It is a sad testament to our low level of national
consciousness that there was hardly any commemoration yesterday of the
death of a President who led the Republic in defeating the communist
insurgency in the 1950s, and who first put high on the nation’s agenda
the urgency of agrarian reform.
Even the website of the Rockefeller-funded Ramon Magsaysay Awards
Foundation, which fancies itself as the Asian equivalent of the Nobel
Prize, didn’t even note that yesterday was the 62nd death anniversary of
the man it has named its awards after. (Ironically, the foundation’s
trustees have mostly been representatives of the Philippine elite that
Magsaysay fought in his time.)
In contrast, there is a non-working national holiday for Benigno
Aquino, Jr., who never got to be president and who, going by a mountain
of evidence that has emerged, helped the communist insurgency of the
1970s to grow, that it continues to trouble our rural areas to this day.
Ironically, it was Magsaysay who appointed Aquino in 1954 as his
personal emissary to convince the insurgent Huk Supremo Luis Taruc to
surrender. Fifteen years later, Aquino tapped his contacts with the Huks
he made in that task to convince a young Huk guerilla Kumander Dante to
join Jose Ma. Sison’s fledgling Communist Party to form a new rebel
force the New People’s Army
The
tragedy I am referring to is the fact that a definitive, accurate work
on Magsaysay and his role in the nation’s history hasn’t yet been
written. This has allowed the narrative that Magsaysay was a puppet of
the US Central Intelligence Agency to prevail among intellectuals here
and abroad.
Brainwashed
A generation of Filipinos – mine – had been brainwashed by the Communist
Party, the landlord elite who wanted to block Magsaysay’s land reform
agenda, and left-wing writers like the late Renato Constantino that he
was simply and entirely a puppet of the US government, a pliable tool in
fact of the CIA’s now renowned Cold Warrior, an Air Force officer
seconded to the CIA, Edward Lansdale.
As a communist cadre in my youth, it was one of my rock-solid beliefs
that Magsaysay was the epitome of a US imperialist puppet. Magsaysay
was a favorite target of vitriol of Communist Party chairman Jose Ma.
Sison. But of course; the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas, of which he
was an officer before he broke away to form his own party, was routed by
Magsaysay, first in his post as defense secretary and then as
President.
The communist leaders, intellectuals from the middle class like Sison
obviously couldn’t accept the fact that a mere mechanic like Magsaysay
who rose to fame because of this wartime guerrilla exploits, could
defeat them. They claimed Magsaysay was just a tool of the most powerful
country in the world.
The tragedy with Magsaysay is that there have been so many books,
mostly written by Americans, claiming this to be so, that it has come to
be the standard view.
The big flaw in this interpretation is that it is mostly based not
just on interviews with, but writings of, the CIA operative Lansdale
himself who would, as most human beings do, exaggerate his role in the
making of—and power over—a Philippine president.
Boasting
Lansdale’s boasting wouldn’t be simply because of his ego though. He was
the epitome of the American Cold Warrior (the model in fact for the
protagonists in two great Cold War novels, The Ugly American and The
Quiet American), and after the defeat of the “Huks,” wanted his
counter-insurgency techniques used in countries such as Vietnam and
Latin American faced with communist-inspired insurgencies.
More than that though, his work before he joined the US Air Force had
been in PR and advertising, and he promoted his alleged exploits in the
Philippines through magazine and newspaper articles, helped by American
journalists whom he consciously befriended. Indeed, he was promoted to
colonel after his anti-Huk activities in the Philippines.
Lansdale’s PR genius is evident in that he planted spectacular
anecdotes showing his control over the Philippine president, the kind US
writers love to spread. An often-told one is that he punched Magsaysay
in a fit of anger for reading a speech written by a Filipino and not by
Lansdale’s American writers.
However, the source of this story is solely Lansdale. He “casually”
made the remark given to a US Navy historian, and narrated it to show
that he “was so close to Magsaysay that they were like brothers.” The
Navy historian of course quickly spread Lansdale’s yarn in US media.
What fogs an accurate view of Magsaysay is the fact that the US CIA
did financially and operationally support his candidacy, fearing that
his rival Elpidio Quirino was incompetent to defeat the Huk insurgency,
especially as he was bogged down in corruption allegations. Quirino also
had appeared to be apathetic to US interests. (The false but widely
spread report that Quirino even had a golden orinola (chamber pot) –
when it was ordinary brass – was said to have been Lansdale’s idea.)
Uncle Sam
But during that time when Filipinos still looked to the US as their
Uncle Sam of sorts, and Magsaysay was going against the Liberal Party
that was the bastion of landed elites, would Magsaysay have been so
idealistic as to reject such help?
What also clouds an accurate view is that Lansdale did give valuable
advice to the Philippines on how to defeat the communist-led Huks (Hukbo
ng Bayan), especially in psywar techniques. A quintessence of
Lansdale’s work was the tactic of killing a Huk guerrilla, punching two
holes in his neck, draining his blood out by hanging him upside down,
and leaving him in the Huks’ guerilla zones That spread terror among the
Huks, who were mostly peasants, that a vampire had come into their area
that they vacated it.
However,
a book that is the most authoritative biography of Lansdale (Jonathan
Nashel, Edward Lansdale’s Cold War) has pointed out the emergence of a
new narrative to the “Magsaysay-was-a-CIA-agent” one:
“The relationship between Lansdale and Magsaysay continues to
intrigue scholars. The standard view has Lansdale seeing in Magsaysay a
pliable American tool; countless books depict Lansdale as a
Svengali-like figure who persuades Magsaysay to think he is acting on
his own or on his country’s behalf when he is really doing only what
Americans think best.”
“Beginning in the 1990s, a revisionist interpretation began to
develop. Richard Slotkin argues in Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the
Frontier in Twentieth-Century America that ‘it was a serious mistake to
see the Lansdale/Magsaysay partnership as a tutelary one. In fact,
Lansdale and Magsaysay worked effectively because the relationship was
balanced; and Magsaysay, as both a native leader and an expert in his
own political culture, shaped the objectives and overall course of
policy. Magsaysay was a genuine reformer.’
Slotkin goes on to describe the intelligence, integrity, and general
acumen possessed by Magsaysay, all to make the larger point that people
of the Third World were (and are today) not simply pawns or dupes of
American policy.
Likewise, Douglas J. Macdonald in Adventures in Chaos: American
Intervention for Reform in the Third World asserts: ‘Though it was
believed within the CIA, and by later critics of American policy that
Lansdale ‘invented’ Magsaysay, this is an incorrect, ethnocentric and
rather arrogant interpretation.’
Nick Cullather, in Illusions of Influence: The Political Economy of
United States-Philippine Relations emphasizes that ‘the two men formed
an association based on mutual career building; that when they finally
met in 1950, Lansdale made it his business to advance Magsaysay’s
career, but…Magsaysay was already a leading figure in his own right’.”
It is such a tragedy that our own historians have been derelict in
allowing the narrative of a CIA agent to dominate our assessment of
Magsaysay, who led the nation in a crucial period of its history.
Would we have had a more egalitarian nation if Magsaysay had not
boarded that cursed plane and continued to a second term, enough time to
undertake social and economic reforms?
Email: tiglao.manilatimes@gmail.com
Facebook: Rigoberto Tiglao
Twitter: @bobitiglao
Order my Debunked book at rigobertotiglao.com/debunked
https://www.manilatimes.net/ramon-magsaysay-a-philippine-tragedy/527210/
https://www.manilatimes.net/ramon-magsaysay-a-philippine-tragedy/527210/
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