Passionate Revolutions. Talitha Espiritu
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had earned the reputation for having the “freest press in Asia.”4 But rather than bolster a genuinely participatory democracy, an oligarchy-controlled media fed en elite-dominated political culture characterized by political violence and electoral fraud. And while capitalism was firmly in place, it was overrun by the rent-seeking practices of the oligarchy. In every respect, the Philippines presented a distorted portrait of modernization.
With Marcos’s declaration of martial law, the Philippines seemed poised to follow in the footsteps of late-industrializing countries where the modernization thesis was being radically rewritten. In these states, authoritarianism was increasingly recognized not as an aberration but as a prerequisite to modernization and development.5 U.S. support for dictatorial regimes dramatically increased at this time, with a concomitant slackening of concern about the defense of democracy.6 Constituting a new domino effect, the turn toward authoritarian rule may be traced back to a fundamental weakness in modernization theory: rather than bolster democracy, the extension of electoral politics to the decolonizing world produced volatile political situations conducive to military regimes, ethnic conflict, or civil war.7
Harvard University political scientist Samuel P. Huntington was among the earliest modernization theorists to point this out. In his influential treatise Political Order in Changing Societies, Huntington took the theory to task for paying insufficient attention to the problem of building political order in the so-called transitional states. Commenting on the social upheavals plaguing these states, Huntington argued that such manifestations of political instability were “the product of rapid social change and rapid mobilization of new groups into politics coupled with the slow development of political institutions.”8 Later known as the Huntington thesis, this refinement of modernization theory argued that in the Third World the building of political order must take precedence over the exercise of procedural democracy.
The Huntington thesis corroborated U.S. support for martial law in the Philippines, underscoring the need for national discipline. As Bonner points out,
Americans demanded law and order, at home and abroad. They also expect the people of other countries to govern themselves as Americans do; when they don’t measure up, the reaction is to assume that they are not capable of the responsibility that democracy requires and therefore not worthy of the freedom that it allows. . . . That is precisely what many American leaders and journalists thought. The Philippines just wasn’t ready for democracy.9
The notion that the Philippines “just wasn’t ready for democracy”—a striking instance of colonial infantilization—is indicative of the continuity between modernization and colonial thinking. In his political treatises concerning martial law, Marcos claimed that the Philippine experiment in modernization had failed because of the profound incompatibility between liberal democracy and the cultural values generated by the nation’s colonial past. Marcos’s uptake of the Huntington thesis was in fact based on an internalization of an imputed lack—a cultural and moral deficiency that rendered the nation unfit to govern itself as a democracy.
As Marcos would have it, colonial rule created a “Filipino personality” marked by “indolence, docility, passivity, a pervading consciousness of racial inferiority, shyness and resistance to being enlightened.”10 Having bred “habits of subservience,” colonial rule was supplanted by a “western democratic system,” which was adopted, Marcos argued, “unexamined” by the postindependence state. The cultural inertias of colonial rule, Marcos claimed, undermined the nation’s uptake of democracy, such that, rather than revolutionize Philippine society, it had “bred corruption, subversion, and sectarianism.”11
To legitimize authoritarian rule, and to co-opt the rhetorical suasion of the Huntington thesis, Marcos provocatively claimed that the Cold War created a false choice between democracy and socialism. Third World nations, he argued, should opt for a third alternative:
The exigencies, the conditions, and the crises in the Third World are peculiar to the Third World and must, consequently, be met with tactics suitable to the temperament and character of its peoples. We can no longer inordinately and gratuitously adopt western political models. We have seen, at an enormous cost, their failure to advance our national goals. . . . [Third World] leadership must possess an authority that is both tough and flexible, realistic and visionary.12
For Marcos, the “third alternative” was strong leadership (i.e., authoritarianism) tempered by nationalism. Loosely referencing Peronism and Juan Perón’s “third way,” Marcos’s statement also appropriated the anticolonialist perspective of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon had argued that the Cold War battle between capitalism and socialism obscured the true struggle faced by Third World nations: decolonization. Always a violent phenomenon, decolonization, Fanon argued, necessitated “the replacing of a certain ‘species’ of men by another ‘species’ of men.” National liberation entailed the material eradication of colonialism; but more fundamentally, it required the psychoaffective transformation of the colonized subject. It is in light of this overriding imperative that Fanon exhorted Third World nations to reject the colonizers’ definitions of their values and identities and to seek instead to “find their own particular values and methods and a style which shall be peculiar to them.” Fanon is emphatic on this count: “Let us not pay tribute to Europe by creating states, institutions and societies which draw their inspiration from her. Humanity is waiting for something from us other than such an imitation, which would be almost an obscene caricature.”13
In his Notes on the New Society of the Philippines, Marcos paraphrases Fanon: “It is important . . . that we extricate ourselves from the mental conditioning of ideologies foreign to our experience.”14 Clearly sharing Fanon’s views on the psychic wounds inflicted on the colonized subject, Marcos likewise prescribes the eradication of colonial subalternity. He advances his notion of a third way as nothing less than the symbolic slaying of a colonial father figure: “By choosing to take up a third alternative as other Third World nations have, we are conducting not America’s experiment but our own, free, independent and unfettered. Anti-American, one may say, because it involves the slaying of the great white father’s image; but more Pro-Filipino, on closer look, for the slaying of the father image means liberation for the brown son, his coming of age, his passage into full manhood in the community of nations.”15
Marcos’s allusion to the brown son’s coming of age is indeed consistent with Fanon’s theorization of the new man born out of the struggle for national liberation. As Fanon put it, “the ‘thing’ which has been colonized becomes man during the same process by which it frees itself.”16 By invoking the slaying of the great white father, Marcos gestures toward the racial politics of modernization, which, in the Philippine context, could be traced back to the American colonial policy of benevolent assimilation. Indeed, a long historical thread linked modernization to this policy, which saw (white) U.S. citizens as the moral superiors, hence political exemplars, of America’s “little brown brothers.” Marcos’s third way was anti-American to the extent that it outwardly rejected this racist bias masquerading as cultural paternalism. However, in valorizing his third way as a “pro-Filipino” experiment, Marcos nonetheless borrowed the great white father’s rhetoric. His third way bore an ambivalent relation to what Vicente Rafael has described as puting pagmamahal (white love), the love of whiteness that has “come to inform if not inflict the varieties of Filipino nationalism that emerged under American patronage.”17
White Love, Modernization, and Marcos’s Third Way
To understand the operation of “white love” in Marcos’s third-way discourse, it is perhaps necessary to take a short detour into the history of U.S. colonialism in the Philippines. After the Spanish-American War, some seventy-five thousand U.S. troops were dispatched to the Philippines in 1899 to crush an indigenous revolutionary struggle. It would in fact take the United States almost four years of brutal warfare to wrest its booty from Filipino nationalists, a conflict that has since been tagged by revisionist historians as the forgotten war.18 Popularly regarded at the time as yet another “Indian war” in America’s expansionist history, the brutal conflict saw political demonology in action: American