
ing rule or a regulation by an agency that has been lobbied against (heavily
in many cases) by private, often pro-corporate lobbying groups, and, (b)
enforcement of a rule that has been enacted despite public interest, in order
to cater to private interest. The deregulation that we have witnessed over
the last forty years has been possible only because the state itself has been
transformed into a neoliberal one, coming under the control of officials
whose election into office have heavily depended on corporate campaign
contributions with little or no restrictions under the guise of free speech,
one which serves largely as a conduit for public funds for private benefit.
Trade liberalization, as third principles herein identified is supposed to
combat protectionism, deemed to be a bad word as it is seen as a barrier
to free trade. The assumption here is that there should be free and unham-
pered exchange of goods and services—but not labor—across national bor-
ders. Thus, trade barriers, direct or indirect, should be eliminated with
the consequent effect that domestic laws, rules, and regulations originally
intended to protect and shield domestic producers from foreign competi-
tion, or to protect certain domestic industries as a means of helping them
grow and flourish, or to protect and conserve certain domestic resources
from foreign exploitation, are now up for elimination. To enforcers of
global trading rules within the WTO, this is seen as a positive step toward
the harmonization of domestic laws with global trading rules. However,
one does not need to think hard that the implication of this principle is dire
for domestic producers, now denied any protection or any assistance from
their government who would now have to compete with well-funded, well-
organized foreign competitors that may, more likely than not, receive sub-
sidies from their own government, e.g., the United States, that subsidizes
its corporations, and provides them with cheap loans for their investments
and operations through the Export-Import Bank, and low-cost insurance
through the OPIC, all designed for no other purpose than to pry open the
so-called emerging economies of the Third World for exploitation and use
(Bauzon 2000).
 8 TELEOLOGY IN HISTORY AND INTELLECTUAL RESPONSIBILITY 253

Finally, the principle of militarization is not a formally recognized prin-

ciple of neoliberal globalization, but it is, in practice, the ultimate ham-
mer over the heads of states that defy the above-principles. Militarization
and neoliberal globalization have been intertwined, by law, as dictated to
by Article XXI of the WTO’s Charter (WTO Charter, Article XXI). This
article provides so-called exceptions to member states allowing them to
allocate domestic budget for purposes of arms production and defense. In
effect, it allows member states to provide subsidies to their arms industry
if the intended goal is to enhance that member state’s security. However,
because the interpretation is loose as to what “security” means, this has
given advantage to the traditional military powers, whose respective mili-
tary establishments have been among the worst polluters and transgressors
of sovereignty of weaker states, and violators of human rights around the
world, led by the United States to build their arsenal, feed money into their
respective military-industrial complexes, and traffic in arms worldwide, con-
tributing to endless cycle of conflicts. “Security” has, in fact, the common
alibi used by the United States to apply a whole range of options involving
the use of force from the routine application of sanctions and embargoes
against states not so much for violations of international law but because
the latter’s policies do not conform with those of the United States, to
assassinations of leaders or otherwise the overthrow of their governments
through coups or outright invasions simply because they have resources
coveted by the United States. The casualness with which the United States
has exercised these options around the world as though god-given prerog-
ative especially since the end of World War II is matched by the hubris with
which the US Special Operations Command has published, in May 2019,
a document entitled Support to Resistance: Strategic Purpose and Effective-
ness, through the Joint Special Operations University (O’Connor). Note
that the traditional meaning of the term “resistance,” as understood in the
report, has been hijacked and its meaning subverted so that it would mean
resistance not to US imperialism as in the case with anti-colonial and anti-
capitalist movements traditionally but, rather, in reactionary support of this
imperialism; it is a coopted resistance in the service of imperialism on the
part of an assortment of surrogate groups, e.g., the Contras in Nicaragua,
the Taliban and the al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, and the right-wing UNITA
[Unico Nacional para Independencia Total de Angola] faction in Angola,
etc., that it has funded, trained, armed, managed, and directed which the
United States has, at one time or another, used and, in some cases, con-
tinues to use, as tools with which to undermine, intimidate, pressure, or,
254 K. E. BAUZON

otherwise, overthrow a regime it does not like or which shows any hint at
all of challenging America’s hegemony. Another Orwellian feature of this
notion of resistance is that it is, in fact, being used offensively against tar-
gets that have not harmed the United States but which are self-determining
and, without much intending to other than wanting to be left alone and
forge their own future, happen to stand in the way of America’s predatory
imperialist agenda. This attests to the subjective construction of terrorism
or the enemy so that its definition suits one’s expedient needs at a given
moment in time. By this Orwellian definition—which would otherwise
be deemed as terrorism by the targeted sovereign and legally constituted
states and as construed under universally accepted principles of interna-
tional law—these identified patterns of US behavior are normalized, and
the US expects the rest of the world to go along. It matters little whether
the International Court of Justice (or World Court in popular parlance)
has already rendered a decision in 1986 in a case filed before it by the San-
dinista Government of Nicaragua, which, in effect pronounced the United
States as both a terrorist state and a terrorist-aiding state by its establish-
ment, management, and arming of the Contra thugs during the 1980s;
the Contras have engaged in untold acts of violence, e.g., destruction of
civilian infrastructure, disruption of agricultural production, assassination
of public officials, and Sandinista supporters and sympathizers, including
in drug trafficking to boot, all designed to undermine the Sandinista gov-
ernment (International Court of Justice). By the above-mentioned study’s
definition, the list of countries targeted for disruption includes Russia and
China today because these two countries, according to the report’s princi-
pal author, “have boldly demonstrated expansionist tendencies,” assuming
that America’s own expansion throughout the past century and more is
normal, a prerogative that belongs only to itself and no other (As quoted
in O’Connor).

US Militarism and the Threat of Nuclear

Annihilation
It is not an exaggeration to say that, at this stage of human history, the other
danger that poses the greatest challenge to human survival—in addition to
the environmental crisis discussed above—remains the threat of reckless
and final war imposed by the United States on the rest of the world, simply
because it can, or as an irrational response to a perceived foreign threat.
Neoliberal rules have allowed this happen, it is an instinctive behavior on
 8 TELEOLOGY IN HISTORY AND INTELLECTUAL RESPONSIBILITY 255

the part of empires at their peak in their drive for economic and geostrate-
gic dominance, and there is no single state—neither Russia nor China,
whose respective military is largely designed for defensive purposes—that
can deter it. This threat of a nuclear holocaust is recognized by no less than
Renata Dwan, currently the Director of the UN Institute for Disarmament
Research who warned that “[a] nuclear doomsday looms closer as the risk
of atomic war is at its highest since World War Two” (“Risk of Nuclear
War”).
Providing much validation to the history recounted in this work, a his-
tory punctuated by the deliberate and sustained drive of the US empire for
expansion and hegemony, an empire that is neither accidental nor abstract.
The fact that a resident in the White House today promises to make this
empire great again is incidental; the “greatness” envisioned in this slo-
gan has been and remains founded on the same principles and practices
that brought about what Marx, the great seer, has described as the “rosy
dawn” of capitalism complete with its accouterment of violence, and its
victims—including the would-be victims—have therefore no illusion about
their fate. Neoliberal globalization, as has been described throughout this
work and recapped in this concluding chapter, is set up comprehensively
to accomplish these. Its comprehensive set of principles, rules, institutions,
and practices are designed to privatize and commodify the commons with-
out regard for the common good but all for accumulation of private profit;
they are especially stacked against the multitude, mainly those in the Third
World but also against the bulk of the population in the First and Second
Worlds whose prosperity, confidence, and security they have enjoyed since
the end World War II have now been steadily eroded and undermined by
the unprecedented greed they have witnessed in their lifetime, thanks to
relentless and systematic drive to privatize public assets and services, and
deregulate and nullify commonsensical laws. For those still with fond hope
and trust that this empire as currently constituted will somehow reform
itself and adhere to its supposed founding enlightened liberal and humane
principles, Francis Boyle, Professor of International Law at the Univer-
sity of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, offers a needed historical context—
and advice—with palpable comparisons between current and previous US
behavior as follows:
256 K. E. BAUZON

Historically, the latest eruption of American militarism in the 21st century

is akin to that of America opening the 20th Century by means of the U.S.-
instigated Spanish-American War in 1898. The then Republican administra-
tion of President William McKinley grabbed their colonial empire from Spain
in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, inflicted a near-genocidal
war against the Filipino people; while at the same time illegally annexing the
Kingdoms of Hawaii and subjecting the Native Hawaiian people… to geno-
cidal conditions. Additionally, McKinley’s military and colonial expansion
into the Pacific was also designed to secure America’s economic exploitation
of China pursuant to the euphemistic rubric of the “open door” policy.
….
Today a century later, the serial imperial aggression launched, waged, and
menaced by the neoconservative Republican Bush, Junior administration,
then the neoliberal Democratic Obama administration and now the reac-
tionary Trump administration threaten to set off World War III”. (Boyle)

The institutional support that provides the enforcement mechanism for

the aforementioned neoliberal rules and principles has been placed at the
virtual disposal of the United States. These include: (a) the World Trade
Organization as the clearinghouse for all global trading activities, providing
even mechanisms for conflict resolution which serve as unelected, pseudo-
judicial body whose decisions are final even against sovereign governments;
(b) regional trading organizations, e.g., the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA) between the United States, Canada, and Mexico; and
the contemplated, highly secretive, and much-criticized Trans-Pacific Part-
nership (TPP); (c) the World Bank and the IMF which impose conditional-
ities, under the guise of so-called Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs),
on borrowing countries while providing a pretext for the pre-determination
of domestic economic policies and, thus, preempt the sovereignty, of the
borrowing country, from the outside.
The rules of neoliberal globalization are contained in the charters of vari-
ous trading regimes agreed upon by the participating member states. These
are enforceable as law on all member states of, say, the WTO, or any regional
trading organization like the NAFTA, or on any state that has officially
signed to borrow funds and agree to the terms of the Structural Adjust-
ment Program (SAP) offered by a public global financial organization,
e.g., the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF); or any
banking consortium, e.g., the European Central Bank (ECB), or the Paris
Club. In practice, these SAPs have become a Trojan Horse that allowed
 8 TELEOLOGY IN HISTORY AND INTELLECTUAL RESPONSIBILITY 257

these lending institutions to predetermine and preempt the sovereign inter-

nal decision-making process of borrowing states because not only do these
SAPs bind the latter states to agree beforehand to the conditionalities,
e.g., deregulation of utilities, privatization of services, sale of public assets,
administrative and governmental reforms, etc., they also agree beforehand
to regular monitoring and oversight to ensure compliance.
Further, the nature of the SAPs is dictated by the general policy direc-
tion preferred by the leading members of these funding institutions due to
built-in rules that favor the wealthy members whose voting rights within
these institutions are guaranteed under the so-called weighted voting sys-
tem. This system assures the same percentage of votes as the percentage of
financial contributions by the members to the general fund. This perenni-
ally favors the wealthy members while it also perennially subjects weaker
borrowing states to bondage. Periodic debt servicing remittances by the
weaker borrowing states ensure sacrificing social programs under threat of
delinquency or bankruptcy. During the 1970s and 1980s, when money
was relatively cheap to lend, many loans were taken out by authoritarian
leaders, many friendly to the United States and who were encouraged to
purchase military hardware to boost their rule, benefiting the US-based
arms industry in the process. When many of these dictators were over-
thrown, succeeding governments, e.g., Corazon Aquino of the Philippines
in 1986, was reticent to declaring these debts odious and, instead, carried
on with loan re-payments, saddling generations of their citizens yet to be
born with these debts.
While the neoliberal globalization’s premise is unhampered free trade,
presuming the supremacy of the market over politics from which it sees
itself—when convenient—as divorced from, it abides by the orthodox eco-
nomic principle of comparative advantage. The principle sounds fair and
benign on the surface as it advices parties to a transaction to take advan-
tage of the resources they have the most of. For instance, because Third
World countries have plenty of natural resources or labor, they should take
advantage of these to forge ahead. Likewise, because the First World coun-
tries have plenty of capital, heavy equipments, and high-tech products to
export, they should also take advantage of these resources. While the logic
seems neat, in practice, it condemns the poorer partner to the transaction to
eternal subordination. The partnership is never equitable and will never be
equitable. This is made worse by the prerogative taken by powerful coun-
tries—while telling the poorer states not to subsidize their industries and
ignore whatever development priorities they might have—to assert their
258 K. E. BAUZON

global economic hegemony through various means including subsidies to

their corporations either through outright grants or, indirectly, through
cheap loans through the Export-Import Bank or cheap insurance of their
assets through the publicly funded Overseas Private Investment Corpo-
ration (OPIC). These subsidies distort the market in that it gives undue
advantage to the favored corporations over their foreign competitors.

Prying Open “Emerging Markets”: Corporations

as Imperial Tools
The powerful states led by the United States also actively promote the
products of their national companies. For example, the US government
routinely provides humanitarian assistance to disaster or poverty-stricken
areas of the world in the form of grains. Often, these grains are genetically
modified food products produced by their food-producing companies, e.g.,
Monsanto, Con Agra, Cargill, ADM (Archer Daniels Midland), benefiting
these companies when new orders come in or when farmers in those coun-
tries begin using these grains for their farms, binding them to an agreement
to respect the patent rights of the grain-producing company(ies), or com-
mitting them to purchase grains for future planting seasons. This is where
the intellectual property rights (IPRs) enforced by the WTO favor and
strengthen these corporations, making them dominant actors in the inter-
national politics. Because they are profit-seeking organizations, they sell
their products to segments of the population who can pay, not to those
who cannot. They serve their shareholders, not the general public, and not
the poor in the Third World. Thus, their slogan of “feeding the world”
(taken from ADM’s “We feed the world” motto) is false on its face.
The dominance today of the global food producers is manifest in the
prevailing verticalized food production system dominated at the top by
global food giants. These giant corporate food producers virtually dictate
prices that are more often than not detached from the real value of the food
or of the labor that produced it. Small farmers at the base of the verticalized
food production produce at the specification of the corporation with which
they are aligned. They survive because they are assured of a market for their
product. Independent farmers, many or whom are organic farmers, are
not aligned with a corporation and, thus, accept the challenges or suffer
the difficulties that come with independence, or even the possibility of
bankruptcy. Because government subsidy is based on acreage, the corporate
farm—which relies on heavy machinery, large acreage, and chemical food
 8 TELEOLOGY IN HISTORY AND INTELLECTUAL RESPONSIBILITY 259

and pesticide products—gets the subsidies while small farmers do not even
though their techniques are more environmentally sustainable.
Further, the dominance of these giant food-producing corporations is
a legacy of the Green Revolution, with its avowed aim of “food security”
was promoted and funded by private philanthropic organizations like the
Ford and Rockefeller Foundations during the 1960s and 1970s. Under the
cover of the slogan to feed the world, it funded grain and seed research
institutes like the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Laguna
Province, Philippines, founded in 1960, and the International Maize and
Wheat Improvement Center (or CIMMYT in its Spanish initials), estab-
lished initially in a collaboration between the Mexican government and
academic- and corporate-based researchers under the auspices of the Rock-
efeller Foundation in 1966, both under the scientific leadership and guid-
ance of Norman E. Borlaug who, in 1970, was awarded the Nobel Peace
Prize for his efforts. The supposed goals were manifold including: (a) dis-
cover high-yielding rice varieties; (b) discover varieties resistant to insects;
(c) discover varieties for upland farming requiring less water; and (d) train
farmers in the use of new technologies, among others. In the end, because
cultivation of the discovered, i.e., genetically engineered, “miracle rice”
was capital intensive, many farmers in the Philippines and elsewhere were
not able to realize the promise of prosperity. They could not afford to pur-
chase hand-held tractors, those who had these new equipments could not
afford to buy spare parts, while others could not afford to buy the requisite
fertilizers and/or pesticides. Many who had initially borrowed money to
invest in equipment or fertilizer went under when crops failed. Who the
Green Revolution benefited, however, were the corporate food producers,
the producers of mechanized farm products, and biotech companies that
began to proliferate worldwide, boosted by the promise of patents being
awarded to them upon discovery of new forms of “life” such as by tinker-
ing with the genetic composition of seeds and, in the process, undermined
food sovereignty in the Third World. This paved the way for a trend iden-
tified by Indian scientist-activist Vandana Shiva as “biopiracy,” or the theft
of indigenous knowledge from all over the world, engaged in not only by
food producers but by pharmaceutical companies as well (Shiva).
260 K. E. BAUZON

Contesting Empire and the Role of Emancipatory

Movements
These are just a few among many that ills the current neoliberal order.
It is unlikely that under the current global structure of power, things
will change for the benefit of who Spinoza referred to as the multitude.
There is an encouraging sign that various manifestations of resistance to
this order are having localized success, e.g., the protest against water priva-
tization in Cochabamba, Bolivia; the armed rebellion by the Mayan Indi-
ans in southern Mexico, under the leadership of the Zapatista National
Liberation Front against land privatization sanctioned under NAFTA; the
urban protest called the Battle of Seattle that disrupted a WTO Ministe-
rial Conference; the seed bank project inspired by Shiva in India; and the
protests against World Bank-funded dam construction project in South
Africa, among many others. However, what is lacking is a comprehensive
understanding about the nature of the problem with its roots in extraction
for value accumulation. As San Juan explains:

Globalization as the transnationalized domination of finance capital exposes

its historical limit in the deepening class inequality of a polarized antagonism-
laden world. While surplus extraction in the international labor market
remains basic to the logic of accumulation, the ideology of neoliberal
exchange has evolved, after 9/11, into the unilateral ‘American Exception-
alist‘ discourse of the ‘war on terrorism’ and the more contentious ‘clash
of civilizations‘. Contradictions in specific loci of social struggles inform the
imperialist project of resolving the crisis of finance capital by eliminating any
obstacle (such as nation-state fiscal controls, trade tariffs, etc.) to its unlimited
sway. Prompted by this exigency, the U.S. ruling class is desperately striving
to impose hegemonic control over multiple nations, states, and peoples in
an increasingly contested space, imposing its own “American Way of Life”.
(San Juan 2007a, xxiii–xxiv)

While no easy and immediate solutions appear on the horizon to resolve,

the prospect of organic protracted resistance at the grassroots exemplified
by the struggle of Ho Chi Minh against French colonialism in Indochina,
Amilcar Cabral against Portuguese colonialism in Africa, Aime Cesaire
against French colonialism in the Caribbean, and Frantz Fanon against
racism in general provide hope and inspiration not lost to San Juan.
It is apropos to conclude this work with reassuring thoughts from no
less than San Juan himself. San Juan upholds the prerogative of peoples
 8 TELEOLOGY IN HISTORY AND INTELLECTUAL RESPONSIBILITY 261

around the world to engage in continued resistance as a matter of right, in

juxtaposition to the imperialism by the United States which it asserts as its
manifest destiny. Thus, San Juan valorizes the anti-imperialist struggle in
the Philippines as exemplary to others, in the following fashion:

In sum, Filipino nationalism constantly renews its emancipatory drive by

forging or revitalizing new political subjects (such as women, church work-
ers, indigenous, or ethnic minorities) at varying historical conjunctures. It is
organically embedded in a long-sustained tradition of emancipatory move-
ments whose origin evokes in part the Enlightenment narrative of popular
sovereignty as mediated by homegrown protagonists interacting with exter-
nal influences. The paradigm of national liberation thus bears a complex
genealogy of native and borrowed constituents in permanent synergy. In
sites of actualization are the local events of mass protests and individually dif-
ferentiated resistance against persisting U.S. domination complicit with com-
prador oligarchy. In effect, the body politic if the Filipino ‘nation’ remains in
the process of being invented primarily through diverse modes of opposition
against corporate transnationalism and its commodifying destructiveness. It
is therefore fashioning without interruption appropriate forms of cultural
identity and autonomous political subjectivity. It selects from past legacies
and present contingencies and is open to solidarity and collaboration with
all progressive, egalitarian struggles of peoples of color and working peo-
ple everywhere for a more just, equal, war-free sustainable world in place of
the exhausted, life-denying dystopia of globalizing capital. (San Juan 2007b,
xxviii–xxix)

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 Index

A as underclass, 173
aboriginal population. See indigenous U.S. president, 224, 225–228
peoples Afrikaaners, 32
Abu Ghraib, 152, 217, 235n10 Agent Orange, 67n5
Abu-Jamal, Mumia, 220 Aguinaldo, Emilio, 78
affirmative action, 197 capture of, 79, 105, 128
Afghanistan, 253 and Dewey, 83, 87–89
Africa, 9, 27, 32, 64n1, 116, 260. See exile in Hong Kong, 79–80
also South Africa as head of provisional government,
anti-colonialism in, 173, 234n8 101
North, 54 as Philippine leader, 78–80
Portuguese colonialism in, 260 manipulation and betrayal of, 81–84
segregation in, 216 proclamation of independence,
South, 32 85–86
underdevelopment of, 180 return from exile, 81–82
U.S. intervention in, 173 revolutionary government of, 87–88
African Americans. See also Obama, Ahab, Captain, 34
Barack; racism Alangkat uprising, 163n6
church-based tradition of, 209 Alden, James, 38–41, 44, 46
discrimination against, 202 Alexander, Michelle, 198–199
opposed to Philippine-American war, Alfonso XIII (King of Spain), 118
110, 112–116 Algeria, 54
rights of, 224–226 Ali, Datu, 127
as soldiers, 110–116 Ali rebellion, 127

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under 285

exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019
K. E. Bauzon, Capitalism, The American Empire, and Neoliberal
Globalization, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9080-8
286 INDEX

Allen, James Edgar, 130–146 B

al-Nakba, 237n11 Bacolod, Sultan of, 139–141
al-Qaeda, 253 Badiou, Alain, 232n4
Alyosha. See Karamazov, Alyosha Balce, Nerissa, 156–160
America. See North America; South Baldwin, Frank D., 129–131, 134–138
America; United States Baldwin, James, 207, 233n8
American Board of Commissioners for Balzac (Honore de), 156
Foreign Missions, 16 Baraka, Ajamu, 199, 201–202
American Pacific Orientalism, 157 barbarism, 7, 53, 204, 230n1
American Squadron, 49 barbarization, 184n3
Ampuan-Agaus, Datu, 147 Basil of Caesarea, 250
Anderson, Anderson, 26 Bates, John C., 116, 119, 121–123
Anderson, Thomas MacArthur, 81 Bates Treaty, 17, 122–124, 128
Angola, 173 Battle of Bacolod, 147, 148
anti-capitalism, 13, 230n1, 253. See Battle of Bayan, 131–138
also capitalism Battle of Bud Bagsak, 148, 149, 163n7
anti-colonialism, 116. See also Battle of Little Big Horn, 67n5
colonialism Battle of Manila, 110
anti-imperialism, 115–116, Battle of Manila Bay, 56, 60, 77, 81
228–230n1. See also imperi- Battle of Seattle, 260
alism Baudelaire (Charles Pierre), 156
Anti-Imperialist League, 92, 110 Baudrillard (Jean), 232n4
Bautista, Ambrosio Rianzares, 85
anti-Semitism, 236n11
Bayan, Sultan of, 129, 130–134, 136
anti-Zionism, 236n11
Beaud, Michel, 24
apartheid, 25, 173
Beede, Benjamin, 129
Apology Resolution, 61
behavioralism, 193
Aquino, Corazon, 257
Belgium, 54, 184n2, 217
Arrighi, Giovanni, 32, 182n1
Bell, J. Franklin, 107
Artacho, Isabelo, 79
benevolent assimilation, 89, 97n5, 119,
Asia. See also China; Japan 125, 151
East, 150 Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation,
Indochina, 172 109–112, 119
South, 178 Benjamin, Walter, 232n4
Southeast, 178 Berge, William H., 63
Asian Americans, 174, 219 Berlin Conference, 32
Asian Development Bank, 13 Beveridge, Alfred, 109
Asian-Pacific Islanders, 231n3 Bhabha, Homi, 203–205
Asiatic mode of production, 28n2 Bilderberg Group, 246
Atlantic slave trade. See slave trade Binidayan Fort, 131–134
austerity, 223 biodiversity, 245
Australia, 47 biopiracy, 259
 INDEX 287

biotech industry, 71n9, 259 Butig, Sultan of, 140

#Black Lives Matter (BLM) Movement,
211, 224
Black Panther Party, 209 C
Black Reparations Movement, 216, Cabral, Amilcar, 13, 29n2, 187n6, 260
220, 224 Cabugatan of Maciu (Sultan), 140, 142
Blount, James H., 87, 158 Cabusao, Jeffrey, 214
Boer Wars, 32 Calderon, Felipe, 101
Bolivia, 13, 178, 250, 260 Calvert, James, 35, 48
Bolshevik Revolution (1917), 27 Camp Vicars, 136–139, 142, 147
Bonifacio, Andres, 77–78, 95n2 Canada, 32, 70n9, 179
Bonifacio, Ciriaco, 79 capital accumulation, 20n2, 31–33, 89,
Bonifacio, Procopio, 79 160n1, 172, 182n1, 205, 213,
Borlaug, Norman E., 259 224
Bourdieu, Pierre, 69n7, 183n1 by dispossession, 29n2
bourgeois class, 27n1, 165n9, 192, hegemony based on, 172–175
220 capitalism, 23, 179, 182n1, 194–198,
Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions 205, 222, 231n3. See also
(BDS) Movement, 213 anti-capitalism; post-capitalism
Boyle, Francis, 255 collective, 32
Braudel Center, 24 and democracy, 5, 200
Braudel, Fernand, 23 and environmental sustainability, 246
Brazil, 178, 218 evil of, 194
Bretton Woods, 172 global, 2, 7, 15, 161n2
Britain, xv, 28n2, 32, 55 and hegemony, 28n1
British East India Company, 9 Kafka’s view of, 236n10
British-French wars, 32 and liberalism, 7
British West Indies Company, 55 logic of, 201
Brothers Karamazov, 8 mature, 27
Brown, Michael, 210 merchant, 180
Brown v. Board of Education, 197 nature of, 180
Buat, Musib M., 118 neoliberal, 18, 247
Buayan (Rajah), 118 and slavery, 26, 69n7
Bud Bagsak, 163n7. See also Battle of and the state, 26–27, 182n1
Bud Bagsak in Western Europe, 172–174
Buffalo Soldiers, 110, 115 as world-system, 3, 32, 180, 201
Bukharin, Nikolai, 31–33, 182n1 Caribbean, 15, 260
Burger, Warren, 197 Carmack, Edward Ward, 88
Burke, Edmund, 9 Carson, Arthur, 64
Bush Administration, 235n10, 256 Cartesian dualism, 5
Bush, George W., 152, 217 imperialism, 229n1
Butig-Maciu expedition, 141, 142–148 Castle, Samuel Northrup, 16
288 INDEX

Cazneau, Jane McManus Storm (Cora colonialism, 14–15, 23, 25, 166n10,
Montgomery), vii, 62 180, 203–204. See also anti-
Cebull, Richard, 196 colonialism
Center for Constitutional Rights, 217 “compadre,”, 57–59
Central America, 217 conflated with progress, 8
counterinsurgency in, 3, 185n4 education and, 153–160
U.S. intervention in, 172 and empire, 6
Central American Free Trade Agree- and Enlightenment, 4, 19
ment – Dominican Agreement European, 19, 24, 181–182,
(CAFTA – DR), 3 204–205, 216
Cesaire, Aime, 233n8, 260 and exploitation of resources, 5
Chaffee, Adna R., 126, 130–135, justification for, 109
137–139 neo-, 161n2, 166n9, 203–207
Chile, 172, 177, 218 in the Philippines, 157–160
China, 16, 32, 65n2, 118, 150, 174, and racism, 24–25
256 United States, 46, 151, 155–156,
CIMMYT (Centro Internacional de 159
Mejoramiento de Maiz y Trigo), victims of, 204–205
259 and violence, 53, 157
Citizen’s Committee of Public Safety, Western, 19
16 colonial plunder, 215–217
civilizing mission, 5, 25, 65n3, 69n8, colonization, 8, 64n1
157 by Britain, 28n2, 32
civil rights movement, 199, 209 by France, 32
Civil War, 25, 66n5 and migrant workers, 154
Clark, Reginald, 226–227 by the Netherlands, 32
Clark, William, 39–43 by Portugal, 9
clash of civilizations, 260 by Spain, 17
class conflict, 27 by the U.S., 66n4
class displacement, 192 commercial civility, 6–8
class, recovery of, 214–220 Commission to Study Reparation
class reductionism, 192 Proposals for African-Americans
class struggle, 29n5 Act, 225
Clay, Henry, vii commodification, 211, 246, 247
Clinton, William Jefferson “Bill,”, 61 commons (global), 5, 9, 180, 245–246,
Coates, Ta-Nehisi, 207–213 247
coercive pacification, 163n7 Communist Party of the Philippines
Cohn, Marjorie, 235n10 (CPP), 183n2
Cold War, 20n1, 172, 212, 221, 222 Compadre colonialism, 57
knowledge production in, 191–194 conatus, principle of, 10
collateral damage, 151 conditionalities, 256
Colombo Plan, 172 conflict theory, xi, 193–194
 INDEX 289

Congo, 173 plural, 202

Congo Free State, 54 political, 202
Constantino, Renato, 153–154 popular, 68n6
consumerism, 54, 165n9 of poverty, 223
Contras, 252–254 primitive, 157
Cooke, Amos Starr, 16 universalized/universalizing, 231n2
corporate personhood, 198 Western, 172
Cortes (Spanish), 79 world, 195
Cosby, Bill, 211, 223 Curry, Manly B., 155
Cosby Show, The, 222 Custer, George A., 67n5
counterinsurgency, 3, 17, 228n1 cybernetics, 193
in Central America, 3, 185n4, 217
in the Philippines, 17, 110, 149,
155, 184n2 D
U.S., 151, 159 Dacula, Datu, 129
in Vietnam, 54, 67n5 Dahl, Robert, 193
criminal justice system, 213 Darity, William A., Jr., 226–228
Crusaders, 8 Darwin, Charles, 25, 191, 192
critical race theory, xi Darwinism, 63
Cuba economic, 212
strategic hamleting in, 54 social, 159, 200–203
subjugation of, 182 Davenport, Kiana, 71n9
U.S. aid to revolutionaries, 15, 17, Davis, Angela, 27, 208
59 Davis, George Whitfield, 126–137
as U.S. possession, 60, 89–90, 116 death squads, 172, 217
and the USS Maine, 59–60 debt servitude, 177
Cuban revolution, 59 deconstruction, 234n10
cultural studies, 71n9, 183n1, 228n1, de Dios, Emilio Riego, 80
231n4 demilitarize. See militarization
cultural theory, 51, 164n8 democracy
culture(s). See also multiculturalism; and capitalism, 5, 184n3, 195, 201,
polyculturalism 205
American, 58, 68n6, 202 direct, 14
civic, 156, 199, 200 enemies of, 235n10
and colonialism, 159–160 and imperialism, 57, 201
common, 13, 53, 200 liberal, 195
Filipino, 97n6, 102, 160 and national identity, 231n3
hegemonic, 73n9 neoliberal, 200
indigenous Pacific, 156 in the Philippines, 55, 166n10, 172
Moro, 122–125 popular, 14, 69n9
Native American, 131 programs, 175
non-Western, 19 Spinoza’s views on, 11, 12, 14
290 INDEX

in the U.S., 193, 200 education, colonial, 153–160

democratization, 184n2 Ejercito Zapatista Liberacion Nacional
De Molay, Order of (Philippines), 155 (EZLN), 178. See also Zapatista
Department of Homeland Security National Liberation Front
(DHS), 200 Elliott, Charles Burke, 56
dependency theory, 180, 186n5 El Mozote massacre, 229n1
deregulation, 180, 184n3, 211, 251, El Salvador, 218
252, 257 Emmons, George, 40–42
De Ruyter, Michiel, 10 empire
desegregation, 197–198 American, 12–19, 52, 56, 59, 61,
determinism, 5, 25, 207, 221–222 62–64, 181, 210, 216, 219,
Dewey, George, 56, 60, 64, 80–81, 228, 256
88–92 British, 7, 51
plausible deniability of, 88–93 class, 201, 231n2, 231n4
de Witt, Cornelius, 10 colonial, 8, 163n6
de Witt, Johan, 10 colonization and, 8
Dirlik, Arif, 2–3 corporate, 229n1, 232n4
diversity, 194 and the Enlightenment, 4–9
domain assumptions, 193
from Enlightenment to neoliberal
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 8
globalization, 9–14
Doty, Roxanne Lynn, 108
evil, 174
Douglass, Frederick, 110
European, 7, 15, 193–194
Dred Scott case, 25
global, 242
drones, 197, 207–208, 236n10
and global commerce, 7, 77
Du Bois, W.E.B., 26, 208, 220, 234n8
and global sovereignty, 11
Dutch. See Netherlands
Dwan, Renata, 255 neoliberal, 196
Dyer, Thomas, 61 North American, 194
in the Philippines, 151, 162n4,
163n7, 166n10
E racial nature of, 182
Eadie, Pauline, 165n9 Spanish, 69n8, 96n3
Eastern Europe, 222 US, x, 14, 151, 164n8, 255
Easton, David, 193 visualization of, 157–160
East Timor, 217 enemy combatants, 197
Ebert, Teresa (Red Feminist), 215 Enlightenment, 95n2, 229n1
economic hit man. See economic jackal and empire, 4–9
economic inequality, 215–228, 231n3 and progress, 5, 8, 14
economic jackal, 4, 55, 66–68n5 Eperjesi, John R., 51
economics, 195 ethnic cleansing, 182n1
economism, 192, 207 eurocentric, 2, 5, 27, 29n2, 53
Edgerton, Robert B., 111–113 eurocentrism, 207, 221
 INDEX 291

Europe. See also specific European Foley, Barbara, xi

countries by name food production, 258
Eastern, 222 Ford Foundation, 259
Western, 246 Ford, Glen, 210
European Central Bank (ECB), 256 foreign assistance (1969), 176
European Council, 184n2 Foreign Assistance Act (1947), 172
exceptionalism, 33–34, 53, 54, 55–57, formalism, xi
199–202, 225 Forsyth, William D., 129
Exclusion Law, 231n3 Foucault (Michel), 232n4, 232n5
executive powers, 197 France, vii, 217
existentialism, 236n10 in Algeria, 54
exploitation, 27, 186n6, 191, 214, 246 colonialism in Indochina, 172
colonial and neocolonial, 203 colonialism in the Caribbean, 260
corporate, 229n1 Francisco, Luzviminda, 103–104, 151
global, 180 Franco, Jean, 185n4
of labor, 164n9, 184n9, 205, 213, Freeman, Needhom N., 121
232n4 free markets, 5, 155, 165n9, 180, 194,
of labor power, 173 232n4, 235n10, 247
of persons of color, 230n1 free trade, 3, 8, 127, 151, 175, 187n6,
politics of, 191 211, 229n1, 230n2, 257
racial, 31 Free Trade Zones, 164n9, 187n6
of resources, 180, 222, 252
Freire, Paulo, 206
sexual, 87
Friedman, Thomas L., 177–182,
of the Third World, 252
184n3
Export-Import Bank, 252
full spectrum dominance, 174
expressive realism, 230n1
Fulton, Robert A., 120, 123–127,
extractivism, 245
140–142
functionalism, xi, 193
Funston, Frederick, 105
F
Fagen, David, 114–116
Fall, Bernard, 151
Fanon, Frantz, 224, 260 G
Ferrer, Felix, 79 G8 Ministerial Conference, 13
field manuals (US military), 17 Gast, John, 146
Fields, Barbara Jeanne, 215–216 Gatewood, Willard, Jr., 113
Fiji islands, 15, 34–53 Gaza. See Palestine and Palestinians
Filipino-American War. See Philippine- Genetically Modified Organisms
American War (GMO), 70n9
Filipino diaspora, 164n9, 184n3 genocide, 66n4, 157, 182n1, 191
First World, 4, 257 cultural, 66n4, 71n9
Flores, Ambrosio, 155 Giroux, Henry A., 195, 211, 233n7
292 INDEX

global financial institutions, 68n5. See Hardt, Michael, 11–14

also International Monetary Fund harmonization rules, 4
(IMF); World Bank (WB) Harvey, David, 185n4
globalization. See also neoliberal Hawaiian Islands, 16, 61, 70n9, 256
globalization Hay, John, 150
corporate, 206 Hearst, William Randolph, 59
and industrialization, 173
hegemony
of labor, 234n10
based on capital accumulation and
as normal, 178
labor extraction, 172–175
predatory, 232n4
based on racial hierarchy, 220
processes of, 11
global, 4, 11, 174, 246
San Juan’s definition of, 182n1,
184n3, 184–186n4, 261 neoliberal, 161n2, 242
and U.S. intervention, 172 of the U.S., 3, 11–12, 220, 231n2,
U.S.-led, 176, 222 233n5, 260
global warming, 245–249 Hendrickson, Kenneth E., 81–82
Gonzalez, Juan, 208 Henry, Wilkes, 40, 44, 46
Goodman, Amy, 208 Higginbotham, F. Michael, 196
Gouldner, Alvin W., 193 historical determination, 205
Government of the Republic of the historical materialism, 220
Philippines (GRP), 161n2, 183n2 historical materialist approach, 23, 24,
Gowing, Peter, 120 94n1, 207, 214, 220, 221, 232n4
Gramsci, Antonio, 232n4, 233n6 historiography, Marxist, 180
Gratz v. Bollinger, 197 Ho Chi Minh, 13
Grayson, William, 103 Holder, Eric, 234n10
Greece, 172, 218 Holland. See Netherlands
Green Revolution, 258
Holliday, Preston, 111
Guam, 60, 89, 256
Hong Kong, 60, 79–80, 154
Guantanamo Bay, 59
Horowitz, Irving Louis, 194–199,
Guantanamo detention camp, 152,
231n2
234n10
Hudson (Captain), 36
Guatemala, 172, 218, 229n1
Guevara, Che, 13 Hukbalahap Movement (Huk), 95n2,
Guevara, Sulpicio, 85 161n2
humanitarian interventionism, 59
humanities, 207
H human rights, 14, 186n6, 202, 224,
Habermanesque, 235n10 235n10
habitus, 69n7, 95n2, 174, 191–194 Hume, David, 6–9
Haiti, 218 Hunt, Hannah, 47
Halstead, Murat, 90 Hunt, John, 47, 50
hamleting, 54, 106 Huntington, Samuel, 235n10
 INDEX 293

I International Maize and Wheat

Idle No More (INM) Movement, 71n9 Improvement Center. See CIM-
ilustrado, 78, 79, 106 MYT (Centro Internacional de
imperialism, 3, 4, 9, 14, 204, 261. See Mejoramiento de Maiz y Trigo)
also anti-imperialism International Monetary Fund (IMF),
American, 181, 205 166n9, 172, 177, 179, 256
in behalf of the Anglo-Saxon race, 63 International Rice Research Institute
(IRRI), 2589
British, 28n2
intersectionality, 214
in China, 65n2
Intramuros, 17, 81
by European powers, 68n7 investor rights, 4
failure of postcolonialism with regard Invisible Hand, 8, 181, 244
to, 207 Iran, 172
in the Pacific, 60–63, 156 Iraq, 109, 177, 235n10
United States, 12, 14, 16, 19, 47, Irish resistance, 26
57, 205, 209, 219–221 Israel Anti-Lobby Act (S.720), 236n11
victims of, 151, 204–2065 Israel, Zionist State of, 207, 212, 224,
Western, 19, 151 236n11
imperialist imaginary, 52 Italy, 172–174
Ince, Onur Ulas, 6–8
India, 28n2
J
Indian Removal Act, vii
Jackson, George, 220
Indian Wars, 181 Jamaica, 54
indigenous peoples, 5, 15, 24, 26, 53, James, C.L.R., 68n6, 232n4, 233n5
204, 223, 261 Jameson, Frederic, 203
as aboriginal savages, 62 Japan, 47, 150, 154, 174, 184n3, 246
in the Algerian Sahara, 54 Jaudenes, Fermin, 90
in America, vii, 9, 67n5 Jim Crow, 198, 226
in Canada, 70n9 John Paul II (Pope), 248
and colonization, 51 Johnson, L.M., 87
as peoples of color, 206 Johnson, Robert, 42
Indochina, 172 Joint Special Operations University,
Indonesia, 217, 218 253
Joint United States Military Advisory
US intervention in, 172
Group (JUSMAG), 152
insurectos , 109. See also insurgent
“Joint Vision 2020” (US DoD), 174
Insurge Intelligence, 249
Jolo Archipelago. See Sulu Archipelago
insurgent, 82, 90, 102, 115, 158
Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs),
258 K
International Court of Justice (World Kafka, Franz, 236n10
Court), 254 Kamlon insurrection, 163n6
294 INDEX

Karamazov, Alyosha, 8 Lenin, Vladimir I., 33

Karnow, Stanley, 58, 151 liberal democracy, 195
Katipunan, 78, 95n2, 155 liberal idealism, 27
Kennedy, John F., 210 liberalization, 150
kerekere, 50 of trade, 2–7, 180, 251–254
Kho, Madge, 117, 118, 120 Lincoln, Abraham, 25
Kipling, Rudyard, 107 Lions Club (Philippines), 156
Kiram, Mohammad Jamalul I (Sultan), Lith, Richard, 49
118 Llanera, Marciano, 80
Klein, Naomi, 245 Locke, John, 5–8, 24
knowledge production, and the Cold Logia Modestia, 155
War, 191–194 London Missionary Society, 47
Knox, Samuel, 37 low-intensity warfare, 112, 185n4,
Kobbe, William, 116 230n1
Krag rifles, 129 Lukacs, Georg, 232n4
Kudarat, Sultan, 125 Luxemburg, Rosa, 232n4
Kuwait, 155 Lyon, Paul, 157

L
labor M
Filipino, 235n10 Mabini, Apolinario, 85, 101
international division of, 3, 164n9, Macabebes, 152
180, 185n3, 186n6 MacArthur, Arthur, 105–110, 154
migrant, 3, 165n9, 187n6 Maciu, Sultan of, 139–147
labor exploitation, 184n3, 186n6, 213, MacNair, W.B., 145
219, 250 Magdalo, 78
labor export, from the Global South, Magdiwang , 78
165n9 Magna Carta (1215), 8
from the Philippines, 3 Maguindanao Sultanate, 17, 118,
labor extraction, 172, 181 125–138, 162n3
labor migration, 3, 65n2 Mahan, Alfred Thayer, 16, 61, 62
labor power, 28n2, 29n5, 173, 192 Maine, USS (battleship), 59–61
Lacan (Jacqus), 232n4 Majul, Cesar Adib, 118
Lake Lanao Expedition, 136–144 Malcolm, George A., 102
Lakota Indians, 67n5 Malinowski, Bronislav, 192
Lanao Expeditionary Force, 134–138 Malolo Massacre, 16, 33–53
Lanao Lake region, pacification of, Manicheanism, 205
125–135, 148 manifest destiny, vii, 15, 53, 62, 89–90,
Land Defenders, 70n8 261
Latin America. See South America Manila Bay, 56, 60, 64, 77
Latin America Free Trade Area Maporo (Datu), 163n6
(LAFTA), 186n5 Marable, Manning, 203
 INDEX 295

Maranao Sultanate, 17, 129–134 workers, 154

Marcuse, Herbert, 203 militarism, 256
marginalization, 191 militarization. See neoliberal globaliza-
Maria Cristina falls, 147 tion
Marks, George P., III, 111 Military Bases Agreement, 152
Marshall Plan, 172 military doctrines, 174–175
Marxism, xii, 2, 9, 194, 203, 220 military operations, 174–175
orthodox, 221 Mill, John Stuart, 25
Marxism-Leninism, 179 Milliken v. Bradley, 197
Marxist dogmatism. See Marxism Mindanao Sultanate. See Maguindanao
Marxist scholarship, 203 Sultanate
sociologists, 194 Miranda rights, 197
tradition, 2 missionaries, 16, 35, 51
Marx, Karl, 9, 25–27, 28n2, 32, 64n1, in Fiji, 45–51
94n1, 193, 255 in Hawaii, 16
Masonic Movement (Philippines), 155 to the Philippines, 64, 159
Massacre at Bud Bagsak, 124, 149, mode of production, 23, 29n2
163n7 modernism, xi, 20n1, 236n10
Massacre at Wounded Knee, 67n5 modernist project, 20n1
Massacre of Bud Dajo, 124 modernization model, 172
materialism, historical, 12, 203, 212, modern state system, 53
220, 233n6 money, as representation of value, 6
materialist critique, historical. See Monroe Doctrine, 16, 60
materialism, historical Montenegro, Antonio, 80
Maura Law (1893), 119 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, 8
McArthur, Arthur, 109 Montgomery, Cora (Jane McManus
McCoy, Alfred, 160, 166n10 Storm Cazneau), vii, 62
McKinley, William, 55, 92, 105, 108, Morga, Antonio, xiii
119, 123, 126, 160n1 Moro, Aldo, 12
Benevolent Assimilation Proclama- Moroland, 17
tion, 119, 160n1 declaring independence from Spain,
McNair, W.S., 131 117–121
Melville, Herman, 34, 68n6 historical background, 162n3
Menchu, Rigoberta, 229n1 integration into Philippines,
Mende-France, Mireille Fanon, 224 150–151
mercantile trade, 6, 8 pacification of, 17, 116–151, 162n5
Merritt, Wesley, 81, 90–91, 125 U.S. sovereignty over, 117, 120,
Mexico, vii, 13, 256 122, 126
privatization in, 13, 178–179 Moro Problem, 127
Middle East, 154, 173, 206 Moro Province Legislative Council,
migrant labor, 3, 155, 187n6 122
remittances by, 3 Morrison, Toni, 207, 213
296 INDEX

Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais militarization of, 177, 233n7

Sem Terra (MST), 179 pedagogy, 200, 221
Muda, Rajah, 134 as predatory, 232n4
multicultural/intercultural relations, principles of, 14, 176–182, 251–254
219 resistance to, 13, 178–179
multiculturalism, xi, 173, 200, 222 rules of, 251–258
fetish of, 199–203 and uneven development, 180–182
paradigm of, 199 neoliberalism, 2, 176, 180, 195, 196,
terminology of, 13 198, 212, 246
multiculturalism, 201–219, 230n2, neoliberal order, 164n9
232n4 neoliberal pedagogy, rise of, 194–199
multitude, 9–14, 255 Netherlands
Mutual Defense Treaty, 152 colonization by, 32
as co-sponsor of peace process
(Philippines), 184n2
N Dutch civilizing expeditions, 54
Nakba. See al-Nakba Dutch descent, 32
national borders, 182n1 Dutch East India Company, 10
National Conference of Black Dutch Golden Age, 10
Lawyersna, 223–224 Dutch Republic, 10
National Democratic Front, 184n2 Orange monarchists, 10
nationalism, 19, 53, 182n1, 206, New People’s Army (NPA), 183n2
229n1 Newtonian presumption, 191
civic, 200 Newton, Isaac, 192
Filipino, 261 “New World Order”, 155
National Military Strategy (2015), New Zealand, 47
174–175 nihilism, 14
Native Americans, vii, 6, 66n4, 131 Nixon, Richard, 176
natural selection, 25 North America, 50, 194, 246. See also
naval imperialism, 62 Canada; United States
Navigation Laws (British), 8 North American Free Trade Agreement
Negri, Antonio, 11–14 (NAFTA), 256, 260
Negritude, 233n8 North Atlantic Treaty Organization
neocolonialism. See colonialism (NATO), 175
neofunctionalism, 193 Norway, 184n2
neoliberal globalization, 55, 150,
178–179, 182n1, 222–224,
251–259 O
and capitalism, 247 Oahu Jack, 37, 39, 41
contemporary, 11, 18, 55, 219, 251 Obama Administration, 224,
hegemony of, 242 234–235n10
institutional structures of, 13, Obama, Barack, 196, 199, 202, 209,
176–179 212, 214, 217, 225–228, 256
 INDEX 297

Occupied Palestinian Territories, 213, Panama Canal, 15, 60

236–237n11 Pandapatan Fort, 132
O’Connell, Paddy, 36 Pandapatan, Sultan of, 134
O’Connor, Tom, 254 Pandita of Nuzca, 147
Odah, Tariq Ba, 217 Papalangi, 35, 36
Olivares, Jose de, 157 Paraguay, 218
“Open Door” policy, 150–151, 256 Paraiso, Bryan Anthony C., 82
Operation Phoenix, 66–67n5 paramilitary organizations, 172,
Operation Rolling Thunder, 66–67n5 185–186n4, 197
Opium Wars, 32, 65n2, 175 Parents Involved in Community Schools
Orientalism, American Pacific, 158 v. Seattle School District No. 1,
Orwellian, 254 197–198
O’Sullivan, John, vii Paris Club, 256
Otis, Elwell, 103, 105, 117, 126, 148, Parsons, Talcott, 192
158 paternalistic principles, 150
Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs), Paterno, Pedro, 79–80, 113
164–166n9, 234–236n10 Pearl Harbor, 16, 61
Filipino contract workers, “pedagogic invasion”, 56
234–236n10 pedagogy
Overseas Private Insurance Corporation neoliberal, 207, 221
(OPIC), 252 public, 196, 212
Overseas Private Investment Corpora- pénétration pacifique, 54
tion (OPIC), 176, 258 peninsulares , 79
OXFAM International, 243, 244 People’s Climate March, 246
Perkins, John, 55
Permanent Court of Arbitration, 33
P Perry, Matthew, 47
pacification Perry, Oliver Hazard, 37
coercive, 163n7 Pershing, John J., 136–151, 163n6
of Lanao Lake region, 125–138, Pershing Lake Lanao Expedition,
147, 148 140–144, 147–148, 163n6
of Moroland, 116–151, 162–163n5 personal responsibility, 210–211, 222,
of the Philippines, 55, 58, 101–110 228
racial dimensions of, 110–116 Philbrick, Nathaniel, 33–46
Pact of Biak-na-Bato, 79–81 Philippine-American War, 55,
Paduka Batara (Sultan), 118 106–108, 158
Pakistan, 172 casualties of, 102, 108, 112, 148,
Pakistani, 217 151, 155
Palestine and Palestinians, 205, 214, desertion of U.S. soldiers, 110,
236–237n11 113–114
Palestinian Great March of Return, incident at San Juan Bridge, 103
236–237n11 pacification campaign, 61–112
298 INDEX

U.S. atrocities, 107, 114, 151 Piang, Datu, 127, 129

Philippine Commissions, 55, 123–124, Pinter, Harold, 217–219
158 Platt Amendment (1903), 15
Philippine Constabulary, 17 Platt, Orville, 15
Philippine Constitution (1935), 152 plenary power, 222, 231n3
Philippine flag, 87 Plessy decision, 25, 111
Philippine National Anthem, 87 pluralism, 173, 193, 199–203
Philippine Organic Act (1902), 55 pluralist analysis, 193
Philippine Revolution, 17, 59, 77–78, policy of attraction, US, 163n7
85, 93n1, 94–95n2, 153 political forecasting, 18
Aguinaldo’s government, 79, 85 political science, 10, 192–193
Dewey’s plausible deniability, 88–93 political theory, 5
execution of Bonifacio, 78–79, 96n4 polo services, 95–96n3
manipulation and betrayal of polyculturalism, 234–235n10
Aguinaldo, 81–84 Portugal, colonization by, 9, 55
in opposition to the cacique Inquisition in, 9
mentality, 94–95n2 positivist logic of representation, 53
at the point of US intervention, post-capitalism, 245. See also capitalism
77–81 postcolonialism, 2–4, 28–29n2,
proclamation of independence, 186–187n6, 203
85–88, 152 postcolonial stage, 186–187n6
Philippine revolutionaries, 77, 78, postcolonial studies, 28n2
95n2, 96n3, 102–106 postcolonial theory, 233n6
Philippines, 16, 17, 218 post-marxism, 28–29n2
counterinsurgency in, 109, 152 postmodernism, 20n1, 175, 236n10
Green Revolution in, 259 transnational, 19
McKinley’s assimilation policy, postmodernity, 185–186n4
108–110 postmodern times, 185–186n4
migrants from, 3 Powell doctrine, 183–184n2
pacification of, 17, 54, 109, 117 Powell, Colin, 183–184n2
racial dimension of pacification, power
110–116 executive, 197
resistance in, 161n2 hierarchies and asymmetries of,
Spanish sovereignty in, 119 230–231n2
U.S. occupation of, 57, 89–92, plenary, 222, 231n3
127–134 Power, Samantha, 65–66n3
U.S. intervention in, 62, 77–93 Pozo, Michael, 50, 206
U.S. surveillance system, 158 Pratt, E. Spencer, 83
Philippine Scouts, 152 Pratt, Edward B. (Captain), 116
photography, ethnographic, 157 Presbyterian Board of Foreign Mission,
Physicians for Human Rights, 64
234–235n10 principalia, 95–96n3
 INDEX 299

privacy rights, 197 Rajah Bungso-Lopez Treaty, 118

privatization, 5, 150, 177, 178, 251, Rakitin, Mikhail Osipovich, 8
260 rational choice theory, 220
in Hawaii, 16 reconcentrado, 54, 106, 113, 138
of the military, 108 Red Brigades, 12
pro-democracy groups, 197 Rehnquist, William, 197
Progressive Era, 157 Reidy, John J., 130–138, 143–147
progressivism, 210, 213 Reparations movement, 216, 220, 224
Project for a New American Century Republic of the Philippines (GRP),
(PNAC), 175 161n2, 183n2
proletarian class, 27, 28–29n2, 78 Rice, George D., 136
Propaganda Movement, 93–94n1 Rice, Mark, 159
protectionism, 176–179 Ringgold, Cadwalader, 41–43, 49
Protestant work ethic, 222 risk analysis, 18
Public Law, 61, 69–73n9 Rivera, Primo de, 80
Puerto Rico, 60, 89, 116, 256 Rizal, Jose P., xii–xiii. See 93–97nn1–6
Pulitzer, Joseph, 59 Roberts, John, 197
Rockefeller Foundation, 259
Rodney, Walter, 180
Q
Roma-Sianturi, Dinah, 56
Quemada, 54
Roof, Dylann, 199
Roosevelt Administration, 123
R Roosevelt, Theodore, 60–62, 107,
race 109, 111, 115, 124, 134
and class, 26 Root, Elihu, 15, 107, 126, 130
without class, 207–221 Rotary Club, 156
race relations, 25, 216, 219, 225–228 Rough Riders, 60, 111, 115
racial hierarchy, 173, 197, 220, Russia, 26, 150, 216, 254
230–231n2
racial inequality, 216, 225, 231n3
racial theory, 159 S
racism, xi, 5, 24, 64, 103, 196, 199, Said, Edward, 19, 71n9, 204, 206
205, 223–224 Saito, Natsu Taylor, 231n3
class basis of, 214–221 Sakdalista, 95n2
and colonialism, 5, 24–25 Saleeby, Najeeb, 120, 122
as domestic terrorism, 233n7 Sandwich Islands. See Hawaiian Islands
eradication of, 199, 222, 228–230n1, San Juan, E., Jr., ix–xi
233n8 on the anti-colonial character of
ideology of, 224 of the Philippine resistance,
structural, 198, 202, 209, 220, 223, 115–116
225 on anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist
and Zionism, 236n11 resistance, 230n1
300 INDEX

on the anti-imperialist themes of on McKinley’s rationale for conquest,

Melville’s Moby Dick, 68n6 92–93
on the apologists for US colonialism on mercantile trade, 64n1
in the Philippines, 57–59 on merchant capitalism, 180
on Asian-Pacific Islanders, 231n3 on Moroland, 162n5, 163n6
on black American soldiers, 110, 113 on multiculturalism, 231n4
on Bonifacio, 95n2 on national liberation, 19, 179
on the bourgeois nationalization of on the nation-state, 53–55
the state, 28n1 on neoliberal democracy, 200
on capitalism as a world system, 201 on the Opium Wars, 65n2
on capitalism as system of capital on the Philippines, 55–58, 92–93,
accumulation, and labor 93n1, 110, 115, 152, 160n1
exploitation, 205 on postcolonial “ethical utopianism”,
on class reductionism, 192 179
on Cold War displacement of class, on postcolonialism, 203–206
191–194 on the Propaganda Movement, 93n1
on colonization, 51 on questioning US suppression of
on the contemporary “state,”, 182n1 dissent, 228n1
on counterinsurgency nature of US on race and racism, 214
assistance, 183n2 on religion as means of exacting
on cultural genocide, 66n4 consent, 50
on resistance in the Philippines,
on cultural studies, 72n9, 228n1
161n2
on the emancipatory role of
on the slave trade, 26, 68n7
knowledge production, 19
on Spain, 97n6
on Fanon, 229n1
on Spinoza, 13
on the feminist praxis in Filipino
as theoretical wedge, 201
writing, 154
on uneven development, 186–187n6
on the Filipino diaspora, 164n9
on the universaliation of the US “war
on finance capitalism, 260
on terror”, 234n10
on Frederick Douglass, 110 on the universalization of culture,
on genocidal US counterinsurgency, 230n2
113 on the US annexation of the
on globalization and labor, 234n10 Philippines and the conscience
on Hawaii, 31, 69n9 of humanists, 151
on history, 19 on the US “civilizing mission”, 69n8
on the internationalization of US on the US claim to exceptionalism,
domestic law, 234n10 56
on Jose Rizal, 93n1 on U.S. colonialism, 97n5, 167n10
on labor exploitation, 184n3, 205 on the US interruption of the
on labor power, 65n2 Philippine Revolution, 93n1
on Marxism and history, 28n2, 220 on utilitarian doctrine, 54
 INDEX 301

on the valor of anti-imperialist slavery, 6–9, 26, 27, 181, 215–217,

resistance, 260–261 220, 223, 224, 226
on value accumulation, 260 slaves, African, 55, 64n1, 77, 160n1,
and violence, 53 250
on violence in international relations, slave trade, 26, 32, 64n1, 68n7
66n3 Atlantic, 223–225
on the violence of US colonial rule, liberal critique of, 7
163n6 Smith, Adam, 8
on white supremacy, 202 Smith, “Howlin’ Jake,”, 107
Sandinista Government of Nicaragua, Snowden, Edward, 160
254 Social Darwinism, 159, 200
Schirmer, Boone D., 90 socialism, 27, 115, 194
Schlesinger, Arthur, 235n10 actually existing, 233n6
School of the Americas, 185n4 social justice, 231n3
Schuck, Charles (son), 120 social knowledge, 191–194
Schuck, Charlie (father), 120–121 social sciences, 18, 193–195, 206–209,
Schuck, Edward, 121 221–224, 229n1
Schuck, Herman, 121 social theory, 5, 26, 194
Schuck, William, 121 social thought, 5
Schurman Commission, 87, 106, 158 sociology, 193–196, 235n10
Sojourner’s Club, 155
Schurman, Jacob, 55
South Africa, 32, 173, 224
Scott, Hugh L., 123
South America, 217
“security exceptions”, 176
as Latin America, 204
seed bank, 260
South Asia, 178
segregation, 29n5, 111, 191
Southeast Asia, 178
Sekou, Osagyefo Uhuru, 213
sovereignty, 4, 11, 17, 59, 70–71n9,
self-determination, right to, 152, 206 97n5, 116–118, 166n10, 256
Semitism, anti-, 236n11 Soviet Union, 218
Shalom, Stephen Rosskamm, 90 and the Cold War, 172, 174
Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean, 156 as “evil empire,”, 174
Sharpton, Al, 213 Spain. See also Philippine Revolution;
Sherman, William Tecumseh, 148 Spanish-American War
Shiva, Vandana, 259, 260 Cuban revolution against, 15, 59–61
Shohat, Ella, 2 Philippine revolution against, 60
Silliman, Horace B., 64 in the Philippines, 16
Silliman Institute. See Silliman surrender of, 90, 91
University treaties with Sultanates, 118
“Silliman spirit”, 64 as weakened international power,
Silliman University, 64, 158 97n6
Singapore, 82 Spanish-American War, 16, 33, 55, 62,
Sison, Jose Maria, 161n2, 184n2 77, 81, 91
302 INDEX

Spanish Armada, 56, 60 Third Expeditionary Force (North

Spanish South Pacific Squadron, 60 Dakota), 155, 234–235n10
Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de), 9–14, Third World, 2, 19, 20n1, 26,
232n4, 260 172–174, 203, 228–230n1, 255,
Spivak, Gayatri, 204 259
Steinberg, David Joel, 57 emerging markets in, 3, 252
Strong, Josiah, 63–64 as enemy of democracy, 234–235n10
Structural Adjustment Programs exploitation of, 252
(SAPs), 3, 177, 247, 256 neocolonial exploitation in, 203
structural dependence, 186n5 postmodernism in, 20n1
structural-functionalism, 58, 193 uneven development of, 180–182,
subaltern studies, 174 186–187n6
subsidies, 258 U.S. intervention in, 172
Sultan Kudarat-Lopez Treaty, 118 and western hegemony, 228–230n1
Sulu Archipelago, 116, 120 Thirty Meter Telescope, 69–73n9
Sulu Sultanate, 17, 118, 121, 122, Thirty Years War, 31, 182–183n1
162n4 Thornley, Andrew, 49, 50
pacification of, 123, 125–129 Tigar, Michael E., 8
Sumner, Samuel S., 138, 141 Tirona, Daniel, 78
Supreme Court decisions, 197–198 Top One Per cent, 164n9, 222, 244
surplus labor, 27 torture, 97n4, 113, 152, 178,
surplus value, 29n2, 31, 53, 180 233–234n8
surveillance, 18, 115–116, 158–160, trade (commerce), 8, 13
187n6, 208 foreign, 6
Sustainable Development Goals liberalization of, 3, 180, 251, 252
(SDGs), 249 mercantile, 6, 8
systems analysis of politics, 193 transnational corporation (TNC), 3
Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), 3, 256
Treaty of Paris (1898), 55, 60, 89, 91,
T 116–118, 122, 123, 125, 126
Tadiar, Neferti, 214 Treaty of Utrecht, 25
Taft Commission, 56, 87, 106, 158 Treaty of Westphalia, 31, 32,
Taft, William Howard, 55, 105–108, 182–183n1
123–124 Trias, Mariano, 80
Taguba, Antonio Mario, 234–236n10 Trilateral Commission, 246
Taguba Report, 234–236n10 Trotskyism (American), 68n6
Taliban, 253 Truman Doctrine, 172
Tejeros Convention, 78 Tuaregs, 54
terrorism, 182n1, 185n4, 233n6 Tui Cakau (Chief), 48–50
testimonio, 228–229n1 Turkey, 218
Texas, annexation of, vii, 62 Turki, Fawaz, 236–237n11
Thatcher, Margaret, 178 Twain, Mark, 92, 97n5, 151
 INDEX 303

Tyler Doctrine, 16, 61 Universal Declaration of Human

Tyler, John, 16, 61 Rights, 243
universal ecclesiastical authority, 31
universalization of culture, 230–231n2
U
“unlawful combatants”, 234–236n10
Uali of Butig (Sultan), 140
unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), 197.
Udasan, Datu, 129
See also drones
Ukraine, 177
UN Working Group of Experts on
Umbra, Datu Amirul, 129
People of African Descent, 224
Underwood, Joseph, 38–40, 43–46
UN World Conference Against Racism,
Uniao Nacional para a Independencia
224
Total de Angola (UNITA), 253
Uruguay, 218
Unilinear view of history, 26
U.S. Agency for International
United Nations (UN), 172, 224,
Development (USAID), 197
65–66n3
U.S. Asiatic Squadron, 60
United Nations Development
U.S. Department of Defense, 174
Programme (UNDP), 242
U.S. Department of State, Office of the
United Nations Institute for Disarma-
Historian, 62
ment Research, 255
U.S. Department of the Treasury, 172
United States
U.S. Exploring Expedition, 33–35
agenda in the Middle East, 65–66n3
aid to Cuban revolutionaries, 15, U.S. Navy, exploration of the Pacific
59–61 by, 33–49
as a settler state, 202 U.S. Special Operations Command,
as superpower, 174–175 253
criticism of (by Harold Pinter), utilitarian individualism, 200
217–219 utilitarianism, 54
emergence as an empire, 14–16, 157 Uttu, Datu, 127, 128
exceptionalism of, 33, 53–59, 202,
225, 260
exploration of the Pacific, 33–53 V
hegemony of, 14, 206, 221, Veidovi (Fijian Chief), 36–39, 45–47
231–232n4, 254 verticalized global food production
imperialism as predatory, 254 system, 13, 258
Malolo Massacre as predictive of Vicars, Thomas A., 136
future military demeanor abroad Vietnamization program, 66–68n5
by the, 65–66n3 Vietnam War, 54, 66–68n5, 151, 217
occupation of Philippines by, 57, violence
89–93, 125–137 as barbarism, 7, 228–230n1
problem of race without class in, and colonialism, 54
207–213 and colonization, 53
unilateralism, 18 and imperialism, 212
westward expansion of, vii, 62 pathology of, 33–53, 235–236n10
304 INDEX

racialized, 151–153 Winfrey, Oprah, 213, 223

and religion, 65–66n3 Wolf, Eric, 64–65n1
state, 26–27, 33–49, 53, 65–66n3, women
151–153, 182–183n1, 222, black, 156–158
233 commodification of, 154–156
and Zionism, 212–213 as migrant workers, 154–156,
184–185n3
Wood, Leonard, 81–82, 122–124
W Worcester, Dean C., 83, 87, 158–160
Walker, William, 55 World Bank (WB), 3, 13, 164–166n9,
Wallerstein, Immanuel, 23 177, 179, 185–186n4, 256, 260
Walzer, Michael, 59 World Conference Against Racism, 224
warfare. See also war on terror; specific World Economic Forum (WEF), 179,
wars by name 246
low-intensity, 112, 174, 218, world hypotheses, 193
184–185n4, 228–230n1 world systems theory, 24, 180
permanent, 174–175 World Trade Organization (WTO), 3,
War of the Spanish Succession, 25 13, 165–166n9, 176, 178–179,
war on terror, 18, 47, 152, 175, 181, 182–183n1, 256
182–183n1, 234–236n10
Washington Consensus, 164–166n9
X
“water cure”, 113
xenophobia, 191
Wesleyan Methodist Missionary
Society, 47
West, Cornel, 207, 208 Z
Western Europe, 7 Zapatista National Liberation Front,
Westphalian state system, 4, 31, 32, 178, 260. See also Ejercito
182–183n1 Zapatista Liberacion Nacional
White Man’s Burden, 5, 25, 151 (EZLN)
white supremacy, 111, 202, 216, Zimbabwe, 173
199–202 Zinn, Howard, viii, 110
Wildman, Rounsenville, 82, 88 Zionism
Wilkes, Charles, 48, 49, 52–53 anti, 236n11
Wilkes Treaty, 162n4 Zionist State of Israel, 207, 212–213,
Williams, John, 47 236n11. See also Israel
Williams, Thomas, 35 Zizek, Slavoj, 201
Willis, Stan E., 224 Zola (Emile), 156