Posted on 09/30/2005 3:21:41 PM PDT by SinisterDexter
THE United States is “America” to most people. But that word refers to the continent. When applied to the United States, it is better spelled with a “k,” as in “swastika.”
It’s the country most Filipinos want to visit. But if you’ve ever been involved in any group or activity faintly progressive; if you have relatives or friends who have been there; or you’re from a country that its officials say harbors “terrorist groups,” you’d be tempting fate to go there. No matter how vague or past your involvement, it could earn you a strip search, an interrogation session with the FBI or immigration, summary deportation, or even indefinite detention.
Retired Philippine Army general Raymundo Jarque and his wife Xenia found this out last week when they landed in Dallas. Singled out for interrogation, the Jarques, both in their 60s, were also denied food while awaiting deportation, and jailed in their underwear. The charge: possible terrorist links because Jarque was a National Democratic Front consultant in the peace talks in the 1990s.
The Jarques went to the United States to visit relatives. Like many Filipinos, they’re linked by blood to that country through sons and daughters, cousins and uncles, nieces or nephews who live there.
The United States is not a nice place for non-whites and dollar-poor people to visit even in the best of times. You don’t really want to live there -- not if you think there’s more to life than McDonald’s, a gas-guzzling car, Mickey Mouse prancing around Disneyland, and indulging one’s earthly appetites at the cost of one’s dignity and self-respect. But I confess: I’ve visited the United States several times to see relatives, and even briefly lived there during arguably better times.
In 1978, Jimmy Carter was US president. Carter had inherited the US policy -- in place since the Johnson administration -- of supporting dictatorships. But Amerika tolerated opponents of dictatorship within its borders. Many Filipino exiles opposed to the Marcos regime were there in the late 1970s, and they could lobby Congress, publish anti-dictatorship tracts, and hold public discussions without fear.
But while dissenters were tolerated, the US government continued to support Marcos with economic and military aid. The conflict was between the United States’ supposed adherence to democratic rights and the demands of its imperial interests. Those interests the architects of its foreign policy sought to defend and advance at all costs, including mass murder.
Since the Reagan presidency, the contradiction has been resolved in favor of repression at home and naked aggression abroad. The Republican gang of George W. Bush has also savaged due process and other individual rights on the excuse that it’s necessary to defeat “international terrorism.”
If Nixon bombed Vietnam and Cambodia, and George W. Bush Iraq, the Democrats’ Bill Clinton did the same to Sudan and the former Yugoslavia. It’s in the policies at home, not abroad, where the Republicans and the Democrats differ. At least at home, minority and immigrant rights, as well as those of visitors, were to some extent respected by Democratic administrations.
US immigration treats every visitor from a poor country as a potential overstaying alien whatever party is in power. But nowadays if you’re Asian, or just look different, you’re likely to be regarded as a possible terrorist as well. The worst thing is to be a Muslim and/or Arab, which makes Indonesians, Malaysians and some Filipinos, but especially Middle Eastern folk, likely victims of racial profiling at US immigration counters.
There are enough horror stories about the treatment of “terrorists” to fill a hefty volume. This is so because the US Patriot Act permits the summary deportation or indefinite detention of suspected terrorists without the benefit of lawyers and visits by relatives, among other reasons.
But the scramble to visit and live in the United States continues because the poverty rampant in the United States world order (800 million people go to bed hungry daily) drives millions from their countries to look for opportunities abroad—especially in the United States.
And yet poverty is no stranger to millions of US residents. Some 37 million are poor, and millions of US children often go hungry. Amerika is also an extremely violent place, with some 30,000 people shot dead every year, and 65,000 more injured. School shootings by students have been described as “an epidemic.” Assaults, rapes and armed robberies are common, with one violent crime for every 47 US residents occurring yearly. Two million people are in US prisons, in the construction of which Amerika excels as it does in war and mayhem.
Racism is as common as grass in the United States, where everything’s right if you’re white, but everything can be wrong if you’re not. And they start them young. Grade school children blithely hurl such racial epithets as “Nigger,” “Spic,” “Chink,” etc. at each other when they quarrel.
It’s a habit of thought that stays with them all their lives, whether on the job, in school or on the street -- where your being a “Slope” (Asian) or a homosexual can earn you a beating by racist gangs.
“America” isn’t in the heart. It’s in the colonial mind, “Amerika” being the reality. You don’t really want to live there, and visiting it is like visiting Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
Except that today you don’t have to be Jewish; you just have to be different.
Luis V. Teodoro is a professor of journalism at the University of the Philippines.
"not if you think there’s more to life than McDonald’s, a gas-guzzling car, Mickey Mouse prancing around Disneyland, and indulging one’s earthly appetites at the cost of one’s dignity and self-respect. But I confess: I’ve visited the United States several times..."
Ha Ha!
I had him pegged as a professor of creative fiction. Journalism's close enough.
"Faintly progressive"?
The FBI must have known enough about this guy to want to take a close look at him when he arrived.
Fess' up ~ send him a check. We don't need this.
Michelle Malkin is Filipino, and she can kick this jerk's ass.
Exactly. And make sure you spread the word around, we've got enough America haters here as it is without letting more of them in.
University of Practically Anywhere is more like it.
Maybe this means that the good professor will not be gracing our shores anythime soon. We should all hope....
I never write a check for less than a buck.
The illegal alien Mexicans disagree, all 15? million of them. They not only come here illegally, they collect every benefit possible, thanks to non-enforcement of immigration laws where Mexican slave laborers are concerned.
Professor Teodoro is simply parroting what is regarded as received truth among the intellectual classes in the Philippines and elsewhere. You could make a perfect translation into French or German without losing a single cliche.
If you think this is pure ignorance you ought to have read the crap in the Manila papers leading up to our exit from that country. This is mild by comparison in tone but no less ignorant.
*snicker*
...permanently.
And they stick around so this guy must be totally full of it (and himself)
Yeah, boo hoo. Ask the Filipinos who have immigrated if their lives are better or worse here than they were in the fatherland. Most will say "better." The ones who say "worse" or either criminals or liars.
Please tell the mexicans also. And stay home.
so let's talk poverty in the phillipines, let's talk terrorist attacks in the phillipines, let's talk about all the women that have to go into the sex trade to feed themselves, let's talk about what an idiot this particular author is,,,,and let's hope he visits us again so HE can be strip searched and held without food - stay where you are in your own impoverished country, you're not welcome here.
Teodoro, eh?
well, Ted... God loves you because he has to. I don't. STFU.
This is just too funny. If you called Americans at random and asked them what a "slope" was, probably less than 10% would identify it as a racial slur.
The professor could spend hours at Google or Lexis-Nexis and search in vain for an incident of a racist white gang picking out and assaulting an asian.
I see. And American poverty is comparable to Filipino poverty in what way? Don't try this on me, old son, I know about Smoky Mountain outside Manila - literally, a mountain of trash outside Manila where the poor eke out a terrible existence.
Given a choice, I dare say Filipinos living in poverty would find living in American poverty a dream come true.
In any event, what a load of leftist nonsense this article is.
Regards, Ivan
Apparently, Filipinos would rather come to the USA and take their chances, than remain in a country that has HIM as one of its so-called leaders. That is what is really bugging Luis V. Teodoro.
Luis V. Teodoro, a professor of Journalism and former dean of the University of the Philippines College of Mass Communication (UP CMC)
Luis V. Teodoro is editor of the Philippine Journalism Review.
Luis V. Teodorois a full professor of journalism and former dean of the College of Mass Communication at the University of the Philippines Diliman. He is also managing editor of quarterly Philippine Journalism Review, published by the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility (formerly National Media Council), of which he is a member of the Board of Advisers.
An award-winning fictionist, he has been a magazine editor and newspaper columnist. He also writes a weekly news analysis forPhilippine News and Features, a Philippine news syndicate.
LuisTeodoro.com - A collection of the writings of Prof. Luis V. Teodoro, a Filipino journalist.
http://www.luisteodoro.com/
Theodore, Theodoro....stuck on Stupid !!!
Center for People Empowerment in Governance
September 23-25, 2005
Analysis on The United States’ role in the Political Crisis
A NEOCOLONY, NOT A SOVEREIGN STATE
TWO major, recent developments reveal, more than anything else, who and what are the real powers in this country. No, they are not Arroyo, her family, cronies and friends; and no, they are not bureaucrats like Norberto Gonzales.
The first event is the confirmation that the United States is closely monitoring political events in the Philippines. The second is the Arroyo government’s entering into a contract with the US lobby group Venable for it to raise money for the Armed Forces of the Philippines modernization and the constitutional amendments to which Arroyo and company are, mostly for political convenience, committed.
Every country with the means to do so spies on others, including its own allies. But US spying on the Philippines is qualitatively different. It is first of all being done by this country’s former and continuing colonizer, whose influence remains deeply rooted in vast sections of the population especially among this country’s current political leadership.
But the United States looms large in the Philippine political equation not only because its interests-- and therefore its premises, values, ideas and sentiments-- are regarded among much of the Philippine population as its own. It is also because US power has always been a critical factor in determining the outcome of major political events, among them the elections in which the US has meddled for deca des, as well as EDSAs 1 and 2.
Implicit in US analyses of the current crisis in the Philippines, for example, is the assumption of US involvement in determining its outcome. When the US describes Noli de Castro as unfit for the Presidency, for example, it is also saying that it will not support de Castro’s ascension to the Presidency. This is a preference already evident in the explicit s upport that former US Embassy Charges d’Affaires Joseph Mussomeli gave to Mrs. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo in July, and in the Embassy’s continuous harping on “the constitutional process” (i.e., Arroyo’s impeachment) as the solution to the crisis.
Unlike those of other countries, US analyses are the bases not solely for interpreting the meaning of political events in the Philippines. They are also the bases for managing them.
The Arroyo government contract with the US law firm Venable, on the other hand (a contract Mrs. Arroyo said she has rescinded but which in the same breath she said the government would “go back to” later), demonstrates that it takes two to run and keep a neocolony. These two are (1) the imperial power, and (2) its willing lackeys in the neocolonial state.
In the minds of these lackeys US interests are the same as the country’s. This explains why they’re more than willing to accept money from the US government on a critical matter like amending the country’s basic law despite the distinct possibility that whatever support the US gives will be premised on the Constitution’s being amended to, among others, allow foreign ownership of land, natural resources, public utilities, and the mass media.
Beyond this puerile assumption, however, is also these lackeys’s looking after nothing more than self-interest. For them the country’s future and its people’s interests are less than secondary; they are concerned with neither people nor country, but with themselves, whose prosperity depends on, among other factors, how well they serve US power through the neocolonial state.
If these two events reveal how sadly accurate is the description of the Philippines as a neocolony rather than a sovereign state, they also reveal how this country’s so-called leadership works hand in glove with the United States in keeping the country that less than independent and sovereign, as well as poor, undeveloped and weak, and as no more than an appendage of another state. #
Contact Person: Luis V Teodoro
Executive Director
Telefax No. 929-9526
This explains everything, including the origins of our own Amerika-Hating Press.
This guy sounds like he's a NPA sympathiser. What is his opinion about the NPA?
Yeah, it really sucks here. Stay home! Please!
He must be pissed because he's NPA or from Mindanao (Islamokazi).
He's welcome to stay in the Fillipines.
He's also welcome to work as a contractor in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Quatar or Iraq.
Peso say so.
"The United States is not a nice place for non-whites and dollar-poor people to visit even in the best of times. You don’t really want to live there --"
this guy needs to relax, at home.
"The worst thing is to be a Muslim"
Well, he did get this right.
If he watched the coverage of Hurricane Katrina, he would have seen that there ain't nobody starving in this country, least of all the poor people.
So, Senor Teodoro, US companies want to invest in the Philippines in order to undevelop it?
Umm hmm, just as all leftist wackos had already suspected. This will undoubtedly take place while we are raping the islands of their natural resources and forcing child prostitutes to take alternate employment in US-owned factories. Heaven forbid!
This isn't Scrappleface or something?? It's hard to tell the difference anymore.
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