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At CounterPULSE last night we had our 3rd Spring Talk, rediscovering the Philippine-US War, delving into some of the sordid details (that read like today’s news!) and setting off cacophonous echoes through 100 years of a history that we haven’t learned, and ARE repeating! Abe Ignacio went first, he is the co-author of the remarkable and indispensable The Forbidden Book. You should definitely get a copy of this beautiful volume; I guarantee it will blow your mind with excellent full color graphic reproductions of the most amazingly racist cartoons you can imagine. One thing he emphasized in his talk, illustrated by the images he helped collect, is the way racism in the U.S. shaped the portrayal of Filipinos in the popular media. Not only are Filipinos routinely presented as black and brown pre-literate, animist savages, even famous U.S. politicians and writers (like Mark Twain) who opposed the annexation and conquest of the Philippine archipelago are presented as black, childish, womanly, and so on.
The reality is that the Philippines had been fighting for their independence for several years before the U.S. entered into war with Spain, and had already declared their independence prior to the U.S. defeat of the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay. The U.S. could not have defeated the Spanish garrison in Manila without the land forces of the Filipino army, but once the surrender was sure, the U.S. negotiated a ‘sale’ of the Philippines from Spain and took over the entire country. Then, two days before the U.S. Senate was to vote on the annexation of the Philippines, a vote that was expected to lose due to widespread popular opposition to the United States becoming a European-style imperial power, U.S. soldiers opened fire on some Filipino regulars crossing a bridge. When they responded in kind, a small battle ensued. Cables were sent to Washington DC in time to sway some senators’ votes, so that the annexation of the Philippines was passed by one vote.
Continue reading Philippines and San Francisco
I don’t get angry too often. There are SO many things to get pissed off about in this life, from the stupidity of urban design to the banal emptiness of most work we do, to the transparent venality of the kleptocratic class running the corporations and the government. But I always find anger takes more out of me than it gives me, so in general I’ve tended to deal with things that anger me with other reactions than overt rage.
There’s a new post at Ken MacLeod’s blog “The Early Days of a Better Nation” on Progressive Rage. I love MacLeod’s science fiction and am just reading his latest “Learning the World,” which at the beginning splits the story between a large travelling space colony looking for a new habitable planetary home and an earth-like planet that is just noticing something unusual in the sky… but the human-like inhabitants are more like birds than humans… fascinating already. (His 4 volume “libertarian communist” series presents inspiring, politically exciting speculations about where the world is heading… The Cassini Division, The Star Fraction, The Stone Canal, and the The Sky Road). Anyway, MacLeod is a thoughtful guy who is engaging the real world of politics and history on his blog. (A tip of the hat to the folks at Crooked Timber for linking to it already and reminding me about it after I’d noticed it but failed to read it at first.)
“If anti-semitism is, in an important aspect, a rage against the machine, against progress, is there an opposite rage: a rage against reaction, a fury at the recalcitrance of the concrete and the stubbornness of tradition? A rage against what is sacred and refuses to be profaned, against what is solid and doesn’t melt into air, against ways of life that resist commodification, against use-value that refuses to become exchange-value? And might that rage too need a fantasy object?”
Perhaps a symbol or ‘fantasy object’ would serve some psychological or even political purpose. But I never like the manipulativeness that such symbols seem to routinely promote. Rather, is there not a way to take the enormous rage in this culture, currently turned in on itself in the forms of racism and misogyny (and even among pwogwessives in the form of endless backbiting over relative ‘privilege’), and reconceptualize it as a passion for a radically better life? Of course there’s shitloads to be mad about, but we’re awfully good at raging and getting nowhere already. I’d be curious if anger and disappointment and rage could turn into something proactive, something that takes the huge energy fueling all that rage and pushes us towards taking life itself by the throat and creating right away what we actually want.
What does that mean exactly? How would such a process unfold? Not by some central director, that’s for sure. I think it’s not impossible to imagine a growing assertion of human conviviality against the banal stupidity and barbarism of this life. We cooperate in myriad ways all day long every day… why not expand that realm, talk about it as a self-aware alternative to the barbaric norms we’re supposed to uphold, and repudiate the small-minded fools who keep parroting that this is the best of all possible worlds? More rhetoric to be sure, but I’d like to at least propose a kind of ju-jitsu approach to our own (perfectly legitimate) anger, that turns it upside down and inside out, takes the energy of it for something beyond a self-referential howl (not that there aren’t often times when a good howl is just the thing!)…
Friends, a quick suggestion: If you haven’t heard, or haven’t had an opportunity to notice, the Zapatistas and Subcomandante Marcos have embarked on a 6-month “Other Campaign” in Mexico. This campaign is not an electoral campaign, though Marcos (“Delegate Zero”) is travelling around the country at the same time that the 3-way presidential campaign is heating up down there. He is ultimately intending to visit all the states of Mexico and to contact directly as many communities and organizations and individuals as feasible, who are working in practical and local ways against the status quo.
Marcos: “The Other Campaign is showing that there are those who will not sell themselves. I’m also talking about those fighters, like those that were talking here about ’68, who went through all the experiments in political participation, who were offered a way to give in to the system, that old trick of telling them that they could do more from the inside. There were people who said no, who could have gone over to the other side but stayed. The Other Campaign is a space for those people.When the Other Campaign defines itself as anticapitalist, it says: “˜we fight for our survival by bringing about the death of what is in front of us.’ Not the death of a person, but of a system.
People say, said Marcos, that he “is promoting abstention in the elections. No, compañeros, what has happened is that we have found an abstentionist movement that identifies with us, because it is sickened by the political class. And if in the past abstention was seen as apathy, the Other Campaign is discovering that it really comes from a lack of alternatives.”
“We are seeing effervescence below that doesn’t put its faith in anything from above. There is a great social effervescence that is not looking toward electoral politics and that is making the political campaigns look innocuous. Neither Madrazo, nor Calderón, nor López Obrador is rising, and it is not our fault, it is because of what they have managed to build in all these years. That is not apathy. We are looking at an effervescent movement, one that could explode at anytime with no coordination, no support.”
in response to one young man who said that “we need to break down the walls because we are all human beings.” Marcos replied: “No. We are all human beings, but some are sons of bitches and some aren’t. That is the truth. They built up their wealth on the misery, death and exploitation of others. What we want is to organize, speak and raise the consciousness of that sector in order to fight together. Because if we don’t, if we leave them alone, they are going to end up destroying everything. They have already demonstrated that. If we don’t do something now there won’t be anything left to struggle for,” Marcos concluded.
I recommend the brilliant Mexican journalist Hermann Bellinghausen’s report over at Narco News from which I’ve grabbed these quotes to catch a whiff of what’s happening invisibly just next door.
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