HIMAGSIK KAYUMANGGI

CULTURAL POLITICS, U.S. IMPERIALIST WAR OF TERROR, and SOCIALIST REVOLUTION IN THE PHILIPPINES We did what we ourselves [Filipino working people] had decided upon--as free people, and power resides in the people. What we did was our heritage... We decided to rebel, to rise up and strike down the sources of power. I said 'We are Sakdals! We want immediate, complete, and absolute independence.' No uprising fails. Each one is a step in the right direction --SALUD ALGABRE, woman leader of the Sakdal Rebellion in the Thirties In spite of the universal horror at the perverse torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and the ruthless devastation of Iraq and Afghanistan by U.S. occupation forces, the U.S. ruling class seems undeterred in pursuing its relentless quest of world domination by military means. Opportunistically seizing the catastrophe of Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. power elite is desperately trying to resolve the crisis of finance capital by unilateral state terrorism.Wh...

  Foreword to   FILIPINA INSURGENCY (Quezon City: Giraffe Books, 1999)   By E. San Juan, Jr.     No uprising fails. Each one is a step in the right direction. --Salud Algabre            Faithful to the injunction “Always historicize!” I would like to situate the individual essays collected here in the conjunctural “thickness” of their origins.        Sometime in the mid-seventies, I edited Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win, the monthly newsletter of the Philippines Research Center (an affiliate of the anti-martial law groups in the United States), which featured in one issue the vicissitudes of the women's liberation movement in the Philippines. One reader asked why I wasted one issue on such a partial and minor trend; my somewhat protracted response took the form of an essay on socialist feminism, its background and prospect. This later evolved into chapter 8 of my book Crisis in the Philippines (South Hadley, Mass: Bergin & Garvey, 1986), included here as chapter 5.        As the...

E. SAN JUAN’S ONLY BY STRUGGLE: CRITICISM AS WEAPON By Prof. TOMAS TALLEDO Division of Social Sciences, University of the Philippines Miagao, Iloilo, Philippines REVIEW OF: San Juan, E. Only By Struggle. Reflections on Philippine Culture, Politics and Society. Foreword by Barbara Harlow and with Introduction. Quezon City. Giraffe Books. 2002. Second and expanded edition. 237 pages. This book gathers seventeen (17) essays written by E. San Juan in different circumstances and occasions. Some of these were earlier published but are still worth reading as they resonate today with urgent issues and heated controversies. The others were decisive interventions during significant literary, social and political events sometime in mid-1980s Philippines when the author was actively engaged in the global united front against U.S. imperialism and its comprador agents. Those were euphoric years for victorious participants of the anti-dictatorship movement. Yet looking back at those years now, they...

FILIPINIZING THE WORLD? OR GLOBALIZING THE PINAYS/PINOYS? NOTES ON THE CENTENNIAL OF FILIPINO ARRIVAL IN HAWAII, OCCUPIED TERRITORY OF THE U.S., IN THE LAST CENTURY Farewell, my adored Land, region of the sun caressed, Pearl of the Orient Sea, our Eden lost…. --JOSE RIZAL On the Asiatic coast, washed by the waves of the ocean, lie the smiling Philippines…. There, American rifles mowed down human lives in heaps. --ROSA LUXEMBURG They are even afraid of our songs of love, my brother…. --CARLOS BULOSAN Thirty thousand Filipinos work in Lebanon today and about the same number in Israel, with thousands more in war-ravaged Iraq and Palestine, several millions in the entire Middle East. Since the bombardment of Beirut and other regions of Lebanon, several hundred Filipinos have been repatriated, thanks to the International Office of Migration. Despite billions of pesos in taxes and fees c...