Adapted from the
Political Literacy Course
of the Common Courage Press
In 1898 the United States instigated a war with Spain for the purpose of stealing Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and the Philippines from the decrepit remains of the evil old Spanish Empire. The Caribbean islands were conquered with ease, but in the faraway Philippines the U.S. military defeated Spain only with the help of Filipino nationalist guerrillas. The Filipinos supported American forces because the U.S. government had promised independence to them.
The U.S. government lied. Of course. It’s an American tradition.
Writes Gore Vidal in his book, The American Presidency:
“President William McKinley decided we ought to keep the Philippines in order to Christianize the natives. When reminded that Filipinos were already Roman Catholic, the president responded, ‘Exactly.’
“The United States betrayed the nationalists who had helped us fight Spain, and we began our own conquest.”
Once they realized they’d been had, the Phillipine people rose in revolt against American rule in February 1899. America unleashed it’s rabid military dogs on them, and 70,000 professional baby-killers (known euphemistically as American soldiers, marines and sailors), spent three years brutally crushing the rebellion. The death toll of Phillipine people was enormous, both from battle casualties and disease. An estimated 200,000 Phillipine men, women and children died horribly at the hands of racist American monsters.
Mark Twain was deeply disturbed by the sadistic war crimes committed by the evil U.S. military in a Vietnam-like genocide which lasted from 1899 to 1902. He was also disgusted with the virtually universal racism in which White Americans shamelessly wallowed throughout those benighted turn-of-the-century years. (The very years which moral Neanderthals in America even now call “The Good Old Days.”)
Twain cynically “saluted” America’s first international genocide “by suggesting that we replace the stars and stripes in our flag with the skull and crossbones.”
It remains an excellent suggestion to this day for the world’s greatest pirate nation.
In A People’s History of the United States Howard Zinn writes of American sadism during the Philippine-American war:
In November 1901, the Manila correspondent of the Philadelphia Ledger reported:
“The present war is no bloodless, opera bouffe engagement; our men have been relentless, have killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people from lads of ten up, the idea prevailing that the Filipino as such was little better than a dog...
“Our soldiers have pumped salt water into men to make them talk, and have taken prisoners people who held up their hands and peacefully surrendered, and an hour later, without an atom of evidence to show that they were even insurrectos, stood them on a bridge and shot them down one by one, to drop into the water below and float down, as examples to those who found their bullet-loaded corpses.”
In Manila, a U.S. Marine named Littletown Waller, a major, was accused of shooting eleven defenseless Filipinos, without trial, on the island of Samar. Other marine officers described his testimony:
The major said that General Smith instructed him to kill and burn, and said that the more he killed and burned the better pleased he would be; that it was no time to take prisoners, and that he was to make Samar a howling wilderness. Major Waller asked General Smith to define the age limit for killing, and he replied “Everything over ten.”
In the province of Batangas, the secretary of the province estimated that of the population of 300,000, one third had been killed by combat, famine, or disease.
American firepower was overwhelmingly superior to anything the Filipino rebels could put together. In the very first battle, Admiral Dewey steamed up the Pasig River and fired 500-pound shells into the Filipino trenches. Dead Filipinos were piled so high that the Americans used their bodies for breastworks.
A British witness said:“This is not war; it is simply massacre and murderous butchery.”
Mark Twain said further of the brutal American genocide:
“...I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone to conquer, not to redeem... And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the [American] eagle put its talons on any other land.”
— Mark Twain
October 15, 1900
The New York Herald
“We have pacified some thousands of the islanders and buried them; destroyed their fields; burned their villages, and turned their widows and orphans out-of-doors; furnished heartbreak by exile to some dozens of disagreeable patriots; subjugated the remaining ten millions by Benevolent Assimilation, which is the pious new name of the musket; we have acquired property in the three hundred concubines and other slaves of our business partner, the Sultan of Sulu, and hoisted our protecting flag over that swag.
“And so, by these Providences of God — and the phrase is the government’s, not mine — we are a World Power.”
— Mark Twain