I ran and us, separated by the Asian landmass, are tangled up in invisible knots first entwined in the mid-20th Century. Time now to give these unseen knots a good feel.
Seventy years ago, Iran’s elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh was forced out of office by a successful smear campaign. The authors of this regime change plot were the British M16 (old-ish, created in 1906) and the United States CIA (brand new, created in 1947). Both foreign intelligence agencies thought Mossadegh sympathetic to the Cold War’s communist sphere of influence; or such was the rationale.
Seventy years ago, that is, in 1953, Defense Secretary Ramon Magsaysay was elected President of the Philippines. That this win was CIA facilitated (or produced, depending on the reader) has become clearer in recent decades, with declassified archives. Edward Lansdale, CIA operative, psywar pioneer, and Magsaysay’s dear friend, helped rout the communist Hukbalahap.
Declassified archives are making it possible to outgrow 1950s to 1970s Cold War rhetoric, for countries like the Philippines, where it has endured for a very long time and disabled independent foreign policy. Iran relieved itself of this imposed world view earlier than the many other countries where the CIA installed dictatorships, but it fell under the spell of a homegrown theocracy since 1979.
For countries only recently emerging from a Cold War frame of mind, it now makes sense how the West-aligned world produced a distinct post-1950’s culture.
CULTURAL MIX
Nations as different as Chile, Nicaragua, the Philippines, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Guatemala, South Vietnam, Cambodia, Argentina, Brazil, Indonesia, Iran, and others fashioned different mixes of autocracy and the veneer of liberal democracy.
In all these cases, the CIA prompted the ouster or assassination of democratically elected leaders such as Iran’s Mossadegh. Or, in the case of 1950s Philippines, ensured the solidity of pro-US leadership embodied by Magsaysay; and within a decade, the arrival of a fully formed autocrat in President Ferdinand Marcos.
In all these cases, the national cultures settled into tolerance for police aggression and military politization and excess, and overly centralizing governance.
This tolerance rested on the false comfort conjured by pretend free elections and posturings in the name of checks and balances; lip service to Constitutional order; and “democratic space” (tightened and loosened, tightened and loosened, ad infinitum) for artistic and political expressions of grievance.
As the second half of the 20th Century unfolded, various cultural admixtures proliferated. Each was composed, in different measures, of middle-class security and elite capture of policymaking, on one hand, and faith, on the other, in a democratic road to socialism.
TRAVELING IDEAS
The West-aligned autocracies fed each other actual project ideas, even if inadvertently in the instance of Iran inspiring the Philippines. The ironic marvel of an imperial democracy, for instance, was produced after Mossadegh’s fall in 1953, when the Shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi, and his Empress Farah Diba, modeled royal excess sustained by the secret police SAVAK — with a combination of civil liberties allowed and disallowed.
Starting with his election in 1965 and speeding up with his declaration of Martial Rule in 1972, Ferdinand Marcos and his consort Imelda Romualdez also indulged royal fantasies, sustained by a politicized police force, the MetroCom. Never mind that the Philippines did not have kingdoms, the Filipino pretend king/queen aspired to the trappings. They were reported to have been proud of themselves during the party-to-end-all-parties in 1971.
The spectacle was held in Persepolis. Two thousand five hundred years of Persian rule were represented in a costume pageant of a scale still unmatched today. Sixty world leaders attended, including all the crowned heads of the time. They partook of food by Paris’ Maxims and escaped the desert heat in tents about which the description “opulent” was an understatement.
The Marcos couple rubbed elbows in the heady milieu and stoked their own appetite for spectacle.
The Philippines staged Kasaysayan ng Lahi in 1974, only three years later emulating the parade of ascent from Xerxes to the Shah. In the Marcosian version, the Roxas Boulevard parade represented an “ascent of man” idea that begins with the Tasaday (they did parade) and climbed to the Marcosian dispensation.
Instead of crowned monarchs galore, the Philippine mimic event was capped by the coronation of Miss Universe. Imelda got to dress a lá Empress Farah, and Ferdinand could then style himself progenitor of a cultural hegemony.
PERSIAN CATS
Arguably — as GeoLogics will indeed argue in future installments — Kasaysayan ng Lahi expressed an unoriginal but destructive concept. The idea that societies begin as primitive and ascend to superior status (Social Darwinism at its most common version) was to undermine democracy in the Philippines through the next 70 years. It was institutionalized undetected in cultural agencies.
Meanwhile, the 1970s unfolded for the Boomer generation with Manila’s streets full of hunks the girls called “Persian cats.” Iranians studying in the Philippines were aplenty and cross-cultural liaisons thrived. Iran-Philippine scholar Henelito Sevilla fleshed out the outlines of the interaction, and below are examples of his detail.
Between the late 1960s and 1979, when the Shah fell and an Islamic Republic was established, Filipino doctors, nurses, midwives, engineers, mechanics, technicians and household workers relocated to Iran, among a first wave of Overseas Filipino Workers in the Middle East. And 2,500 Iranian students lived in the Philippines.
The exchanges halted with the 1979 ascendance to power of Ayatollah Ruhollah Komeini, a people powered event met with demonstrations by 700-some Iranian students in Manila. Prior to this point, Marcos was thought by geopolitical watchers “the American Shah in the Philippines.”
The political demise of Iran’s Shah and the Philippines’ Marcos — both American proxies in their respective regions, both armed by the US military, both violently repressive against socialist alternative ideas, and both main dominos supposedly preventing a “domino effect” yielding to the Eastern bloc during the Cold War — exposed the limits of CIA-buttressed strategies of dancing with dictators.
UNSEEN CONSEQUENCE
But just to return to the beginning, 1953. The Philippines’ beloved Magsaysay was to launch with the aforementioned Lansdale another cultural idea. Not original, but of a larger scale than ever before deployed in the Philippines. The concept: land to the landless, the call appropriated and repurposed from early 20th Century Left fronts.
To defeat the Hukbalahap, the Magsaysay-Lansdale plan combined psywar and the offer of land for resettlement in Mindanao, principally for Huk returnees to legal order. Beyond these former rebels, the National Resettlement and Agrarian Administration (NARRA) oversaw hundreds of thousands who answered the call. The successful program was taught in US military schools as an ideal anti-insurrection strategy to accompany low intensity warfare.
Within a decade, that is, by end 1960s, the NARRA operations had proven efficient, transparent, and well-aligned with the Magsaysay political aura of benevolence. It also increased the settler population in Mindanao by nearly 300%. The Muslim communities and small-scale societies adhering to indigenous cultures, the original Mindanao populations, were entirely marginalized.
By 1969, Muslim separatists commenced a full-scale war that owed hugely to land dispossession. This war was to last 50 years, cost more than a trillion pesos and hundreds of thousands of lives, and, at certain points, threatened the territorial integrity of the Philippines. It was a cost Magsaysay and Lansdale did not foresee.
Land was thought freely for the taking by the powerful. Such was the culture that CIA plots elaborated on. The true consequences were unaccounted for — as witness today’s horrific aftermath of minoritization and land dispossession in the Gaza Strip. The Jewish settlements in Gaza buttress political occupation of Palestinian land by Israel, enabled by the Western powers.
IRAN, NEARBY
This cultural mindset slipped intact from colonial times into the mid-20th Century period when nations were forming themselves. Resettlement created minoritized groups in Mindanao, Palestine, Indonesia (Javanese resettling in East Timor), and wherever else the power center had absolute prerogative over people and lands thought marginal.
In fact, Iran’s oil pipelines, laid by British and American corporations, are yet another example of engineering for social engineering. “The social history of pipelines is a paradoxical tale of the dispossession of local communities and their often-coercive integration into wider national and global political economies,” contends a Duke University research paper.
The Soviet-China bloc worked with different cultures of power consolidation since this same mid-20th Century point. Some stuff is similar, but this is for another column. For today, Iran should be more than a distant battlefield to Filipinos. It is effectively nearby, in having been, with the Philippines, simultaneously a playground for a Western culture of impunity in the last 70 years.
Marian Pastor Roces is an independent curator and critic of institutions. Her body of work addresses the intersection of culture and politics.
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