WALKING THE TIGHT WIRE

By Mauro Gia Samonte

THE ESCALATION of the Scaraborough Shoal standoff has thrown the Filipino people into a delicate balancing act. One little misstep and the country goes plummeting down either the sinister US design for dominance in the Asia Pacific or China’s intransigent assertiveness in the South China Sea.

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            Already, apparently belligerent mass protests are being launched by certain sectors of the Philippine populace, condemning what is called Chinese aggression in Philippine waters. And China has taken prompt retaliatory actions such as travel ban by Chinese nationals to the Philippines and strict quarantine measures on fruit imports from the country.

            The burning of the Chinese flag in these demonstrations surely must instill rage and vengeance in a people whose most distinct characteristic is a consuming sense of ethnicity. Again this affront to the Chinese is promptly met with a corresponding action by China.

The situation has now worsened to such an extent that both countries end up issuing warning to its citizens to avoid confrontation with locals, i.e. Chinese in the Philippines viz Filipinos and vice versa.   

One can’t help recalling the horror of those immediate days prior to the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. While diplomats of Japan and the US appeared serious in finding means to defuse the heightening tension between their two countries, on the military level war plans had actually been set to motion.

What, then, could be ongoing militarily between China and the US now that Filipinos are increasingly manifesting their fighting stance on the standoff at Scarborough Shoal?

Thoughts of another Pearl Harbor scenario horrify us.

The intensifying anti-China protests by the Philippines can lead the country inextricably into armed confrontation with the Asian behemoth. Here is how an editorial of the state-owned English-language China Daily  has put the matter very recently: “No matter how willing we are to discuss the issue, the current Philippine leadership is intent on pressing us into a corner where there is no other left but the use of arms… Manila is living in a fantasy world if it mistakes our forbearance for timidity. This is a dangerous delusion. We have never been a trigger-happy nation. But nor have we ever been afraid to fight when necessary… the Philippines should stop being a troublemaker and drop its ridiculous claim. Otherwise they will learn to their cost how serious we are about our land and sea.”

The words are clear and unequivocal. China will engage the Philippines in war if “the current  Philippine leadership” presses it to the corner. And yet the current wave of anti-China protests – highlighted by the Makati rally in front of the Chinese embassy last Friday (this article was first posted May 12, 2012) and replicated simultaneously elsewhere in the world – by no means accomplishes the kind and degree of “pressing” that will push China into a war. Truly nationalistic outpouring of anti-Chinese sentiments can be manifested in a spontaneous violent rising by the people, involving thousands, even millions, of angry citizenry, definitely not a sparse few hundreds who from the looks in their faces qualify as nothing more than rent-a-crowd provocateurs.

The Chinese leadership, particularly the People’s Liberation Army, is not stupid so as not to realize that these bursts of apparently anti-Chinese upheaval can amount to nothing but a provocation; it does not reflect a genuine national feeling on the issue. In other words, these current protests are not to be taken as manifestations of a genuine sentiment of the Filipino people against the Chinese over the Scarborough Shoal conflict. The Chinese warning, therefore, cannot be directed against the Filipino people in general but rather, indeed, against the “current leadership” of the Philippines which China perceives as playing into some machination aimed at provoking it into a war.

          As we say it in Tagalog: “Hampas sa kalabaw, latay sa kabayo. (Whip on the carabao, whipmarks on the horse.)”

This, we should realize from one outstanding fact: the prime mover of the anti-Chinese protests is a lady named Loida Nicolas-Lewis. Who is she? A native of Sorsogon, she finished law studies at the University of the Philippines, went on to pass the bar exams of the United States, the first Asian to do so without having to undergo American law studies, practiced the law profession in New York, became an attorney of the US Immigration and Naturalization Service, met on a blind date the wealthiest African-American, Reginald F. Lewis, whom she eventually married, and when the died in 1994, took over his giant conglomerate, the TLC Beatrice International, Inc., by fair estimates valued at $600 billion.

Today, Loida Nicolas-Lewis is reputed to be the wealthiest Filipino outside of the Philippines.

A keen observer of political affairs in the US has this to say on the lady: “She has axe to grind against China because  they rejected many of her supposed projects when she tried to expand over there. But I think she is interested in oil exploration in the contested areas in the South China Sea.”

Now, at every escalation of the conflict over the Spratlys and the Scarborough reef, Loida Nicolas-Lewis has always been at the forefront of anti-China protests. In July 2011, she initiated such protests in connection with the Philippine claim to the Spratlys. That was the year the US pulled out from the Middle East and began pursuing America’s Pacific Century, a strategy for US dominance over the Asia Pacific over the next 100 years. That was also the period of China’s heightened aggressiveness in South China Sea, highlighted by its launching in these waters of its first-ever aircraft carrier.

It does appear that Loida Nicolas Lewis has been consistently and actively pushing the American side in the US-China conflict over the Asia Pacific region.

We quote a portion of an article recently posted in World Socialist Web Site (wsws.org):

 “The protests being led by Akbayan, the ex-left group allied with Philippine President Aquino, have been funded by Loida Nicolas-Lewis. Lewis is an American billionaire, originally from the Philippines. She was married to Reginald Lewis, food industry tycoon and the wealthiest African-American in the 1980s. Upon her husband’s death she assumed control of the business. She was a prominent backer for Obama, and met with him on several occasions.

She formed the political group US Pinoys for Good Government (USP4GG) to financially support Aquino’s campaign for the Philippine presidency, with the expressed intention of using Aquino’s administration to assert Philippine sovereignty in the South China Sea. Lewis funded the war-mongering trip made by Walden Bello and other Akbayan representatives to islands in the South China Sea in July of last year when they denounced China and asserted Philippine ownership of the Spratly islands. In August 2011, Lewis met with Ben Bernanke, head of the US federal reserve, to discuss opposition to the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China’s (ICBC) acquisition of the Bank of East Asia which had 20 branches in the United States.

The provocative and well-funded protests against China today are part of a calculated campaign of escalating tensions in the region and undermining Chinese influence. This campaign has its origins in Washington.”

Hence far from expressing genuine Filipino sentiments, the current ostensible Philippine anti-China protests are a US machination conducted by its stooges in Philippine society to provoke China into making moves that would justify US war actions in the Asia Pacific.

And this is what the Philippines should urgently worry about: getting to be the sacrificial goat once more in the great American drive for world hegemony.

For the Filipino people, it is one hell of a decision to make. They take up the call for defending Philippine sovereignty, they play into the American hands. They refuse to bite at the American bait, they surrender to Chinese aggression.

            Either way, it is a surrender of national uprightness.

Fortunately for the Philippine proletariat, one other option is left: to walk that exquisitely thin line between national surrender and class righteousness.

On the Scarborough Shoal impasse, the lesson of the HUKBALAHAP in World War II must stare us now in the face. The Philippine entry into that war was not the country’s own making. The Americans dragged the country into the war with Japan as an imperative of War Plan Orange, a strategy that called for US abandonment of the Asia Pacific region and focus on winning the war first in the European theater. As a consequence of that abandonment, the Hukbo ng Bayan Laban sa Hapon (HUKBALAHAP) carried the brunt of battle against the Japanese invaders. And holding high proletarian principles and nationalism, the Huk fighters succeeded in resisting Japanese aggression, eventually pushing it into the hinterlands, and then establishing people’s governments over most of Luzon. Too bad that when General Douglas MacArthur fulfilled his famous “I Shall Return”, he carried with him devastating forces that crushed as much the remnants of the Japanese invasion as the people’s governments established by the HUKBALAHAP.

With this lesson from World War II as its balancing pole, the Philippine proletariat is equipped with sufficient leverage to make that critical walk on history’s tight wire and ensure that errors in the proletarian struggle are not committed one more time.

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