In a provocative essay, “Policing America’s Empire: The United States, The Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State” (Madison, U. of Wisconsin Press, 2009), historian Alfred W. McCoy makes the case that methods of American national security state were conceived as a response to an all but forgotten war in the Philippines. In 1898, with American victory over Spain in the Spanish-American War, Spain ceded Philippines to United States for $20 million. Filipinos were determined to gain their independence and war broke out in Manila on Feb. 4, 1899. Brave as the Filipinos were, they were no match for America’s new machine guns, long-range artillery and very aggressive young men with repeating rifles. Only after 9 months and many costly defeats did the Filipino leadership convert to guerrilla tactics. The guerrilla phase of the war was far more damaging to the Americans and created alarm both in Washington and among military leadership in the islands. In order to prevail, the Americans resorted to increasingly harsh tactics, concentration of civilians into camps where they died by thousands of disease & malnutrition, slaughter of livestock, destruction of crops, burning of villages, & summary execution marked by an untold number of atrocities!! Military historians consider these operations masterpieces of counterinsurgency warfare; others liken them to the criminal bludgeoning of a weaker people into submission. In July 1902, President Roosevelt announced the war ended. Dates 1899 to 1902 are invariably attached to any history of the conflict, but serious historians of the subject know that the date Roosevelt appended was an arbitrary one, one created for home consumption. Two competing narratives, a rosy one for public consumption, the real one for the administration’s private information, continued for years. The cheerful reports arrived regularly in Washington while the Filipinos kept fighting and resisting. A British woman living in the islands, Mrs. Campbell Dauncey, wrote in 1905: “Americans give out... that Philippine Islands are completely pacified, & Filipinos love Americans & their rule!!. This ... is complete and utter humbug, for the country is honeycombed with insurrections and plots; fighting has never ceased, & natives loathe Americans & their theories.“!!! This was the first time America had ever fought a war to suppress another peoples’ aspirations for independence. The problem they faced was not just winning the war militarily but in persuading the people they had defeated to accept American colonial rule. The period from the supposed end of hostilities in 1902 until the end of the decade marked a third phase of the war. The young officers who served in the Philippines represent the shift from the old frontier army of 19th Century to a modern 20th Century military!! These men developed techniques employed to gain full control over Filipinos and in doing so they far outdid their Spanish colonial predecessors in developing police surveillance tactics!!!. Alfred W. McCoy: “Despite certain strengths, none of these could match the synthesis of legal repression, incessant patrolling, and suffocating surveillance found in the colonial Philippines.” The army created five integrated security agencies, a centralized telephone network, fingerprinting, photographic identification, & an index of police files of 200,000 alphabetized file cards w/ means to collect, retrieve and analyze a vast amount of intelligence!!! PRISM of 21st century!!! They employed spies in ceaseless surveillance and used their powers to censor public discourse, infiltrate civil society, penetrate households, and monitor private mail. They applied military intelligence and data management to problems of political espionage and developed covert techniques of surveillance and penetration in a decade-long effort to coerce the Filipinos into submission!!!. McCoy sums up their achievement: "In the first decade of civil rule the colonial government covered the archipelago with a coercive apparatus invisible in its covert penetrations, omnivorous in its appetite for information, and enveloping in its omniscience!!!. Regular regiments stood ready near the capital to quell any disturbance, constabulary companies crisscrossed remote hinterlands, and municipal police guarded town plazas and city streets. Armed resistance was met with mass slaughter as artillery and repeating rifles covered the ground with corpses. Nationalist agitation was contained through a suffocating surveillance, labor agitation crushed by arbitrary arrests & agent provocateur operations. W/in a decade this total information regime had pacified the Philippines."!!! ORIGINAL POLICE STATE OF USA!!! He concludes: “The sum of this colonial experience thus played a seminal role in building Washington’s domestic counterintelligence apparatus and, more broadly, its earliest covert capacity.” Filipinos had the misfortune of taking on a modern western power with no guidebooks or models to aid them in their struggle. Not only were they savagely reduced to submission but were then subjected to a decade of indoctrination, the first victims of the incipient American surveillance state!!!. Now, a century later, Americans are the subjects of their own creation in its ever more sophisticated manifestations.The trend does not bode well for those who value their privacy and their independence.GRAND BACKFIRE ON AMERICAN RACISTS/MILITARISTS/CAPITALIST/IMPERIALIST ELITE!!!
Posted on: Sun, 30 Jun 2013 06:17:09 +0000
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