[Corruption in the Philippines] Imelda Marcos The Rise and Fall of One of the Worlds Most Powerful Women #5/212

In the crowd were United States Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, Prime Minister Chung Il-kwon of Korea, Foreign Minister Thanat Khoman of Thailand, and Prime Minister Kishi
Nobusuke of Japan.

Mr. Humphrey’s presence underlined the importance of the Philippines to the United States. Although most Westerners have only a vague romantic image of this group of islands of some 115,000 square miles in the Pacific, the country is the site of the two largest military bases outside the United States. As such it is strategically important to the Western world. But more importantly, it holds the key to understanding America, for the Philippines, as it were, is the skeleton in its closet, the country that holds the distinction of being the only formal colony that freedom-loving America has ever had. From the time that Admiral Dewev docked his warship at Manila Bay in 1898, and Americans took over the Philippines in 1899, millions of dollars have been poured by American entrepreneurs into these islands for the odd profit.

But the mercenary aspect had long been clouded by rationalization and evangelical zeal. Like the Spaniards before them, the Americans claimed they came to the Philippines to save poor Filipinos. The trouble was they never asked whether Filipinos wanted to be “saved.” One-tenth of the entire Filipino population died, in what American historian Gore Vidal described as the first genocide in modern history before Hitler, resisting such “altruism.”

The conquest of the Philippines was America’s maiden imperialist adventure in the Pacific, and all major political events in that country thereafter spring from that fact. Yet through the years the memories of that brutal war have been repressed, reined in by declarations of special friendship, plenty of aid, and good deeds until it came to pass that some Americans believed that the granting of independence to the Philippines was an act of kindness and generosity to Filipinos rather than one of self-respect and self-preservation.

This distortion is at the bottom of America’s ambivalent policy and attitudes toward the people of these islands. America has not quite come to terms with the fact that sometime in the past it had committed a grave mistake by using brute force to deprive a people of a victory that was rightfully theirs. But more tragically, when the mistake had been realized, it refused or was unable to cut and cut cleanly, to paraphrase a Republican senator apropos the end of the Marcos regime.