Happy Pearl Harbor Day comrades.
On that day US president FDR forced it upon himself the impossible task of telling Americans to care about a place that some still don’t even see as legitimately part the US even today due to their racist, colonial understandings of themselves and the world.
Americans (especially in the military) definitely did not care about the millions of Filipino people, and other pacific peoples, that both Japanese and American imperialists would kill in their war for dominance over the Pacific Ocean, its nations of both people and more than human, and their resources.
Few Americans know the incredible death toll inflicted on the people of the Philippines and much less the death toll the US military inflicted during “liberation,” particularly in Manila. None of these deaths were seen as an American death, none of the US soldiers believed they were liberating US territory or American people.
To this day many believe that the US has not been invaded for centuries, forgetting that the Philippines was legally a US territory and that Philipino people were part of the US Empire. This common and inaccurate view of history is the child of racism, colonialism, and the incredible privilege and arrogance it takes to forget you used to litterally own another nation not even a century ago.
This apathy, this callous colonial mindset, enabled imperialists to view colonized people as a burden on the metropole leading up to WW2, and after. This drove American “post-colonial” history toward privatizing much of its empire, including the Philippines, with neocolonial policies that synergized with the post war world. It is also seen in the coinciding Termination era that destroyed many Native institutions in the US mainland for timber capital, leading to a new era of settler-colonial genocide after the wars end.
Today we can still see this mindset in plain view with strangleholds on remaining US territories such as Puerto Rico, yet too few understand that these places exist and are part of the the US Empire.
Glory to the Nations of the Pacific, glory to the PLA, the Soviet Red Army, the Korean People’s Revolutionary Army, and the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army (and all I am ignorant of) for driving Japanese imperialism off of the Asian mainland and securing a future with many possibilities.
May the Pacific Ocean one day be liberated from its imperialist occupation that was reinforced by the devestating war waged between Japanese Empire and the US Empire and may solidarity between the Pacific Nations and North American Indigenous Nations and their accomplices grow stronger with international kinship.
(Sources: https://youtu.be/ZaKOOqXDnqA)