Image Chronicles the History of the United

¶ … Image chronicles the history of the United States and the Philippines over several hundred years of modern history. Karnow's main argument about the relationship between the new nation is that the United States had an empire over this far-off but ostensibly independent country that "dare not speak its name." Over the course of the book, Karnow paints a convincing portrait of a nation colonized. Karnow suggests that what was particularly damaging about the de facto (if not de jure) American empire in the Philippines was that America's self-image is that it is a democratic, non-empirical country. By engaging in the sort of relationship America had with the Philippines, America betrayed its most fundamental principles as a nation as well as engaged in exploitation. Because America did not perceive itself as a nation capable of exploiting other nations like its parent country England, it could not even acknowledge the abuses it perpetuated after the fact in the Philippines

Karnow is fairly explicit in the vehemence of his thesis from the onset of the book. Even the subtitle of the book "American's Empire in the Philippines" reinforces the idea that America attempted to make over the Philippines into a nation into our image, in political, economic, and religious terms. America used the Philippines as a colonial bastion against political ideologies it disliked, such as communism. Furthermore, because this remanufacture of imaging was done on an unequal basis, with the Philippines assumed to be inferior child to the parental and patriarchal re-manufacturing nature of America, the relationship between the two nations, in Karnow's envisioning was almost doomed to be exploitative. "Three centuries in a Catholic convent and fifty years in Hollywood.... Few countries... have been more heavily shackled by the past than the Philippines." In other words, the Philippines exists in the European and then the American imagination first as a place to carry 'the white man's burden' of exporting Christianity, then as a beautiful and exotic island paradise.

Karnow is not a Philippine himself, he is a foreign correspondent from America, but he without a doubt takes the Philippine nation's 'side' in this book, or at least that of the Aquinos. Karnow begins his book, not chronologically with the origins of the United States engagement in the Philippines, but with the image of Cory Aquino speaking to a joint session of Congress, asking for aid and greater foreign investment in the Philippine nation. Karnow uses this as a touchstone to explore the reasons for Aquino's need to ask for aid and for the shadowy circumstances behind the death of her husband Nicky Aquino.

Karnow then begins with a far-reaching history that stretches almost as long back as the 'discovery' of the current nation of America itself. From Cory Aquino, he then turns to Ferdinand Magellan's accidental arrival in the Philippines in 1521, through the creation of the American nation. Magellan's installation of Spanish corruption paralleled and created a tradition of political glad handling that formed the foundation of the Marcos' regime. Quickly, then Karnow moves over the course of hundreds of years of American history, to the Manifest Destiny decree during the 19th century and how it played out in the Philippines, to William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, and even William Howard Taft's treatment of the island nation.

He gives particular, later attention to Douglas MacArthur who considered himself redeemer of the Philippines but whom Karnow believes only contributed to its exploitation and plunder.

Karnow is particularly harsh on the United States in describing the way the Reagan administration propped up the Marcoses. The administration's justification for doing this was anti-communism, that Marcos was an anti-Communist in a world beset by an evil empire. However, Karnow does not exculpate this Philippine president from all blame, even though he is merciless when discussing Reagan's initial refusal to help return Marcos from exile after his loss to Nicky Aquino in the first fair presidential elections in the land. Karnow admits President Aquino's later eroding popularity and its impact on the Philippines.

Oddly enough, however Karnow does not disdain further American involvement in the nation. America is so involved, Karnow suggests in his book's conclusion; it cannot really extract itself from responsibility in the Philippines. He writes that "the critics who derided [Cory Aquino] for relying on America for salvation had either forgotten or deliberately ignored reality. If only to serve its own interests, America had repeatedly rescued the Philippines -just as, out of gratitude for relatively benign tutelage, Filipinos had sacrificed themselves for the U.S. So both Americans and Filipinos implicitly understood that, however, lopsided, thorny and at times frustrating their 'special relationship' might be, it reflected a century of shared experience."