-Caveat Lector-
An excerpt from:
The Marcos Dynasty
Sterling Seagrave�1988
Harper & Row, Inc
ISBN 0-06-015815-8
out-of-print
----
Five
UNNATURAL ACTS
AT THE END of the Pacific War, life in the Philippines did not return to
normal but took on a surreal, nightmarish quality as America refused to leave.
Throughout the Far East, Washington was attempting to install right-wing
governments as a first line of defense against communism, and its success
depended heavily on two dubious allies, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's
notoriously corrupt KMT and the Japanese underworld. Because of the nature of
things in Asia, conservative political movements derived their power from the
muscle of the underworld, which could be paid to knock heads and counted on
to resist reform of any variety. In Korea and China, as well as in Japan and
the Philippines, MacArthur's G-2, General Willoughby, was purging radicals
with the single-mindedness of Torquemada and the help of the underworld. In
Washington, Senator McCarthy and the China Lobby were coming into full cry.
Although one day McCarthy and the China Lobby would be discredited, by then
MacArthur, Willoughby, and the CIA had midwifed a string of bone-crushing
regimes calling themselves the Iron Triangle. One leg of this tripod was the
Chiang regime, transposed to Taiwan and protected by the U.S. Seventh Fleet.
Generalissimo Chiang was anxious to influence the politics of wealthy
overseas Chinese and maintained an undercover army of political agents
throughout the Far East. This provided an ideal funnel for the CIA's
anti-Communist funds and a ready-made vehicle for U.S. covert operations. The
Philippines became a staging area for intervention in the affairs of
Indonesia, Indochina, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaya, and Burma. America's huge
air and naval bases in the Philippines provided jumping-off points.
Controlling politics in the archipelago became more important after America
allowed the Philippines to become independent in 1946. For its part, the KMT
became more obsessed than ever with destroying leftist and liberal elements
in the Philippines and with dominating its Chinese community. A secret war
got underway in which ordinary Filipinos became the enemy.
On the very eve of independence, Washington began to intervene once again in
favor of those members of the oligarchy prepared to engage in unnatural acts.
The rule of law was to be honored in the breach, appearance was to count
instead of reality, and the whole charade was to be mimed with a bogus air of
piety. The scene was set for a new generation of corruption and malfeasance
on a monumental scale, a large standing army would be engaged full time only
in protecting vested interests, all democratic protest in the islands would
be labeled subversive or Communist-inspired, and opportunities for bribery to
achieve short range goals would prove irresistible even for the White House.
Again it was Douglas MacArthur who set the standard.
As the U.S. Army advanced into the mountains around Baguio in April 1945,
remaining members of the Laurel government began to slip away from the
Japanese. Manuel Roxas, three other cabinet ministers, and the chief justice
reached American lines. MacArthur sent a plane for Roxas, but had the other
men detained, and ordered the Free Philippines, a newspaper of the Office of
War Information, to run a trumpedup story: "ROXAS IS AMONG LIBERATED, 4
CABINET AIDES CAUGHT." MacArthur thus set his protege Roxas apart, distorting
postwar politics in the islands and turning ethics on their head. Manuel
Roxas was freed, restored to his rank of general, and given MacArthur's
special pardon. The rest of the wartime puppets, most of them MacArthur's
personal adversaries, or rivals of MacArthur's business associates in Manila,
were interned.
"MacArthur could be wildly inconsistent when the oppressors were friends of
his," conceded biographer William Manchester. Locked away in the files of
U.S. Attorney General Tom Clark was a secret report identifying Roxas as one
of the leading Filipino collaborators; this document (still classified
decades later) contained hard evidence that members of the senate, cabinet,
and Roxas himself had helped the Japanese wipe out Filipino and American
guerrillas, seize food from poor farmers to feed Japanese troops, and draft
the Laurel government's declaration of war against the United States.
Despite this evidence, at MacArthur's urging President Truman abandoned
Roosevelt's policy that there must be an American-enforced purge of
collaborators. Truman's decision was influenced by America's growing
obsession with communism, a fear being fanned energetically by the Republican
party in its effort to recapture the White House from the Democrats. In
Manila the excitement of independence gave way to the jingoism of the
McCarthy era. General MacArthur and High Commissioner Paul McNutt, nicknamed
the "Hoosier Hitler" by his Filipino opponents, urged vigorous support for
the oligarchy as the only way to restore "law and order," to fight communism,
and to assure pro-American leadership in the future. That was true so far as
it went. The oligarchy had the most to lose if reforms of any kind occurred
and was accustomed to keeping order, although its methods were brutally
undemocratic. So many of them had been collaborators that the issue had to be
buried quickly, except where MacArthur himself had other reasons to fear or
hate the men in, question.
As America's supreme commander in the Far East, MacArthur was based in Tokyo
rather than Manila, but he was up to the same mischief in both places. His
treatment of senior Japanese military officers was vengeful and hypocritical.
Generals Homma and Yamashita were railroaded by courts in Manila at
MacArthur's instigation. When Filipino collaborators were tried, there had to
be at least two eyewitnesses for every charge; in the trials of Homma and
Yamashita the wildest hearsay was admissible. Yamashita, who was arguably the
most capable Japanese commander the Allies faced during the war, was
deliberately and unscrupulously maligned. MacArthur hurried their trials so
the verdicts could be announced on the fourth anniversary of Pearl Harbor.
Twelve journalists who sat through all the Yamashita testimony found for the
defendant, 12 to 0. Homma, an amateur playwright, had been unable to control
the cruelty of his men, but there was no evidence at all connecting him to
the Death March. However, both men were sentenced to death. U.S. Supreme
Court justice Wiley Rutledge condemned the proceedings, quoting Tom Paine:
"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from
oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will
reach himself."
MacArthur relished the hanging of Yamashita, ordering that he be stripped of
uniform, decorations and other appurtenances signifying membership in the
military profession." Homma was shot by a firing squad. MacArthur wanted them
executed because they had humiliated him professionally, not because they
were Fascist war criminals. This is revealed by what he was doing meanwhile
in Tokyo.
In 1945, billionaires Kodama Yoshio and Sasakawa Ryoichi were among those
locked up as "Class A war criminals" in Sugamo Prison to await trial. Kodama,
a lifelong member of the Yakuza underworld, and its most brilliant patron,
had made more than $200 million during the war just selling stolen goods to
the Japanese Navy, a small part of his wartime activities. Sasakawa was one
of Kodama's. cleverest associates. Both men had served prison terms in the
1930s, Kodama for plotting to murder government officials who were not far
enough to the right, Sasakawa for repeatedly threatening people with violence
to extort money from them. Both energetically supported the Tojo regime. U.S.
intelligence described Sasakawa as "potentially dangerous to Japan's
political future." Of Kodama: "His long and fanatic involvement in
ultra-nationalistic activities, violence included, and his skill in appealing
to youth make him a grave security risk." On the day Tojo was hanged,
MacArthur quietly had Kodama and Sasakawa released along with fifty-two of
their politically powerful cellmates. He needed them to suppress Japan's
postwar radicals and to impose a malleable right-wing regime. With his
blessing, Kodama and Sasakawa became key organizers and financial backers of
the Liberal Democratic party, which has dominated Japanese politics ever
since. But there is much more to this intrigue than a simple case of
political horse trading.
Sasakawa was born the son of a village sake brewer near Osaka in 1899. In
1927, after compulsory military service, he started his own ultra-rightist
society, entered politics, and amassed a fortune which he attributed blandly
to speculating in rice futures. In 1931, as the Imperial Army seized
Manchuria, Japan was swept by a wave of nationalistic fervour and Sasakawa
joined a young Yakuza terrorist named Kodama Yoshio in founding a nationwide
organization, the Patriotic People's Mass Party, or Kokosui Taishuto (KT).
Members of the KT dressed in black shirts like the Fascists of Mussolini, who
was one of Sasakawa's heroes. The KT specialized in blackmailing or extorting
money from businessmen, politicians, and bureaucrats by threatening to
denounce them as unpatriotic. Sasakawa was said to have made huge sums out of
the general fear in Japan at the time of "intimations of disloyalty�a
situation not unlike the McCarthy hysteria in postwar America. In 1934
Sasakawa was jailed for threatening people who refused to comply with his
demands. When he was released from prison in the late 1930s, he had his KT
membership build a big airfield in Osaka that he donated grandly to the army.
Soon he had put together a private fleet of twenty planes to form a volunteer
air force, and in 1939 he flew off to visit his idol Mussolini in Rome. In
1942 he was elected to the Diet as a backer of Tojo's scheme to expand
Japanese conquest in Southeast Asia.
Despite its political party trappings of twenty-three chapters and thousands
of members, the KT was different from other patriotic groups because its main
function was to collect unwilling donations. While Sasakawa concentrated on
directing the party's domestic strongarm fund-raising activities, cultivating
the army and air force in the process, his partner Kodama devoted his
attention to the navy and the secret service and to collecting donations
overseas.
Kodama was twelve years younger than Sasakawa, the fifth son of a broken
gentleman in Nihonmatsu City. At age eight, he was dumped on relatives in
Korea who put him to work as a child laborer. He was 11 adopted" by Yakuza
gangsters and in his teens became an organizer for ultranationalist groups,
showing a real genius for violence. He became, in effect, a professional
terrorist, apprenticing himself to Toyama Mitsuru of the Dark Ocean Society.
In the early 1930s, he and Sasakawa launched their Kokosui Taishuto "people's
party" with the primary purpose of using extreme patriotism to bully money.
In 1934 Kodama participated in an abortive attempt to assassinate cabinet
members, including Prime Minister Admiral Saito. Sentenced to prison, he had
time to brood, and when he was released in 1937 he embarked on an
extraordinary new career. Joining the army, he became a staff officer at
headquarters, and was posted to the Foreign Ministry's information bureau as
a secret agent.
Kodama was no longer an ordinary gangster or terrorist. He had matured into a
high-level "fixer," a master of conspiracy, and a trusted ally and close
friend of many senior Japanese ultranationalists. Among them were the
Imperial Army's Lieutenant Colonel Tsuji, the "God of Operations," who later
designed Yamashita's assault on Singapore; Vice Admiral Onishi, who planned
the assault on Pearl Harbor and created the kamikaze corps; General Ishihara,
who developed Japan's scheme for the conquest of Manchuria; and a prince of
the royal blood who was the overlord of the secret service. When Colonel
Tsuji discovered that Prime Minister Konoye was trying to avert war with the
United States by reaching a compromise with Roosevelt, he asked Kodama to
assassinate the prime minister by blowing up his train. The attempt at peace
failed, so the murder was not carried out.
Long before Pearl Harbor, Kodama accompanied the Japanese expeditionary force
to North China and Manchuria where he showed himself to be an arch criminal
organizer. Kodama was one of those in charge of looting Manchuria and
portions of North China as they came under Japanese military control. He put
the Yakuza to work in concert with the army and the Kempeitei to bleed the
country dry, using kidnapping and extortion on an unprecedented scale and
setting up monopolies under Japanese protection. Kodama's agents looted
hundreds of millions of dollars worth of gems and precious metals from
Manchuria and North China while plundering them of strategic materials. The
opium monopoly he helped set up in Manchuria generated $300 million a year in
profits for the Imperial Army.
For a time, Kodama was in Nanking where he posed as a bodyguard for the
puppet prime minister, Wang Ching-wei. At the time of Pearl Harbor, he was in
Shanghai smuggling in heroin from Manchuria disguised as war materiel, and
marketing it in collaboration with the Green Gang.
The day after Pearl Harbor, Kodama set up the Kodama Agency in Shanghai with
an exclusive contract from the Imperial Navy Air Force to supply it with
strategic materiel. This meant armed robbery and grand larceny on a
monumental scale, and put Kodama in a rare position to strike bargains and
make deals with the biggest criminal organizations in China. He dealt
directly with Nationalist China's underworld boss, Tu Yueh-sheng (known as
"Big-eared Tu"), and with the dreaded Ku. brothers, one the Green Gang ruler
of the Shanghai waterfront, the other a top KMT general soon to become
chief-of-staff of Chiang Kaishek's army. The Shanghai-based Green Gang became
one of the means by which the Kempeitei and the KMT arranged mutually
beneficial wartime deals throughout the Yangtze River valley, including the
sale to Japanese agents of warehouses full of American Lend-Lease supplies,
all with the cooperation and active participation of Generalissimo Chiang's
inner circle. In the process, Kodama established a lasting bond with Chiang.
Through the Kodama Agency, he created his own secret service combining
members of the Kokosui Taishuto with Yakuza gangsters and members of the
Kempeitei, the army, and the navy. Although he had been an army officer,
Kodama now was made a rear admiral, enjoying extraordinary influence in the
naval hierarchy, with direct connections to the Imperial family.
Kodama's main preoccupation was the systematic looting of the conquered
nations and (theoretically, at least) the transportation of that loot back to
the emperor. As Japan consolidated its conquest of Southeast Asia, Kodama
made his way from China down through the CoProsperity Sphere to Vietnam,
Thailand, Burma, Malaya, Singapore, and the East Indies, working in each
country with Colonel Tsuji and others to strip them and their populations of
their wealth and strategic materials. Eventually, he made his way back up the
coast of Borneo through Brunei to the Philippines, shepherding masses of war
loot in naval vessels ahead of him under the watchful eye of naval officers
seconded to him.
In Manila, the treasure was assembled for onward shipment to Tokyo, and was
stored meanwhile in the labyrinth of tunnels that had existed since Spanish
days beneath Fort Bonifacio, Fort Santiago, and the old walled city of
Intramuros, and also in the tunnels at Corregidor. The Japanese were
continually enlarging these tunnels under Intramuros and Corregidor by slave
labor, using teams of Allied POWs who were literally worked to death below
ground. It was estimated that they dug some 35 miles of tunnels in all
beneath Intramuros, many of the passages designed specifically for storage of
the treasure.
The shogun of this extraordinary and very secret operation was not Kodama but
the man he worked for, the overlord of the Japanese secret service. This man
was said to be an exceptionally urbane aristocrat, a prince and a cousin of
Emperor Hirohito, who spoke flawless English and who regarded these treasures
as a natural entitlement, no different from the loot that England, France,
and other colonial powers had traditionally removed from Asia. Privately
after the war he was said to have put an estimated value of $50 billion on
the treasure left behind and hidden in the Philippines, and he conjectured
that it would take a hundred years to recover it all.
By the end of 1943 American submarines posed such a hazard that it was
increasingly risky to send shipments of the treasure home. Six months later,
as the Americans massed to invade, so many ships had been lost that the
Japanese in Manila found themselves sitting on top of a great hoard of loot
in a country other than their own. Priority had to be given to burying it
right where it was, disguising its locations, and booby trapping all possible
approaches. For security reasons, all the POWs involved at each site had to
be buried alive with the treasure, or machine-gunned.
It is likely that Kodama never intended to send all of the loot back to the
Imperial Treasury. There was so much of it that from the beginning the
temptation was irresistible to bury portions of it for recovery later. Kodama
had always kept the platinum and diamonds for himself, as a "finder's fee."
Nobody ever calculated how much he had in gems alone. He was proficient at
seeing to it that freighters and warships carrying treasure were "sunk" on
their way home, and that trucks filled with gold never reached their
destinations. Fifty- or one-hundred-ton shipments of bullion were not that
big and could be "lost" in creative ways. (Thirty thousand tons of gold
bullion sounds like it would take up a football field, but gold is so dense
that this amount would all fit into a single-family dwelling. This shows how
easy it would be to hide large quantities; this of course is one of the
reasons for gold's appeal throughout history.) By early 1944, the war was
reaching its turning point, and Kodama knew what was in the divine wind. He
began making preparations accordingly, and by the start of 1945, he was
already back in Tokyo setting the stage for a new career.
After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with defeat at hand, Tokyo became a dangerous
place as political leaders and military officers committed ritual suicide,
while others carried out assassinations of government officials they blamed
for the defeat. To keep a lid on things during the transition, and to rescue
as many chestnuts as possible, Prince Higashikuni Toshihiko became the
interim prime minister. The thirty-four-year-old Rear Admiral Kodama, perhaps
the master thief and master fixer of all time, was one of his advisers.
Early in 1946, Sasakawa and Kodama were rounded up by the Occupation forces
and detained in Sugamo Prison for three years. According to Sasakawa, "Life
in prison was a vacation given me by God." The time he spent in Sugamo, he
said, was the key to his political education. With his politically powerful
cellmates Kishi Nobusuke (later prime minister), Kaya Okinori, Kodama Yoshio,
and others, Sasakawa joined in planning the resurrection of Japan. This time
their energies and genius would be devoted to economic rather than military
imperialism. The wealth that Sasakawa had accumulated, and the loot that
Kodama had amassed all over Asia, would provide the financial foundation for
the political organization that would lead the way, the Liberal Democratic
party.
The liberation from Sugamo and the emergence of Kodama and Sasakawa as two of
the leading power brokers in East Asia was part of a package deal they made
with Generalissimo Chiang and MacArthur's G-2, General Willoughby. Facing a
showdown with the forces of Mao Tse-tung, the Generalissimo was seeking help
urgently anywhere he could find it. Kodama knew where all the skeletons in
China were hidden. As part of the deal, Kodama turned over half of what was
then considered to be his immediate personal fortune of $200 million
(obviously only a fragment of the whole) to the American Counter-Intelligence
Corps to be split with Chiang Kai-shek. How much Kodama's wealthy cellmates
like Sasakawa contributed to the deal has never been disclosed. Willoughby's
part in this intrigue becomes understandable when seen in light of the fact
that after his retirement from the U.S. Army he became the chief American
adviser to Generalissimo Franco in Madrid. It was Sasakawa himself who
revealed Chiang's role when he blurted out to an interviewer, "I was one of
the 54 'war criminals' released by Chiang.... Chiang pardoned us all. People
don't realize this point."
The deal made Sasakawa and Kodama the kuromaku ("the men behind the black
curtain"), the fixers of Japan's biggest postwar political and commercial
deals. In 1975, The Guardian said the two men could pull "enough strings to
run a kind of shadow government in Japan." Privately the Japanese called
Kodama "the Monster." He and Sasakawa became secretly active in sponsoring
right-wing elements in the countries Japan had briefly conquered. Men in
Bangkok, Jakarta, and Saigon who had collaborated with the Kempeitei were
soon back at work for the KMT and the CIA.
After Japan's defeat in the Pacific war, Sasakawa's real interests revolved
around rebuilding Tokyo's economic penetration of Southeast Asia and gaining
new leverage for Japan in the Middle East. His boast that his time in prison
had been a God-given opportunity was no idle statement, for he and his
cellmates emerged with a grand strategy. Sugamo cellmate Kishi Nobusuke
became Japan's prime minister, and Tokyo launched a campaign to rebuild its
damaged ties with Jakarta and Manila, offering stepped-up war reparations
accompanied by a strong commercial thrust. Sasakawa became president of a new
Japan-Philippines Association and a Japan-Indonesia Association, followed by
other friendship societies in neighboring countries.
Although Kodama was tight-lipped about his part in all this, Sasakawa was a
vain man who occasionally revealed glimpses of his secret world. In his
advancing years he suffered from chronic media lip-flap. He was Kodama's
geisha, plucking the koto and stroking the shakuhachi for foreigners who had
a taste for green-tea fascism. It was Sasakawa who volunteered that the
special relationship between Ferdinand Marcos and the Japanese kuromaku grew
out of a long-standing friendship. "I was very close to Marcos long before he
became president," Sasakawa once admitted.
it is likely that they became acquainted during the Quirino presidency at the
end of the 1940s when Marcos and other Quirino lieutenants were busy trying
to discover where Yamashita's Gold was hidden, and Fukumitsu was interviewing
Japanese government figures and military officers in their behalf. However
they first met, by the late 1950s Marcos and Sasakawa were collaborating
energetically. Officially, they were brought together by the CIA in the
secret supply of arms and consumer goods during the CIA's anti-Sukarno
rebellion. (Sasakawa told an interviewer, "I was taking charge of [supplying]
materials to the anti-Sukarno camp.")
This was one of the first examples of the new CIA bringing in foreign proxies
and cutouts to supply sterilized weapons for a secret war. Before the
rebellion collapsed, the Agency trained forty-two thousand Indonesian
dissidents and mercenaries at bases in the Philippines. The sheer numbers
involved offer a clue to the scale of the operation, and to the number of
people who were required to keep it all going at the quartermaster level. Air
attacks by CIA mercenaries on shipping in Indonesian waters forced up
insurance rates, and brought commercial navigation to a halt, enabling
Kodama, Sasakawa, Marcos, and his friend Lino Bocalan, the Cavite warlord, to
make millions smuggling goods to Indonesian islands cut off from normal
supplies.
Although the attempt to topple Sukarno failed, Sasakawa was not discouraged.
His methods proved much more effective than those of the CIA. He himself
recounted how, during a state visit the Indonesian leader made to Tokyo, he
made a present to Sukarno of a beautiful young Japanese girl named Dewi, who
became one of Sukarno's wives. In return, Sasakawa was said to have become
the agent for all trade between the two nations, which over the years
involved billions of dollars.
Never one to be sentimental, Sasakawa also boasted that he played a decisive
part in the September 30, 1965, coup d'etat that marked the end of Sukarno's
reign.
Many of MacArthur's friends in Manila were bound to him by a common
commitment to big money and fascism. In the islands, priority was given to
defending billionaire landowners from peasant farmers who earned less than a
dollar a day, forfeited half their harvest, and could only make ends meet by
borrowing from the landlord at 500 percent interest. (The situation was
getting worse, not better. In 1969, when a typical tenant farmer in Tarlac
Province still was lucky to make $200 the entire year, wealthy young Benigno
Aquino, Jr., remarked that his wife Cory's big landowning family-the
Cojuangcos�had a $500 million turnover.) Decade after decade, American
officials studiously ignored the grievances of these rural poor, who along
with the urban poor in Metro-Manila totaled 70 percent of the population.
Back in 1935 when MacArthur first became Quezon's field marshal, a peasant
rebellion had been in progress in the countryside for many years, As the
Spanish Civil War raged in Europe, MacArthur's sponsors, among them Franco's
wealthy consul in Manila, Andres Soriano, persuaded him that Filipino farmers
were led by Communist cadres plotting a Marxist regime. Eventually, this
became a self-fulfilling prophecy, but it was not true in the early decades.
Even Luis Taruc, the leader of the peasant rebellion, did not join the
Communist party until four years after MacArthur became field marshal. As
were many others, he was driven to it. Most Filipinos started out as
grievance guerrillas, not as Marxists, and surprisingly few ever became
ideological converts. But that mattered not at all.
During the Japanese occupation, this unequal conflict between landlords and
farmers intensified. Big landowners supported the Japanese because the
Japanese protected their property. Tenant farmers were brutally treated and
their produce confiscated. To fight back, many joined Taruc's Hukbalahap, the
People's Anti-Japanese Army, which soon numbered thirty thousand men.
Unfortunately, the Huk leaders offended American guerrilla officers by
refusing to put themselves under American command. The Americans retaliated
by issuing a general order that all anti-Japanese guerrillas who were not
members of USAFFE were enemies of the American government. Thereafter, USAFFE
guerrillas did everything they could to discredit the Huks, reporting to
MacArthur (inaccurately) that they were a "subversive ... radical
organization .... Its operations [of] carnage, revenge, banditry and
highjacking ... never [have been] equalled in any page of history of the
Philippines." After fighting the Japanese so energetically, the Huks hoped to
have American support to resolve their grievances, but were treated as
enemies instead of allies. MacArthur arrested Luis Taruc. When the Huks
turned over their wartime rosters to the U.S. Army as a gesture of good
faith, the lists were used to identify, arrest, or kill Huk veterans, or were
circulated among landlords and employers who turned down Huks for jobs and
evicted them as undesirable tenants. The worst incident was the massacre of
109 Huk guerrillas at Malolos in Bulacan, the town where Ferdinand Marcos had
been the guest of friends running the Constabulary. Huk Squadron 77 was
walking home to Pampanga in early February 1945, passing through Malolos.
American and Filipino soldiers surrounded the Huks, disarmed them, and took
them before a USAFFE colonel named Adonias Maclang. He accused them of
looting the town. Without a trial, Maclang forced the Huks to dig a mass
grave, then had his soldiers shoot them all. Those only wounded were clubbed
to death with their shovels. American counterintelligence officers were
present the entire time. They later picked Maclang to be mayor of Malolos.
In 1946, the Huk army disbanded as its leaders shifted to political
campaigning in an effort to win legislative representation in Congress by
accepted channels. The democratic approach proved impossible, however.
Landowners paid vigilante groups to beat up anyone campaigning for land
reform. A U.S. official explained: "Only if U.S. security were [directly]
threatened would we assist in realizing land reform in the Philippines. It
would be difficult, but we could pull it off. If the Huks had been perceived
as more of a threat, we would have done what we did in Japan, Korea, and
Taiwan." In all three countries, the United States forced through draconian
land reform measures. But in the Philippines, Washington chose not to follow
the same policy. Thus the Huk threat really was not grave, and was purposely
distorted for purely political ends. Long after granting independence to the
Philippines, America would continue to use the same Huk bogeyman to justify
political manipulations in Manila and its military presence in the islands.
Looking back at it now, American posturing in those days had the demented
quality in paintings by Hieronymous Bosch; like a man with a violin sticking
out of his ass.
pp.112-123
-----
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
Six
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