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.
This chapter assesses the formation of a private paramilitary organization in the 1950s by Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agents who were associated with Edward Lansdale, as well as by a group of veterans from the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP). This “Freedom Company” was meant to transport the “lessons of the Huk campaign” to sites elsewhere in Asia and Latin America. As an organizing principle, the Freedom Company and its U.S.-based supporters assumed that U.S. colonialism had imparted “modern political knowledge” to Filipinos; as the most “politically modern” Asians, therefore, they were best equipped to “export democracy” throughout the region. The Freedom Company Philippines (FCP), staffed entirely by Filipinos in an effort to distance contemporary U.S. interventions from a history of Western imperialism, actively promoted the idea that the U.S. colonial project in the Philippines had succeeded, while European imperial practices had failed to develop Asian societies properly. Though steeped in racialized perceptions regarding the political capacities of colonized or formerly colonized peoples, anticommunists contended that U.S. colonialism in the Philippines and contemporary U.S. interventions demonstrated the United States' interests in liberating Asians from colonialism across the region.
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