1/31/23

Déjà vu. The United States of America finds itself as the occupying power in a foreign land. While the inhabitants are initially very well disposed toward the Americans as their liberators, things quickly go sour. Both the Americans and the natives begin to use terrorism and brutality, including “water boarding”. Back home, the Democratic Party is opposed to this “imperialism”, while the Republicans favor occupation and brand anybody who opposes it as a traitor. Things eventually wind down after the capture or death of the main “insurgent” leaders.


Welcome to the Philippine Islands from 1899-1903. Stuart Creighton Miller wrote ”Benevolent Assimilation” (quotes in the original) in 1982, so the “comparison war” was Vietnam, not Iraq. As implied, however, some of the similarities to Iraq are pretty creepy. The Americans were much more brutal than in Iraq. Water boarding (then called “the water cure”) was a pretty common way to extract information from Filipinos and was apparently applied with extreme prejudice; one of the Army officers justifying it claimed it was a “mild” form of torture, such that only about a quarter of the people subjected to it died. Whole villages were burned and all the inhabitants shot outright in retaliation for attacks on Americans. I’d be a little dubious of this as typical 1980s antimilitary propaganda, except Miller has extracted a lot of information from letters home by American soldiers, and the few surviving veterans confirmed and justified their actions.


It’s not an exact comparison, of course. Nobody really opposed the war with Spain (even though in hindsight it’s probably the least justifiable conflict the USA ever fought); it was annexation and empire that was the issue. The Democrats opposed to annexation were not that way because they were the party of sweetness and light, but because they were mostly Southern and they didn’t like the possibility that Filipinos might someday be considered as white people (a Senator from South Carolina described them as “similar to Negroes, but inferior”). Senior college professors were opposed to annexation, but younger professors and students were almost universally in favor. Protestant religious figures were in favor of annexation, because it would open the Philippines to missionary work; Catholics were opposed (the Pope eventually came out in favor of American occupation; one of the many insurgent groups on the islands was a heretical sect, the Katipunan, sort of vaguely similar to the later Hukbalahap but with more religious than Marxist overtones). Almost all newspapers were in favor (with the interesting exception of German-language ones, since keeping the islands out of the Kaiser’s hands was one of the justifications for annexation).


The Filipinos, of course, were not all harmless little brown brothers; there were a couple of very nasty incidents on Samar where natives befriended the small American garrisons and then butchered them almost to a man. When possible, the Americans “Filipinized” the war, using tribal animosities (notably Macabebe versus Tagalog). It’s not clear if the Filipinos would have been able to put together a stable government if the US has allowed it; there were a number of groups of varying competence and ideology and it’s certainly possible that in the absence of American intervention things might have degenerated into a bloody civil war. As it happened, the people who ended up in charge under the Americans were almost exactly the same as those in charge under the Spanish.


An interesting if disquieting read; my previous exposure to the Spanish-American War/Philippine Insurrection was confined to the military rather than the socio-political aspects. ( )