THESE days you will hear talk that conflict stunted the growth of Mindanao. Stunted? Why? How tall is Mindanao supposed to be? Taller, I hope, than the rest of this country.
Mindanao daw lost years of growth; and because it was lost, it can be found—by surrendering part of Mindanao to terrorists. You know, Lost & Found department. Such talk is meaningless. It is dismissed by logic as counterfactual; meaning it is a “if only blah, then blah happens.” Or “if only this, then that.”
Now, that is true of billiard balls. If you hit a ball in one spot from a certain angle it will go this way or that and because you did not, it didn’t go one way or the other but somewhere else farther from the pocket. That is true of billiards. But that is not true of life and history.
To say that conflict stunted Mindanaoan growth begs two questions. One, what growth? Two, what conflict? It goes against the facts that Mindanao did not grow. It did. It produced some of the largest personal fortunes in the country—and it was a growth based on real economic activity and not just on real estate. Think Dole and Del Monte, the Florendos and the Tuasons and my Tito Chito Ayala.
Mindanao has given more livelihoods to more people than the rest of the country. To say that Mindanao could have grown still more can only be true in the fanciful sense that anything can be other than what it is—but only in the imagination and not in fact. You can never know what a thing might have become because something didn’t happen to it.
Another question is begged: What conflict? In the 1970s, and 1980s, the Moro National Liberal Front—led by Nur Misuari, arguably the ablest Muslim general since Saladin—fought a war of independence. But Marcos destroyed it. Cory resurrected Misuari by letting him back in from Arabian exile. But Ramos buried him for good.
Christian settlers did not start the conflict. They never settled where there were Muslims already. Christians were attacked first; they responded in kind and a little more badly, but such is life. You piss in my soup and I’ll crap on your grave. In the 1980s the peace and order problem was the National People’s Army. Local death squads took care of it. Ask Duterte.
When you come down to it, there has been no real growth to speak of in the rest of the country. The Philippines made the conscious decision not to industrialize and for two good reasons.
One, we were chicken. No other Third World country, not even one as comparatively rich as ours, had tried it, let alone succeeded. Two, capital was lacking. What capital was borrowed from state banks was lost. Democratic governments are no good at guiding economies; but without guidance, economies go wayward rather than grow.
But then even oligarchic Japan, whose economy was minutely controlled by MITI, and authoritarian Korea, which threatened businessmen to invest in mostly failed enterprises, turned out crap that passed for cars and appliances.
It was one shoddy product after another, until they begged, borrowed and stole European and American designs. Then they spent another 20 years getting the hang of them. Read Studwell’s How Asia Works.
We wouldn’t do that to our own people. If they were going to spend, they deserved the best that their hard-earned money could buy; which is to say Made in the USA.
We let them import Chevys and Fords, General Electric and Westinghouse. This was not wrong. The current Japanese and Korean supremacy in carmaking and marketing do not justify four generations of exploited Japanese and Korean consumers. Read Ha-Joon Chang on The Myth of Free Trade/The Secret History of Capitalism.
If we had tried to industrialize, it would have been as likely that we screwed up as that we succeeded. Read Governing the Market by Robert Wade, together with Ha-Joon Chang, on how Taiwan’s car manufacturing never got off the ground; how its other manufacturers tanked, leaving only just recently Lenovo; and how it first took off with tomatoes and continues to prosper through other high-end, population-dense, intensive agricultural products.
Mindanao had more promise than older parts of the country. That is why poor Ilonggos moved there and armed themselves as Ilaga for self-protection.
Mindanao fulfilled its promise as best it could. Christians had a thriving agriculture, Muslims a bustling trade. The Americans called that trade smuggling and piracy. We called it cheaper soap than Proctor & Gamble sold; we called them cheaper DVDs that even embassy personnel could afford.
But when iTunes perpetrated more piracy the Americans called it progress and when China dumped on the American market through Walmart, it was free trade.
The best thing really for us up north is to leave the south alone: to live and work and die—Muslims and Christians together—like they’ve done before. Let’s not start a pretend war for a crack at the Nobel Peace Prize when we cannot even make it to Time 100.