The Realm of the Punisher: Travels in Duterte's Philippines

Part 1: 1985-2010

1. Pearl of the Orient

The first I ever heard of the Philippines was from my grandad. I was six, he was sixty. I was surprised how warmly he spoke of the place. He wasn’t known for his warmth.

‘Took shore leave in Manila with the navy. Back in ’41. We were well looked after. Bloody modern as you like. Elevators that went whoosh. Also rather pretty. Palm trees, mangoes, that sort of thing.’

Grandad always spoke in these telegram-like sentences, as if giving orders. While he talked, he’d scratch at his cropped white hair, bold and bright as the target spots of the searchlights he used on HMS Formidable to bamboozle kamikazes.

He showed me black and white pictures of Manila and told me how it had been beautified by the American architect Daniel Burnham. According to Burnham’s plans, the US colonial authorities widened the tangled streets into acacia-shaded boulevards, dredged the inner city estuaries and grew gardens between handsome villas with capiz (oyster shell) windows. Grandad claimed Manila was cleaner and greener than British cities of the time.

For an officer of the Royal Navy, Manila’s pleasures were varied and affordable. Grandad frequented the Manila Hotel, another Burnham brainchild. Surrounded by its own custom-built park, this 500-room Art Deco spectacle had champagne suites, string quartets and celebrity guests. One evening, Grandad spotted the imposing bulk and moustache of Mr Ernest Hemingway holding hands with an attractive blonde woman, but was too shy to approach them. Grandad’s memory was probably correct – later I found out that, in February 1941, Hemingway flew into Manila with his then wife Martha Gellhorn, the notable war correspondent, en route to Beijing to report on the Sino-Japanese War.

Grandad showed me the silk suits he’d bought from Chinese-Filipino tailors in Intramuros, the walled city built in the late sixteenth century by the Spanish colonizers of the Philippines. He told of lazy afternoons at a café famed for its bibingka (rice cakes) that took hours to prepare, and of long nights on the azoteas of colonial bars filling his belly with ice-cold tuba (coconut wine) and his pipe with fine local tobacco.

The Army and Navy Club in Luneta Park was the place to go for poker, pink gins and beautiful women. Grandad said he resisted the latter temptation. Not that the six-year-old me really understood such adult things. At the club on Sundays, you could play polo, golf and tennis with the British and American officers. To cool off in the evening, the members would swim in the translucent, indigo waters of Manila Bay, the flower-crested island of Corregidor gleaming in the distance.

Although he was later to scowl at the multiculturalism that reshaped post-war Britain, Grandad marvelled at the diversity of pre-war Manila. He joked with the fast-talking Indian-Filipino traders descended from Sepoys who’d deserted during the British occupation in the 1760s. He was impressed with the erudite, Western-educated mestizos of mixed Spanish, Chinese and Malay descent. He bantered with Greek and German and French captains of ships packed with coffee, sugar and hemp bound for Europe, China and the US.

After these nostalgic flights, there was always a point when the glee would slip from Grandad’s eyes. His sneer would expose brown, jagged teeth.

‘All went to shit in Manila,’ he’d growl. ‘Japs invaded after Pearl Harbor. Wrested it from the Yanks. Place got hairier than bugger’s carpets.’ Years later, I discovered that ‘bugger’s carpets’ was 1940s slang for sideburns. ‘Made it a bloody shambles,’ Grandad would continue. ‘Damned ruthless the Japs, the lot of ’em. Killed the men. Raped the women. Bloody animals.’ At this juncture, Grandad would snuff out the rest of his glass of Laphroaig and flop back in his armchair.

Grandad didn’t elaborate on the Japanese invasion, but later aged nine, I learned more by listening to stories from other veterans. A great uncle who’d fled Hong Kong after it fell to the Japanese was detained in the Philippines on his way to Australia. He became one of the few British POWs amongst mostly Americans in the horrific New Bilibid Prison, Manila. When I asked him for more details he slowly replied, ‘I’m sorry, Tom, I just can’t go back there.’

To Grandad’s chagrin, my parents sent me to a progressive state middle school run by ex-hippies where we sang Bob Dylan’s anti-war songs in assembly rather than the usual hymns about God, joy and ploughing fields. Grandad was pleased, though, when I started researching a project on the Pacific War. The schoolbooks said that the Japanese, as part of their plot for world domination, had surprise-attacked American forces based in the Philippines. One of my ex-hippie teachers pointed out that, in fact, the US was an imperial power too, hence its presence in the Philippines in the first place. Manila changed hands twice during the war and, by the end of it, was one of the world’s most damaged cities. I found an old book of photos of the Battle of Manila, 1945, when the Americans recaptured the Philippines and dealt a mortal blow to the Japanese Empire. The scratchy monochrome of the pictures made them all the more disturbing:

A shell-shocked GI, pupils dilated behind wide-lens glasses, staggering zombie-like through rubble, holding a wounded little Filipina in his arms.

Another GI kneeling to fire a flamethrower, the outline of a Japanese just visible within the cloud of fire. His brother-in-arms looking on coolly, foot resting on a shell case.

Filipino civilians executed by fleeing Japanese, lying face down, limbs and backs curved into the pliable postures of rag dolls.

More corpses: Japanese commandos strewn around a bullet-holed truck. One leaning against an oil drum, arm reaching desperately for help that isn’t there. Another, on his back, wearing a death grin, floating in a lake of oil-black blood.

One side of the Old Congress Building pristine, the other side crumbling like the facial droop of a stroke victim.

Finally, a bird’s eye view of the city after the Japanese surrender – eerie, blank, nothing left but ash and foundations. Easily mistaken for post-A-bomb Hiroshima.

These shocking pictures jarred with the exotic images of pre-war Manila I had in my head from Grandad. Now I understood his sadness. It was also important for a young boy to know about these things in order to understand the brutality of the world. I imagine those notorious stills from the Vietnam War – that Viet Cong guerrilla about to be shot in the head, that nine-year-old girl running naked and napalm-scorched – had a similar impact on those who saw them in the 1960s.

At school, I had a history teacher called Mr Turnbull whose nose was bent because a policeman broke it in 1968. He’d been one of the 6,000 at Grosvenor Square protesting against the Vietnam War. A charismatic speaker, he got me interested in Asian liberation movements of the Cold War era. I didn’t tell Grandad about that. He hated the political left as much as he hated the Japanese. I came to admire Ho Chi Minh, who led the struggle for Vietnamese self-determination, routing first the Japanese and then the French. After that, his socialist model of development appalled the United States, which was trying to enforce its own market system upon the world. It’s little known that Ho had begun his career as a fan of the US. His initial plans for an independent republic of Vietnam quoted its Constitution extensively. Ho never wanted a confrontation with the Americans, but the Americans saw him as an evil communist tyrant who had to be stopped. They failed, of course, and Ho stands out in history as the only national leader ever to have beaten the US in open warfare, even though he didn’t quite live to see the last of its troops flee Saigon in 1973.

I also learned about the Huks, the Filipino Marxist guerrillas who, like the Vietminh, had daringly repelled the Japanese. After the war, they took on the shady, US-backed regime of President Ramon Magsaysay. Aiming to stop feudal landlords from cheating and abusing peasant farmers, the Huks robbed banks, planted bombs and assassinated politicians. By 1950, they were gathering on the outskirts of Manila.

I didn’t tell Grandad about my research into the Huks either. Marxists and imperial Japanese were equally unwelcome in the idyllic ‘Pearl of the Orient’ of his memories. I know now that Grandad’s Manila was run by and for rich, white Westerners like himself, and sustained by the kind of monstrous exploitation the Huks railed against.

‘And a bloody good thing too,’ Grandad might have added.

2. Whose Philippines?

While Grandad’s affection for the Philippines sparked my curiosity about the country, my perspective on its history, culture and society would come to differ from his. In 1996, I went to study history – amongst other A-Levels – at Havant College in a suburb of Portsmouth. After class one day, I got talking to a German exchange student called Werner. ‘I went to watch thiss film last night,’ he hissed, ‘and it was a-bloody rubbish!’

He had only himself to blame – he’d gone to see The Thin Red Line. This pompous sham of a movie is one of the few I’ve walked out of, even if it was on a subject that interested me: the Battle of Guadalcanal, a crucial clash in the Pacific War. Despite some arresting cinematography, not a lot happens beyond a horde of Hollywood stars relating specious homilies in voiceover about life, death, love, bravery and so forth.

‘Only ’cos your lot lost,’ snorted Ryan, a tracksuit-clad townie, which was snobbish nineties slang for brash working class youth. Like me, Ryan had a grandfather who’d served in the Royal Navy during the war. Since then, two generations of British males had been raised to revere those who’d shielded Britain from the Nazis. Pop culture reinforced this. As infants, we’d spent our pocket money on toy soldiers, comics set in the D-Day landings and polystyrene Spitfires that raced off on the breeze when thrown from the beach. Many of the lad-oriented films of my youth, from Raiders of the Lost Ark to Saving Private Ryan, had Nazi antagonists. When England played Germany at football, the tabloid papers would superimpose Tommy helmets onto the heads of Stuart Pearce and Paul Gascoigne. Stereotypes drawn from the Nazi cult were applied to normal, modern German people – they were ruthless, irritable, humourless, despotic and as efficient as their public transport systems.

‘I do not know what you mean by your lot,’ Werner replied. ‘Those crimes had nothing to do with me, I wass not born then. And every country in the world has been in wars to be ashamed of, yours also.’

‘What you on about, mate?’ Ryan glared.

Werner glared back. ‘The British Empire. Thiss is an example, no?’

‘The British Empire was sorted.’

‘Really? The colonies? The slavery? The famines?’

‘Look mate, I’m gonna deck you in a minute...’ Ryan took a step forward but Werner held his ground. If they’d got physical, I wouldn’t have known who to bet on. While Werner had the tubby cheeks and prescription spectacles of an archetypal geek, his torso was muscle-studded and he had four inches’ height on Ryan’s spare, featherweight boxer’s physique.

After an uneasy instant while it seemed someone was preparing to throw the first punch, Werner continued his spiel, perhaps thinking this was a battle better won with words. ‘I am just asking you to be a little fairer here. I am not saying what happened in my country wass right, it was a-bloody rubbish, you know. The damage England did to other countries is also true. Not that you boys are to blame for that either.’

Ryan made a brushing gesture with his hands. ‘Not worth it,’ he said and sloped off to the bike sheds for a cigarette.

Werner got me thinking. What if he was right and the population of a country shouldn’t be liable for the actions of its rulers? The assumption of the nationalist or the patriot is that their government always represents and serves its people. Can that be said of dictatorships like Nazi Germany or the USSR that, by definition, don’t rule by public consent? Can it be said of many democracies given that a party can win an election with a third or less of the popular vote? And even if, say 99 per cent of Britons in 1780 supported slavery or the same percentage of Germans loved Hitler in the 1930s, why should progressive young people like me and Werner, who weren’t alive then, be held responsible for such outrages? Furthermore, what if Werner was right and almost every state has cadavers in its military-imperial cupboard? And following that, what if there are no firm boundaries between ‘them’ (the baddies) and ‘us’ (the goodies), especially if ‘them’ and ‘us’ merely refers to the ruling elites of nation states?

I went on to find proof for Werner’s points. Britain, France and Portugal, among others, were responsible for the deaths of 30-60 million Africans during the Atlantic Slave Trade. Settler colonization from the 1600s to the 1900s in what we now call the United States wiped out 90 million Native Americans through disease and outright butchery. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, 60 million Indians perished in famines the British authorities could have prevented. Belgian company bosses in the Congo Free State killed another 10-15 million indigenes between 1885 and 1908. Yet, in the popular discourse, these atrocities – if they get an airing at all – are seen as bagatelles next to the Nazi extermination of 10 million European Jews, gypsies, disabled people and homosexuals, not to say the breaches of the Geneva Convention by the Japanese in World War II. Why? One reason is that history is written by the winners, as shown by the candid admission of Curtis LeMay, the US general in charge of the bombardment of Japanese cities in the war, that, had the Axis powers won the conflict, he’d have been hanged for war crimes.

Furthermore, there are gaps in the histories written by those who won World War II and stopped the Holocaust. They forget that the ‘liberal democracies’ not only appeased Hitler but supported him. Most of his ideas about race came from top universities in Britain and the US – some twenty American states had banned interracial marriage and sterilized ‘undesirable’ people long before the Nazi Party existed. Throughout his reign, Hitler had a portrait of Henry Ford on the wall of his office – fitting, since Ford had funded the US publication of the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fake news report on a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world. Anglo-American firms from IBM to Ford to the Bank of England did business with Germany throughout the war. In the 1930s, my local newspaper, the Portsmouth News, was friendly to fascism – one op-ed was headlined ‘HITLER THE MAN To Lead Germany to Liberty!’ Notable Britons and Americans who agreed with Nazi ideology included Edward VIII, Charles Lindbergh, Errol Flynn and Winston Churchill. Although he’s painted as saviour to Hitler’s antichrist, in truth Winnie would have got on famously with the führer. He detested socialism, communism and trade unions. He also detested Indians enough to deny them aid during the 1943 famine, writing at the time, ‘Why hasn’t Gandhi died yet?’ Gandhi survived, but 4 million of his compatriots didn’t. Earlier in his career, Churchill had praised British concentration camps in the Boer War, promoted the gassing of Kurds in Iraq (sixty years before Saddam Hussein actually did it) and reckoned racist mass-murder broadly a good thing. ‘I do not admit,’ he wrote, ‘for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.’

I found out – and not from the college-approved reading lists – that money was the common driver of modernity’s genocides. African slaves were needed for the lucrative mines and plantations of the New World. Native Americans were evicted from economically valuable land across the same continent. Indian peasants starved because the Raj was intent on selling the grain on the world market. The Congolese were either worked to death – or executed for not working hard enough – in the extraction of rubber for export to resource-hungry Europe. While the Holocaust didn’t bring any commercial benefit – rather it became a huge burden on the German war effort – it was rooted in economics because the pervasive bigotry towards European Jews hinged on their perceived wealth, avarice and commercial acumen.

My history teachers said we’d learned lessons from these tragedies. ‘Never again’ was the favoured phrase. I wasn’t so sure. Capitalism was still alive and, since the Cold War had ended, now almost ubiquitous. Surely, there’d be more slaughter for greed. A few years later, some of the same states responsible for the imperial crimes above would be violently plundering Iraqi oil. When Bush and Blair said they were on a humane mission of mercy, history suggested otherwise.

Our set texts for history stated that the Cold War was all about the democratic US reacting to the provocations of the totalitarian USSR. When I read other scholars not on that list – for example, Chomsky on neo-imperialism and Nkrumah on neo-colonialism – I found another angle: under the cover story of the Red Menace, the American-led First World had tried to crush nationalism in the Third World the better to loot the Third World’s resources and make it a market for First World products. Millions more had died in that process – in Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Korea, Chile, Guatemala and elsewhere.

When I went on to the University of East Anglia in 1998, I learned that the Philippines had been the first prey of American imperialism. For 333 years, the archipelago had been a Spanish colony ruled by perfidious friars who stole all the land, forcibly converted the natives to Roman Catholicism and introduced a racist caste system that largely meant the darker you were, the worse you’d be treated. Then in 1898, the US allied with Filipino revolutionaries to overthrow the Spanish regime. American diplomats hinted to rebel leader Emilio Aguinaldo that, after the job was done, the Filipinos would be free to set up an independent republic. However, the US went back on this pledge and decided that occupying the islands would be better for everyone, especially the US. Its merchants wanted rice, hemp, cocoa and tobacco, not to say access to the China market. Its strategists desired a military foothold in the Far East. Its ‘race scientists’ held that Homo philippinensis – the indigenous Filipino – was too savage and backward to be allowed to choose his own destiny. ‘Your new caught sullen peoples/Half-devil and half-child,’ as Rudyard Kipling depicted them in ‘The White Man’s Burden’, his panegyric to the intervention.

But the Filipinos didn’t want to swap one bunch of colonial masters for another. An asymmetrical war began that would bear chilling parallels with Vietnam and Iraq. According to the historian Howard Zinn, Brigadier General Jacob Smith instructed his troops to kill any Filipino of either gender over the age of ten. ‘I want no prisoners,’ he added. ‘I wish you to kill and burn. The more you kill and burn the better it will please me.’ The Americans used torture by water-boarding for the first time. ‘His sufferings must be that of a man who is drowning, but cannot drown,’ said Lieutenant Grover Flint.

After three years of fighting, a quarter million or more Filipinos lay dead: a genocide by anyone’s standards. As Mark Twain wrote at the time, ‘We have pacified some thousands of the islanders and buried them; destroyed their fields; burned their villages, and turned their widows and orphans out-of-doors.’

At the end of my second year at UEA, I had my own encounter with US imperialism, although it wasn’t nearly as damaging as the Philippine-American War. I went for a brief holiday in San Francisco, my first stop Chinatown. It was spookily quiet. Old men played chess under the pea-green canopies of a pagoda. Most of the shops were closed, yet it was a Tuesday. I bought a newspaper, but it offered no clues.

I then saw a policeman with a handlebar moustache lowering the Stars and Stripes to half-mast. It was an affecting symbol of defeat, an anti-Iwo Jima. ‘Excuse me,’ I asked, ‘could you tell me why you’re taking that flag down?’

‘Haven’t you heard?’ the cop bellowed, his eyes fireballs of wrath. ‘America has been attacked! American airplanes have been hijacked! Many thousands of Americans are dead! This is too big-scale for a Timothy McVeigh kinda thing, so foreigners must be behind it!’

I walked away from the cop and into what had once been Jack Kerouac’s favourite bar. The widescreen TV was showing what has become the most famous video footage in history: those planes crashing into those buildings. It’s almost banal now, we’ve all seen it so often. But at that moment, at 11:30am on 11 September 2001, I was seeing it for the first time, and there was something frighteningly new about it. So new as to be unreal. Indeed, later on in my trip a Canadian tourist would tell me that, when he first saw it, he expected James Bond to leap from the cockpit of one of the planes just before the moment of impact.

The caption on the screen read AMERICA UNDER ATTACK – PLANES CRASHED INTO WORLD TRADE CENTER, NEW YORK. The footage was replaying on a loop. I ordered a beer and sat near an office worker whose collar was loose around his scarlet throat. He kept shaking his fist at each replay, shouting, ‘I don’t wanna see it no more!’ Why was he putting himself through it then? Perhaps he was simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by the cyclic image of destruction. He wasn’t the only one: more people were coming into the bar, ordering drinks and then shouting at the TV. Someone was holding an ‘extra’ edition of a local newspaper. I’d never seen an ‘extra’ before. The front page was a still from what we were watching on the screen. The headline simply read BASTARDS!

The office worker got precariously to his feet. ‘I bet the ragheads did it,’ he said and left.

This was not the first time the US had faced suicide attacks from Islamic jihadists. During the Philippine-American War a Moro (Muslim from the southern island of Mindanao) assassin would work himself up into a state of amok (meaning ‘insane rage’ and the origin of the English idiom ‘run amok’) by spending all night with a piece of copper wire tied around his testicles. When he was sufficiently angry, he’d charge at the nearest American soldier and do as much harm as he could with a sword before getting himself shot, usually with a Colt .45 automatic, a sidearm invented expressly to fend off the Moros.

The Philippine conquest announced the twentieth century, the American century. Now, though, we were very much in the twenty-first. Now suicide attacks were happening on American soil, in the nub of American power. Was change afoot?

When I came home, I found a book called Language of the Street by Nick Joaquin on a stall at Norwich market. The autumn weather unusually fine, I went down to the university lake, sat on the grass and read the text in one sitting. After what I’d gleaned from a British Navy officer, here was a Manileño’s take on Manila. Joaquin showed me a richly distinctive culture that paradoxically owed much to foreign influence. I learned about the evolution of Tagalog – the main language of the Philippines – from its early appropriations of Spanish to its absorption of Americanisms such as genoowine (a compliment paid to a woman with fair skin). With a cool equilibrium that contrasted with my anti-imperialist fervour, Joaquin argued against renaming the streets of his home town for nationalistic reasons because ‘Manila has been a Malay city, a Spanish city, an American city, and is now a Filipino city ... a people as young as we have surely need of every bit of memory that can surely make us feel more intensely us.’ He went on to explore