FILIPINO SCHOLAR'S NEW WORKS (tags)
U.S.-based Filipino intellectual, E. San Juan, Jr., issues 4 new works critical of U.S. imperialism, white racial supremacy, and postmodernist ideological fashions serving neoliberal global capitalism.
FILIPINA SENATOR ATTACKS ARROYO STATE TERRORISM IN THE PHILIPPINES (tags)
Of distinguished progressive lineage, Senator Jamby Madrigal of the Philippines takes a principle stand critical of the Arroyo regime's bloody and brutal repression of Filipinos backed by the Bush neocons. This article provides a context for the Philippine crisis and Senator Madrigal's views on U.S. imperialism in the neocolony and its complicity with State-terrorist repression.
APPROACHING THE FILIPINO EXODUS & DIASPORA (tags)
Two new books by noted Filipino author E. SAN JUAN, Jr. explore the predicament of millions of Filipinos leaving the Philippines and working or settling in other countries around the world--an unprecedented 9-10 milllion of 85 million Filipinos are scattered around the planet. Their huge remittance props up a sharply divided class society where a tiny oligarchy (supported by Washington/Pentagon) exploits and oppresses the majority. Over 830 victims of extrajudicial killings occured from 2001 up to the present under Arroyo's corrupt, illegitimate regime. Why is this happening?
In the light of the profound economic and political crisis in the Philippines today, what could be the significance of celebrating the one-hundred year anniversary of the coming of Filipino contract labor to Hawaii? Are Filipinos the new compradors for the militarist U.S. Empire? Or are they harbingers of a new generation of combatants from the oppressed communities? At the turn of the century, the revolutionary organizer Rosa Luxemburg elegized the dismal plight of the subjugated natives. Today, US Special Forces are back to reconquer the neocolony, with the natives no longer smiling, now up in arms, united with people of color in Venezuela, Palestine, Hawaii, Nepal, Mexico, and other battlefronts of our beleaguered planet. Whither the Filipino diaspora?
THE FILIPINO PEASANT IMAGINATION VERSUS AMERICAN LEFTISM (tags)
The following remarks are intended to supplement the author's paper "Blueprint for a Bulosan Project" posted in the online journal OUR OWN VOICE. This essay critiques the position of "leftists" in the elite U.S. academies who claim a "manifest destiny" to civilize colonized subalterns and peasant radicals like the Filipino writer Carlos Bulosan who (they claim) have failed to take "America" out of a transnationalizing U.S. Studies. Are we seeing a replay of the "Thomasites" who produced generations of neocolonized "little brown brothers" now serving U.S. imperialist aggression in Iraq, Aghanistan, Palestine, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, and in the Philippines, its former direct colony? "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea...."
FILIPINOS IN THE U.S.A. AND AROUND THE WORLD: WHENCE AND WHITHER? (tags)
About ten million Filipinos are now scattered in the U.S. and around the world, chiefly as exploited migrant labor. Meanwhile, 85 million Filipinos--with the exception of a tiny privileged minority--are sufffering and resisting the current repressive regime in a rapidly deteriorating neocolonized social order. The Philippines has one of the most durable and vibrant revolutionary traditions in the whole world--the first Asian people to revolt against Western colonialism. 4.1 million Filipinos died opposing U.S. domination in the Filipino-American War at the turn of the last century. Today Filipinos are engaged in a popular democratic revolutionary process against U.S. imperialism and its local agents. Can overseas Filipinos contribute to the radical transformation of a world afflicted by the atrocities and terrors of global capitalism?
The anniversary of the death of the Philippines' national hero Jose Rizal this Dec. 30 affords us the occasion to reassess his work, particularly in the context of ongoing fierce class war in the Philippines between the oppressed, impoverished majority and the few privileged landlords and politicians bought by global capital. This is taking place at a time when the Philippines is being re-colonized by the U.S. as the world's imperialist hegemon. Would Rizal want the country partitioned to greedy transnational corporations and their national elites in the current terrorist war against peoples of color in particular? These reflections hope to provoke a re-thinking of what it means to be a Filipino with the Philippines in permanent crisis, using Rizal as a point of departure, especially in the light of its citizens becoming an embattled diaspora--more than ten million OFWs as exploited domestics and contract workers around the planet, while the country's rich natural resources, cultures and traditions are wasted by foreign profiteers of globalizing capital supported by local comprador parasites currently headed by the corrupt Arroyo regime. "O where is the hope of the motherland...."?
Self-educated at the Los Angeles Public Library in the Thirties, Carlos Bulosan, the militant Filipino writer and labor activist, died on September 11, 1956. His death anniversary last month provided the occasion for the Filipino community to celebrate his contribution to the revolutionary struggle of peoples everywhere for justice, dignity, and self-determination. Bulosan was part of the community of progressive Los Angeles-based intellectuals (Carey McWilliams, Sanora Babb, Louis Adamic, Ring Lardner Jr. and others) victimized by McCarthyism and fascist reaction. His example of resistance continues to inspire people of color everywhere.