Phil-American War

Excerpt from A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES by Howard Zinn:
“The fighting with the rebels began, McKinley said, when the insurrectos attacked American forces. But later, American soldiers testified that the United States had fired the first shot. After the war, an army officer speaking in Boston’s Faneuil Hall said his colonel had given him orders to provoke a conflict with the insurgents.”
“In February 1899, they rose in revolt against American rule, as they had rebelled several times against the Spanish. Emilio Aguinaldo, a Filipino leader, who had earlier been brought back from China by U.S. warships to lead soldiers against Spain, now became a leader of the insurrectos fighting the United States. He proposed Filipino independence within a U.S. protection, but this was rejected.
It took the United States three years to crush the rebellion, using 70,000 troops – four times as many as were landed in Cuba. It was a harsh war. For the Filipinos the death rate was enormous from battle casualties and from disease. . . .
William James, the Harvard philosopher, wrote a letter to the Boston Tanscript about “the cold pot grease of McKingley’s cant at the recent Boston banquet” and said the Philippines operation “reeked of the infernal adroitness of the great department store, which has reached perfect expertness in the art of killing silently, and with no public squalling or commotion, the neighboring small concerns.”
James was part of a movement of prominent American businessmen, politicians, and intellectuals who formed the Anti—Imperialist League in 1898 and carried on a long campaign to educate the American public about the horrors of the Philippine war and the evils of imperialism. It was an odd group (Andrew Carnegie belonged), including anti-labor aristocrats and scholars, united in a common moral courage at what was being done to the Filipino in the name of freedom. Whatever their differences on other matters, they would all agree with William James’s angry statement: “ God damn the U.S. for its vile conduct in the Philippines Isles.” Unquote.
Today in the Philippines, we have famous columnists, such as Emil Jurado of the Manila Standard, who wrote: “Can our government ever modernize the military without American aid? Can we fight terrorism alone? Even now, US soldiers are helping the Armed Forces go against the Abu Sayyaf terrorists. So don’t give us that baloney that we can do without the Americans?”Wow!
Imagine the Filipino in this 21st century still killing fellow-Filipinos and we need the Visiting Forces Agreement to help us do the job with modern weapons Made In America! Poch Suzara