“Under Three Flags” by Benedict Anderson

As a natural law anarchist I tend to take a dim view of nationalism. However, I am a bit more ambivalent about anti-colonial national movements. Their tendencies to strike at rigid, racist imperial structures certainly seem like a step in the right direction. Especially when they achieved pan-ethnic unity, their amorphous, decentralized, and horizontal leadership structures often created the kind of polycentric institutions I am most fond of. This book combines anti-colonialism, nationalism, anarchism, journalism, art, and literature from the Third World in the nineteenth century. Anderson uses as a focus the Philippine struggle for independence against imperial Spain, but in doing so also traverses the globe from Manilla to Madrid, Barcelona, Paris, London, Cuba, Russia, Japan, Hong Kong, and America. He discusses trends from high journalism and art that encouraged anarchist actions to actual “propaganda of the deed” where assassins killed in the name of furthering and publicizing their cause. He concentrates on a couple of Filipino writers and activists not well known to history. Isabelo de los Reyes was a collector of Philippine folklore: not just folklore as in myths and fairy tales, but “saber popular” or indigenous, local knowledge that survived westernization and colonization. He spoke Ilocano, as well as Tagalog, Spanish, English, and French and would slip between them in his stories as he slipped between life in Manilla, Madrid, and Paris. Jose Rizal is more well known today: a hero still, in the Philippines at least, as a poet and their first novelist. His second novel, depicting a strange jeweled bomb placed at a colonial ball, presaged the wave of anarchist and nationalist bombings that were to later rock Europe and colonial outposts in the fin de siecle period. These Filipino writers were cosmopolitan, multi-lingual, and avid readers, imbuing their own writings and philosophies with anarchist luminaries like Bakunin, Proudhon, and Kropotkin. They mingled with anarchists from the Continent and Cuba in their several stints in Montjuich Prison, the most notorious in Spain and an incubator and meeting place for radicalism. A motto, taken from Kropotkin, was “permanent revolt by means of the spoken word, writing, the dagger, the gun, and dynamite…. For us everything good which is outside legality.” This book is a detailed history of the last days of the Spanish Empire as told through the lens of Filipino revolutionaries.