Rizal Philippines
September 11, 2016
From Filipknow - Dark Chapters in Fil American history
Today marks the 15th year after the 9/11 attacks by the terrorists using 4 hijacked passenger airliners to attack Pentagon, Twin Towers at NYC, and Philadelphia, killing 3,000 Americans in their homeland, the first mass murder of such magnitude in the USA.
Today we recall too the recent spat between Pres DU30 and Obama resulting in the cancellation of their bilateral talks in Laos Asean Summit. The massacre at Mt Dajo of 600 combatants, children and women was recalled. That DU30 has violated and committed EJK is unfair for the Philippine President, and history. Really USA and its leader must be reminded too of what atrocities and EJK Americans had committed in the Philppines
We are reminded in the research of Luzviminda Francisco (Philippines: the end of an Illusion, London 1973) that 1.4 million Filipinos combatants and non combatants alike were killed from 1899 to 1902: It was the first Vietnam (the My Lai massacre) Compare this to the deaths during the Japanese occupation where 500,000 to 1,000,000 Filipinos died. Remember, 1941 to 1945 was modern warfare where there were more efficient weapons for killing. The Spaniards could have killed less during their 400 years of occupation of the Philippines and would be more benevolent
From Filipknow - Myths about the Spanish occupation of the Philippines
Genocide in the Philippines
I would consider the site having leftist or even NDF slant but its claims are well documented, and the first time I knew about this when my daughter who was studying in UP asked me to summarize for her a book on American atrocities in the country
A moment of reflection returns us to what Bernard Fall called “the first Vietnam,” the Filipino-American War of 1899-1902, in which at least 1.4 million Filipinos. The campaign to conquer the Philippines was designed in accordance with President McKinley’s policy of “Benevolent Assimilation” of the uncivilized and unchristian natives, a “civilizing mission” that Mark Twain considered worthy of the Puritan settlers and the pioneers in the proverbial “virgin land.” In Twain’s classic prose: “Thirty thousand killed a million. It seems a pity that the historian let that get out; it is really a most embarrassing circumstance.” This was a realization of the barbarism that Henry Adams feared before Admiral George Dewey entered Manila Bay on 1 May 1898: “I turn green in bed at midnight if I think of the horror of a year’s warfare in the Philippines where…we must slaughter a million or two of foolish Malays in order to give them the comforts of flannel petticoats and electric trailways.”
In “Benevolent Assimilation”: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899-1903 (1982), Stuart Creighton Miller recounts the U.S. military’s “scorched earth” tactics in Samar and Batangas, atrocities from “search and destroy” missions reminiscent of Song My and My Lai in Vietnam. This episode in the glorious history of Empire is usually accorded a marginal footnote, or a token paragraph in school textbooks. Miller only mentions in passing the U.S. attempt to subjugate the unhispanized Moros, the Muslim Filipinos in Mindanao and Sulu islands. On March 9, 1906, four years after President Theodore Roosevelt declared the war over, children in the battle ofMajor General Leonard Wood, commanding five hundred and forty soldiers, killed a beleaguered group of six hundred Muslim men, women and and children at Mount Dajo. A less publicized but horrific battle occurred on June 13, 1913, when the Muslim sultanate of Sulu mobilized about 5,000 followers (men, women and children) against the American troops led by Capt. John Pershing. The battle of Mount Bagsak, 25 kilometers east of Jolo City, ended with the death of 340 Americans and of 2,000 (some say 3000) Moro defenders. Pershing was true to form—earlier he had left a path of destruction in Lanao, Samal Island, and other towns where local residents fought his incursions. Anyone who resisted U.S. aggression was either a “brigand” or seditious bandit. The carnage continued up to the “anti-brigandage” campaigns of the first three decades which suppressed numerous peasant revolts and workers’ strikes against the colonial state and its local agencies.
Not EJK or war crimes?
“Violence reached a crescendo against the Indian after the Civil War and found a yet bloodier manifestation during the protracted conquest of the Philippines from 1898 until well into the next decade, when anywhere from 200,000 to 600,000 Filipinos were killed in an orgy of racist slaughter that evoked much congratulation and approval….” Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980) cites 300,000 Filipinos killed in Batangas alone, while William Pomeroy’s American Neo-Colonialism (1970) cites 600,000 Filipinos dead in Luzon alone by 1902. The actual figure of 1.4 million covers the period from 1899 to 1905 when resistance by the Filipino revolutionary forces mutated from outright combat in battle to guerilla skirmishes; it doesn’t include the thousands of Moros (Filipino Muslims) killed in the first two decades of U.S. colonial domination."
Baka dapat palitan ang pangalang Mckinley Road leading to BGC. Hindi tama
At Leonard Wood avenue in Baguio City?
Balanggiga Massacre (who were massacred, the American soldiers as their history books say?)
This narration does not cover the Balanggiga Massacre (the Filipino American )(no Americans are allowed to visit the town up to now.) The Americans led by Maj Gen Jake Howling Smith retaliated after a humiliating defeat from the hands of natives led by Valerinano Abenador
Smith and another field commander were court martial-ed. He later issued the famous Circular 6 which stated his plans to crush resistance in the island and said that that he "wanted no prisoners. I want you to burn and kill, the more you burn and kill the more it pleases me. He ordered every one above ten to be killed: "to turn the place into howling wilderness and to kill anyone over ten.
Brig. Gen. Jacob H. Smith's infamous order "KILL EVERYONE OVER TEN" was the caption in the New York Journal cartoon on May 5, 1902. The Old Glory draped an American shield on which a vulture replaced the bald eagle. The bottom caption exclaimed, "Criminals Because They Were Born Ten Years Before We Took the Philippines." The Philippine occupation was the first war, historian Gail Buckley has pointed out, in which “American officers and troops were officially charged with what we would now call war crimes.” In 44 military trials, all of which ended in convictions, including that of General Jacob Smith, “sentences, almost invariably, were light.” The Baltimore American had to admit the U.S. occupation “aped” Spain's cruelty and committed crimes “we went to war to banish.”
Then he tasked his men to reduce Samar into a "howling wilderness," to kill anyone 10 years old and above capable of bearing arms.
He stressed that, "Every native will henceforth be treated as an enemy until he has conclusively shown that he is a friend." His policy would be "to wage war in the sharpest and most decisive manner," and that "a course would be pursued that would create a burning desire for peace." [On Dec. 29, 1890, as a cavalryman, Smith was present at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, an incident ---also referred to as a massacre---that left about 300 Sioux men, women and children, and 29 Army soldiers dead.]
No one knows for sure how many natives were killed. Some place this at 2,500. Filipino historians place this at 50,000. Whatever it is, there was massacre of Filipinos by American soldiers short of genocide. And no one not even Obama has right to talk the Philippine President on human rights or EJK. De Lima should read her history books too (those that are impartial and not made by American authors)
Aftermath
The exact number of Filipino civilians killed by US troops will never be known, but an exhaustive research made by a British writer in the 1990s put the figure at about 2,500; Filipino historians believe it to be around 50,000.
The Bells of Balangiga
American occupation of the Philippines one of the ugliest in the history of imperialism?
According to Luzviminda Francisco, the Philippine-American War was a forgotten war in the U.S. annals. American textbooks contain several pages on the Spanish-American War but only devote a paragraph on the Philippine-American War despite the fact that the latter was more pronounced in terms of duration, scale, and number of casualties. The war was ugly, ruthless, and brutal, prompting Stanley Karnow to describe it as “among the cruelest conflicts in the annals of Western imperialism.” Other scholars refer to the conflict as the United States’ “first Vietnam.” Luzviminda estimates that as many as 126,000 American soldiers, or 3/4 of the U.S. army, were shipped to the Philippines, and at least 600,000 Filipinos died during the war. American anti-imperialist Mark Twainclaimed that the number of Filipino casualties was close to one million or the equivalent of 1/6 of the country’s total population at the turn of the century. He
Really vengeance belongs to the Lord. The 9/11 was a comeuppance to the the Big White Brother?
This post does not want to reopen old wounds, but the good leader of US provoked us to remind him of history and so that he would place his comments about PI in proper context. Of course DU30 lacked the diplomacy to do it.
PI is also thankful for the military assistance and other aid to the PI, and the visa it has granted and permanent residency to many Filipinos (including citizenship) as a way of recompense? I may not get a visa for this post
