Colleen Woods
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781501749131
- eISBN:
- 9781501749155
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9781501749131.003.0001
- Subject:
- History, American History: 19th Century
This introductory chapter discusses how global anticommunism in the Philippines worked to affirm the processes of global decolonization while simultaneously containing challenges to colonial rule. ...
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This introductory chapter discusses how global anticommunism in the Philippines worked to affirm the processes of global decolonization while simultaneously containing challenges to colonial rule. Because enemies of the Philippine Left used anticommunism as a way to discredit and marginalize challenges to elite rule, Filipino elites and their U.S. allies made U.S. imperial exceptionalism and anticommunist politics—two ideological formations that took shape in the colonial period—defining features of the postcolonial relationship between the two nations. From the early 1930s to the late 1950s, U.S. policymakers, state agents, and Filipino elites used anticommunist policies to quash leftist opposition locally and internationally and to explain how U.S. intervention could exist alongside Philippine independence. Ultimately, the investment of U.S. policymakers, and Filipino elites, in defining and controlling the meaning of Philippine independence—and the relationship between the United States and the Philippines—reveals the entanglement of Philippine colonial history with the expansion of U.S. global power in the context of emerging Cold War global politics and the era of decolonization. Tracing the development and deployment of two specific operations of anticommunism—maintaining an ideology of imperial exceptionalism and repressing political dissent—this book details how Filipinos and their U.S. allies transformed local political struggles into sites of global communist revolution and international warfare.Less
This introductory chapter discusses how global anticommunism in the Philippines worked to affirm the processes of global decolonization while simultaneously containing challenges to colonial rule. Because enemies of the Philippine Left used anticommunism as a way to discredit and marginalize challenges to elite rule, Filipino elites and their U.S. allies made U.S. imperial exceptionalism and anticommunist politics—two ideological formations that took shape in the colonial period—defining features of the postcolonial relationship between the two nations. From the early 1930s to the late 1950s, U.S. policymakers, state agents, and Filipino elites used anticommunist policies to quash leftist opposition locally and internationally and to explain how U.S. intervention could exist alongside Philippine independence. Ultimately, the investment of U.S. policymakers, and Filipino elites, in defining and controlling the meaning of Philippine independence—and the relationship between the United States and the Philippines—reveals the entanglement of Philippine colonial history with the expansion of U.S. global power in the context of emerging Cold War global politics and the era of decolonization. Tracing the development and deployment of two specific operations of anticommunism—maintaining an ideology of imperial exceptionalism and repressing political dissent—this book details how Filipinos and their U.S. allies transformed local political struggles into sites of global communist revolution and international warfare.
Colleen Woods
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781501749131
- eISBN:
- 9781501749155
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9781501749131.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, American History: 19th Century
This book demonstrates how anticommunist political projects were critical to the United States' expanding imperial power in the age of decolonization, and how anticommunism was essential to the ...
More
This book demonstrates how anticommunist political projects were critical to the United States' expanding imperial power in the age of decolonization, and how anticommunism was essential to the growing global economy of imperial violence in the Cold War era. The book shows how, in the mid-twentieth-century Philippines, U.S. policymakers and Filipino elites promoted the islands as a model colony. In the wake of World War II, as the decolonization movement strengthened, those same political actors pivoted and, after Philippine independence in 1946, lauded the archipelago as a successful postcolonial democracy. Despite elite propaganda, from the early 1930s to late 1950s, radical movements in the Philippines highlighted U.S. hegemony over the new Republic of the Philippines and, in so doing, threatened American efforts to separate the US from sordid histories of empire, imperialism, and the colonial racial order. The book finds that in order to justify U.S. intervention in an ostensibly independent Philippine nation, anticommunist Filipinos and their American allies transformed local political struggles in the Philippines into sites of resistance against global communist revolution. By linking political struggles over local resources to a war against communism, American and Filipino anticommunists legitimized the use of violence as a means to capture and contain alternative forms of political, economic, and social organization. Placing the post-World War II history of anticommunism in the Philippines within a larger imperial framework, the book illustrates how American and Filipino intelligence agents, military officials, paramilitaries, state bureaucrats, academics, and entrepreneurs mobilized anticommunist politics to contain challenges to elite rule in the Philippines.Less
This book demonstrates how anticommunist political projects were critical to the United States' expanding imperial power in the age of decolonization, and how anticommunism was essential to the growing global economy of imperial violence in the Cold War era. The book shows how, in the mid-twentieth-century Philippines, U.S. policymakers and Filipino elites promoted the islands as a model colony. In the wake of World War II, as the decolonization movement strengthened, those same political actors pivoted and, after Philippine independence in 1946, lauded the archipelago as a successful postcolonial democracy. Despite elite propaganda, from the early 1930s to late 1950s, radical movements in the Philippines highlighted U.S. hegemony over the new Republic of the Philippines and, in so doing, threatened American efforts to separate the US from sordid histories of empire, imperialism, and the colonial racial order. The book finds that in order to justify U.S. intervention in an ostensibly independent Philippine nation, anticommunist Filipinos and their American allies transformed local political struggles in the Philippines into sites of resistance against global communist revolution. By linking political struggles over local resources to a war against communism, American and Filipino anticommunists legitimized the use of violence as a means to capture and contain alternative forms of political, economic, and social organization. Placing the post-World War II history of anticommunism in the Philippines within a larger imperial framework, the book illustrates how American and Filipino intelligence agents, military officials, paramilitaries, state bureaucrats, academics, and entrepreneurs mobilized anticommunist politics to contain challenges to elite rule in the Philippines.
