Louis wrote: "But it was also a war in the Pacific without any discernible *class* differences between Japanese and American imperialism. It does not matter if Filipinos welcomed in American troops. That is not our criterion for deciding whether a war is progressive or not."
True. But, I noted this and asked "why?" it is. In fact, really the question is the 'end of the tale'. The reality is that shortly after the Japanese defeat of US and US lead colonial Filipino forces at Bataan, the Filipino *people* waged a very intense guerrilla campaign against the occupation, far and above anything previous nationalist lead forces were able to do against the US occupation that had been ongoing, more or less, for decades. Was this struggle a struggle for national liberation or wasn't it? Was the fact that the US aided this struggle for it's own reasons (since the US had a stated purpose of NOT supporting Filipino independence) somehow a 'minus' for this movement and if so, was it a determining factor in the actual politics of this struggle? Would it have been correct for socialists or internationalists to demand "US Out of the Philippines"??? And this is one example. WWII is fraught, IMO, with these sorts of interesting historical contradictions. That WWII was an imperialist war is something I am most definitely not questioning. I'm suggesting that it was also not the kind of war like WWI was. As an aside, this was also a war of Italian Imperialism to conquer a section of N. Africa as well. David ________________________________________________ YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
