Category: colonialism

Goodbye to the queen, goodbye to the fairy tale

I don’t know that the 10 days of pomp and pageantry that attended the death of Queen Elizabeth is going to do the reign of King Charles much good. Unless of course the funeral was meant to signal, truly, the end of an era and the start of serious downsizing and decolonizing complete with apologies and reparations and repatriation of looted wealth. In which case it was an impressively extravagant show of love and respect, even, a well-deserved last-hurrah for a queen who did a stupendous job selling white supremacy to the world. Otherwise, if it’s going to be business as usual under Charles, then the recent ostentatious display of vast wealth is grist for the mill of anti-monarchists of all colors and stripes in a world where the happy rich are obscenely few and the oppressed poor are obscenely many.

Read Chris Hedges’ Sept 12 essay, Monarchs Belong in the Dustbin of History. https://therealnews.com/chris-hedges-monarchs-belong-in-the-dustbin-of-history

The royals are oligarchs. They are guardians of their class. The world’s largest landowners include King Mohammed VI of Morocco with 176 million acres, the Holy Roman Catholic Church with 177 million acres, the heirs of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia with 531 million acres and now, King Charles III with 6.6 billion acres of land. British monarchs are worth almost $28 billion. The British public will provide a $33 million subsidy to the Royal Family over the next two years, although the average household in the UK saw its income fall for the longest period since records began in 1955 and 227,000 households experience homelessness in Britain.

… In 1953, Her Majesty’s Government sent three warships, along with 700 troops, to its colony British Guiana, suspended the constitution and overthrew the democratically elected government of Cheddi Jagan. Her Majesty’s Government helped to build and long supported the apartheid government in South Africa. Her Majesty’s Government savagely crushed the Mau Mau independence movement in Kenya from 1952 to 1960, herding 1.5 million Kenyans into concentration camps where many were tortured. British soldiers castrated suspected rebels and sympathizers, often with pliers, and raped girls and women. Her Majesty’s Government inherited staggering wealth from the $45 trillion Great Britain looted from India, wealth accumulated by violently crushing a series of uprisings, including the First War of Independence in 1857. Her Majesty’s Government carried out a dirty war to break the Greek Cypriot War of Independence from 1955 to 1959 and later in Yemen from 1962 to 1969. Torture, extrajudicial assassinations, public hangings and mass executions by the British were routine….  

And watch the Sept 14 video of Double Down News, The Dark Side of British History You Weren’t Taught in School @GeorgeMonbiot

the text.

MONBIOT. In Britain we present the colonial project as being about teaching the natives table manners and double-entry bookkeeping. In India the British manufactured a famine in the 1870s out of nothing. There were food surpluses, massive amounts of food, but the governor Lord Lytton insisted this food be exported wholesale to Britain. The ensuing starvation killed at least 12 million people, possibly as much as 29 million people.  All relief works were banned except for hard labour in labour camps, where the inmates received the same rations as the inmates of Buchenwald and where there was a 94% death rate per year.

This was all done in the name of liberal free-market capitalism; of course, the British did something similar in Ireland. In Kenya soon after the Second World War there was an uprising, by the Kikuyu people who wanted their land back. The Kikuyu were herded into concentration camps and fortified villages. Almost the entire population of over a million people. People were systematically tortured to death. They invented a new kind of pliers, whose purpose was first to crush men’s testicles and then to cut them off. They raped women with bayonets, they raped men similarly. A favored technique was to Ram sand up the rectum with a stick. Sometimes they were rolled up in barbed wire, and kicked around the compound until they bled to death.

Some of the British soldiers boasted about this; this is within living memory. The Colonial Secretary lied about it, the papers documenting it were burnt. The impact of the rich and powerful Nations has been so phenomenally murderous and destructive that it is being completely airbrushed from our national consciousness.

In order to justify the land grabbing colonial projects, you had to create an ideology: we the Europeans or the Americans, have come to rescue the rest of the world from its depravity and backwardness. But in order to do that you have to be able to demonstrate that the rest of the world is depraved and backward. From this arose the racism that is still with us today. It was a necessary component of the colonial project.

Some people might claim; well, okay, we broke a few eggs to make this omelet.  As if all those human beings were eggs! But look at the omelet, isn’t it fantastic! Look we’ve made this fantastic omelet! Forget about all that unpleasant stuff and let’s just celebrate where we are.

Where we are is a continuation of the project: we commodified people’s land, and people’s labour, and turned it into our property. We’re also destroying the rest of the living world alongside it.

We don’t have to be like this. We are the same human beings as anybody else. We’re all part of the same big human family. We just have to recognize that, accept that.

Of course within Western countries there are plenty of brilliant people, resisting colonization within our own countries, and external colonization of other people’s countries. These are the voices which must come to the fore, those who emphasize altruism and kindness and generosity, and empathy for others. Those who recognize that skin color and any other difference of language, of religion, of background is completely irrelevant, by comparison to what we share, which is our humanity.

 

For whom the bells toll

Amelia HC Ylagan

… When Amb. Kim made his speech for the turnover of the bells, he made no apologies, no explanations for the confiscation of the bells by the US. He simply said, “In World War II and in Korea, our soldiers fought, bled, died, and sacrificed side by side. Together they made possible the peace and prosperity we enjoy today… Our relationship has withstood the tests of history and flourishes today. And every day our relationship is further strengthened by our unbreakable alliance, robust economic partnership, and deep people-to-people ties” (usembassy.gov, Dec 11, 2018).

Somehow, Amb. Kim’s careful diplomatic allusions to “our relationship” cannot but call back Pres. Duterte’s oft-repeated open disdain for the US (specially for past US President Barack Obama and for immediate-past Ambassador Philip Goldberg). Duterte’s rejection has progressively been made more painful to the US, juxtaposed to his open and gushy declaration of love for Chinese President Xi Jinping and all things Chinese. In the current heightened US-China global trade and political war, the suddenly rushed return of the Balangiga bells might plaintively ring: but we two — the Philippines and the US — we are friends, are we not?

… And insistently, triumphantly, the bells will toll again at Balangiga. But for whom, and for what will the bells toll?

The once-silenced Balangiga bells must peal and boom even more urgently now than in the chilling wars of betrayal and treachery for dominance and power in the early 1900s. The jubilation for national pride redeemed by the return of the symbolic bells is confused by the sickening feeling in the pit that the horned specter of dominance and greed still hovers, in the appearance of the Filipino’s own skin and mien. For colonization and dominance, and its treachery and betrayals can also be by our own leaders.

So many issues in our country that overwhelm us at yearend: is there really democracy guided by the rule of law, in the insuppressible and persistent “rumors” of extrajudicial killings and transgressions of human rights, protested and called down locally and by foreign observers?

Have we not observed and experienced first-hand how the constitution and the laws have been turned upside down in shockingly unorthodox little-known legal trickeries like the quo warranto to remove a Chief Justice; and the revocation of amnesty granted to one particular ex-putschist senator and present critic of the administration? Why are other politicians accused of plunder and other high crimes pardoned? What about the fate of another senator languishing in jail for alleged drug involvement? And are we not chilled by the continuous extension of martial law in Mindanao, justified by an Armed Forces who should have been doing its job as it is supposed to be competently doing?

Are we not aghast and terrified at the blatant dishonesty and corruption that are dismissed lightly for “friends” of those in power versus the persecution by evidently trumped-up charges for the vulnerable non-friends or those “unfriended” for lost utility? And we are overwhelmed in anxiety for a 2019 budget not yet approved, discovering in painful bits and pieces the self-serving “insertions” and allocations of “savings” in hidden pork barrel that was already deemed unconstitutional in the previous administration. Players in the controlling “team” seem to be fighting each other in sibling rivalry for opportunistic control of the resources of government — nay, the resources of the people.

But the unkindest cut of all by the “new colonizers” that we may call those who want to perpetuate themselves in economic and political power, is rushing the charter change for federalism to be transfused into our life veins. We will not be a free people anymore if the Hadean concepts are installed and institutionalized of unlimited terms for government positions, allowed political dynasties forever, and the divide-and-rule over federal regions controlled by a president practically for life, with a convenient vice-president of the president’s own party and personal subservience — among other self-serving and opportunistic insurances of control and impunity by those already in power.

The Balangiga bells must toll for freedom and democracy in the Philippines.

“We are here to stay.”

that’s U.S. president barack obama telling asia  that the U.S. military would expand its role in the Asia-Pacific region, despite budget cuts, declaring America was “here to stay” as a Pacific power which would help shape the region’s future.

he said it in australia, in a pre-ASEAN summit visit, but he might as well have said it here, where U.S. forces continue to be based (“visiting” kuno) and where hillary clinton happened to be celebrating the mutual (so-called) defense treaty with the prez and shrugging off anti-America demonstrations by the militant left.

not that it needed saying.  alam naman natin, the history is indisputable, they never meant to leave.

Dear Hillary

Conrado de Quiros

Not that you are likely to read this, though it can’t hurt to read something a little more intelligent than the usual crap given you that passes for intelligence. I write to reiterate some of the points I made in a previous letter I wrote your boss a couple of months ago. I wrote it in the hope that people who have the audacity to hope would also have the audacity to listen.

I was one of those who rejoiced at your party’s victory a year ago (has it been that long?), a victory that had “We shall overcome” written all over it. I was one of those who believed that victory did not just represent a victory for Americans but a victory for the world. The first world president, the signs blared in neon, and I thrilled to see it. What a difference a year makes. The lights have not gone out completely but how so much dimmer they’ve become.

I personally rooted for Barack Obama over you in the primaries, even if it meant nothing to you or your country. Not leastbecause of your endorsement of the Iraq invasion—let’s call a spade a spade, although occupation, seizure or grabbing is a lot more accurate—which your rival, who eventually became your country’s first black president, had a field day twitting you with. Your excuse that it was a bipartisan vote and that you got the wrong intelligence from George W. and his bunch of cutthroats just doesn’t cut it. All it proves is that your intelligence is crap, and you would be better off reading more intelligent things like this.

Still, I had hoped that your becoming state secretary would add fuel to a US government that seemed to want to go boldly where no US government had gone before. I had hoped you would help present the other face of America to the world, the face of Thomas Jefferson, Mark Twain and Martin Luther King and not the faces of Randolph Hearst, Richard Nixon and Fox News. At the very least I had hoped you, upon the frenzied instigation of your boss, would do no less, if not much more, than Jimmy Carter in pressing the cause of liberty before the world.

I hoped wrong.

Your coming to the Philippines does not press that cause before the Filipinos, it suppresses it. It cannot help that you pass off your trip here—trumpeted loudly by your ambassador—as a desire to personally see the devastation wrought by the recent typhoons. I know we are a country that has earned worldwide renown only for boxing and stealing, but we have not entirely lost our wits. When two top American officials visit this country one on top of the other—the other one was CIA director Leon Panetta who visited last June—we have to ask what we have done to deserve the honor.

Being flattened by howling wind and raging flood is not the first thing that comes to mind. The American capacity for solicitousness has nowhere been in evidence in this country. What has been in evidence throughout the years is a “special relations” that gives whole new meanings to the word “special.” It improves on Sun-Tzu’s famous aphorism, “Keep your friends close and your enemies even closer,” by proposing, “Make your enemies pay dear and your friends even dearer.”

To suggest that you are coming here out of concern for our ravaged state only makes you out to be afflicted by the same disease as your host, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. The activists are right: You want to see a spectacle of devastation, look elsewhere. The burying of whole villages in water and the ruining of whole crops at harvest time are nothing compared to the wasteland this country has been turned into by two things.

The first is your host. It cannot speak very highly of a transformational government that you want only to transform someone who has been the greatest bane her countrymen has known after Ferdinand Marcos into a blessing for democracy. The last by saying, as Obama did when she visited, and as various US officials like yourself have said when she has complied, or gone overboard, with the American wishes, that she is a mighty ally in the fight against terrorism.

Mighty ally, my foot. No one has wreaked more terror upon this land than she, though that is clearly of little concernto you. Sort of reminds us of how George’s father, Bush Senior, toasted Marcos for his adherence to democracy during his time. The only transformation that seems to have happened is the superficial one of color in the American leadership, from white to black. For us at least, it remains as black (-and-white) as before.

And for what? Just so you can continue to have your will with us. Spare us the nurturing posture, it merely adds insult to the injury. And it makes you look like Kristie Kenney, your one ambassador who has learned the art of humoring the natives. You are here, as Panetta was here, as all sorts of American officials high and low will be here, because you are anxious to remain here. Or because you are anxious to have your bases remain here. Yes, bases. They may be mobile, they may be itinerant, they may be floating, crawling, or traipsing, but they are bases nonetheless. Before the storms became permanent visitors in this country, you already were.

You want to see devastation, gaze upon the devastation you have wrought. Upon a people who have done you no harm, who came to your side, notwithstanding that you enslaved them at the very time of their lives they were near to being free, when you lay prostrate at the hands of the Japanese. Gaze upon the way you repaid them by propping up their oppressors in the name of fighting communism and now of terrorism. The point of fighting communism and terrorism is to protect democracy. It is not to create more communists and terrorists by the sheer hellishness of it.

You shall overcome?

Right now, the only thing you need to overcome is yourselves.