IT is not really surprising if President Duterte hates some misguided Americans, because he has a mind of a genuine nationalist who always put the interest of the country at heart.
A keen observer of history, Mr. Duterte is in the same mold as the authentic nationalist of the past like Sen. Claro M. Recto, industrialist Salvador Araneta, Harvard-trained lawyer-economist Alejandro Lichauco, economist Dr. Emmanuel Yap and noted historian-writer Renato Constantino, to cite a few, who incessantly quarreled with some misguided Americans for good reasons.
For instance, Araneta strongly denounced some US officials for blocking the industrialization policy of the country after uncovering the existence of the Dodds Report.
He explained the failure of the country to industrialize, thus: “The indifferent economic development of the country…was due to America’s policy toward Japan and the Philippines. This policy was the result of the Dodds Report, which President Truman accepted and which had as its objective to make Japan the industrial workshop of Asia and the Philippines a mere supplier of raw materials.”
Araneta bitterly continued: “We do not argue against the wisdom of providing Japan with the means to rehabilitate herself and allowed to become an industrial country once again, although this was contrary to the prior recommendation of a post-war planning committee headed by US Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr., a recommendation which was in line with the prevailing sentiment at the end of the war. But, certainly, we can argue against a policy that would make Japan the exclusive industrialized country in the Far East, for such a policy was most detrimental to the Philippines. Indeed, the United States could not justify a policy that provided all kinds of stumbling blocks to the industrialization of her ally (Philippines) in the war against Japan. As a result of this policy, industrialization in the Philippines suffered severe setbacks.
The Dodds Report, according to Constantino, in a series of conversations with this writer some years back, explained the continuing obsession of US foreign policy to keep the Philippines a free and open market for US products, because a liberal import policy, another name for free trade, ensures that this country will never be able to industrialize and take the same nationalistic developmental strategy that enabled once poorer neighbors Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, Malaysia and Thailand to transform into the newly industrialized countries.
The late nationalist CM Recto described the geopolitical plan embodied in the Dodds Report as “America’s anti-industrialization policy for the Philippines.”
Conclusive proof of what Recto described as America’s “anti-industrialization policy for the Philippines” came when President Ferdinand E. Marcos formally launched an industrialization program in the late 1970s based on 11 heavy industries, led by the steel, petrochemical and engineering industries. The announcement of that plan swiftly followed a protest by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the pro-American technocrats in the Marcos Cabinet, led by no less than Prime Minister Cesar Virata.
The anti-industrialization policy has been implemented all these years through IMF conditionalities, and it isn’t hard to understand that for the past 60 years this country has been under the continuous economic supervision of the IMF. There is no country in the world that can claim to be under IMF’s supervision for even a fraction of that time. And it isn’t coincidence either that this country is the only one in the region that isn’t making any headway toward industrialization.
When the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and Singapore originally founded the Asean in 1967, not one of them was a newly industrialized country (NIC). Today only the Philippines remained outside of the NIC-hood status. The four other cofounders of the Asean are now acknowledged NICs.
“The sovereign nationhood was pure fiction, because the colonial power, which supposedly returned to us the independence which it had wrested from Andres Bonifacio’s revolution, never really left and never really allowed us to exist and act as a free and sovereign people,” Lichauco said.
In a conversation with this writer before his death in 2015, Lichauco said: “The Philippines is a neocolonial state which, by definition, means a state that is sovereign and independent in theory but which, in fact, is the colony of another, or of others. As a people, we are the classic victim of what Webster’s New World Dictionary calls neocolonialism and which it defines as “the exploitation of a supposedly independent nation as by imposing a puppet government.”
For his part, Yap, one of those who crafted and pushed the approval of the House Joint Resolution 2, or the Magna Carta of Social Justice and Economic Freedom, in the Sixth Congress, said in a conversation with this writer a few years ago: “If we had a total economic crisis in our hands, it is because we are a country stuck in the preindustrial stage of history.” Although unimplemented, the Magna Carta still remains a valid law today.
Isn’t President Duterte’s recall of how American soldiers massacred hundreds of Moros in March 1906 in Bud Dajo, Sulu, a way of reminding misguided Americans, who continue to meddle in purely domestic affairs, are more answerable to issues of human-rights violations and a trail of economic degradation?
To reach the writer, e-mail cecilio.arillo@gmail.com.
4 comments
Nationalism created so much death in the past. . ..(Hitler’s Germany and Japan during WW II, for example)
Today’s constructivism must continue in the globalized world. All humanity lives in a single planet, they call the Earth. . .
Nationalistic it may seem, but Duterte is leading the country to chaos.
a single planet which america lead militarily then it will be dust will remain outside america one after another like middle easth
duterte give peace to people of ph and give chaos to criminals
“This is why they hate us: The real American history neither Ted Cruz nor the New York Times will tell you”
Salon. November 18, 2015
“In the second Democratic presidential debate, however, candidate Bernie Sanders condemned a long-standing government policy his peers rarely admit exists.
“I think we have a disagreement,” Sanders said of fellow presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. “And the disagreement is that not only did I vote against the war in Iraq. If you look at history, you will find that regime change — whether it was in the early ’50s in Iran, whether it was toppling Salvador Allende in Chile, or whether it was overthrowing the government of Guatemala way back when — these invasions, these toppling of governments, regime changes have unintended consequences. I would say that on this issue I’m a little bit more conservative than the secretary.”
“I am not a great fan of regime changes,” Sanders added.
“Regime change” is not a phrase you hear discussed honestly much in Washington, yet it is a common practice in and defining feature of U.S. foreign policy for well over a century. For many decades, leaders from both sides of the aisle, Republicans and Democrats, have pursued a bipartisan strategy of violently overthrowing democratically elected foreign governments that do not kowtow to U.S. orders.”
Read more:
http :// www. salon. com /2015/11/18/this_is_why_they_hate_us_the_real_american_history_neither_ted_cruz_nor_the_new_york_times_will_tell_you/
“Overthrowing other people’s governments: The Master List”
By William Blum – Published February 2013
Read more:
https :// williamblum. org /essays/read/overthrowing-other-peoples-governments-the-master-list
Overstaying is a pathology of the U.S. empire. The U.S. has a long history of engaging in military intervention and regime change to maintain or advance its regional or global hegemony. The Philippines is moving forward as a sovereign and independent state by charting a more independent foreign policy. The Philippines has long ceased to be America’s precious colony in the Pacific. The United States has to move on from imposing its rule and hegemonic agenda over other countries. It’s time for U.S. forces to go home and move out of the Filipino homeland. The Philippines is not Edcastan. The Philippines should accept humanitarian assistance and disaster relief only from countries that do not impose or require foreign military presence in the Filipino home islands.