Passionate Revolutions. Talitha Espiritu
people. In fact, they claimed that there were no Filipinos as such, only a mixed collection of polyglot savages lacking a common culture and prone to impulsive and irrational behavior.19 Given the “absence” of a Filipino nation, the new colonizers rationalized U.S. presence in the islands, not as an act of imperialist aggression (since after all there was no nation to usurp), but as a benevolent act: they were in the islands to defuse the political instability unleashed by “deluded peasants and workers” led by a gang of mixed-race leaders.20
The fourteen-year conflict was thus paradoxically perceived as a humane war. Despite the thousands of Filipino deaths, it was characterized as a valuable learning experience for Filipinos and Americans alike. David Prescott Barrows, head of the Bureau of Non-Christian Tribes, wrote in 1901 that the conflict was a blessing, “for without it the Filipinos would never have recognized their own weaknesses; without it we would never had done our work thoroughly.”21
It is well worth reiterating the racial politics underpinning the U.S. policy of Benevolent Assimilation. President McKinley, who coined the term, argued that the “earnest and paramount aim” of colonization was to “win the confidence, respect and affection” of the people.22 In William Howard Taft’s view, Filipinos were orphaned children, “little brown brothers” abandoned by their Spanish fathers. It was therefore imperative to enfold them within the compassionate and protective embrace of the United States. It was, in short, an instance of white love. As Rafael puts it, “As a father is bound to guide his son, the United States was charged with the development of native others. Neither exploitative nor enslaving, colonization entailed the cultivation of the ‘felicity and perfection of the Philippine people’ through the ‘uninterrupted devotion’ to those ‘noble ideals which constitute the higher civilization of mankind.’”23
Such has been the colonial thread of white love: the allegorical projection of a great white father whose love for his wayward children is served by creating a reciprocal relationship between a civilizing love and a love of civilization. Cultural paternalism clearly underpinned the policy of Benevolent Assimilation, which “required making native inhabitants desire what colonial authority desired for them.”24 It also involved the enforcement of constant surveillance, for the Filipino, it was believed, was incapable of self-government. This fundamental incapacity—something we have seen repeated in Marcos’s time with the Huntington thesis and the view that Filipinos “just weren’t ready for democracy”—was in fact the official reason why U.S. colonial rule lasted until 1946. Benevolent Assimilation projected U.S. colonial rule as merely a transitional stage; self-rule would be granted as soon as the natives, in Taft’s words, “have been elevated and taught the dignity of labor . . . and self-restraint.”25 In other words, self-government can be achieved only when the subject has learned to colonize itself. In Woodrow Wilson’s words, “Self-government is a form of character. It follows upon the long discipline which gives a people self-possession, self-mastery, and the habit of order and peace . . . the steadiness of self-control and political mastery. And these things cannot be had without long discipline. . . . No people can be ‘given’ the self-control of maturity. Only a long apprenticeship of obedience can secure them the precious possession.”26
As a precondition of Filipino self-rule, white love set standards of discipline and civility that required the tutelary subject to submit to strict regimens of training and the constant supervision of a sovereign master. By mid-century, white love evolved into the Cold War technology of modernization. Replacing direct colonial supervision with the application of the social sciences to the problems of decolonizing states, modernization worked to spread the culture and values of the United States throughout the Third World. Modernization, in expanding and reconstituting the colonial project of white love, had definite, if unstated, racial overtones. Its humanistic teleology, to borrow Fanon’s terms, “invit[ed] the submen to become human and to take as their prototype Western humanity.”27
Marcos strategically sidesteps modernization’s emphasis on the social replication of Western culture and values to focus instead on the theory’s normative construction of human emancipation. In his Five Years of the New Society, Marcos projects an outwardly radiating series of transformations centering on the recalibration of national “values”: first, such values will foster a sense of pride in the individual; it follows that this pride will foster a sense of belonging to a larger national community; and finally, a sense of belonging to a national community will enjoin individuals to seek “oneness with mankind.”28
To “Third Worldize” this model of human emancipation, Marcos sought the psychoaffective creation of a “decolonized” cultural subject. The New Society’s cultural policy indeed hinged on eradicating colonial subalternity by restoring the dignity and self-respect of the New Filipino. But as we shall see, Marcos’s program of cultural rehabilitation nonetheless called on the cultural sphere to effect an internal colonization along the lines of the cultural paternalism of white love. Its promise of a perfect social order presupposed the citizenry’s submission to the dictator’s “paternal” authority and the consolidation of a social hierarchy through the internalization of traditions invented by, and grounded in, the martial-law state.
The Internal Revolution and Governmentality
Despite its First World narcissism, the salience of modernization theory, as far as Marcos was concerned, lay in its emphasis on the power of cultural values to shape patterns of social conduct. The New Society was indeed the first deliberate attempt ever made in the Philippines to realign the cultural values of the populace with the development initiatives of the state.29 For Marcos, this process involved “restructuring mental dispositions and evolving an authentic individual and social consciousness.”30
Just months after the declaration of martial law, veteran psychological warfare specialist Jose Ma. Crisol, working through the auspices of the Armed Forces of the Philippines’ Office of Civil Relations, convened an academic think tank to construct a master plan for moral reform. Their report, Towards a Restructuring of Filipino Values, gave the following recommendation: “We should treat the country as our very own family, where the President of the Republic is the father and all the citizens as our brothers. From this new value we develop a strong sense of oneness, loyalty to the country, and a feeling of nationalism.”31
Thus elevating the family as the principal institution for formulating national values, the report anticipated Foucault’s description of the intimate connection between the family and the science of policing, Jacques Donzelot’s term for the “methods for developing the quality of the population and the strength of the nation.”32 For Foucault, the task of policing led to the rise of governmentality via a modern state that “exerci[zed] towards its inhabitants, and the wealth and behavior of each and all, a form of surveillance and control as attentive as that of the head of the family over his household and goods.”33 In Marcos’s own writings on the New Society, metaphors of the father’s role in a well-run household abound. Like the head of the household (in Tagalog, ama ng tahanan), the president’s primary role is to ensure that his house is in order, for this “does not only ensure the regularity of one’s daily bread; it provides the vitality that fills both the thirst for productive labor and creative contemplation.”34
In matters of culture, Marcos’s ama ng tahanan blended the cultural paternalism of the great white father of Benevolent Assimilation with the anticolonial stance of Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. Though he actively promoted modernization to bring about the humanist project of national development, he also prescribed a cultural liberation program that would correct the colonial mentality of the populace.
Marcos’s notion of cultural liberation closely follows Fanon’s conception of cultural rehabilitation. Because colonialism distorted, disfigured, and destroyed the native’s past, it devolves on the postcolonial state to seek a national culture in the past. Thus enmeshed in the psychoaffective operations of cultural rehabilitation, the creation of a national culture is a necessary feature of decolonization, for without it, liberated peoples would be “colorless, stateless, rootless—a race of angels.”35
The search for