Less augury than symptom, the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic betokens a profound crisis of the neoliberal capitalist global order. Over four million people worldwide have died, 609 thousand in the U.S., 539 in Brazil, and 413 in India (as of July 15, 2021). Variants are multiplying, with no end in sight. People of color, the poor and marginalized everywhere, suffer more than the propertied, as usual. We transitioned from 9/11 “disaster” and “global war on terrorism” to the 2008 meltdown of casino/finance capital without much retribution—except the misery of the impoverished millions. Perhaps the survivors are now regrouping and strategizing their next moves to overturn the predatory, iniquitous system, as witnessed in Colombia, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, and Myanmar.

Crisis is essential to capitalism as a way of what Marx called “the forcible adjustment of all the contradictions of capitalism” (Harvey 2014, xiii). Dispossession as capital accumulation, creative destruction, profitable waste—such are the paradoxes, antinomies, aporias that litter the postmodern landscape. Antagonism between the few plutocratic managers of the security/surveillance state and the redundant majority are bound to sharpen as we face worldwide discontent—witness the mass mobilization after George Floyd’s killing and the campus protests against summary deportation of migrants to El Salvador’s Gulag. Aside from the pandemic, we are distraught by drought, fires, floods, and all sorts of natural disasters wreaking havoc on economies and lives in many continents, on top of internecine and multilateral conflicts for control of markets, resources, territories, hopes, dreams, etc.

What we are facing now is, however, quite unprecedented. It is not rebellion from the exploited masses but an ecological catastrophe that capitalist globalization cannot stop, much less prevent from worsening since it has exacerbated the process of disintegration. Commodity-fetishism reigns supreme. Mike Davis has incisively diagnosed our current predicament: “We see a world system of accumulation everywhere breaking down traditional boundaries between animal diseases and humans, increasing the power of drug monopolies, proliferating carcinogenic waste, subsidizing oligarchy and undermining progressive governments committed to public health, destroying traditional communities (both industrial and preindustrial) and turning the oceans into sewers. Market solutions leave in place Dickensian social conditions and perpetuate the global shame of income-limited access to clean water and sanitation.” Davis sums up the convergent crises of our civilization as “defined by capitalism’s inability to generate incomes for the majority of humanity, to provide jobs and meaningful social roles, end fossil fuel emissions, and translate revolutionary biological advances into public health….The super-capitalism of today has become an absolute fetter on the development of the productive forces necessary for our species survival” (2020).

The implications of this planetary upheaval was recently spelled out by the U.S. National Intelligence Council in its report, “Global Trends 2040.” Not only disruption of international trade would ensue but also an erosion of the world-order, fragmentation, polarization. Distrust and skepticism toward hegemonic institutions would intensify, calling for “alternative providers of governance” (Barnes 2021). Racial, ethnic and national divisions would multiply and deepen. Global politics would be more volatile and contentious, as evidenced by the exacerbated confrontation between China and the United States. But, unfortunately, the conclusion of this report appeals to the corporate elite, the State technocrats, to be “anticipatory rather than reactionary,” and solve the crises (Editorial, The New York Times, 2021). What about the rebellion of the Green parties and the coalition of indigenous communities defying corporate rapacity?

Rumblings from the “Belly of the Beast”

All accounts of the public response to the pandemic have praised the front-liners, the doctors, nurses, and health-care workers in hospitals, for their dedication. The economist Joseph A. Lim summarized the impact of the 2020 pandemic to which the government responded with a hard 3-month lockdown called “Enhanced Community Quarantine.” This resulted in “the highest unemployment and the biggest fall in GDP on the second quarter of 2020” (Lim 2020). It also contributed to the rise of involuntary hunger from 2.9 million families in June 2022 to 7.5 million families in March 2025, according to Social Weather Stations survey data (IBON 2025), a crisis attributable to persistent low incomes, depressed family living wages, and the exorbitant price of food.

 The pandemic’s toll on Filipino nurses in the United States, however, signaled the racialized, unequal burden shared by this group. As of September 2020, 67 Filipino nurses had died of Covid-19, a third of total registered nurses nationwide, though they made up only four percent of nurses overall. Why is this so? Because in the colonized periphery, “an American curriculum as early as 1907 granting degrees to English-speaking nurses who could slot easily into American hospitals” prepared the subalterns for such emergencies (Powell 2021, 30). With the severe staffing shortage in the 1980s due to the AIDs epidemic, recruitment of Filipino nurses for New York and San Francisco hospitals allowed thousands to secure visas. However, since then, this group has earned less than the majority of Americans of the same educational level (Catholic Institute 1987, 44-48), typical of a racialized system of redistribution and social recognition.

 About 3.4 million Filipino Americans constitute the second largest group of Asians in the U.S., with over 310,000 undocumented persons (Aquino 2017). Sixty percent of Filipino-Americans are women due to the feminization of exported labor as part of Philippine growth strategy. In 2008, we find 666,000 Filipino-born female workers employed in civilian labor, with 22.9 percent reported working as registered nurses. The plight of women serves as an index to the prostituted condition of globalized Filipino labor (Tadiar 1998; Aguilar 2024; for peasant women, see Lindio-McGovern 1997). Throughout over a hundred years of linkage between the neocolony and its imperial tutor, scholars have concluded that Filipinos “endured discrimination, race-based violence, and a series of restrictive federal legislation impacting civil rights and immigration” (Morelli, Trinidad and Alboroto 2020). Nothing to be surprised about, given the pattern of discrimination and exclusion experienced by migrant ethnic labor from Asia and other underdeveloped countries.

 Filipino migrant labor in the United States contributed to capital accumulation in Hawaii and the West Coast soon after U.S. “pacification” of the islands in the Filipino-American War of 1899-1913. But instead of social recognition, they encountered prejudice and ostracism. Historians often cite the notorious Watsonville, California 4-day-riots of December 1929 when white vigilantes attacked Filipino farm workers and killed one of them with impunity (Takaki 1989, 327-28). The martyred worker Fermin Tobera was hailed a hero when his body was interred in his homeland.This is only one of many violent incidents that distinguished the militant Filipino presence in the imperial heartland where their leadership of multiethnic union strikes—from the Hawaii sugar plantations to the grape-farms of California in the Sixties—prefigured the multiracial Civil-Rights mobilization of the last quarter of the twentieth-century.

With ironic pathos, the Watsonville riot has been forgotten by Filipinos who now celebrate assimilation as White House chef, Disneyland entertainers, social-media rock stars, etc. With Trump’s canard about “kung-flu” stigmatizing all Asian-looking folks, Filipinos are now targeted as easy scapegoats. Vilma Kari, a 65-year-old Filipina woman, was attacked on a street near Times Square, mid-Manhattan, New York City Three onlookers turned their backs on her (Hong et al, 2021, A15). Earlier, Filipino residents as well as Chinese-American women were assaulted in New York City and California as alien-looking migrants, carriers of the deadly virus from Wuhan, China. Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders have suddenly lost their “model-minority aura” and, with fear and trembling, now call for solidarity over and above class, ethnic or religious differences. They need triage and sanctuary from white-supremacist injury and death-threats.

 Given the nationwide alarm over accelerating hate-crimes, the hashtag “#StopAsianHate” went viral on Twitter. Viet Thanh Nguyen (2021), the award-winning novelist, urged a common political identity for Black Americans, Muslims, Latinos and LGBTQ people to unite together for a decolonizing agenda. Without any warning, the massacre of six women of Asian descent in the Atlanta, Georgia spa, triggered a universal outcry and stirred the White House and Congress to take action. But with the Biden administration focusing on China as the prime enemy that needs to be controlled or contained, how feasible can the task of decolonizing Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders succeed in halting racialized imperial aggression around the world? In any case, pious teary-eyed wolves guarding sheep are hardly reassuring.

Limahong’s Inscrutable Descendants?

In the context of the end of neoliberal globalization, I recount in this book the U.S. conquest of the Philippines by bloody subjugation. Over one million dead Filipinos, unfortunately, were not able to enjoy McKinley’s “Benevolent Assimilation.” Regarded as the “first Vietnam,” the colonizing adventure inaugurated the start of U.S. imperial expansion into Asia, specifically China (San Juan 2007, 1-66). It was an earnest step in fulfilling the “civilizing mission” or “White Men’s Burden,” to quote Kipling’s poem written expressly as white-supremacist defense of U.S. aggression in the Philippines. Vladimir Lenin noted that “in annexing the Philippines, the United States cheated Filipino leader Aguinaldo by promising the country independence.” Apropos of Wilson’s 1918 “Fourteen Points” affirming self-determination for all nations, Lenin observed that “most peculiarly, your demands say nothing…about the liberation of the Philippines” (Institute of Oriental Studies 1978, 412-13). Lenin’s remark, as well as that of Rosa Luxemburg, were only  footnotes to Mark Twain’s censure of U.S. butchery of the recalcitrant natives, among them 900 Moro men, women and children at Mount Dajo, on March 9, 1906 (1992, 168-78; for U.S. atrocities in Samar, Philippines, see Wendland 2022, 149-152). The carnage persists with the help of U.S. drones, missiles, logistics, and U.S. Special Forces in the total destruction of Marawi City in May-June 2017, one of Duterte’s signal accomplishments.

 After World War II, the Philippines served as the convenient springboard for intervention in the Korean and IndoChina War at the height of the Cold War.  In 1957, U.S. foreign policy expert Vera Micheles Dean lauded Western colonialism as the midwife of a “plural society” while she lamented the death of the anticommunist, CIA-sponsored Ramon Magsaysay (1957, 180-85).  The process of neocolonization has been fully described by Daniel B. Schirmer (1987) and Jonathan Fast (1973), with the latter demonstrating the total cooptation of the comprador elite as satraps of U.S. suzerainty up to today. This should belie all preposterous claims about Philippine postcoloniality.  After the IndoChina conflict, another expert William McCord touted Fukuyama’s apocalyptic triumph of market liberalism. At the same time, he bewailed the autocrat Ferdinand Marcos’ wasting of the great potential of the islands, making it “the economic basket case of Pacific Asia” (1991, 57), while its industrialized neighbors prospered tremendously. The basket case may now be unsalvageable, plunged deeply in more dire circumstances.

 The February 1986 “People Power” revolt may be deemed more as cautionary farce than tragicomedy. After Marcos, the Aquino regime returned to the neofeudal, cacique-led democracy bequeathed by U.S. neocolonialism (O’Brien 1990; Bauzon 1991; Sison 2015) and retooled by her successors from General Fidel Ramos to the rapacious Arroyo and the shifty, vicious Duterte. The once-vaunted “showcase of democracy” for the Free World now serves again to project U.S. power as Washington pivots to the Asia-Pacific region. China is now the new upstart Leviathan to confront and contain, hence the strategic value of the archipelago, in particular the sea lanes next to the contested reefs and isles of the West Philippine Sea. Inaugurated when the Philippines became the “second front” after Afghanistan/Iraq in combating Islamic extremism, this new role for the archipelago was reaffirmed by then President Trump’s visit to Manila and Clark Field military base in February 2017. Boasting of the U.S. devastation of Japan in World War II, Trump threatened the People’s Republic of North Korea with “fire and fury,” a more savage version of the genocidal campaign against Filipinos in pursuit of the brutalizing “Manifest Destiny.”

 Meanwhile, the war against the Abu Sayyaf and other extremists continues as the rationale for the operations of heavily armed U.S.Special Forces with their drones and logistics. Aside from the installation of additional missile-launching sites in scattered regions of the Philippines, the former U.S. military bases in Clark and Subic Bay have been refurbished as counter-insurgency centers against anyone protesting corporate plunder of the neocolony’s human and natural resources. Duterte’s corrupt demagogic rule was supported by U.S. military aid, logistics and advisers in its campaign against drug dealers as well as against terrorists/communists (the terms are interchangeable). This highly publicized campaigns functioned as pretexts to justify a Plan-Colombia mode of U.S. intervention. This was fully evident in the U.S. participation in the destruction of Marawi City, Mindanao, as well as in the ruthless bombing and massacre of peasants, especially the villages of Lumads, Manobos, and other indigenes located in the rich mineral lands and forests of Mindanao.

Passage Through Unchartered Waters

Of crucial importance is the controversy over scattered islands in the West Philippine Sea which China claims while building military installations on them presumably to safeguard the shipping lanes. This move is a flagrant rejection of the 2016 judgment of the Hague Permanent Court of Arbitration favoring Philippine jurisdiction over the disputed zone. The fishing grounds around the Scarborough Shoal (Panatag Island), Spratley Islands, and various reefs all lie within the Philippine Exclusive Zone. However, China has ordered its coast guard fleet and armed militia to intimidate and drive away Filipino fishing boats. Duterte had publicly abandoned protecting the territorial integrity of the nation he had sworn to uphold—a stark display of treason that, in other sovereign states, would have summoned the firing squad without much ado. The recent U.S. “pivot to Asia” has converted this region into a powder-keg, a veritable tinderbox, for a shooting match between two nuclear-powered states (already trading belligerent accusations) in which the Philippines may prove to be simply “collateral damage” (for the Indo-Pacific geopolitical import, see Bellamy and Clark 2024; for Duterte’s policy, see Rivera, Simbulan and Tuazon 2018).

 For over a year now,  over a hundred million Filipinos have suffered the ravages of pandemic due to the militarized abuses and criminal negligence of the Duterte regime, with the State apparatus practically managed by police and army officials, retired officers, and their entourage of parasitic minions. The scourge of the planet continues to ravage the neocolony. As of July 2021, 1,181 deaths due to Covid-19 have been reported. Up to now, there are no organized vaccination campaigns, no accessible mass testing, no provision of adequate medical facilities such as public hospitals and clinics. Given the incompetent, avaricious bureaucracy, it is impossible to expect any humane community-oriented and rights-based approach to the pandemic. Unrelieved unemployment, widespread poverty, hunger, hopelessness and misery seem to be the unsavory prospect of millions for the future.

 Meanwhile, with his tenure ending (this report was completed in 2021), Duterte is gearing to manipulate the 2022 elections to insure his impunity from the International Criminal Court’s ongoing investigation. As we noted above, this failed because of the break-up of his collusion with the Marcos dynasty. Even in detention at The Hague, Duterte has no scruples admitting that he authorized the killings. Everyone seems to concur that Duterte’s “crimes against humanity” are horrific. They include staggered atrocities, particularly tens of thousands killed during the drug-war crusade and extra-judicial killings of opponents ranging from priests (e.g. Fr. Rustico Luna Tan of Missionaries of the Sacred Heart, Cebu, is the most recent), civil-society activists, human rights defenders, farmers, workers, students, professionals, and lumpen elements. Specifically targeted are the indigenous communities of Tumandoks in Panay, and the Lumads and Manobos in Mindanao, with Lumad families, particularly children in schools being singled out for arrests, torture, prolonged detention, and assassination.

 Mass media and internet platforms cannot keep up with the regime’s punitive outrages. The inventory of victims has been diligently kept by Karapatan, the leading human-rights monitor in the Philippines. It has publicized online Duterte’s accomplishments to date: 414 victims of extra-judicial killings, 479 frustrated attempts to kill by State security agents; 1,126 illegal arrests and detentions; forced evictions of 469,025 peasants, workers; and 713 political prisoners (Karapatan 2021). While Marcos Sr, killed and tortured 3,257 Filipinos, Duterte surpassed him with a record of at least 30,000 deaths (54 of them children) since 2016 (Robertson, 2020). What’s scandalous is that this routine bloodletting seems to have inured the elected legislators, judges, and bureaucrats to the impunity of a cursed, rutheless, brutish status quo.

Articulating a Cynical Realpolitik

The consensus of pundits may be cited here. Duterte’s “populist authoritarianism” won him the 2016 elections because it addressed, according to Sheila Coronel, “the insecurity of people’s lives and their yearning for effective government” (2017). Unemployment and the seductive, toxic consumerism of a media-saturated milieu heightened this insecurity. The term “populism” is thus misleading since the “people” is a fabrication of commercial polls, social media, etc. It is a free-floating signifier representing anyone not tied to the contested oligarchic hegemony, hence it can be articulated as an antagonistic discourse to challenge whoever is in power (Laclau 1979). Thus Duterte, with appropriate rhetoric and vulgar performance, posed as “the social bandit” who would rescue drug-addicts, the immoral poor, from perversity and perdition. He may be popular but not populist since his game is more theatrical or histrionic than ideological, yielding the illusion of a messianic reality-effect emanating from the propaganda of a local/provincial warlord in search of charisma. In short, it’s all a prestidigitator’s tawdry trick with catastrophic consequences.Sociologist Wataru Kosaka conducted a survey of impoverished groups and proposed this hypothesis: “Duterte’s extra-judicial violence has been largely accepted as ‘tough love’ because his legitimacy is rooted not in adherence to the law but in the persisting social bandit-like morality that revolves around the compassion and violence of a local patriarchal strongman, who maintains social order outside of the state” (2017, 72). Violence, yes, but compassion?

 No doubt the epithet “populist” is an adhoc rubric, not an analytical category. Instead of being a “populist,” in my view, Duterte performs up tp now as a master-magician whose technocratic handlers have manipulated the psyche/habitus of poverty-stricken males into a compensatory politics of “we” versus “them,” the “good citizens” versus the criminalized “immoral others” who deserve to be wiped out (Almendral 2017). But this compromised binary is apt to break out in irreconcilable contradiction. Lacking publicly deliberated consensus, this moralizing performance relies on the capricious passivity, fatalism, and temporizing gullibility of its victims. It’s a precarious equilibrium that characterizes a crisis of transition in Philippine politics, from the glamorized Aquino/trapo dynasty back to a parodic Marcos-style clientelism supported by military-police vigilantes/death-squads and their media apologists.

To be sure, Duterte’s power during his watch lacked authority in its rejection of traditional jurisprudence and Constitutional imperatives. His tenure, resting on militarized coercion and fortuna (Arendt 1968), coukd not last without a foundation in a sovereign, economically stable industrialized republic. Emergencies cannot excuse barbarism. Duterte’s presidency could not even leave a negative residue (unlike his model Marcos’ martial-law regime) in a feudal-compradorized polity dependent on contingent Chinese investments, not to mention the unrelinquishable hold of Washington-Pentagon via the 1946 Treaty of General Relations, the 2014 Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement, and their instrumentalities, the International Monetary Fund and global bank consortiums. Duterte’s gamesmanship with these competing powers was geared to wreck the economy and damage the received social contract if it continued without letup.

 So far, this putative “social order” from Duterte to Marcos Jr.—a euphemism for draconian regulations, summary executions, and extra-judicial slayings in police crackdowns—has produced over 30,000 victims. The police operations only officially registered 4,075 deaths, while 16,000 cases are still under investigation (Sarmiento 2018). Impunity or lack of accountability by State agencies explains why the Philippines topped the 2017 Global Impunity Index over 69 countries surveyed, which included numerous Latin American countries (Dalangin-Fernandez 2017). Duterte’s brutal policy in eliminating drug addiction resembles the devastating tragedy in Colombia where the alleged cure—executing suspected drug-addicts in impoverished slums—was “infinitely worse than the disease” (Time Editors, 1-8 May 2017, 74). Meanwhile, new oligarchs linked to drug syndicates with clandestine links to Duterte associates are emerging from old and new compadre networks, as well as from revitalized patrimonial dynasties (Marcos, Arroyo & their ilk) all ready and eager to replace him.

Resurrecting the “Cold War” Syndrome

Shock and awe inflicted on millions by a “fatherly” disciplinarian may have worked wonders: slum neighborhoods are supposed to be safe, addicts out of sight; but is anyone accountable or responsible? How is it possible for a “homicidal sociopath,” a foul-mouthed ruffian, to carry out this barbarism in modern-day Philippines? On December 4, 2018, Duterte signed Executive Order 70 (EO70), also known as “the whole-of-nation approach to end the local communist insurgency.” Obviously the targets are the Communist Party of the Philippines and its armed wing, the New People’s Army, and recently the National Democratic Front. Duterte’s Task Force has now implicated their alleged legal fronts such as Gabriela, Bayan Muna, Karapatan, Ibon, etc. No one is safe from the dragnet. Reactionary expediency serves to deflect attention from widespread corruption in government to legitimize transnational corporate profiteering and plunder of public funds.

Observers here and abroad have opined that, under cover of the pandemic, the crusade against communism is an attempt to legitimize the carnage of the drug-war and large-scale looting of the public treasury. Reminiscent of Cold War McCarthyism, EO70 has utilized the entire government apparatus for counterinsurgency operations. It is an adjunct to the military’s Oplan Kapayapaan, part of the U.S. “Operation Pacific Eagle: Philippines” which activated U.S. armed participation in the Marawi bloodletting. Various agencies and bureaucratic machineries have been mobilized to redtag critics, dissenters, human-rights defenders, and practically anyone suspected of being critical of the oligarchic neocolonized regime. EO70 has been reinforced with the Anti-Terror Law which imposes de facto martial law on the whole country, with the pandemic and Marawi City siege lending credibility to the fascist weaponization of law, the coercive security agencies, and the entire bureaucractic State apparatus manipulating civil society.

 Duterte’s EO70 created also the National Task Force to End the Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC), the country’s prime red-tagger, staffed with military personnel and retired officers. With the end of the 2017 peace talks with the “local communists,” the NTF-ELCAC now labels the insurgents and their sympathizers “terrorists.” To implement its spiteful, relentless program to extirpate those terrorists, this bloc of privileged officials was granted a huge budget of P19 billion diverted from the resources needed to address the extreme poverty of millions severely afflicted by the pandemic and lack of health-care, food, humane shelter, etc. With draconian measures, the State’s coercive agencies, together with the court system, continue to stigmatize and intimidate the poorest sectors of society represented by red-tagged organizations such as the Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP), the largest network of peasants struggling for genuine land reform, Anakpawis Party-list, Union ng mga Manggagawa sa Agrikultura, KMU (May First Labor Federation), and other groups working for the interests of the most oppressed and exploited sectors of society. 

 With his ascribed “gangster charm,” Duterte had openly endorsed the indiscriminate violence of his police and soldiers, urging them to follow a “shoot-to-kill” policy. He broadcast his command in public: “If a suspect draws out a gun, kill him. If he doesn’t, kill him anyway” (Simangan 2017; Sajor 2020). Over 30,000 suspects, among them juveniles, died, all deprived of the citizen’s right to due process, presumption of innocence, fair trial, etc. After junking peace talks with the National Democratic Front (NDF), now labeled a terrorist group in addition to the Communist Party of the Philippines and the New People’s Army, Duterte started systematically bombing Lumad villages and terrorizing indigenous tribes occupying mineral-rich regions for allegedly supporting communists. The fascist regime concentrated on the assassination of NDF consultants such as Randy Malayao, Randall Echanis, Agaton Topacio, Eugenia Magpantay, Reynaldo Bocala, Julius Giron, among others. It filed trumped-up charges leveled at environmental activists, human rights defenders such as Karapatan head Cristina Palabay, church workers, indigenous teachers, all accused of being communist fronts, sympathizers, guilty “fellow-travelers.”

Inquiry and Counter-Hegemony

Diverse international groups such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, UN Human Rights Council, and the U.S. State Department have taken notice of Duterte’s record of killings and wanton defiance of universal norms of justice. Duterte’s regime might claim to honor the right to life, liberty, and security of persons guaranteed by the UN Declaration of Human Rights and other Covenants; but its practice consistently defiled those norms. Duterte’s Anti-Terrorism Bill, for example, nullifies the citizen’s right to due process, fair trial, rights to free speech and assembly, all promulgated in the Philippine Constitution. Under this Bill, anyone can be surveilled, framed-up and arrested without judicial warrant, jailed without charges, based on mere suspicion and planted evidence. The planting of evidence (guns, bombs, etc.) has become the modus operandi for police and army. The Bill gives license to abduct, torture and kill suspects. It legalized Duterte’s full-blown fascist dictatorship without any need for him to formally declare martial law (Anakbayan 2020).

 Concerned Filipinos have alerted the international community on this fascist transmogrification. In her report, UN Special Rapporteur Agnes Callamard charged Duterte with “widespread and systematic attack directed against a civilian population” (Umil 2021). The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights reported in June 2020 how the Anti-Terrorism Act and the National Task Force provided institutional mechanisms allowing extensive human rights violations, without domestic remedies to resolve the abuses. The Philippine judicial system has been complicit in repressing any critic or dissenter. Likewise, the Senate has abandoned its duty to inquire into such flagrant atrocities, with one senator even urging the body to grant emergency powers to the autocratic president so as to arrest anyone without a warrant. Desperation and fragility characterized the despot’s last days. With the Congress and Senate rendered inutile, if not an accomplice of the perpetrator, Duterte had threatened to declare martial law—in imitation of his mentor, Ferdinand Marcos Sr.—if the judiciary (Supreme Court) interfered with his war on drug-addicts. Dishevelled impotence and futility distinguished such threats.

 Justice may be delayed but not forever denied. Although Duterte withdrew the country from being a signatory party to the Rome Statute for fear of being indicted, the International Criminal Court had not been deterred. It had decided to proceed in its investigation of Duterte’s crimes against humanity, specifically his sponsorship of extrajudicial killings and summary executions while he was mayor of Davao City and as president. On June 14, 2021, The Court had documented 378 cases of recorded extrajudicial killings and 488 cases of attempted murder. The Court included within its scope the record of massive human-rights violations in Davao City when Duterte was mayor. His notorious death-squad in Davao City served as the institutional template for his ruthless war against drug-addicts, farmers, teachers, lawyers, doctors, journalists, trade unionists, indigenous leaders and urban poor organizers in their own homes. This looming indictment drove Duterte to speculate on vying for the position of vice-president in the 2020 elections to insure that he could use the state apparatus to defy and elude the Court’s outreach. Counter-intuitively, doomsday cannot be postponed. His daughter Sara Duterte teamed up with Marcos Jr., only to be slapped with impeachment by the Marcos clique now grooming a Romualdez-dynasty relative for the presidential race in 2028.

Denouement Without Catharsis

The international group InvestigatePH had called on the UN Human Rights Council to hold the Duterte regime responsible for thousands of extra-judicial killings, abductions, illegal arrests, detentions and other forms of violation of human rights and humanitarian law. It recommended that Duterte be held criminally liable for official orders to kill drug users and civil-society activists, allowing government agencies to utilize public funds and networks to weaponize the law and stifle dissent (Cabana 2021).

Since the U.S. has been actively involved in funding military and police training, as well as providing arms and equipment to the Philippine government, various international groups had called on the U.S. Congress to pass the Philippines Human Rights Act (PHRA). This Act will halt military funding, weapon sales and donations of armament, to the police and army until the Philippine government guarantees respect for the human rights of its citizens. It also requires the Philippine judicial system to prosecute members of the police and military responsible for human-rights violations. Since 2014, the US. has given $550 million in military aid or security assistance. More than $33 million of U.S. taxpayers money has been given to the Philippine police for its war on drugs.

 In 2018, U.S. aid amounted to $193.5 million. Last July 2020, the U.S. Congress was discussing the terms of $2 billion arms sales including twelve attack helicopters, hundreds of missiles and warheads, guidance and detection systems, machine guns, over eighty-thousand rounds of ammunition, and so on (Chew 2020). All these will be used in the regime’s campaign to crush the opposition with the pretext of fighting terrorism. Much of the earlier aid had been used in the Marawi City battle where indiscriminate warfare by massive aerial bombing and artillery fire killed civilians and displaced over 450,000 civilians. U.S. personnel, weapons, intelligence and training were all involved in this breach of international humanitarian law. This war on the BangsaMoro nation has provided cover for land seizures from displaced residents, denying the Moro people’s right to self-determination (InvestigatePH, 2021),

 Responding to a worldwide campaign, the International Committee of the AFL-CIO has urged the passage of the PHRA to suspend U.S. taxpayer-funded military aid to the Duterte regime “until security officials stop the routine violations of human rights and those responsible for abuses are held accountable” (2020). This move is supported by the Communication Workers of America, International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines, MALAYA organization, and others. On the face of this international outcry, the plight of 110 million Filipinos has worsened with the militarized handling of the pandemic, aggravating the misery caused by lack of social provisions for health care and basic necessities of food, shelter, clothing, sanitation, etc. Precarity, fatalism, servility, and arbitrary violence characterize the chaotic milieu of millions of ordinary Filipinos today, including those in the diaspora.

 Vernacular Decadence

 In his classic “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” Karl Marx amends Hegel’s quip on history repeating itself, first as tragedy and then as farce (1986, 97). With the former Philippine dictator Marcos’s son in office, will farcical acts be the spectacle for the next six years? Imagine the sons of Somoza, Trujillo, or Batista returning to their banana republics—that would indeed be “the tradition of all the dead generations” acting as toxic “nightmare on the brain of the living.” The return of the Marcos dynasty to political power—surely not as maid-servants glamorized by Imee Marcos (recently re-elected as Senator)—signals a revanchist move to revamp the narrative of the February 1986 debacle (on the deceitfulness of the Duterte-Marcos transition, see Gutoman and Mulingtapang 2022).

 For the Marcos loyalists, history may just be “tsismis” or gossip. But they take it seriously. One sign is the attempt to abolish the Presidential Committee on Good Government (PCGG) tasked to recover Marcos’ stolen wealth amounting to billions of dollars. Another is the move to sustain Duterte’s withdrawal of the country from the sway of the International Criminal Court which has been pursuing cases filed by many victims of Duterte’s drug-war since he assumed office as mayor of Davao City (1988-98).  Duterte admitted complicity with death-squads in 2015. He boasted wanting to kill 100,000 people before the end of his presidency. Over 30,000 victims of extrajudicial killlings under Duterte’s watch have been recorded, though only about 1,400 have been reported by the national police. Exhumations of the hundreds of slain “drug suspects” and autopsies are being processed to determine the authenticity of police records.

Let us review the chronicle of subordination and parasitism again. The oldest U.S. neocolony, the Philippines, was plundered and ruined by Ferdinand Marcos Sr. from 1966 to 1986. Biding their time in Hawaii, a refuge offered by the colonizers, the Marcos dynasty staged a comeback with their wealth and retinue of factotums intact. They consolidated power in their localities (Ilocos, Leyte) and began a program of selective retrieval. Aided by consumerist amnesia and a new generation bereft of historical knowledge, they smuggled their way to governorship and congressional seats. Amid widespread vote-buying and fixing of the Smartmatic computerized machines in the May 2022 elections, Marcos Jr., known as “Bongbong,” was installed as president (CENPEG 2022). They struck a bargain with strongman Duterte by allowing the daughter Sara to run as vice-president to safeguard the father from any criminal investigation after his tenure. Despite some citizens’ protests and media demands to review the election results by the Duterte-controlled Commission on Elections, nothing was done to block Bongbong’s proclamation. The corrupted State ideological apparatuses to pacify class conflicts (legislature, courts, police, military bureaucracy) had already been eviscerated. The farce seems to be the consensus of the oligarchic clans—Arroyo, Estrada, Duterte, Marcos, billionaire Chinoy networks—with huge funding by corporate interests, religious, and military blocs that have so far benefited from their rule.

 The Marcos dynasty has so far successfully defied all court verdicts since their return from Hawaii in 1992. Bongbong himself refused to pay back-taxes while his mother, Imelda Marcos, sentenced to jail a while ago, remains free to flaunt her wealth—not her fabled thousand shoes, but the dynasty’s “past glory” reconfirmed  by Marcos’ burial in the cemetery of heroes by Duterte. The elaborate State funeral was the ritual designed to repair the frayed social cohesion that is somehow ascribed to the Aquino clan represented by the “pink party” of the Liberal Party (Roxas clan) and the defeated candidate Leni Robredo. A compromise was reached with the Duterte bloc, compensating for Bongbong’s frustrated vice-presidential ambition in 2016.

Counter-Insurgency Blues

The rampant practice of stigmatizing anyone critical of government policies as “terrorists” began with Cory Aquino and worsened with Duterte’s red-tagging policy.

Any dissenter is tagged as  a “terrorist” supporter of the Communist Party of the Philippines and the New People’s Army. This originated with U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s declaration in 2001 of the two groups as “terrorist” organizations. Under Duterte’s rule, the number of political prisoners ballooned to 592. Compare the number of detainees under President Arroyo (343) and under Benigno Aquino Jr. (306). This was before “Bloody Sunday, March 7, 2021, when Duterte’s police killed nine union workers and arrested six—all justified by his “shoot-to-kill” style of eradicating those he had already judged guilty (Bolledo 2022; ABS-CBN 2015). As of June 22, 2022, the total number of political prisoners—critics of the regime arrested with guns and grenades planted on them—was 803. Among the most deprived and dehumanized are women, dating back to the bloodthirsty regimes of Estrada and Arroyo (San Juan 2010)

          With continued imposition of arbitrary arrests, rabid witch-hunting of branded “reds,” and subservience of the courts and legislature to the diktat of Marcos-Duterte, the already congested prisons—ghettoes of poor farmers, workers, and unemployed—promise more misery and deaths of hundreds of innocent citizens who thought they were exercising their rights and other constitutionally-mandated liberties. According to Karapatan, the most trusted human-rights monitor in the Philippines, there were 126 women prisoners in March 2021, the majority of whom are charged for being associated with dissidents labeled “terrorists.” Many are human rights defenders, activists involved in helping workers, urban squatters, indigenous communities. Because they work for the deprived sectors, they are accused of being supporters of communist insurgents to justify their illegal arrest and continuing detention in squalid quarters. They are presumed innocent until proven guilty—a principle rejected by the “justice” system in the Philippines. They are punished for trumped-up charges and planted weapons; some have been released after a long expensive appeal.  According to Karapatan. from January to March 2025, the Marcos Jr. regime continues to terrorize the country, with 124 extra-judicial killings, 15 enforced disappearances, and 3,611 violent dispersals of civic assemblies. Bombings of rural areas have occurred 51,206 times. There are 745 political prisoners of which 148 are women (Karapatan 2025). In Februry 2025, the Trump administration provided the Marcos regime $336 million aid bundle “for modernizing Philippine security forces” (Pardo 2015).          

     With the September 17, 2022 passage of the Philippine Human Rights Act (H.R. 8313) in the U.S. Congress, some constraint on the Phiippine National Police and Armed Forces of the Philippines in inflicting warrantless arrests, harassment, torture and other human-rights violations might spare future victims. If those practices continue, the Bill seeks to suspend assistance to the police and military amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars in logistics, weapons, training, etc. During his rule, Marcos Sr. received billions of U.S. military aid much of which he stole and transferred to secret bank accounts in Switzerland, Panama, and elsewhere, now utilized by his son and minions. Bill 8313 is based on the U.S. State Department’s annual reports of “arbitrary or unlawful killings” committed during Duterte’s drug wars. It mentions the case of Senator Leila de Lima (recently released) who was detained for two years as “a staunch critic of the drug war killings,” as well as labor leaders and legislators killed or held as political prisoners to be punished indefinitely, with justice held in abeyance.

          Establishment power relies on fear, not consent, and abject fatalism. Red-tagging functions to silence critics or anyone expressing dissent or questioning state authority. Not to be neglected is institutionalized terrorism, that is, the government’s infamous “vilification of dissent…being institutionalized and normalized” based on the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020. This rubber-stamped Act enables the billion-pesos-funded NTF-ELCAC (discussed earlier) to stifle dissent on mere suspicion and surreptitious surveillance. It functions to void the Philippine Constitution’s Bill of Rights and resuscitate the authoritarian, fascist method of social harmony imposed by Bongbong’s father nearly forty years ago—a tragedy now being revived as excruciating farce.

At the Cross-Road Embarkation Point