Suchergebnisse

Introduction : A Decolonized Empire -- An Amazing Record of Red Plotting : Policing Radical and Racial Boundaries in the Colonial Philippines -- State Violence and the Problem of Political Legitimacy : WWII, Philippine Independence, and the Hukbalahap -- The Anti-Communist International : The Philippine Front and Global Anticommunist Warfare -- Efficient, Honest, and Democratic : US Foreign Aid, Public Administration, and the Campaign Against Corruption -- A Dirty, Half-Hidden War : The CIA and US-Philippine Covert Operations in Southeast Asia -- Epilogue : A Friendship Written in Blood.

This article details how US colonial policymakers and Filipino political elites, intent on fostering a non-revolutionary Philippine nationalism in the late 1920s and 1930s, produced an anti-communist politics aimed at eliminating or delegitimizing radical anti-imperialism. Communist-inspired, anti-imperial activists placed US imperialism in the Philippines within the framework of western imperialism in Asia, thereby challenging the anti-imperial ideology of the US empire. Americans and elite Filipinos met this challenge by repressing radical, anti-imperialist visions of Philippine independence through inter-colonial surveillance and cooperation, increased policing, mass imprisonment, and the outlawing of communist politics in the Philippines.

This article illustrates how the work of low-wage Filipino laborers fortified the US military's imperial grasp on the Pacific and generated profit for American businesses. I argue that the hiring of Filipino laborers for work on US military installations deepened an existing transpacific migration pattern whereby state and capital interests collaborated to control, and ultimately exploit, the labor of Filipinos. This Pacific-wide circulation of Filipino laborers reproduced an imperial system based on deep wage inequalities, revealing how the geographic expansions of US national security and US capital were mutually constituted in the early postwar period.