WHEN WE TOOK THE PHILIPPINES

From the American Prospect:

A war anniversary that U.S. wishes to forget

Insurrection doesn’t begin to describe the full-fledged war that lasted three years, with more than 100,000 Americans involved. Depending on the accounts you read, the Filipino civilian death toll ranged from 250,000 to as high as 1 million, counting those who died from disease or starvation.

The war was an American betrayal. Nationalists, under Emilio Aguinaldo, had broken off from Spain and, relying heavily on a promise of U.S. support during the Spanish-American War, started their own independent republic in 1898 — the first in Asia. That promise was broken when the McKinley administration sought the Philippines as a colony and tapped into a new patriotic fervor for American Imperialism.

More here.

Our war to annex the Philippines barely gets a footnote in American history classes. But it's fairly typical of US warmongering behavior, typical in its bloodiness, typical in its betrayal of our deepest national values, typical in its underhandedness--indeed, the Filipinos believed we were there to liberate them from Spanish imperialism, instead of simply taking over, because that's what we told them. Indeed, from the moment we had our shit together as a nation, we've been conquering brown skinned people, from Native Americans, to Mexicans, to Filipinos, to Vietnamese, to Iraqis and Afghans.

How on earth have we been able to reconcile our love for democracy and justice with our love for killing non-white people and taking their land? Answer: we haven't. We haven't even tried. We just sort of allow two contradictory cultural strains to exist in our hearts simultaneously, without questioning it. And it gets us into trouble, deep trouble, again and again, in countless ways.

I wonder if we'll ever get this figured out.

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