The Missionary and the Libertine

by Ian Buruma

  It fits right into Karnow’s general thesis, though. He believes that the American mission to transplant its values and institutions to the Philippines, or anywhere in Asia, was a dangerous illusion. As he puts it, “A noble dream, it proved in later years to be largely an exercise in self-deception.” This, in Karnow’s view, is because of deep cultural differences. I have my doubts about this argument as well. The idea that every country can be just like America and every capital another American town is naive, to be sure, but the aborted effort of Filipinos to establish their own democratic republic, partly based on American institutions, proves that there is nothing in Filipino culture innately hostile to a liberal democracy. Karnow rightly says that Filipino politics are based on personal relationships—between landowners and peasants, political bosses and clients and so on—rather than impersonal institutions, but this is less a cultural peculiarity than the normal condition of any preindustrial society.

  The Americans were a destructive force not because their ideals could not be transplanted, but because they robbed Filipinos of the chance to be their own masters. By making them dependent on American tutelage and largesse, they perpetuated the old colonial setup and deprived the Filipino elite of responsibility, the effect of which has lasted to this day. The Filipinos submitted to foreign domination, but not from choice. Indeed, as Karnow describes in detail, one of the worst instances of betrayal was the American promise to Aguinaldo in 1898 that the Philippines would be left alone once the Spaniards were ousted.

  It is, of course, true that the Americans tried to remake the Philippines “in our image,” which included lessons in democracy. But the reason these lessons didn’t stick has less to do with incompatible Filipino values than with the gap between ideals and colonial reality. How could Filipinos become responsible democrats if the democratic tutors behaved like feudal patrons, fostering dependence while preaching the virtues of independence? This is where the cultural and political signals got seriously confused—again a situation that has lasted more or less to this day. For when the Americans act like masters, Filipinos talk about freedom from the American yoke; but as soon as the Americans threaten to cut their charges loose, Filipinos feel betrayed, as though the patron is forgetting his obligations. By the time the Filipino elite was actually offered independence, the Fil-American relationship had already become much too cozy, the psychology of dependence too deeply entrenched, the special privileges too convenient. Sergio Osmeña, who became president just before coming home with Douglas MacArthur in 1944, is said to have observed that “the Filipinos wanted independence only when it seemed to be getting farther off, and the minute it began to get near they would begin to get very much frightened.”

  As far as other Asian “client states” are concerned, the problems with democracy have less to do with the incompatibility of American values and local traditions than with America’s ambivalent policies. South Korea and Japan are good examples. After World War II, there was great eagerness in both countries, especially among leftists (the only real opponents of Japanese authoritarianism), to accept America’s help to set up liberal democracies. At first they even got the blessing of General MacArthur—not a man generally known for his liberal views. But by the late 1940s fear of communism was such that the noncommunist left was purged along with the communists, and reactionary regimes returned to power, secure in their knowledge of American support. Realpolitik alternated with idealism in a way that has bewildered American allies ever since Aguinaldo sailed to Manila onboard a U.S. Navy ship. Masters or missionaries? Liberation or the White Man’s Burden? Anticolonial colonialism: President McKinley was not the only American unsure of what to do in Asia.

  In a way, American foreign policy has always been a hostage to its own propaganda. Moral arguments must be harnessed to convince the home front of the justness of America’s cause. Great expectations are raised abroad only to be abandoned in sudden shifts of policy. The national interest can get hopelessly mixed up with the national mission to spread the gospel of freedom and democracy, and the two, alas, don’t always dovetail neatly. Sometimes the national interest suffers, sometimes the mission; either way, people end up feeling betrayed.

  Nonetheless, despite the demands of realpolitik, America has been a relatively generous superpower. So much so that it strikes many Americans as extraordinary when such generosity is reciprocated with surly resentment instead of gratitude. For someone like Imelda Marcos, indulged by at least four American presidents, to feel betrayed by America must appear perverse. But it has to be said that some Filipinos had ample cause to think they had been screwed by Uncle Sam.

  When MacArthur returned to repossess the Philippines from the Japanese, he found a Filipino elite, led by Benigno Aquino Senior, Cory’s father-in-law, and José P. Laurel, father of Cory’s vice president, that had dealt with the Japanese in precisely the way the American and Spanish masters and missionaries had been dealt with before: collaboration in exchange for patronage. Once again the Filipino elite had offered head. The strongest resistance to the Japanese came from the darker-skinned people, the traditional rebels recruited in the poor rural areas, in this case the guerrilla army of the leftist Hukbalahap, or Huks. They had helped the Americans free Luzon, but when that job was done they were seen as a communist threat to the established order. The Huk leader, Luis Taruc, was jailed on charges of preventing the country “from returning to a normal way of life.” The normal way of life was, of course, a meager existence for the peasants whose cause the Huks championed under the domination of the old landlords, the very people who had collaborated with the Japanese.

  As Karnow rightly observes, MacArthur “aborted change in the Philippines by reinstalling the traditional dynasties, whose primary aim was to protect their vested interests.” Could he have done otherwise, a man in a hurry to restore order in a chaotic country in ruins? Perhaps not. But what was truly unforgivable in many Filipino eyes was his swift abandonment of the Philippines to become the proconsul in Tokyo, where, again in Filipino eyes, the great American Father, their very own compadre, proceeded to make the old enemy rich and powerful again. This offended the old custom of utang na loob, obligation earned through favors. Hadn’t Filipinos died for the U.S.A.? So, did most Filipinos feel well and truly screwed by the old Lion of Luzon? No, no, no, said Cardinal Jaime Sin, archbishop of Manila, interviewed by Karnow in a fascinating television documentary about the Fil-American relationship: “Nobody can say anything against MacArthur here. You’d get stoned. That man saved us. He promised to return, and he did return.”

  If only he hadn’t, if only America had left its old colony alone, things might have turned out better in the end. For if the Americans are often confused about their motives and aims, the Filipinos have an even harder time disentangling sentimental and cultural expectations from national interest. We hate you, we love you; Yankee go home, but please not just yet. As President Quezon once said, “Damn the Americans, why don’t they tyrannize us more!” There are many countries where men have come to power with the help of the CIA, but only in the Philippines can one imagine a local boy being elected—and, what is more, being hugely popular—because he is backed by the CIA. This was the case with Ramón Magsaysay (“He’s Our Guy”), elected president in 1953. The agency could not have wished for a better front man. He was an earthy, dark-skinned man of the people, quite different from his rich mestizo predecessors. He didn’t even have a Spanish name. Although hardened foreign correspondents like to dismiss him as nothing but a CIA creation, many Filipinos remember Our Guy wistfully: if only we could have another Magsaysay; if only he were still with us. He died in a plane crash in 1957.

  Marcos, too, was a change from what he called the old oligarchy. But, unlike Magsaysay, he was not made by the CIA. He was a brilliant young upstart from the gritty north who first gate-crashed the privileged world of the Filipino elite and then proceeded to strip some of its most prominent members of their assets—only to redistribute the new wealth among
his friends. He also seemed serious about land reforms, and even dared challenge the traditional power of the Catholic Church. Here, at last, was a popular nationalist who would tackle some of the country’s fundamental problems. Now more than a few people think wistfully of his early years too: if only he had done what he promised to do.

  But instead he created a mirror image of the old colonial system, in which he was the only patron, the super compadre, the don of dons. And American eagerness to keep the bases (the country’s biggest employer after the Philippine government) meant that Marcos, just like his predecessors in the colonial era, could make himself and his friends fortunes by squeezing the old White Chief. He became so adept at this, and Washington was often so clumsy, that it was not always clear who was screwing whom. In addition, he stole from his own country’s coffers. The extraordinary insouciance of Marcos’s kleptocracy can be understood only as an example of colonial psychology: Why should he be responsible for anything but himself, his family and his friends? America would always be there to protect him and clear up the mess. After all, he was America’s loyal friend, and he fought communists. Isn’t that what America wanted?

  But, as we know, even Marcos came to grief, the beginning of his demise shown live on Ted Koppel’s TV show. There they went, the president and his First Lady, lifted out of their palace in an American helicopter, the First Lady singing “New York, New York.” And then the Marcoses, too, feel screwed, as they told The Washington Post in April 1989. They were “kidnapped” by the Americans, they said, after having been betrayed by the American press. “I grew up around everything American,” said Mrs. Marcos, in between singing old Irving Berlin tunes for visiting reporters—“American food, American music … U.S.A., red, white and blue … We were not just friends, allies, we were one in spirit with America.” But, then, “America did us in.… Before the kidnapping, we were clean, we were good-looking. I was ‘beautiful,’ I was ‘great.’ And after the kidnapping, I was—everything was rotten.”

  I daresay that, underneath all the lies and all the playacting, this emotion was sincere—as sincere as is humanly possible with show folks like the Marcos couple; as sincere, at least, as President McKinley’s intention to civilize and Christianize and do the best by the little brown brothers in … what was the name of that place again? It was sincere and deeply humiliating, in the way that squabbles over money in a whorehouse are humiliating. Mrs. Marcos’s tears were like the tears of a hooker who feels she has not been paid enough for her services.

  Much of this really has to be seen to be believed. Karnow is an excellent sketcher of characters, and what characters they are!—Teddy Roosevelt, Douglas MacArthur, Manuel Quezon, Imelda Marcos, “Ninoy” Aquino. In the world of Filipino politics—one is tempted to say Filipino life—everybody becomes an actor, playing roles, often confused, always bella figura.

  Frankie José in some ways exemplifies the turmoil of Filipino intellectual life. He talks about the need for a “truly nationalist revolution,” though he loves America, where several of his children have settled. He sympathizes with young people who disappear into the mountains to join the communist New People’s Army, though he has little sympathy with communism. Yet in some circles he is regarded as a communist, while more progressive types accuse him of being a “CIA agent”—for his association in the 1950s with the Congress for Cultural Freedom. This is nothing special in the Philippines: most people are suspected of being either communists or American agents. That José is accused of both says something about the man: he is the kind of free spirit who would be intolerable to any revolutionary regime, whether of the right or the left.

  José’s radicalism is not so much the product of Marxist analysis as of a moral rage: what V. S. Naipaul calls colonial rage, against the humiliation of subservience, the indignity of a history of failure. This is the theme that runs through all José’s novels, including his major work, the so-called Rosales saga, four novels dealing with Filipino history from 1872 to 1972. The entire saga can be read as an allegory for the Filipino in search of an identity.

  The heroine of José’s novel Ermita is a prostitute. As if that metaphor were not strong enough, she was born as the result of a rape, inflicted on her rich mestizo mother by a Japanese soldier during the sacking of Manila in 1945. Ermita, the name of the heroine as well as the title of the novel, screws her way to the top, ending up with that most desirable of things, a rich American husband. But in the kind of denouement José likes, she rejects the American and goes back to her real love, a Filipino she grew up with. His real name, incidentally, is Mac—short for MacArthur. She doesn’t actually take to the hills, to join the revolution, as does the hero in José’s best-known novel, Mass, but she does, as a Manila intellectual might put it, find her identity as a Filipina. In José’s moral universe, the two are closely linked: revolution is a matter of pride, dignity, identity. “What we need,” says José, tapping his nut-brown head, “is a revolution in here.” What we need, he means to say, is to stop being prostitutes.

  Colonial rage usually boils over into self-hatred. A young student in Mass sums up the author’s feelings:

  Listen, our history … is a history of failed revolutions. Always, in the end, someone was bought or someone turned traitor. We are a nation of traitors.… We delight in seeing the downfall of others, even friends. We betray for money, for revenge, for envy … but most of the time, out of sheer cussedness.

  In Ermita, a former historian called Cruz, now “prostituting” himself for a multinational company, tells Ermita that

  we are witnessing the slow demise, the gradual self-destruction of this nation. And we don’t need a foreign colonizer to do this. We are blissfully doing it ourselves.… Our entire educational system—and I am its product—is valueless. It is our creation. We cannot blame it for the fatal flaw in us. Maybe we deserve the darkness that is coming.

  José’s rage seems at odds with the seemingly indestructible carnivalesque jokiness of the Filipinos. Yet it reflects a dark current that runs through their history, occasionally erupting in messianic zeal and violence. José is an urbane, witty, cosmopolitan man of the world, a pillar of the local PEN club, a gourmet and a connoisseur of art. He is not a communist, and voted for Cory Aquino. But his spirit is with the rebels in the hills, in whom he thinks he sees the latest incarnation of his Indio ancestors, still waiting to exact their blood debt from the mestizos who betrayed them.

  1989

  THE SEOUL OLYMPICS

  In September 1988, for the second time since its opening in 1987, I visited the Independence Hall of Korea, a huge patriotic monument south of Seoul, and I was struck by the same thoughts as during the first visit: Was my revulsion a sign of decadence, of Western flabbiness? Were Spengler and Toynbee perhaps right? Is there something to the idea of the rise and fall of national, even racial vigor? Intellectually, one rebels against such notions. But still the place overwhelms by its sheer force; it has the fascination of Leni Riefenstahl’s documentaries. One notes the kitsch, the absurd mysticism, the sentimentality, the brutal aesthetics, but one cannot deny the power.

  Unlike before, the place was virtually empty. People were either at work or watching the Olympics on TV. I examined at my leisure the great Patriots Memorial, the Patriotic Poems and Quotations, and the Grand Hall of the Nation, an enormous temple with large stone groups of patriots, nude, Nordic-looking and vigorous, their lantern jaws and outstretched arms pointing towards a glorious future. The effect of histrionic power was heightened by Wagnerian music and sounds of drums and neighing horses. The hall commemorates the struggle against Japanese colonialism. The style owes a great deal to Arno Breker and Stalin’s socialist realists. The purpose, according to the official guide, is “to awaken Korean national consciousness and promote patriotism.” The method is quasi-religious.

  Inside the exhibition halls I read some of the anthropological information. On the physical characteristics of Koreans (in English): “Their arms are rather short. The
ir heads tend to be flat in the back and their fore-heads are rather broad, suggesting large brain capacity.”

  In the history section there was a nineteenth-century stone with an inscription that read: “Western barbarians invade our lands—if we do not fight, we must appease them. To urge appeasement is to betray our nation.” A rebellion by the Righteous Army against the Japanese in 1907 was said to have “sent a signal to the world that the Koreans were prepared to unite to fight for their national sovereignty, justice and world peace.”

  At the end of the exhibition, as a kind of climax after all the heavy oil paintings of battle scenes, pictures of Japanese atrocities and relics of Korean martyrdom, we get to the Olympic Games. There is a model of the Olympic stadium, there are photographs of Korean medalists at the 1986 Asian Games in Seoul and, in a panoramic film entitled Korea, My Motherland, we see a thousand young tae kwon do fighters in identical martial gear punching the air in unison while letting out a piercing battle cry. This is followed by images of steel furnaces, followed by more pictures of Korean athletes winning gold.

  “Welcome to ’88 Olympics, and the Land of Ginseng,” says a ginseng-root drink commercial: “Ginseng for over forty centuries has symbolized power and youth throughout Asia.”

  KOREA’S ECONOMY OUTPOWERS JAPAN’S AT TIME OF TOKYO OLYMPIC GAMES IN 1964, said a headline in the Korea Times on the day before the opening ceremony.