Guerrilla History - Women and Militarism w/ Sarah Raymundo

Episode Date: November 15, 2024

In this important episode of Guerrilla History, bring on Sarah Raymundo to discuss Women and Militarism, with a particular focus on the context of the Philippines, but ranging far beyond that!  Within this conversation, we discuss the impact of militarism, and imperialist/colonialist military presence on women, as well as women's resistance to militarism.  This is a critical discussion, and Sarah brings out many important threads here within the conversation. You, listeners, will no doubt be happy to know that we have plans for another episode with Sarah soon, on indigenous issues within the Philippines, so be sure to stay tuned! Sarah Raymundo is a faculty member at the University of the Philippines-Diliman Center for International Studies. She is engaged in activist work in BAYAN (The New Patriotic Alliance), the International League of Peoples’ Struggles, and Chair of the Philippines-Bolivarian Venezuela Friendship Association. She is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal for Labor and Society (LANDS) and Interface: Journal of/and for Social Movements.  You can follow Sarah on twitter @jinkydoo. Help support the show by signing up to our patreon, where you also will get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory 

You remember Den Bamboo? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello and welcome to Gorilla History, the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present.

I'm one of your co-hosts, Henry Huckmanke, joined as usual by my co-host, Professor Adnan-Husain, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. How are you doing today? I'm doing well, Henry. It's great to be with you. Absolutely. Nice to see you. As always, I know it's only been a couple days since the last time, but always a pleasure. Now, we have a really terrific conversation ahead of you today, listeners with a really fantastic guest. But before I introduce the guest, I want to make sure that I remind you that you can help support the show and allow us to continue making episodes like this by going

to patreon.com forward slash gorilla history. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. And you can keep up to date with everything that Adnan and I are doing individually as well as what the show is doing collectively by following us on Twitter at Gorilla underscore Pod. Again, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A-U-A-U-Pod. So, as I said, we have a really terrific conversation ahead of us. The topic is Women and Militarism, and we're joined by the fantastic Sarah Raimundo,

who is a faculty member at the University of Philippines Dilliman, Center for International Studies. She's an activist with Bayon, the new Patriotic Alliance in the Philippines, the International League of People's Struggles, as well as an editorial board member of the Journal for Labor and Society, which we've referenced many times on the show in the past. So Sarah, it's terrific to have you on the show.

I know we've been in contact off and on for a couple of years, but we finally have you. Hello, Henry. Hello, Adnan. Thank you so much for that wonderful introduction. Fantastic makes me nervous. But I'm really honored to be here and for guerrilla history to be discussing this topic on women and militarism. it really makes me happy. Yeah, absolutely, and it's a pleasure. And like I said, it's a bit overdue because we have been talking off and on for a couple of years.

But don't worry, listeners. We're sure you're going to enjoy this conversation now, and we also have plans on bringing Sarah back on again very soon for another conversation on another interesting topic, which we might announce at the end of this conversation. But allow me to open this conversation, Sarah, by just having you discuss briefly to get the conversation underway, the work that you do within this topic. So you have done work on the topic of women and militarism, particularly within the context of the Philippines. If you can, just give us a rundown of the work that you do, and then we can kind of dig in a bit deeper

from there. Right. So I've been part of the National Democratic Movement in the Philippines since the mid-90s as a student activist. And now I work with, as you know, by And one of our campaigns or one of our, you know, very important basis of unity would be anti-imperialism, right? So, and one of our allied organizations is the largest women organization in the Philippines, Gabriela, women, peasant women, women workers, urban poor women and so on and so forth, really holding the line against imperialist plunder and imperialist attacks. So since the, well, the campaign against the military basis, which I was not part of because I was too young, but Gabrella has been active in that particular campaign alongside other organizations under the banner of national democracy. So basically, one of the more developed, well, analysis and study or,

social investigation and class analysis that the National Democratic Movement has made would be the impact of United States militarism on women in the Philippines. And it has been really significant and far-reaching with various forms of violence, exploitation, marginalization reported. And I can talk about the key aspects unless you have any more. or follow-up question or so organizations like you have Gabriela reaching out to not only to women they have organized but reaching out to the middle forces and so on and so forth reaching out to farmers and workers and urban and rural poor and coming up with a social investigation on the impacts or the consequences of U.S. militarism So they're also allied with, you know, other centers like Center for Women's Resources,

basically progressive research outfits that focus on the plight of women and U.S. militarism. So one of the impacts would be sex trafficking and prostitution. The presence of military bases in the Philippines has really led to an increase, in sex trafficking and prostitution, especially around the basis. And, you know, they say that we've already kicked out the basis and what we have are just, you know, military facilities. But that's not true. It goes on.

It goes on in Clark. It goes on in Subic to this day. So women and girls are often forced into prostitution and that, you know, and which cater to U.S. And of course, this results in sexual violence. And there have been numerous reports of rape, sexual assault against Filipino women and trans women by U.S. servicemen. And these crimes often go unpunished due to legal loopholes and impunity. Then you also have displacement, right? Displacement and land grabbing as a result of U.S. military operations and base expansion. So you have displacement of communities, particularly indigenous peoples.

And women are disproportionately affected, losing their livelihoods. And, of course, this also includes human rights abuses against Filipino women. they have faced, well, arbitrary arrest, torture, even in forced disappearances, particularly during counterinsurgency operations, especially women advocates, right? Or women who have become activists and are really engaged in organizing their communities against the U.S. basis, against U.S. militarism. And of course, there's economic exploitation. U.S. militarism perpetuates economic inequality with, of course, women bearing the brunt. There's poverty, lack of opportunity, and, you know, they're being driven mainly into exploitative labor. And as I've mentioned earlier, sex work.

What else? But also, this has bred resistance. and activism. Filipino women have been at the forefront of anti-basists and anti-militarization movements, advocating against prostitution, advocating against sex work, and for sovereignty, human rights, and gender justice. And then, of course, I think one of the things that I've missed is to mention the health impacts, right? So there's exposure to toxic waste from U.S. military activities has really harmed women's health and reproductive rights, as well as, you know, children.

So, you know, these are interlocking impacts of U.S. militarism. They interluck with other forms of oppression, such as poverty, fascism, patriarchy, exacerbating. vulnerabilities faced by Filipino women. Well, that was a great introduction and survey to the impacts in several different fields that I think we'll hope to talk about further and in some greater detail in each of those topics. One thing I was wondering about is maybe for our listeners who are a little less familiar with the U.S. presence in the Philippines. Of course, this goes back very far in history with U.S. colonialism, direct colonialism, and military intervention in the Philippines. But even, of course, after the period of Philippine independence, you know, the question of sovereignty that you mentioned is one that, of course, has been undermined by the presence of U.S. military bases and using the Philippines to be part of its strategy of, hegemony, economic, and military and political in the whole Pacific region, and, you know,

forcing the Philippines to be part of military alliances, like historically the Manila pact, as it was called, the Seattle, the, you know, the treaty organization in the 1950s. And so this has been a long historical kind of condition that Philippines, people have had to resist. And so I'm wondering if maybe you can tell us a little bit more for those who are not familiar with that kind of background, how in the kind of more contemporary period of your activism and scholarship, you know, U.S. military presence has been shaped and has shaped Philippine society. How many bases still or military facilities exist now today, for example, example, I noticed that in 2023, the U.S. announced four new what they're calling

EDCA sites, so enhanced defense cooperation arrangement, which sounds like one of these horrible, you know, euphemisms for military bases, but they're not calling them U.S. military bases. And they mentioned that these are the new sites are in addition to five existing sites. So what's the situation currently in terms of, you know, U.S. military presence in the Philippines? So there are right now nine Edka sites, right, in the country. Bongbong Marcus just added five upon, of course, the orders of the White House. And, you know, since, of course, we probably are very familiar with the history of the Marcos family, how the U.S. saved Marcos after or during the people power back in 86,

and now the Philippines is back to its position as the U.S. Star Ally in Asia. So we do have these facilities, which we believe are actually basing facilities, you know. They're not just, you know, military sites. And they're actually permanent. They're there and they've been storing weapons of war. And so this is basically a United States way of really propping up the Philippines, the so-called Indo-Pacific War Theater to further encircle China within the area of, you know, the area of, Asia. But of course, this particular condition can only be grasped, can only be understood

if we try to trace it back to history. Like, how come the Philippines has become the most loyal friend of, you know, the United States in Asia? But following the Declaration of Independence in 1898. I'm not going to go into the detail, don't worry. But I think it's crucial to mention 1898. It's two years after the Philippine Revolution, the armed revolutionary apprising of the catiponeros led by Bonifacio. So by 1898, the government was first run under a so-called dictatorship.

So on June 20, on June 1898, this was replaced by a revolution. administration led by Emilio Aginaldo as president. Supposedly, well, he ordered the assassination of Andres Bonifacio. So basically, the Malolos Constitution was formally proclaimed the year after, and this marked the start of the first Philippine Republic. And then the Philippine-American War broke. It broke out when the Philippines declared war on the United States, as it became clear that the U.S. would not recognize the recently formed republic. So due to a shortage of ammunition, the Philippine Revolutionary Forces suffered numerous defeats in combat.

So the Filipinos had lost the war entirely by 1901. And then it's very interesting how, you know, that particular period in 1898, how the Aginaldo faction actually dealt with the U.S. So there are several dispatches, well, archival dispatches covering how, you know, the diplomatic ties between the United States and so-called Philippine Republic at the time. So, for example, in 1898, in August 1898, there was a press dispatch that informed Aginaldo that the U.S. government had declared that the future of the Philippines was to be left at the decision of a Spanish-American commission, and that Manila and its vicinity was, in the meantime, to be controlled by the United States, right? So then Aginalta wrote to his comrade Agoncilio urging him to,

but this is Felipe Agonsilio. He urged him to proceed, you know, at once to, you know, to go to the U.S. And then so, again, see you left the Hong Kong junta. And so just basically there was a group of people from, The Tatiponeros that went to the U.S. and they clinch some kind of, you know, diplomacy. So what was this diplomacy all about? It's interesting that this diplomacy was, well, in the name of Aginaldo, first and foremost, Agonsilio congratulated the U.S. president on the successful termination of the war. And then they commended the occupation of Manila and assured,

U.S. that there's going to be allegiance and unquestioning support of the Filipino people to the U.S. And then there was a petition that, you know, they be granted or one or more representatives on the commission that is to decide the future of our islands. So there were many letters, but, you know, basically that was that was the essence of it, right? We're supposed to be under U.S. control. So, but even long before 1898, Anglo-American interests already dominated local trade and agriculture in the 1800s. So, for example, it was only in 1988 that this particular, you know, domination of the Philippines by the U.S. was possible because of, because the Spanish regime already crumbled at that time. So that was, you know,

the background, two years after the revolution, there was a hijack. There was a U.S. imperialist hijack, and there was the Philippine-American War. Even before that, like in 1897, there was a Filipino-American War, and this was crucial in the construction of the Philippine Army. So, for example, so the Philippine Revolutionary Army was founded on 1897 in Cavite, right? So this was under Aginaldo. And then through the Philippine Army, grew out the forces in opposition to basically other, you know, factions within the Katipunan that were really fighting against U.S. domination, right? So the Philippine Constrabulari was founded in 1901.

And then it was founded. So the Philippine Constabulary is the current armed forces of the Philippines. And basically, it was founded in order to aid in the fight against the remaining revolutionaries, to aid the U.S., right, in that fight. So the National Defense Act of 1935 established the armed forces of the Philippines as a formal institution, right? And it was established during the American Commonwealth era. And interestingly, the original members of the Philippine Army was former U.S. Army Reserve Commission. And well, the members of this particular army were former U.S. Army Reserve Commission holders. And these are officers from the Philippine Scouts and Philippine Constabulary and so on and so forth.

And these are groups that participated in the defeat of the revolutionary forces. And then, you know, after the Philippines gained independence from the United States, States, quote-unquote independence, President Manuel El-Keson became the first president of the Commonwealths, right? And he renamed the Philippine Army to the armed forces of the Philippines and appointed General Douglas MacArthur as its first commanding officer. So after accepting the invitation, MacArthur joined the ranks of the AFP. be as the only individual with dual citizenship. And no one else in the armed forces of the Philippines has had the title of

Field Marshal, which MacArthur held. Although MacArthur increased the size of the Philippine armed forces, they were also unable to repel the Japanese invasion of the country during the Battle of the Philippines from 1941. to 1942 and were not really prepared for battle when the Pacific War broke out in December 1941. So this is a great lesson for us Filipinos, especially at this time when the Philippines, especially the conflict between China and the Philippines on the South China Sea is being used as a pretext for a war in the Pacific.

Well, zooming forward in history from that point, you know, you mentioned Ferdinand Marcos briefly, it would be interesting also for us to discuss the relations between the U.S. military and the Philippines during the Marcos dictatorship. And then how that also has progressed to now, because as you mentioned, Bongbong Marcos is the current president of the Philippines. I know a lot of Americans and other, you know, listeners that we have that are not based in the Philippines, maybe don't follow Philippine politics particularly closely, so they may not know that

the dictator, Marcos, his son is the current president of the Philippines, and the vice president is Duterte's daughter, Duterte, the previous president. And there's been interesting relations between the U.S. rhetorically and then in practice between the U.S. government and the U.S. military and the Philippines throughout this period of time from Ferdinand Marcos' dictatorship up to the present. And there has been some shifts, again, sometimes rhetorically, sometimes in practice, mostly rhetorically. But it would be interesting to discuss how those dynamics worked up to the present, because then we can dive in a little bit deeper on the impacts of this involvement between U.S. military presence in the Philippines and some

of these components that you talked about in your opening answers, such as health, such as reproductive rights and sex trafficking and things like that. But, you know, bringing that history up to the present, I think is probably the point that we should stick with now. Right. Yeah, that's great, Henry. Yeah, I think what's constant is the Philippines position as the most crucial anchor of U.S. hegemony in Southeast Asia. But this was actually first tested and proven not during the Marcus dictatorship, but by the success of the Edward Lansdale, Ramon Magsaysai, covert operations, the Central Intelligence Agency. But yeah, yeah, let's zoom in on Marcus and then I'll go back to that.

So, yeah, historians have, you know, they talk about the long 60s as the decades following World War II, which witnessed the radicalization that was founded on. a very strong global wave of Marxist-inspired national liberation struggles. And these years were marked by massive political actions, both radical and reactionary. And, you know, that's globally, but also in the Philippines, there was the reestablishment of the Communist Party of the Philippines in 1968. and this was followed by the founding of the New People's Army in 1969 in Central Luzon and the Bang Zamoro Army led Muslim separatist movement in Mindanao.

And these became threats to U.S. interests and a section of, you know, the oligarchy represented by Ferdinand Marcos. and his presidency lasted from, I believe, 1965 to 1986, right? And then there was a competing faction of the ruling elite that was represented by Benigno Aquino. He was a senator. He became the face of mainstream opposition at the time in the 80s, and it complemented the revolutionary anti-imperialist and separatist movements. So on parallel grounds, those forces assailed anti-imperialist interests and challenged the conduct of the ruling elite or, you know, how they govern the country. So this particular history shows how the Marcus rule was really, it was neither an exception nor a self-contained phenomenon, as I argued elsewhere.

It was a logical outcome of U.S. counterinsurgency state organizing and subsidizing a faction of the ruling oligarchy so that they can, you know, they can crush counter or contain counter-hegemonic forces in the post-war period and the so-called American peace or Pax Americana. So, yeah, so this meant the constant. onset sabotage of any program for national liberation and self-determination from the Katipunan, the hooks, the new people's army, and the Bangsamoro struggle through various regimes from Aguinaldo to Duterte and to the current Marcus Jr. regime. So I think it's crucial to really take into account the evolution of the Philippine, oligarchy and how it is intertwined with the history of continuing U.S. military control of the Philippines, right? So, you know, so when we talk about military control in this sense,

it's not only a set of military agreements, right, that allowed for the U.S. basis to be here and that now allows for, you know, U.S. arm supply to the Philippine Army. and U.S. troops who train with Filipino soldiers, even with the IDF. So the project of a U.S. global hegemony that reached the Philippine shores in the late 19th century is intertwined with the history of capitalist accumulation, right, from a free market to its imperialist face. So, you know, U.S. global militarism is both a partner and an outcome of the world systems, the world capitalist systems, reliance on the military sector for the regulation of its own crisis-ridden business cycles. So to accumulate process amidst systemic economic crisis, U.S. imperialism promotes counterinsurgency, not just war, but counterinsurgency as a permanent state policy.

So this entails the continued recruitment of Philippine bureaucrats from oligarchic families who will continue the stability or who will ensure the stability of unequal exchange and global, U.S. global militarism through the implementation of counter-insurgency. Before Adnan goes in with the next question, I just want to plug another episode that we have. So Sarah mentioned the hooks in the New People's Army. We have one of my favorite episodes that we've ever done in interview with Joma Sison talking about the hooks and the form. formation of the new people's army, as well as his involvement in each of those movements, particularly in the formation of the new people's army, was a fairly large portion of that

interview. That was one of our earlier episodes, but we did remaster it shortly after his passing, which would have been last winter, I believe last December. So listeners, be sure to check out that episode that we did with Comrade Joma Sison, and you can listen to the remastered edition, which has all of the audio cleaned up and sounding excellent. So Adnan, I will turn it over to here now after making that appeal to the listeners to check out that episode. Yeah, thanks so much for that very interesting answer that brought up the whole question of counterinsurgency as a kind of permanent condition of the Philippine state. And one thing that I noticed in the, you know, as a point of emphasis in your account of this history is that

the present Philippine military is something that has emerged and arisen, you know, as an adjunct to U.S. military domination in the region in the Philippines. And as a result, it has kind of further advanced the effects and consequences of U.S. militarism through as almost as a proxy or an allied, you know, force that has been constructed. And so I wanted to pick up and ask a little bit more about some of the consequences, particularly for women of this permanent counterinsurgency footing that the militarism itself and the lack of sovereignty itself has created, of course, resistance, as you pointed out, over the decades, over this long history, and that that resistance has been the kind of conditions under which continued domestic militarism and

imposing, it's not just that the presence that they're used military bases for the large geopolitical condition that you mentioned, but as you were emphasizing, it has these terrible consequences domestically in terms of making, you know, philippa. populations who resist or who want to assert sovereignty themselves, enemies of both U.S. and the Philippine militaries continuing counterinsurgency. So maybe you could talk a little bit more about what has happened in terms of this kind of history of counterinsurgency and particularly the consequences, which is different from some of the other kinds of effects that you mentioned. And we should come back and elaborate on further about, you know, sex trafficking around the bases and, you know, human rights abuses and so forth.

But broadly speaking within the frame of counterinsurgency, what has been the kind of consequences and effects on Philippine society and in particularly women as a result of this ongoing and continuing counterinsurgency policy and program? Yeah, well, actually, women bear the brunt of basically militarization, especially in the countryside, right? Where, you know, their husbands would usually are, they're farmers, but at the same time, they become leaders of, say, organic farming associations. And these are severely red-tagged or tagged as terrorists by the military. And of course, women in the countryside are themselves farmers or peasants, right? So they have to deal with having to make sure that, you know, their husbands go back to the farm or they're able to, you know, try to aid or help their children, go to school and so on and so forth. So it really worsens the multiple burden on women, right? And of course, they also have to deal with, you know, a severely feudal and patriarchal culture in the countryside, right?

Also, I think counterinsurgency, broadly speaking, of course, it has a, it's a policy, it's a specific policy. But at the same time, it is something that also, it's an enabling condition for the role of the Philippine economy in the world market or its position in the world system. So basically counterinsurgency is a set of policies that's supposed to crush oppositional politics. But at the same time, there are ways in which this is super embedded in our culture so that the Philippines continues as an economic economy that exports both raw materials in labor, right? So you have, in popular culture, you have images of women as, you know, the ideal woman, the mother, you know, the sacrificing overseas Filipino worker as opposed to the prostituted woman or

the rebel and so on and so forth, right? But I think it's very much, it's almost like a bourgeois compradour campaign or a state campaign that we will be watching in telenovelas, you know, women and girls being socialized to become caregivers and nurses, etc. And that's really entrenched in our culture, how to socially reproduce an ideal, you know, feminine subject position, you know, a subject position that we can export, right? Because there's, you know, in the world where there's an equal exchange, we're supposed to be providing this particular labor force to the United States, to, you know, countries in Europe, even in Saudi Arabia, our nurses, and, you know, our domestic helpers, et cetera. And, you know, our domestic helpers, etc. And we pay the cost for this.

Filipino people pay the cost for this. Like we send our girls to school, to nursing school and so on and so forth, or even to, you know, they finish college and they end up at call centers or BPO's that's dedicated to, you know, service people in the United States and so on and so forth. So, and this is the way that we should live, right? And we shouldn't be, like, joining activist organizations because these organizations are supposed to be terrorists. So there's really the systematic sabotage of oppositional politics, and which includes a systematic repression, you know, by the state, you know, by state agencies. So there's that. But also there's this, you know, there's this, you know, there's. this particular culture that is experienced by women on an everyday basis.

But I'd also like to talk about, you know, this formalized agency and state agency that's under the direction of the National Task Force to end local communist armed conflict or the infamous N.EF. Elback. So this was very recent. formed. It was formed in 2018 after Duterte scuttled the royal Norwegian government assisted peace talks

between the government of the Republic of the Philippines and the National Democratic Front. So this was basically the NTFL KAC is the mechanism by which there's this executive order by Duterte, EO7P,

and this is the institutionalization of the whole of nation approach, which of course is copied, hook line and sinker from the United States. So it's also implemented. So the NTFLC is, you know, there's a budget of initially $16 billion. And then it just blew, it kept ballooning, especially during the lockdown, the COVID lockdown from 2021 to 2022. So it's an adoption of the U.S. whole of nation approach. In fact, there's this very interesting article that I read, which troubleshoots the USWNA or the whole of nation approach as applied in, I think, four case studies in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Sudan, in Sudan, and particularly

in Mindanao. It doesn't say the Philippines, but Mindanao, right? It's a major island in the Philippines. So it stated that in the era of globalization, U.S. foreign policy is dominated by attempts to, you know, bring peace and stability in conflict-plagued areas. So, you know, we are made to believe that, you know, we are a place that's conflict-ridden, that our culture is problematic and so on. on and so forth and that our enemies are, you know, or the conflicts is really caused by the differences between ethnic minorities or even religious differences between the Christians and the Muslims, etc. So, yeah, so, you know, the NPF Elkhak under the whole of nation approach principles systematically targets and prosecutes critics of this regime, of the marco's regime and the Duterte regime through terror tagging or red tagging.

So how is it happening exactly? So they're labeling or they're calling the new people's army as a network of citizens that is supposedly or allegedly supporting communist, quote-unquote communist terrorist group. So it's a totalizing state-led political vilification of activities. And this has actually led the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, to really criticize this particular policy, right? So it's really, so it targets critics, but it also sends a message to the whole citizenry, right? And especially to women who, you know, were usually socialized to be, you know, not assertive, not aggressive,

and not to take on the public sphere and so on and so forth. So, yeah. That's a fascinating answer. The analysis that you're suggesting, maybe I can clarify and bring these threads a little bit together, but it seems to me what you're suggesting is that the counterinsurgency is able to build and kind of work by, exploiting a very gendered vision and inculcate a very gendered vision about women's roles and

so on to assist in the depoliticization in response to militarism, lack of sovereignty, all of these social and economic and political conditions that are so oppressive under the military weight of U.S. imperialism, but is able to use a gendered kind of a in some ways to short-circuit or circumvent political opposition while and thus invest in a lot of particular kinds of education and training that assists in positioning the Philippines in a global market and labor exchange that takes away resources, human resources, that could be used to remake and build the economy and society and just and fair ways within the Philippines to send a lot of workers outside in vulnerable conditions where they are exploited in places like

the Middle East. I've been in the Middle East for research and so on because that's the area I work in. And there's so many Philippine workers, women workers in particular, and caregivers. And that this is connected the way you were describing it also with this kind of explicit counterinsurgency anti-communist and anti and and and through this global war on terror whole nation approach to solving uh you know supposedly solving you know conflict ridden you know areas these all come together i mean what you were discussing was the way in which each of these actually interact to create, you know, a policy that enforces through this frame of counterinsurgency, not only a global labor regime, but also a geopolitical militarism

and U.S. empire in the regime. That was a very fascinating point that you brought those things all together. Well, and I would like to add to that, what you're mentioning. Thank you so much. Well, what you had talked about, Sarah, and what Adnan is putting out there is related to two points that I wanted to raise. So I'm just going to add them into what Adnan was saying and make the question particularly gigantic for you, Sarah. So, you know, when you're talking about this labor regime, it reminds me of the conversation that we had with our mutual friend, Sarah, Emmanuel Ness, on his book, Migration as Economic Imperialism. and we did talk about the case study of Filipino nurses being essentially exported to various countries and that being a source of exploitation and extraction of value from the Philippines.

But also when we're talking about counterinsurgency, and this is another one of those linkages that came up between what the two of you were saying, I had recently read a book that was out from Foreign Languages Press, Operation Green Hunt in India, social practices of the genocidal counterinsurgency strategy, hearts and minds. And it's this last part, hearts and minds that reminds me of some of the things that you're talking about. So what's discussed is that, you know, there is this counterinsurgency, a genocidal campaign taking place in that book in the case of India, but also we can look at the Philippines and how counterinsurgency just works. But this idea of how you are framing campaigns and the narrative surrounding the campaigns is also an

important thing that needs to be considered. So this idea of appealing to the hearts and minds during these campaigns is a very critical component of counterinsurgency campaigns. And in many of these cases, the role of women is a critical component. So you're talking each of you about the way that women's roles are conceived within these campaigns in order to de-radicalize and depoliticize women's roles and to enable for this extraction of value of women, and again, linking it to that labor regime. But then also, again, framing it as one, women are victims of political movements that are, you know, radical anti-establishment political movements. And at the same time, what we see when we actually analyze the effects

of counterinsurgency campaigns is that women in particular are disproportionately affected by them. But the narrative is one of, you know, protecting women and protecting the roles of women without the analysis of what actually the effect of such counterinsurgency campaigns is and the parallels between this case study of India and, again, a book that I just recently read for the sake of reading it, and what we're discussing here in the case of the Philippines is stark. We can really see those linkages. So just to put that out there in terms of terms of the narrative that is put forth about counterinsurgency campaigns versus the actual effective counterinsurgency campaigns and how that relates both within the

counterinsurgency campaign itself and its direct impact on women and within different political groups and communities within the Philippines, but then also how it feeds into this labor regime, that linkage that we were talking about as well, I think is quite interesting. So I just wanted to add that in there. Yeah. Thank you. Great. Henry. Well, so maybe we can move to talking a little bit more about some of the consequences and effects that you outlined at the very start in broad terms. You know, there were health impacts. There were the emergence of, you know, sex trafficking, there were human rights abuses, and particularly how it affects women in militarism. I'm wondering if maybe we can talk a little bit more about

some of the specifics that have emerged as a result of U.S. troop presence in the Philippines, these nine E.DCA, you know, bases, let's just say, their bases, clearly they've renamed them to try and, you know, confuse people or suggest. I mean, and I was reading this, I just have to come back to this. I was reading this like announcement by, you know, the U.S. Department of Defense about those four new one. new ones that were being created, and this is from April 23 when they were announced, and I guess very rapidly they have been established and built and so on,

but they talk about them as, you know, this cooperation and that the United States and Philippines have stood shoulder to shoulder as friends and allies for more than seven decades, unwavering in our treaty commitments and our shared vision. for a more peaceful, secure, and prosperous region, you know, and how they talk about it as modernizing. It's going to spur economic growth and bring investments and job opportunities in these provinces. And so it's this rosy picture of development, you know, as if this is the way development takes place, when in fact, of course, militarism is a de-developer, as we were just talking, you know, about. And so I'm wondering if maybe you can pick up and talk a little bit more about, you know, what are the negative consequences?

and effects to society and economy, particularly on women, and we can elaborate on some of those four main areas that you mentioned, but perhaps a little bit more on that social and economic kind of components of how it reorients economies away from productive things to things, like you were mentioning, that a lot of people have criticism of is dependent, you know, sorts of, you know, providing kind of small-scale services, you know, and provisioning and so on for these military installations, but also sex work and sex trafficking and so on. Perhaps you could elaborate a little bit more and we can go deeper into that topic. Right.

You've mentioned shoulder-to-shoulder exercises. So this is Balikatan exercises. This is a series of joint military training operations between the Philippines and the United States. and they aim to enhance, as you said, you know, the interoperability and readiness across critical areas like external defense operations. Well, they mentioned cyber defense and humanitarian assistance. So again, a few days ago, they were saying that, you know, they were trying to, you know, come up with the propaganda about these edgar sites that they're being used for, you know, to help. the victims of the Typhoon Christine. So, you know, so these Baliketan exercises have been conducted annually

since the beginning of the millennium, 2000. And its latest iteration, Balikatan 2024, involved over 16,000 service members from both the Philippines and the U.S. And there are, I think, observers from France and Japan in Australia. So this large-scale military operations actually lead to displacement from temporary to permanent displacement of communities, including farmers. And of course, this affect land use patterns, right? And this has really, apart from hamleting or militarization in the countryside where, you know, like where community members, are being driven off of their houses

so that they can build they can install mining mining companies and so on and so forth. Large-scale militarization have actually pushed a rural population to urban centers,

not just Metro Manila, but urban centers in the different regions. And this has really resulted in the ballooning of the semi-proletariat, you know, or, you know, the phenomenon of deep peasantization, which means that militarism, which is not just Balikatan exercises, but which includes counterinsurgency because there's U.S. aid for counterinsurgency, right? So militarism has really, is really the main cause for the movement from, you know, the periphery to the urban centers. And this has

resulted in exploitable labor, especially the labor of women. Most of them are, of course, jobless. When they basically go to the urban areas, they want to seek jobs. But when they start working for, say, expert processing zones or or, you know, and, you know, similar, similar arrangements or similar production arrangements, they end up getting lower wages compared to their male counterpart. So most of them also engage in informal work, like in beauty parlors, they become, and the Philippine government has a way of absorbing this, of managing this crisis. So it will be training women how to basically do some manicure and pedicure, et cetera. So gendered labor, there's nothing wrong with it.

But it's exploitable, you know. It's below minimum wage, right? And it has everything to do with this, with this military exercises. And apart from this, of course, This military exercises have armed the environment, and this has affected agricultural productivity and farmers' livelihoods. And these factors have been really compelled mothers to look for other means of how to support their children in urban centers. You're talking about also the chemicals that are being related to the military. It does remind me that we have to talk about health specifically and the fact that the health

of women is particularly vulnerable when it comes to some of these associated effects of military, not only intervention, but the chemicals associated with military presence, something that it also reminds me of in terms of how women are particularly vulnerable. I remember quite distinctly from my undergrad. One of my best friends in undergrad was a Palestinian woman who we were active together and some Palestinian solidarity organizations together. And during our undergrad research, we would often talk about the work that we were doing. Mine was in biology.

Hers was in the confluence of public health and sociology. And one of the things that she was studying was the effect on the onset of menarche, which is the age of the first period for girls in places where U.S. intervention had taken place, particularly in the Middle East. And now the interesting thing is, and I know that this is like getting us a little bit away from the topic, but I do want to bring it up because it was quite interesting research that was being done by my friend. Not only was there dramatic impacts on the onset of monarchy in terms of the age and the regularity, depending on whether or not the U.S. was intervening in a location, but those impacts are also seen generationally.

What I mean by that is that we would see epigenetic-related impacts, where when the U.S. military would be involved in destabilizing and having a major impact as a result of bombing campaigns or invasions, not only were the girls who were going through that, period of life themselves impacted, but their children, and even in some cases looking in some regions where the military intervention had taken place 50 years previously, the children of the children of the people who were growing up during that military intervention were still seeing impacts on the onset of monarchy. Again, this goes to epigenetics, which I'm not going to talk about too much here, because it's not the point of this episode. But the point

is, is that what we see here is that young girls, in particular, were directly susceptible in a very easy to find way generationally as a result of military intervention. Now, if we also think about military presence more generally, one of the things that you mentioned, your last answer, Sarah, was the presence of chemicals associated with the military. And this also goes back to another conversation that we had, Earth's greatest enemy with Mike Prysner about the documentary that they were putting together about the impact environmentally of the U.S. military. But one of the things that we talked about in that was not only the environmental impact, but also the health impact of some of these forever chemicals and whatnot that are heavily,

and in some cases exclusively for military usage. And we're not talking about chemicals that are released as a result of dropping a bomb. We're talking about just things that the military uses even at a time of quote unquote peace. So the presence of the military in these communities and around these communities is contributing to putting these chemicals into the ground, into the foods, into the communities that are then impacted. And as you mentioned, Sarah, some of your work is related to how the health of women is impacted by military presence. So this really, really long preamble, which I apologize for, was just as a way of setting up for you to talk about some of the ways that you see. the health of women being impacted as a result of military presence within the communities that you've looked at. Well, that's one of the most understudied phenomenon in terms of, you know, women's health would be the impact of U.S. military basis,

especially since, you know, these areas in Subic, for example, or in Clark, Pampanga, you know, we have a very poor public health system, right? So it's really also difficult to gather data in terms of to what extent, say, the waste, uranium waste, being thrown into the sea and so on and so forth. And all of these toxic waste, toxic waste, have continued to affect women and children, right? So this is really, I think, one of, you know, it should be a priority in terms of really coming up with a study that directly, that makes a direct correlation between, you know, women's health and the presence of all of this U.S. military facilities, U.S. bases, and so on. could talk about another, well, impact on women and on culture that's really, how is it? It has really created a very, how do you say, misogynist and a distorted sort of aspiration for Filipino women.

I hate to talk about this, right? But there's really this how it's even a joke in, you know, in everyday culture that when a Filipino woman is seen with, say, a white person or a white serviceman, it's like, it's the expression is something translatable to aim high, aim high pinai, or another compatriot is about to lift herself up from poverty. And that's, I think it's very culturally and ideologically pernicious because it dovetails this whole idea of, say, modernization that if we continue to, you know, welcome, you know, the U.S. basis, welcome U.S. foreign policy and so on and so forth, then we're supposed to be, you know, we're supposed to develop. And something like that is also happening on

an everyday basis that has really, that affects how, say, ordinary Filipino women think about, you know, their future or their aspirations, right? Or how, say, leaving the Philippines, working abroad, et cetera, is a, is desirable, you know, or how, say, the, you know, how the military business. or how these actually already existing U.S. military facilities provide some kind of, you know, economic movement in a very poor community. So there's that. Ordinary people, not, not, you know, ordinary Filipinos are not automatically against U.S. military bases. In fact, many consider this as an economic opportunity on account of joblessness and gladlessness. Yeah, well, that comes back to a question that I wanted to take up again a little bit more that we touched upon,

which was about the socioeconomic kind of reorienting or the direction of development of economic and social development that takes place in the context of militarism and these bases and so on. on. But I did want to mention that, you know, Henry mentioned all of these episodes that we've had that do deal with the question of the U.S. military and its environmental effects. And it reminded me that we also have an episode about the Red Hill fuel facility of the U.S. Navy in Hawaii. And we had an episode where we discussed that topic with Mikey from the Oahu water protectors. And it's a very analogous kind of situation about how there was contamination of the water and indigenous peoples on the island are suffering the effects, the myriad effects of U.S. military hegemony on the

island of Hawaii, which of course is a, you know, an island in the Pacific as well. And so there's a lot of analogies that the U.S. military network of bases, you know, of course we know around the world, there's, you know, close to a thousand facilities, but, you know, the Pacific region in particular is one that is dominated by U.S. military facilities and hegemony. And so I just wanted to remind listeners of that. And just say there's a lot of threads that connect, you know, the experience of other U.S. colonial possessions direct and incorporated into the United States in the Pacific Theater and those that have nominal independence like the Philippines, but they have this long history of being dominated colonally, you know, under colonialism. And

then even in the era of their independence, there's serious consequences as we've been talking about, about, you know, local and national sovereignty. But maybe we could come back to that kind of question of the way in which U.S. military bases and the militarism of that it fosters in the Philippine Army affects the socioeconomic orientation of the Philippines. And it's a theme we've touched upon in some of our answers. But perhaps we can do more to talk about those conflicts. Because as you just mentioned, there's a lot of people who feel that they have economic interest in servicing the U.S. military facilities and that it undermines political solidarity for removing U.S. military presence or opposing it because some people feel

that, well, they can do business, they can provide services, they can supply them, and maybe they might purchase some local supplies. And, you know, there are some people who even think of it a lot like a tourist economy, like, oh, we've got these foreigners coming and spending money in our country, you know, but this has big consequences and effects for a national economy. And so maybe you could talk a little bit more about what are some of the economic consequences and, you know, especially for women and women's work, you know, of this, of U.S. military presence and militarism of Philippine society. Well, there's this one case, especially in Mindanao, I think there's this really huge U.S. military presence in that area being the last frontier, being the richest island in the Philippines.

It's also doubted as the most conflict-ridden area. But, of course, that's an imperialist campaign. And what's interesting is that this is also an area where there are, the most, it hosts over 600 mining contracts, right? Even, I think, more to this day. And of course, you cannot do that unless you cannot actually just basically create a, you actually have to displace a whole village to build a, a mining company, and these are ancestral domains of the different tribes in Mindanao that call themselves, that constituted themselves the Lumad. So basically, this is very interesting in the sense that mining, I think, has a different, this particular, it has a distinct circuit of capital in the sense that it employs

nature, right? Nature's contribution to value creation. Like, for example, if you mine ore, nickel, and so on and so forth, these are not necessarily finished products, right? So you would need to militarize that whole area. The strongest hold of U.S. militarism would be Mindenau, and there are U.S. servicemen in that area. And so children, mothers and their fathers are, you know, they're all being deployed to these mining companies, right? Of course, what they mine under the ground goes into all sorts of, you know, technology for war, right? for U.S. war, and for that to happen, for, for, you know, to support all of this, you know, basically the U.S. military industrial complex, you would need to, you know, basically displace the indigenous population in Mindanao, right? This is a case where, you know, analysts, economists, even progressive or radical political economists would say that there was, how do they call it, the industrialization in the U.S.

And they transferred production to, you know, China and other places in the global south. But mining is different because you don't necessarily produce something, right? you come up with, you mine raw materials, and this directly translates into the creation of weapons of war, right? But, you know, it's rare that, you know, people make this connection between how militarism in a periphery or in a semi-colony like the Philippines is so important in order for the U.S. to maintain its global hegemony, its global military hegemony, because actually you would need all of these minerals under the ground, you know, you would need our land, right, to create weapons of mass destruction, to create technology to surveil people and so on and so forth. So it just, it's, it's, it's, it's very stark. It's, it's super, it's super connected.

And, yeah, and I think it's, it's important in the sense that it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it's, it, it's, it, it's, it, it's, it spoils our land, uh, it, it's, uh, it's, it's, our land, uh, it's, uh, it's, uh, it's spoils our land. It really causes the destruction of nature here in the Philippines. Well, speaking of connections, you've been quite generous with your time, Sarah, but we have one final question, which is on connections and solidarity in women's resistance to militarism. So as we mentioned at the beginning, you're involved in some activist groups that are majority women or some exclusively women against militarism. And of course, this is an international struggle against militarism. And many of these organizations that you are a part of are involved with international solidarity

against militarism. So if you can, in closing this conversation out, discuss the importance of thinking about resisting militarism as an international process and ways in which we can connect struggle within a national context like the Philippines with the international struggle against militarism in places as far as widely spread as Latin America, the Philippines and Palestine and how all of these, you know, are related and need to be considered to be related processes in the way in which we confront them. Right.

So, but in the past, I think a year and a half, our buy-in has been engaged in really not launching, but relaunching a campaign against U.S. imperialism and we've been in conversation with women leaders like Lisa Masa. We've been in conversation with Lila Filipina, the advocates for comfort women during the Japanese period. We've been in constant conversation with Gabriela. And I think what I've learned particularly from, you know, from women from these sectors is that, you know, in our meetings, in our conversations and educational discussion, it's almost always the case that a woman activist would assert that, you know, U.S. imperialism is the number one enemy of the Filipino people. And, you know,

it's the, and it's basically being the number one enemy of the Filipino people, it is the principal target of the Philippine revolution for national and social liberation. So that's very clear in the speeches, in the interventions of women from the grassroots. And recently there's been this focus on what I've mentioned. mentioned earlier as the conflict between China and the Philippines, which I think is very important because, you know, as I've said, it's being used by the U.S. to justify its military presence, not just in the Philippines, but basically it's armed sale to Taiwan to escalate tensions in in the region.

So if you, you know, talk to our women leaders, you know, leaders from farmers organizations, workers organizations, they would say that the conflict between the Philippines and China in the South China Sea is an internal problem. And the U.S. has, you know, no business in intervening in this particular conflict. And the Philippines can, and, you know, they've also, or we have also learned from our comrades in different, you know, activists from Vietnam and Malaysia who talk about, you know, sorting out their maritime problems with China through diplomatic approaches. So, like, you know, our comrades from Vietnam, from Malaysia, this is what they do. The U.S. is really, how do you say, is using this particular conflict in the Philippines to justify or to drag us into its anti-China aggression. And of course, women's organization in the Philippines are anti-war and not just anti-war, but anti-imperialist, anti-war organizations. Yeah. So basically, another way of saying it is that what I've learned from the women's movement off late, and especially in this regional, what is starting to become a regional conflict in the Asia Pacific is that our contradiction with the United States is a principal contradiction.

Meaning, when we say principle, it's not just, I don't just mean it's primary, but we mean it to be antagonistic and it cannot be settled through diplomatic means. That's why there's civil war in the Philippines. You have women engage in the people's war in the countryside building organs of political power. and it could only be our antagonism with U.S. imperialists can only be settled through a revolution. Meanwhile, our contradiction with China is non-antagonistic. It's secondary in the sense that it's non-antagonistic and can be settled through, you know,

peaceful means through negotiations or diplomacy. But it can actually become antagonistic because you have, you know, local, reactionaries. And there are also women reactionaries in power and who are, you know, and the U.S. can use them as, you know, as proxy against China, just like, you know, how Ukraine is being used by the U.S. as proxy against Russia. So in other words, the women's movement here in the Philippines have been very sensitive to the history of U.S. endless wars. Not only, you know, now it's unfolding in the present,

but, you know, our experience with our entanglement with the United States. So, and with that, I would like to, you know, probably, how do you say, conclude these, basically how we're organizing ourselves here in the Philippines, how we're approaching U.S. global militarism, and that it's really very important for us to lift up the women's movement and the anti-war movement. And not only, you know, it's an anti-war movement that is anti-imperialist, and it's an anti-imperialist movement that honors the people. People's War in the different regions in the country. Absolutely fantastic.

Again, listeners, our guest was Sarah Raimundo, who's a faculty member at University of Philippines, Dilliman Center for International Studies, activists that buy on the new Patriotic Alliance. International League of People's Struggles and an editorial board member of the journal for labor and society. Sarah, it was a pleasure having you on the program. Is there anywhere that you would like us to direct the listeners to, to, to, find more of your work. Henry, Adnan, thank you

so much. The pleasure is mine. I've learned so much from you also. I hope I could get a raw copy of this one, right? I write forbulatlatlatte.com. It's an

progressive platform, online platform Bulatlatte, so you can just search it. I'm on some social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, but I'm sometimes on and off. Well, we'll have all of that linked in the show notes so that the listeners can find it. And, of course, we will make sure that you have a copy of this conversation as well before we post it publicly. Adnan, how can the listeners find you and your other excellent podcast?

Well, you can find me on Twitter at Adnan A. Hussain. H-U-S-A-I-N, and I can be intermittent also, but when the mood inspires, I get active and post-furiously. So you can catch up with me there, and if you have time, you can listen to the M-H-L-L-I-S podcast that I host on the Middle East Islamic World, Muslim Diaspras, and I do have plans for new episodes lining up some guests, so look forward to that. I know. I am looking forward to it. And listeners, you certainly are as well. As for me, you can find me on Twitter at Huck-1995, H-U-C-K-1-9-95. You can find the program on Twitter at Gorilla-U-E-R-R-I-L-A underscore pod to keep up to date with everything that we're doing individually and collectively. And you can help support the show and allow us to continue making episodes like this by going to Patreon.com forward slash Gorr. history. Again, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. And until next time, listeners, Solidarity. Thank you.