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Sitaram · Site Admin Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 1079

http://sulekha.com/chpost.asp?for...ilosophy&show=0&cid=84966

Prior to the 20th century, the word for "genocide" was "massacre."

http://www.bibingka.com/phg/balangiga/default.htm

When hostilities started in 1899 and 3,000 Filipino corpses littered
the streets of Manila, the Chicago Tribune, a journal close to the
McKinley administration opined, "The slaughter at Manila was
necessary, but not glorious. The entire American population justifies
the conduct of its army at Manila because only by a crushing repulse
of the Filipinos could our position be made secure. We are the
trustees of civilization and peace throughout the islands."

Major Waller, for example, reported that in an eleven-day span his
men burned 255 dwellings, slaughtered 13 carabaos and killed 39
people. Other officers reported similar activity.

Virtually every member of America's high command in the Philippines
had spent most of his career chasing Apaches, Comanches, Kiowas, and
Sioux. Some of them had taken part in the massacre at Wounded Knee.
According to historian Stuart Creighton Miller, it was easy for these
commanders to order similar tactics in the Philippines when faced
with the frustrations of guerrilla warfare. Easy, because that
warfare was waged against an enemy belonging to an inferior race.
That, too, explains why today the Balangiga Massacre still means in
American history books the killing of forty-eight Americans, not the
killing of tens of thousands of Filipino civilians.

=====================================================

The following historical accounts show just how nazi-like and
genocidal the American military was at the end of the 19th century.
Yes, they were monsters, but then, war is monstrous and monsters win
wars.

American technology pioneered the development of nuclear and
biological weapons of mass destruction. How naive to think that such
weapons would be developed at such great expense if there would never
be any intention to use them for mass destruction.

Americans of the 21st century are too squeamish to repeat a Dresden
fire bombing or a nuclear attack on Hiroshema.

America is doomed to defeat by a gradual attrition and wearing away
from the decades of terrorists attacks which are yet to come, and
also by a simple, gradual outnumbering: population growth as a
political weapon.

Majority rules and majority defeats.

If it would be possible for America to open its eyes, and see the
ideological enemy which it faces, and use genocidal force (which is a
sin) to stop that enemy once and for all, then in a bizarre fashion,
America would be quite Christ-like, taking such sin upon itself so
that future generations might be free from tyrrany and oppression.

=========================================

Twenty thousand Filipino insurgents were killed in combat. Another
200,000 noncombatants died from hunger, rape, disease, torture and
other indirect results of the war. And a systematic scorched-earth
campaign left thousands of acres, hundreds of villages, houses,
crops, food stores, animals and boats burned to ash. Though not as
successful as other genocidal campaigns, still one out of every forty
men, women and children killed in a distant jungle colony is a
testament to American persistence and know-how. Besides the
traditional methods of killing civilians, an innovation with far-
reaching echoes was developed in the Philippines: the concentration
camp.
Dr. Henry Rowland, an Army surgeon, explained that "it does not take
the American soldier, from private to general, long to conceive of
the insurrectos as vermin, only to be ridded by extermination."
Under General Otis' orders, a party of U.S. troops burned through the
jungle on a steam train, squirting oil on villages to hasten their
destruction. Another general, Robert Hughes, was proclaimed a hero
for burning "a path 60 miles wide from one end of Panay to the
other."
Beside the innovative use of new technologies (machine guns and
shotguns too were used as anti-personnel weapons) the U.S. Army
brought to perfection an old form of torture called affectionately
the "water cure" by soldiers in the field.
This "treatment" consisted of spread-eagling a prisoner on his back,
forcing his mouth open with a bamboo stick and pouring gallons of
water down his throat. Helpless, the insurrecto was pumped with water
until his stomach was near the bursting point. Then he was
questioned. If he refused to answer — which happened surprisingly
often — an American soldier stood or kneeled on is belly, forcing the
water out. One report by a U.S. soldier told how "a good heavy man"
jumped on a prisoner's belly "sending a gush of water from his mouth
into the air as high as six feet." This cure was repeated until the
prisoner talked or died. Roughly half the insurrectos given the cure
survived. How many Filipinos were killed by torture is not known, but
the extent of the practice is well documented by a letter sent home
by a soldier who bragged of inflicting the water cure on 160
Filipinos, 134 of whom died.

General Jacob Smith bragged to a reporter that his aim was to set
the entirety of Samar on fire and leave every inhabitant dead. Though
he didn't achieve his goal of total extermination, he did give orders
that everyone on the island (roughly 250,000 people) be placed in
concentration camps. Anyone who refused was shot on sight. Another
command, given to his subordinate Major Littleton Waller, was played
prominently in the stateside papers during Smith's trial. "I want no
prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn; the more you kill and burn,
the better it will please me. I want all persons killed who are
capable of bearing arms in actual hostilities against the United
States."

Though the soldiers, observers and boosters back home used the
term "exterminate" to describe the killing in the Philippines, was it
metaphor, exaggeration or an accurate appraisal of the war?

First, bear in mind that extermination is systematic, not a random
spree of killing. Often with the gloss of science or rationality, the
exterminator uses whatever tools are best fitted for the job. He is
supposedly not driven by emotion or irrational impulses. His work is
routine; he's done it before and he'll do it again, because he's a
professional. He's paid for his work. This is no leisure activity but
a source of income, an economic transaction. An infestation of
insects and rodents threatens property values or business viability.
Likewise, the presence of undesirable humans is a threat to
profitability. It may seem obvious, but it's important to keep in
mind that the exterminator is an outsider, brought in or imposing
himself from another environment. It's implied that he comes from a
vermin-free place, superior to the one he must cleanse. He is of
course of another species. Men kill bugs; the exterminator is totally
unlike the vermin. The rules that apply to him do not apply to the
inferior, infesting presence. "Murder" only applies to intra-species
killing. A hunter doesn't murder his prey; nor does the exterminator
murder the vermin. To exterminate implies correctness — if not moral,
then certainly hygienic or medical. It is the right and proper thing
to do. There is no such thing as "wrong" extermination. And lastly,
when the exterminator leaves, he makes sure that the place is
uninhabitable. He leaves behind a toxic residue, poison or traps. He
plugs up the reentry points, builds barriers and removes attractions
for the vermin.

Was then the war in the Philippines an exterminationist campaign? By
all the standards just mentioned: yes. Some are obviously the case.
Only the notion of inter-species eradication requires any further
discussion. Repeatedly in campaigns against racial undesirables,
propaganda, slang terms, social mores and explicit law make an
attempt to redefine "human." If the enemy is a "goo-goo" or "n!gger,"
if he's uncivilized, barbaric, bestial (an ape, a turkey, a rabbit,
an insect) then he is not human in the way the conqueror is human.
Every campaign of extermination requires a rigid differentiation:
racial or ethnic categories become "scientific" or "biological"
truth. Nazis depicted Jews as lice and rats. The Boers called
Africans bobbejaan (baboons). The upper class of northern Nigeria
viewed Ibos as verminous subhumans. French colonists in Algeria
called Moslems ratons (rats). The Japanese during World War Two were
repeatedly depicted as apes while Americans were seen by Japanese as
devils. Lynched blacks in the American south were "monkeys." And in
the Philippines we find the "goo-goo," a strange amalgam of clichés
and slanders, deserving punishment for genetic inferiority, racial
cleansing, total extermination.

http://www.antiwar.com/stromberg/s032000.html

The White Man's Burden has been sung,'' he wrote. "Who will sing the
Brown Man's?'' Meanwhile, President William McKinley, sounding eerily
like President Bush, told the American people of a dream he had that
convinced him that it was God's will for the United States to help
Filipinos learn democracy and embrace Christianity, even though most
Filipinos were already Roman Catholic Christians.

In October of 1901, U.S. Brig. Gen. Jacob H. Smith was put in charge
of the "pacification" of Samar Island. In response to one of the few
Filipino battle victories where Filipinos disguised as women attacked
off-guard U.S. forces with bolos. Smith's orders were: "I want no
prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn
the better you will please me. I want all persons killed who are
capable of bearing arms in actual hostilities against the United
States

When one of his officers asked for clarification, Smith specified
that everyone 10 years of age or older should be killed. It is
estimated that as many as 50,000 Filipinos died from the ensuing
campaign of extermination and devastation on Samar. By the time the
war officially ended in 1902, 5,000 Americans and an estimated 20,000
Filipino soldiers had lost their lives. Civilian deaths numbered
around 200,000. Filipinos continued to fight for their independence
until 1913.

http://www.loompanics.com/Articles/DestroyAllGooGoos.htm

The train groaned to a halt and a crew of soldiers got the pumps
working. However, there was no fire, yet. No water jetted from the
hoses. Instead, a noxious geyser of petrol shot onto the huts and
larger buildings. A high stinking arc, fuel pumped from the tank car
behind. When the village was thoroughly soaked, the engine's boiler
was stoked and the train pulled on, out of danger. It disappeared
into the dense curtain of huge drooping leaves and vines.

A squad of soldiers left behind struck matches, lit oil-soaked fronds
and tossed them onto the nearest dripping hut. In a steady, deafening
moan, flames swallowed the village.

Described by some officers as a "punitive expedition," this ceaseless
burning was indeed a kind of punishment for the Filipinos who defied
U.S. rule. Five years later, the United States Army was still
rounding up natives and shooting them en masse for daring to fight
back against their new masters. But just as often the scorched-earth
campaign was seen as a kind of cleansing, a "holy fire" to burn
away "Asiatic contamination." American military, religious, economic
and technical power had thrust itself on the Philippines in 1898 and
the U.S. was determined to utterly expunge all trace of
uncivilized "Mongolian" taint, all "nameless contagion's" and
racial "leprosy."

Two months after Admiral Dewey's grand victory in Manila Bay, the
U.S. Army arrived in force. Raw volunteers for whom the idea
of "killing niggers" was one step away from a "turkey shoot," and
veterans who'd learned their trade killing Indians, arrived in the
Philippines to secure the new acquisition.

Besides being the debut of the new imperialist U.S. identity, it was
just as significantly the first time U.S. forces engaged in a
prolonged war against "Asiatic heathens." President McKinley claimed
to have prayed on his knees "for light and guidance from the `ruler
of all nations.' " The message he received was to "educate the
Filipinos, to civilize and uplift and Christianize them."

It soon became difficult to tell the savages from the bringers of
civilization. A reporter for the Philadelphia Ledger summed up what
he saw of McKinley's "benevolent" crusade:

The present war is no bloodless, fake, opera bouffé 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 and up, an idea prevailing that the
Filipino, as such, was little better than a dog, a noisome reptile in
some instances, whose best disposition was to the rubbish heap. Our
soldiers have pumped salt water into men to `make them talk,' have
taken prisoner people who held up their hands and peacefully
surrendered, and an hour later, without an atom of evidence to show
they were even insurrectos, stood them up on a bridge and shot them
down one by one, to drop them into the water below and float down as
an example to those who found their bullet-riddled corpses.

The U.S. was inarguably haunted by racial anxieties. The nation as we
know it could not have come into existence without the wholesale
slaughter of Indians and the enslavement of Africans. Perhaps nothing
has shaped the U.S. more. So it's no coincidence that the two racial
groups show up in Philippine War imagery. Unsure what the Filipinos
were, Americans applied old racial terms. Besides the standard Yellow
Peril slanders that had developed since the Chinese began entering
the U.S. in the 1850s (slurs such as "degenerate and alien
races," "contagious moral lepers," "carriers of loathsome diseases,
debasing habits, unhuman lusts and drug addiction") the Filipinos
were tarred with two broad brushes. They were "n!ggers" and they
were "injuns." And the two terms were fused in the new racial slur —
goo-goo — that had echoes sixty years later in the word "gook," used
for Vietnamese "subhumans."

Stateside, at the time of the insurrection, "goo-goo" meant an
inviting sexual glance. In 1900, as American troops slaughtered
the "bloody savages" (in Teddy Roosevelt's memorable phrase) the
song "Just Because She Made dem Googoo Eyes" was popular. A year
later we read of someone "throwing a googoo" as if it were an erotic
curse or bomb. In that same decade, the term was a noun ("goo-goo
giver") and a verb ("She googooed him and he lost his powers of
speech."). That the word came to mean a despised, racially degenerate
foreigner may seem odd. Perhaps the single syllable "goo,"
meaning "dirty moisture" is the root. Goo indicates a substance of
indeterminate composition — sweet, sticky, wet, shiny, oozing,
viscous, vaguely biological, the essence of defilement. It's been
argued too that the Filipinos were called goo-goos because of
their "soft, liquid eyes." Others claim it was for its echoes of baby
talk. (President McKinley called the Filipinos "little brown
brothers.") Or perhaps the racial hatred is tinged with a secret
attraction: Asian as the dark-skinned Other who can only be known,
communicated with, "loved," by killing. American attitudes certainly
were ambiguous: the urge to kill and the urge to civilize were
inextricable. Goo-goos were "treacherous and barbarous," a "racial
leprosy." They also needed to be uplifted, Christianized, saved.

Where the word comes from may remain unknown, but what the U.S.
thought of the goo-goo is quite clear.

Blue-shirted soldiers carrying the scalps and severed ears of goo-
goos marched proudly into the jungles singing this anthem. No
subtlety, no irony here: anti-Asian invective ("Khakiac ladrone" was
a native bandit), soft-headed clichés about flag and homeland, and
most telling: the belief that to civilize the goo-goo he needed to be
shot dead. A thousand times the slogan "the only good injun is a dead
injun" was applied to the Filipinos.

Indians, also despised and butchered by the American army, were a
second current in the stream of race hate. Many of the officers in
the American counter-insurgency army had been molded and hardened in
the fierce Indian wars of the American West. They often saw the new
Asian enemy in cowboy-and-Indian terms: "… half child and half devil,
a most accomplished sneak thief, utterly without conscience and as
full of treachery as our Arizona Apache." Countless times, soldiers
spoke of and wrote of "injun warfare" — pitiless, brutal, relentless —
being necessary against the Filipino "savages."

It wasn't only the soldiers, however, who saw the goo-goo as a savage
subhuman. Professor of Law Theodore Woolsey of Yale told a body of
learned men that the Filipinos were "incapable of gratitude,
profligate, undependable, improvident, cruel, impertinent,
superstitious, treacherous… All are liars, even in the confessional."
The natives were not only deceitful and barbaric, declared an
Episcopal prelate returned from a tour of the islands, but
also "defective in reasoning." Yes, American men of God were very
much in favor of this undertaking. Dewey's victory was called "God's
vengeance" by missionaries; the battleship guns were "God's trumpet-
tones summoning his people out of their isolation." Some missionary
journals took the religious mandate idea to absurd and obscene
lengths: "Has it ever occurred to you that Jesus was the most
imperial of the imperialists?" Again and again in Protestant
journals, writers argued that the little brown brother needed to be
led out of the vile darkness of "paganism and papistry."

THE `SPLENDID LITTLE WAR' OF 1898

As sometimes noted here, many historians see the beginnings of
American imperialism in the Spanish-American War. A war fought
ostensibly for the freedom of the Cuban people allowed the United
States to relieve Spain of its Pacific possessions, Guam, the
Marianas, and the Philippines. We took Puerto Rico as well and Cuba
became an American protectorate, or informal colony, down to 1959.
The Pacific assets fit into a grander scheme of things – the "large
policy" of Open Door empire worked out by Brooks Adams, Theodore
Roosevelt, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, and others.

The response to the bloody counterinsurgency in the Philippines,
critics founded the American Anti-Imperialist League. Their goal was
to combat the "large policy," empire, and colonialism. For the most
part, the Anti-Imperialists were classical liberals who espoused free
markets and free trade. Many had ties to the old antislavery
movement.

V. I. Lenin called the Anti's the "last of the Mohicans of bourgeois
democracy" – which is true enough. Prominent members of the League
included industrialist Andrew Carnegie, Boston textile magnate Edward
F. Atkinson, former Senator Carl Schurz, writer Mark Twain, and
philosopher William James. Former President Grover Cleveland was at
least a sympathizer. Atkinson stirred up all kinds of trouble when he
sent anti-war pamphlets to American troops in the Philippines. To
stop this "sedition" the government seized the pamphlets before they
arrived in the field.

It has been suggested that the upper class character of the League
kept it from leading the broad public against overseas imperialism.
Certainly, there were critics of empire – generally referred to
as "expansion" – outside the League, but neither the League nor
anyone else welded them into an effective opposition to empire. Nor
was the election of 1900, which pitted the incumbent McKinley against
the populist Democrat William Jennings Bryan, much of a "referendum"
on the policy of empire. Bryan made little use of the issue, having
apparently decided that it wasn't much of a vote-getter.1

THE `PHILIPPINE INSURRECTION': MASS GRAVES AND `FREE-FIRE ZONES'

With McKinley safely elected, along with his ineffable new Vice
President Teddy Roosevelt, the pacification of the Philippine Islands
dragged on. Whole districts were declared combat zones – "free-fire"
zones in effect – and US troops were allowed to follow the positivist
rules of warfare drawn up by Francis Lieber for Lincoln's War
Department in 1862. Under these rules, inhabitants of such areas were
assets to the enemy and their lives, rights, and property at the
mercy of US commanders, who were sole judge of the "convenience" of
letting the people enjoy continued use of those things.

Given the difficulty of distinguishing the insurgents from the
population, American soldiers began killing Filipinos wholesale.
Stories of indiscriminate warfare, mass graves, "concentration" of
civilians into camps (cf. "strategic hamlets"), and atrocities like
the "water torture" began trickling home. In the end, about 220,000
Filipinos perished in the war. The greater number of these died from
disease, disruption of food supplies, and other causes linked to the
war, rather than from actual combat. The overall "tone" was that of
an overseas Indian war, a circumstance doubtless connected with the
fact that many US officers in the Philippines were veterans of the
last such wars.2

The islands were "pacified" and American proconsuls, Progressive
bureaucrats, and anthropologists could get on with the important
business of finding willing local collaborators within the Filipino
elite, the ilustrados, and getting Philippine resources such as
timber, coconuts, and cattle into the hands of deserving US
corporations. In Cuba, US occupation authorities oversaw a
virtual "enclosure movement," alienating land from smaller
landholders – a task made easier because departing Spanish
bureaucrats took all the land records with them. Whether this overall
approach to expanding commerce, which shifted the costs of finding,
rigging, and holding new markets onto the taxpaying public, was the
best possible one, went unanswered. Anti-imperialists inside and
outside of the League sought to supply answers.

http://hnn.us/articles/1595.html

McKinley's assurances of "individual rights and liberties" for
Filipinos went up in smoke, as village after village was torched.
Angered by guerrilla ambushes, U.S. volunteers, most of them racist
to begin with, eagerly executed the "kill-and-burn" orders of their
Indian-fighter commanders. In turn, Aguinaldo's men slaughtered
isolated American units, whose comrades responded in kind. U.S.
reinforcements kept arriving. By mid-1900, 75,000 U.S. troops were in
action, almost two-thirds of the entire army.

Worried about the slaughter — "the blood-stained trenches around
Manila, where every red drop, whether from the veins of an American
soldier or a misguided Filipino, is anguish to my heart" — McKinley
turned to civilian leadership. William Howard Taft was dispatched to
the Philippines to become the archipelago's first civilian chief
executive, to the chagrin of Brig. Gen. Arthur MacArthur, who as
military governor had sought to keep civilians out. Under Taft's
leadership, the Americans sponsored huge programs in education,
public health and economic improvement. Meanwhile, MacArthur's army
ruthlessly pacified the country, ignoring its civilian advisors.
Filipinos were alternately terrified, gratified and confused.

On July 4,1902, President Roosevelt officially declared the end of
the "great insurrection." It had lasted more than three years.
American casualties were 4,234 dead, almost 3,000 wounded. Thousands
more died later of diseases they had contracted in the Philippines.
The American casualty count in the Philippines was almost 10 times
what it was during the Spanish-American War. Some 20,000 Filipino
soldiers were killed. Nearly 200,000 civilians died in the
insurrection, either from the actual fighting or from the disease and
pestilence it spawned.

Despite Roosevelt's announcement, heavy fighting continued until
1913, largely against the Moros, the archipelago's implacable Muslim
minority. Taft imported shiploads of eager young American teachers to
set up a nationwide public education system for his "little brown
brothers." Commerce in the archipelago picked up, although the
economy was rigged to help American exporters. The first legislative
elections were held in 1907. By 1910, having weathered a decade of
spasmodic "good-cop, bad-cop" U.S. governance, Filipinos were not
doing badly. "Americanized," historian Stanley Karnow put
it, "without becoming Americans," they were at last enjoying
something close to McKinley's promised peace.

Throughout the long decade, however, the Americans made costly and
needless mistakes. They occupied the islands without knowing a thing
about them — and never took the time to learn. McKinley's pledge
to "Christianize" the Philippines sounded odd to overwhelmingly
Catholic Filipinos. Nor did they think of themselves as "aborigines."
During the first year of occupation, American administration was
vacillating and inconsistent. Annexation was imposed without
explaining it to the Filipinos, whose Malay-Latino culture was held
in contempt by the Americans. Communications between occupiers and
the occupied was generally lacking, except for the few Filipino
leaders who understood English. Worst of all was the contradiction
between the occupiers' lofty democratic proclamations and their
alternately repressive and patronizing behavior.

Yet, in comparison with the U.S. challenge in Iraq, McKinley had it
easy. The Philippines in 1899 was largely agricultural, a land of
small farms and villages with only one large city. The population of
21st century Iraq is 70 percent urban, and its vastly more complex
infrastructure is now in ruins. In the sequestered world of the early
1900s, Americans could run their colonial occupation without outside
interference. There were no denunciations from fatwa-quoting mullahs
in Egypt and Pakistan, no Al Jazeera cameramen feeding anti-American
sentiment in the Middle East, no troublesome kibitzing from Europe
and the U.N.

McKinley's goal was simply annexation — "benevolent assimilation," as
he put it. President Bush's goal for Iraq is far more ambitious: to
create a new working democracy as soon as possible. "America's
interests in security and America's belief in liberty both lead in
the same direction: to a free and peaceful Iraq," Bush said in
February. But with suicidal guerrillas roaming the streets of
Baghdad, basic services such as water and electricity unreliable and
local law enforcement almost nonexistent, the costs in men, material
and attention could dwarf those experienced in the Philippines.
Happily for McKinley, he never had to face such perilous choices in
his occupation, nor worry about equally pressing problems in North
Korea, Afghanistan and the West Bank.

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