A recycled US colony?

Is the Philippines today turning into an American colony once again?  What prompts that question has to do with two main issues. One is the fact that the Philippine government has offered the Americans the use of five strategic sites to guard against China’s further encroachments, possibly also to keep a peripheral eye out for Islamic terrorism. (As expected, some nationalists have protested the country’s perceived loss of sovereignty, balking at the fact that the established feudal system which they say is abetted by the Americans will be further entrenched.)

The other issue has to do with a presidential candidate who may win the race in May. Such an eventuality could make the Philippines the only country in the world where the presidential palace will be inhabited by a chief executive’s alien offspring. That doesn’t seem to bother the candidate’s supporters. Having American citizens living in Malacañang is apparently quite acceptable to them.

The wording in the military agreement between the Philippines and the United States skirts the use of the word “bases” and instead says that the use of locations in Luzon, Cebu, Mindanao and Palawan will be for a “rotational presence” where US ships and aircraft will be deployed for maritime security and humanitarian operations.  The choice of words may be because it wasn’t too long ago that Filipino nationalists succeeded in ousting the Americans from their air and naval bases at Clark Field and Subic Bay. Which makes the present new arrangement, the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement, somewhat delicate, though the pact makes no bones about continuing “joint war games” and “Balikatan” exercises.

This brings to mind that movement back in the early 1970s when the members of a vocal group began calling for the Philippines to be made the 51st state of the United States. The group called Philippine Statehood USA claimed a membership of close to a million, which struck many people, Filipino and foreign, as bizarre.  Indeed, those days seemed to be “more fun” (and games) in the Philippines before that slogan promoting tourism was coined.

Now and then some media mavens will recall the words of the first president of the Commonwealth republic, Manuel L. Quezon, who said: “I would rather have a country run like hell by Filipinos than one run like heaven by the Americans.” A few pundits hark back to that statement somewhat wistfully, but they may not want to endorse it, for fear of being labeled unpatriotic.

Among some domestics working in Hong Kong, I once met an Ilocano woman who, having seen what the British had wrought in that well-run colony, declared it was a pity that America, and not Britain, had colonized the Philippines. Writing in the now-defunct satirical magazine “Spike” in 2004, I reported my conversation with her in which she stated her refusal to vote in our next presidential election. She trotted out the standard line about not expecting change to happen—“Wala namang magbabago”—as many others have done in our other elections.

The woman’s wish for British colonization reminded me that the Spanish were ejected from Manila by the British in 1762, when Rear Adm. Samuel Cornish and Brig. Gen. William Draper sailed into Manila Bay and occupied the city.  They apparently had no designs on the rest of the archipelago.  So did they give Manila back to the Spanish less than two years later in 1764, because they had found the natives unmanageable?

Is the Philippines today too politically fragmented and economically lopsided to be a truly unified nation? The observable disillusionment replacing the euphoria over the Edsa “revolution” just 30 years ago suggests that the proud event has lost its luster. Unfortunately, memories of the dark era of martial law have grown dim, with educators today admitting their failure to fully explain the dictator’s depredations to the younger generation.

So that ignorance has allowed Ferdinand Marcos’ offspring to thumb their noses at their own people as they plotted their way back to Malacañang.

Santayana’s words have become a cliché about those who can’t remember the past being condemned to repeat it.  It is Hegel’s words which surely are more relevant to the Philippines today:

“What experience and history teach is that people and governments never have learned from history, or acted in principles deduced from it.  Each period is involved in such peculiar circumstances, exhibits a condition of things so strictly idiosyncratic, that its conduct must be regulated by considerations connected with itself, and itself alone.”

Isabel T. Escoda is a freelance journalist formerly based in Hong Kong.