2SANJUAN

Postcolonial CUL-DE-SAC And The Return OfU.S. Imperial Terror

E. San Juan, Jr.

A few months before his death, Edward Said, arguably thefounding patriarch of postcolonial studies, reassessed hiscritique of Orientalism by affirming the value ofhumanistic critique to open up the fields of struggle so as to enablethe speaking of issues of injustice and suffering within the amplysituated contexts of history and socioeconomic reality. He invokedsentiments of generosity and hospitality so that the interpreters mindcan actively make a place for a foreign other, the active practiceof worldly secular rational discourse. He strongly denounced thecurrent U.S. government policy of celebrating American or westernexceptionalism and demonstrating contempt for other cultures, allin the service of terror, pre-emptive war, and unilateral regimechange (2003, xx). In an earlier interview, Said asserted that hismain interest was in neocolonialism, not postcolonialism (which, tohim, was a misnomer), in the structures of dependency andimpoverishment in the global South due to the operations of theInternational Monetary Fund and the World Bank (1998/99, 82).Overall, a modernist humanism, not postcolonial hybridity,deconstruction, or genealogy of speechless subalterns, was for Saidthe paradigmatic framework of inquiry for a comparative analysis ofcultures and societies in an epoch of decolonization.

After over two decades of intellectual specialization andinvestment, postcolonial inquiry has now enjoyed sufficient legitimacyand prestige in the Euro-American academy to make it serviceablefor reinforcing the Establishment consensus. Decolonization is over.The natives now run the government. Long live the free market

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Postcolonial Cul - De - Sac

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around the planet! Works by Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, andothers are institutionally consecrated touchstones, to use theArnoldian rubric, that, though somewhat vitiated as products of acomprador intelligentsia, nevertheless serve to authorize avalidation of colonialism and its legacies as a useful if ambivalentresource. Informed by theoretical protocols and procedures hostileto nationalist movements, not to speak of anti-imperialistrevolutionary struggles and other metanarratives inspired by Fanon,Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara and others, postcolonial studiestoday function not as supplements to the critical theories of Derrida,Foucault or Deleuze, but to the official apologetics of the new worldorder called globalization ushered with the demise of the SovietUnion and the end of the Cold War, that is to say, the end of historyand the eternal triumph of capitalism and its attendant ideology,neoliberal globalism. As Arif Dirlik summed it up, postcolonialdiscourse has become an academic orthodoxy in its self-identification with hybridity, in-betweeness, marginality,borderlandsa fatal move from the language of revolution infusedwith the vocabulary of political economy to a culturalist language ofidentity politics (2000, 5).

What happened to revolution and the decolonizing figureprefigured by Caliban and personified by Rizal, Sandino, NelsonMandela, and others? In his master-work Culture and Imperialism,Said paid homage to the revolutionary militants, Amilcar Cabral,Frantz Fanon, C.L.R. James, and others, as the locus classicus ofemancipatory third world discourse who engaged the recovery oflost integrity in the context of regaining the territorial habitat ofmemoryplaces instead of spaces and popular sovereignty. Buttoday, nationalism and national liberation struggles are anathema topostcolonialists. And with the neoconservative counter-revolutionafter the defeat of U.S. aggression in Indochina, a cultural turneffectively replaced the revolutionary process in history with anendless process of abrogation and appropriation of colonial textsand practices in quest of an identity that is ultimately and foreverdecentered, shifting, borderless, fluid, aleatory, ambivalent, and soon. What encapsulates all these qualities is the term transnational,

Diliman Review 52, 1-4 (2005)

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the prefix trans functioning as the magic word that would bridgethe immense gap between the terrible misery of peoples in theunderdeveloped South and the affluent suburban megamalls of theNorth. One might ask: Would transnationals and transculturalsresolve questions of suffering and injustice that confront us daily inIraq, Palestine, Afghanistan, Colombia, the Philippines, and ofcourse in the internal colonies of North America and Europe?

Postcolonial Singularities

In the canonical handbook Key Concepts in Post-ColonialStudies by the same Australian authors (Bill Ashcroft, GarethGriffiths and Helen Tiffin) of The Empire Writes Back, we do notfind any entry for Liberation but one for Liminality. And, moretelling, there is no entry for Revolution either. Aside from thevalorization of the liminal as the in-between hybrid notion, rhizomeis privileged by our postcolonial experts as the concept (attributedto Deleuze and Guattari, but defined in Foucauldian terminology)that best describes colonial power: it operates dynamically, laterallyand intermittently. Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin assert that Thereis no master-plan of imperialism, and its advance is not necessarilysecured through violence and oppression; and therefore we shouldfocus on the way cultural hegemony operates through an invisiblenetwork of filiative connections, psychological internalizations, andunconsciously complicit associations (1998, 207). Surely thesegeneralizations will strike anyone as quite dubious, departing radicallyfrom Gramscis use of hegemony as a historically variablecombination of force and consent.

One sign of the terminal exhaustion of this anti-totalizingstance is the reduction of the issue of globalization to the natureand survival of social and cultural identity, thus evacuating the arenaof political and socioeconomic struggle which Said and his models(Fanon, C.L.R. James) considered salient and inescapable. Disturbedby this trend, students and teachers at McMaster University inOntario, Canada, recently organized a conference on the politics


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of postcoloniality. Anticipating an Empire Resurrected, theyposed the following questions in a futuristic or subjunctive mode(reproduced from a widely circulated flyer):

What are the chances of establishing directcolonialism again in the 21st century? Why did theold empires give up their old colonies in favor ofindirect colonialism? What are the conditions thatwould make them revert back to direct colonialism?What are the circumstances (economical/political/cultural/social) that would facilitate the resurrectionof direct colonialism/empire? How can colonialschemes be countered? What should be the newmode of resistance? What is the role of civildisobedience in this case? Is terrorism/radicalresistance the new mode for countering the newempire? What are the viable modes of resistance?How can postcolonial theory respond/react tosuch a possibility? What would be its role?

These are fresh winds blowing from the dusty ivory-towers andarchives of academy, betokening grassroots unrest that might stir usup from dogmatic slumber induced by the seductive pleasures ofpostcolonial contingency and disjuncture.

We are at a pivotal juncture in critical self-reflectiveinventory. Instead of fully elaborating the historical circumstancesthat might explain this shift, a transition I have sketched in my BeyondPostcolonial Theory (1998), what I would like to attempt here is toexplore briefly the most suggestive ways in which we can restore thecritical edge in postcolonial critique by engaging the problem ofterrorism and its polar antithesis, the New American Century andthe project of globalization designed to re-establish an imperialhegemony not dreamed of by either Cecil Rhodes or the architectsof pax Americana erected on the ruins of Hiroshima, Berlin andStalingrad. What I have in mind is the interrogation of the discourseof imperial neoliberalism as the wily, duplicitous mimicry of


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postcolonial agency. What is urgently needed is a new analyticapproach to twenty-first century imperial hegemony and a corollarystrategy of demystification that would advance the anti-globalizationactions to take into account crucial developments since the disasterof September 11, 2001 and its aftermath, the ongoing devastationof Afghanistan and Iraq. This is both a pedagogical and mobilizingtask aimed at sectors of the petty bourgeois intelligentsia and middlestrata open to an evolving neo-postcolonial critique.

Approaching Imperial Neoliberalism

Imperial neoliberalism, the rationale of actual politicaland economic globalization, reveals itself most lucidly in theProject for the New American Century, the manifesto of advisersclosest to President George W. Bush. The designers of this newaggressive U.S. foreign policy premised on an unprecedentedmilitary buildup were participants in the invasions of Panamaand Grenada, counter-insurgency wars in Central and SouthAmerica (particularly Colombia, Peru), the Cold War showdownwith the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and the arming of Iraq tocounter radical Islamists in Iran and elsewhere. Basically, theproject centers on a doctrine of unilateral pre-emptive war againstany nation or power seeking to rival the U.S. rather thancontainment and multilateral internationalism of terrorist groups.The goal is total war, endless war, premised on acceleratedmilitarization of society and moral clarity. What the last phrasemeans may be grasped by quoting portions of the manifesto:American foreign and defense policy is adriftAs the 20th centurydraws to a close, the United States stands as the worlds pre-eminent power.Does the United States have the resolve to shapea new century favorable to American principles andinterests?(1997). This domination of the planet is based onunquestioned U.S. military preeminence beefed up with newgeneration of nuclear weapons and sufficient combat forcesdeployed to a wider network of foreward operating bases to fightand win multiple wars, including forces for constabulary duties


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with American rather than UN leadership. Are we facing here anaberrant act committed in a moment of absent-mindedness? 1

In a blueprint entitled Rebuilding Americas Defenses:Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century released lastSeptember 2000, this neoconservative group outlined its grand planfor world hegemony:

The United States is the worlds only superpower,combining preeminent military power, globaltechnological leadership, and the worlds largesteconomy. Americas grand strategy should aim topreserve and extend this advantageous position asfar into the future as possible. Yet no moment ininternational politics can be frozen in time; even aglobal pax Americana will not preserve itselfThepresence of American forces in critical regionsaround the world is the visible expression of theextent of Americas status as a superpower

The report urges the control of the Persian Gulf region by the U.S.,proceeding through the conquest of Iraq, followed by Syria andeventually Iran. For this plan to be saleable to the public acatastrophic and catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor wasneeded; this was promptly supplied by September 11, 2001. Whilethe ostensible excuse for the invasion of Iraq included Husseinstyranny, putative weapons of mass destruction, and terrorism, it wasin effect the desire of the US ruling elite for a permanent role andbase in this strategically important region of the world, rich inresources but also geographically situated in a way that wouldprovided springboards for intervention into Europe, Russia, Chinaand the Indian subcontinent.

In President Bushs 2002 State of the Union address, thedoctrine of preemptive war as the lynchpin in the endless waragainst terrorism, against rogue states that form the axis of evil (Iraq,Iran and North Korea), was announced. The right to actpreemptively, using nuclear strikes and other operational


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capabilities, was no longer being exercised to punish theperpetrators of the crime of September 11 by the savage onslaughton Afghanistan where Al-Qaeda and Osama bin laden hadstrongholds, but it was a measure necessary to defend our libertyand to defend our lives. The fantasmatic danger of terrorismscattered around the world now justifies this militarization offoreign policy and the willingness to intervene and engage evenin lots of small, dirty fights in remote and dangerous places inthe process of draining the swamp of civil society (to quoteDefense Secretary Rumsfeld; Mahajan 2002, 97; Shank 2003). Inaddition to the shock and awe war against Iraq, endless andborderless war against anyone perceived or declared as terrorist,that is, anti-American, seems overreaching and out of proportionto the catastrophe of September 11 (Ullman and Wade 1996).The aim of fighting and winning multiple, simultaneous majortheater wars seems a postmodernist avant-garde invention. Butthe reality of events appear to confirm the intent: Afghanistan wassubjugated at the expense of some 20,000 lives, Iraq at more thantriple the number and still counting.

What strikes most people as sinister is the plan of a secretarmy or super-intelligence support activity labeled as the ProactivePre-emptive Operations Group, or P2OG. It will combine the CIAand military covert action, information warfare, and deception toprovoke terrorist attacks that would then require U.S.counterattacks against countries harboring the terrorists. But thisis humdrum routine for the civilizing mission since theconquistadors landed in the New World and the European traders-missionaries began the merchandising of the bodies of African slaves.

In retrospect, one can discern an uncanny similarity withthe events before the war against Iraq in 1991, which inauguratedthe era of total war. The depressed economic situation and thescandals of corporate criminality cannot be remedied by furtherdismantling of the welfare state, so the public must be diverted. NoamChomskys analysis of that situation sounds prescient and historically


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grounded in a well-defined pattern of political sequences thatcondense half-a-century of postcolonial interventions:

Two classic devices are to inspire fear of terribleenemies and worship of our grand leaders, whorescue us just in the nick of time. The enemies maybe domestic (criminal Blacks, uppity women,subversives undermining the tradition, etc.), butforeign demons have natural advantages.... As thestandard pretext [Communists] vanished, thedomestic population has been frightenedwith somesuccessby images of Qaddafis hordes ofinternational terrorists, Sandinistas marching onTexas, Grenada interdicting sea lanes andthreatening the homeland itself, Hispanic narco-traffickers directed by the arch-maniac Noriega, afterhe underwent the usual conversion from favoredfriend to Attila the Hun after committing the oneunforgivable crime, the crime of disobedience.The scenario requires Awe as well as Fear... (1992,408).

The Terrorizing Sublime

Awe as well as fearthis structure of feeling, whichpostcolonial critics have so far ignored, frames the situation of thewar against terrorism carried to the imperial margins, this time inthe Philippines. I would now like to call the attention of the readerto the Philippines, a former colony of the United States (now arguablya genuine U.S. neocolony) and the continuing laffaire Abu Sayyafand its use as a pretext for the invasion by over a thousand U.S.troops of this second front of the war against terrorism, afterAfghanistan.

Since the seventies at the time of the Marcos dictatorship,the severely impoverished Muslims in the southern Philippines called


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Moros (who were never actually subjugated by the Spaniards,Americans or Japanese throughout their history) have mounted afierce struggle for autonomy and dignity, for some measure of self-determination. While the Moro National Liberation Front hascompromised with the government, another more formidablegroup, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, has continued itsstruggle. But its fighters are now branded terrorists and theirlegitimate cause criminalized. It is expected that the MILF willbe classified as a foreign terrorist organizationforeign, of course,to Americans, but not to Filipinos. When President Arroyoallowed the U.S. Special Forces to participate in the pursuit ofthe Abu Sayyaf, a bandit-group that is really a creation of both theCIA and the Philippine Armed Forces, did she not violate thePhilippine Constitution? Indifference to this question is asymptom of the larger problem of either ignorance of the plightof the Moro people, or complicity with the ruling class in theoppression and exploitation of at least 7.5 million citizens whohappen to subscribe to another faith.

Thousands, perhaps over a hundred thousand now, havedied since the flare-up of Christian-Muslim hostilities in the sixties,climaxing in the years after 1972 with the battle of Jolo, Sulu. Thecity was actually burned by government forces, producing 2,000corpses and 60,000 refugees in one night. A ceasefire was reachedafter the Tripoli Agreement of 1976, but it was often honored inthe breach. The split of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front ledHashim Salamat from Misuaris more secular Moro NationalLiberation Front introduced a sectarian but also conciliatory elementin the scene, precipitating the formation of the Abu Sayyaf alongthe lines of the government-sponsored and CIA-funded BangsaMoro Liberation Organization (BMLO) in 1976.

The Abu Sayyaf has been represented in the U.S. massmedia as an awesome and fearful force, mysterious yet intelligible.It is now public knowledge that the Abu Sayyaf, like the MILF, wasset up by the Philippine government to split the Moro struggle forself-determination and pressure the MNLF into capitulation. But


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since 1995 the Abu Sayyaf has turned into a Frankensteins monsterdevoted to hostage-taking for ransom and terrorizing civiliancommunities. In the midst of U.S. intervention last year, anInternational Peace Commission went to Basilan on March 23-27,2002, and produced what I think is the most comprehensive anddetailed report on conditions in the region. The conclusion oftheir report, entitled Basilan: The Next Afghanistan?, isunequivocal: the Abu Sayyaf is a symptom of the disastrous failureof the state in ensuring not only peace and security but honestand efficient governmentboth provincial governance and military-police agenciesin a milieu where the proverbial forces of civilsociety (business, church, media) have been complicit. Enmeshedin corruption that involves local officials, military officers, andcentral government, the region where the Abu Sayyaf thrives haswitnessed the reign of absolute terror over civilians. Nowhere inthe entire Philippines is the violation of human rights and thebrutalization of civilian suspects as flagrant and ubiquitous as inBasilan where this group operates. In this context, the deploymentof U.S. troops in Mindanao, compliments of the Arroyoadministration, has only worsened the situation, demonized andmystified the Abu Sayyaf as an Al Qaeda accomplice, andpromoted hostility among various ethnic groups.

Engaging the Neocolonial Return

Given this context, let us examine how metropolitanwisdom has employed postcolonial resources to represent thiswhole conjuncture to the academic public. One example is CharlesO. Frakes article Abu Sayyaf: Displays of Violence and theProliferation of Contested Identities among Philippine Muslimsin a 1998 issue of American Anthropologist. While Frake is quiteerudite in referencing the history of the Muslims from the Spanishtimes to the present, he never examines seriously, except in atokenizing gestural mode, the political and economic context of landdispossession and economic marginalization of the Muslim majority.Instead, typical of postcolonial discourse, he focuses on the Abu


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Sayyaf as an attempt to solve the logical gap in the identity matrixof Philippine Muslim insurgency. Since the Moro movement hasbeen fragmented by ethnic antagonisms among Tausugs,Maguindanaos, Maranaos, Yakans, and so on, the Abu Sayyaf,according to Frake, is militantly Islamicist. And because itsleadership draws from the displaced and unaffiliated youth, aswell as the traditional outlaw areas, the group represents a newlayer in the strata of kinds of identity laid down in the long historyof conflict in the Muslim Philippines (1998, 48). In short, theAbu Sayyaf (according to Frakes postmodernist optic) is a symptomof the problem of identity proliferation, since the fault-lines ofidentity construction are often revealed in explosions of politicalviolence. Empire, class and nation have all been expunged fromthe functionalist, cooptative frame of analysis.

Frake is an example of a knowledge-producer intent onunwitting mystification. The result of applying Geertz thickdescription, that is, the focus on how participants interpret everydayhappenings, instead of clarifying the nexus of causality andaccountability, muddles it. Frake wants to answer the question: Howcan such nice people [meaning the anonymous members of theAbu Sayyaf], at times, do such horrible things? But his premisethat the central motivation of individuals in society is to be recognizedas somebody, to establish an identityis completely detached fromhistorical specificities, even from the basic determinants of anycultural complex or location. Despite the empirical citations andputative data, Frakes attempt to deploy postmodern ethnographyon the Abu Sayyaf phenomenon results only in a simplistic reduction:that in situations of struggle, people fail to unite because theycontinually interpret whats going on around them, thus multiplyingcontested identities. I am afraid such thick descriptions arereally opaque ruses obscuring instead of illuminating the plight ofthe Moro people. Vincent Crapanzanos critique of Geertz may bequoted here: the method of thick description offers nounderstanding of the native from the natives point of view,...nospecifiable evidence for his attributions of intention, his assertion of


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subjectivity, his declarations of experience (quoted in San Juan2002, 234). 2

Recalling Saids critique of Orientalist scholarship citedearlier, I cannot imagine any intellectual who, endeavoring to graspthe roots of a long-enduring, complex Moro problem, willpreemptively assert or claim a detached or disinterested stance.A few postmodernist scholars openly announce their point-of-view, their subject-positionsif only to wash their hands, of course,of any complicity with US colonialism or imperialism. Professionsof neutrality have been replaced with gestures of liberal guiltmanifest in philanthropic compassion. Unfortunately, thesegestures only prolong the orientalizing supremacy of Westernknowledge-production and its hegemonic influence. Of course itis now commonplace to note that all disciplinary researchperformed in state institutions, all pedagogical agencies (in KarlMannheims phrase, the everyday constituent assembly of themind), are sites of ideological class struggle and none can behermetically insulated from the pressures of material local andglobal interests. There is no vacuum or neutral space in theplanetary conflict of classes and groups for hegemony.

Perseverance In CommitmentPerseverance In CommitmentPerseverance In CommitmentPerseverance In CommitmentPerseverance In Commitment

In my recent work (San Juan 2002; 2004), I called attentionto recent developments in Cultural Studies as a disciplinary practicein North America and Europe that have subverted the early promiseof the field as a radical transformative force. In every attempt to doany inquiry into cultural practices and discourses, one is alwayscarrying out a political and ethical project, whether one is consciousof it or not. There are many reasons for this, the main one being theinescapable political-economic constitution of any discursive fieldof inquiry, as Pierre Bourdieu has convincingly demonstrated. Andin the famous theoretical couplet that Foucault has popularized,knowledge/power, the production of knowledge is always alreadyimplicated in the ongoing struggles across class, nation, gender,


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locality, ethnicity, and so on, which envelopes and surrounds theintellectual, the would-be knower, learner, investigator, scholar, andso on.

This is the moment when I would like to close with somereflections, and questions, on why problems of culture andknowledge are of decisive political importance for the postcolonialcritic. 3

Although we always conceive of ourselves as citizen-subjects with rights, it is also the case that we are all caught up ina network of obligations whose entirety is not within our consciousgrasp. What is our relation to Othersthe excluded, marginalized,and prostituted who affirm our existence and identityin oursociety? In a sense we (Filipinos, Americans) are responsible forthe plight of the Morosyes, including the existence of the AbuSayyaf-insofar as we claim to live in a community of singularpersons who alternatively occupy the positions of speakers andlisteners, Is and yous, and who have obligations to one another,and reciprocal accountabilities. We should also keep in mindthe new historical milieu characterized by what Alain Badiou callsthe disjunctive synthesis of two nihilisms, capitalist nihilism andthe anonymous fascist nihilism manifested in the 9/11 attack(Badiou 2003, 160). This ethical challenge sums up, to my mind,the riposte that postcolonial agency must pose to neoliberalimperialism (instanced by Frakes discourse, among others) if it isto sustain its tradition of critique, that uncompromisingquestioning of absolutisms and sacralizing mystifications thatEdward Said initiated at the beginning of his exemplary intellectualadventure.4


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NOTES

1 We can cite here the principle of global leadership embodied by therealist statesmanship of Georg Kennan, former head of the U.S. State DepartmentPolicy Planning Staff in the early days of the Cold War.

Kennan may be the presiding genius behind the neoconservative conspiracyto rehabilitate imperial dreams when he wrote (in Document PPS23, 24February1948): We have about 60% of the worlds wealth but only 6.3% of itspopulation. In this situation we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment.Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which willpermit us to maintain this position of disparity. We need not deceive ourselvesthat we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world benefaction. We shouldcease to talk about such vague and unreal objectives as human rights, the raisingof living standards and democratization. The day is not far off when we are goingto have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered byidealistic slogans, the better (U. S. Government, 1950).

2 The same caveats apply to two indefatigable American anthropologistsintending to explain Filipinos to themselves: Thomas McKennas Muslim Rulersand Rebels (1998) and Nicole Constables Maid to Order in Hong Kong: Storiesof Filipina Workers (1997).

I am not indicting all of American or Western anthropology, let alone the hermeneuticmethodology of the social sciences. But I would like to mention here two othersources of historical and political inquiries, aside from the writings of Cesar AdibMajul: one is the work of the Indian scholar Aijaz Ahmad (1982), and the essayof political scientist Robert Stauffer (1981). In both these thinkers, thedifferentiated totality of Filipino society and its historical imbrication in the world-system of global capitalism are the two necessary requisites for grasping theconcrete linkages and contradictions in the Moro struggle for autonomy and dignity.For these intellectuals are not only practitioners of a mode of scientific analysisof history but also protagonists in the search for solutions to the most urgentsocial and political problems of our time

3 I am following an argument elaborated by the late Canadian scholarBill Readings in his provocative book, The University in Ruins. Speculating onthe impossibility of subjective self-identity, of being free from obligation to others,Readings comments on an attitude prevalent in the United Statesan attitudethat, I think, became more articulate when, after September 11, most Americans,newly self-anointed as victims, refused to see any responsibility for what happenedto them and disclaimed any share in causing such horrendous disaster, what isindeed a terrible tragedy because it is uncomprehended and disconnected fromthe flaws of the egotistical sublime, hence the hunger for revenge. Readings,of course, includes his fellow Canadians in the following remarkwhich wecan immediately apply to our own relations with the Moros, Igorots, and otherostracized neighbors:

It is the desire for subjective autonomy that has led North Americans, for example,to want to forget their obligations to the acts of genocide on which their society is


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founded, to ignore debts to Native American and other peoples that contemporaryindividuals did not personally contract, but for which I would nonetheless arguethey are responsible (and not only insofar as they benefit indirectly from thehistorical legacy of those acts). In short, the social bond is not the property of anautonomous subject, since it exceeds subjective consciousness and evenindividual histories of action. The nature of my obligations to the history of theplace in which I live, and my exact positioning in relation to that history, are notthings I can decide upon or things that can be calculated exhaustively. No tax ofx percent on the incomes of white Americans could ever, for example, make fullreparation for the history of racism in the United States (how much is a lynchingworth?). Nor would it put an end to the guilt of racism by whiteness. (1996,186)

4 Noam Chomsky and other public intellectuals have called the UnitedStates itself a leading terrorist state (Chomsky 2001, 16). Just to give an exampleof how this has registered in the lives of Filipinos in the United States: Last June,62 Filipinos (among them, doctors and engineers) were apprehended by the USImmigration and Naturalization Services for overstaying their visa or for lack ofappropriate documentation. They were arrested as absconders, handcuffed andmanacled in chains while aboard a plane on the way to the former Clark Air Basein Pampanga. About 140 Filipinos are now being treated as hardened criminals,according to Migrante International, thanks to the Patriot Act. Over a thousandpersons, most of them people of color, are now detained in the United States assuspects, already being punished. I am not referring to the prisoners captured inAfghanistan and confined to cells in Guantanamo, Cuba; I am referring to Americancitizens who have been jailed on suspicion that they have links with Osama binLaden or other terrorist groups listed by the US State Department (which nowincludes the CPP/NPA). Just last November, there was a report of eight Filipinoaircraft mechanics who were detained since last June without bail due tosuspected terrorist links; they are now being deported because of allegedinaccuracies in their immigration papers. I conclude with this question: How manymore Filipinos will suffer globalized state terrorism spearheaded by the UnitedStates government, a fate that may befall any one of us who as citizens (here orin the United States) may be branded as unpatriotic or traitors because we dareto criticize, dare to think and resist?


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WORKS CITED

Ahmad, Aijaz. Who is the Moro? and Class and Colony in Mindanao. SoutheastAsia Chronicle (February 1982): 2-10.

Asad, Talal. Some Thoughts on the WTC Disaster. ISIM Newsletter 9 (January2002): 5-6.

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. Key Concepts in Post-ColonialStudies. London and New York: Routledge, 1998.

Badiou, Alain. Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return of Philosophy. London andNew York: Continuum, 2003.

Chomsky, Noam. Deterring Democracy. New York: Hill and Wang, 1992.

Constable, Nicole. Maid to Order in Hong Kong: Stories of Filipina Workers. Ithaca,NY: Cornell University Press, 1997.

Dirlik, Arif. Postmodernitys Histories. Lanham, Md: Rowman and Littlefield Inc.,2000.

Frake, Charles. Abu Sayyaf: Displays of Violence and the Proliferation ofContested Identit ies among Philippine Muslims. AmericanAnthropologist 100.1 (1998): 41-54.

Mahajan, Rahul. The New Crusade: Americas War on Terrorism. New York:Monthly Review Press, 2002.

McKenna, Thomas M. Muslim Rulers and Rebels. Berkeley, CA: University ofCalifornia Press, 1998.

The Project for the New American Century. Statement of Principles. 3 June1997.http://newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm

Rebuilding Americas Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a NewCentury.September2000. http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf

Readings, Bill. The University in Ruins. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,1996.

Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1994.

Edward Said, in conversation with Neeladri Bhattacharya, Suvir Kaul and AniaLoomba, New Delhi, 16 December 1997. Interventions 1.1 (1998/9):81-96.

A Window on the World. The Guardian (2 August 2003): 1-6.


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San Juan, E. Beyond Postcolonial Theory. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,1998.

______. Racism and Cultural Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press,2002.

______. Working through the Contradictions: From Cultural Theory toCritical Practice. Bucknell, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2004.

Shank, Duane. The Project for a New American Empire: Who are these guys?And Why do they think they can rule the World? Sojourner 22(August 2003): xxx.

Stauffer, Robert. The Politics of Becoming: The Mindanao Conflict in a World-System Perspective. Dependency Series No. 31. Quezon City:University of the Philippines Third World Studies Center, 1981.

Ullman, Harlan and James Wade. Shock and Awe: Achieving RapidDominance. NDU Press, 1996.

U.S. Government. Foreign Relations of the United States. Vol. 1, 1948 (1950).Made public in 1975.

The United States is a Leading Terrorist State. Interview by David Barsamian.Monthly Review 53.6 (November, 1992): 10-19.

Documents

2SANJUAN